Dick Turpin: The pre-postmodern outlaw

Abstract

The iconography of Dick Turpin, an 18th century Essex butcher turned career criminal, has for almost three centuries undergone a complex process of rehabilitation. Much of this myth was constructed in visual recreations of his persona in film and comic books, and the Turpin now vividly fixed in the popular imagination is a dashing outlaw swashbuckler with a romantic social conscience. This article examines the Turpin legend and explores the role the British Thriller Library comics of the 1950s has played in the evolution of this mythology.

Keywords

• postmodernism
• highwaymen
• Dick Turpin
• adaptation studies
• Comics