Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. the hands.

c.1600		Shakespeare Hamlet III ii: So I do still, by these pickers and stealers.
1775		S.J. Pratt Liberal Opinion I 108: They cried in. deed with their eyes, but not chusing to hold up an handkerchief to wipe them, their pickers and stealers were at at liberty, to secrete certain portable moveables.
1824		Hants Chron. 17 May 3/2: His visage curiously fretted with small-pox [...] his bright-red stumpy pickers and stealers encircled with massive gold rings.
1832		Egan Bk of Sports 5: His ‘pickers and stealers,’ as the classic might call them; his fingers and hands [...] were protected from the inclemency of the rude elements by ‘white kid gloves’.
1841		Worcs. Chron. 12 May 3/2: George Jones was captured [...] diving his pickers and stealers, alias his nimble fingers, into a farmer’s pocket.
1853		Halifax Courier 3 Sept. 2/2: His lordship [...] still retained the use of his ‘pickers and stealers’ [...] and did not arm his compositor with a pair of pincers.
1866		Canterbury Jrnl 14 Apr. 3/6: His ‘pickers and stealers’ were unclasped and in the palm of his hand was discovered a half-sovereign.
1875		Public Ledger (Memphis, TN) 27 Aug. 3/3: Many of the vags can swear like that fellow Shakespeare — ‘by these pickers and stealers’.
1889		Juanita Sentinel (Mifflintown, PA) 27 Feb. 1/3: There was a vice-like firmness in the candidate’s grip of the old man’s ‘pickers and stealers’.
1896		Omaha Dly Bee (NE) 18 Apr. 3/2: The pickers and stealers of pickpockets should deprive him of his purse every day of the week.
1902		St Paul Globe (MN) 15 Nov. 4/3: If they have anything that his sultanship can get his pickers and stealers on, he is not likely to stop at a trifle.
1908		Free Press (Hays, KS) 2 May 3/1: Some of the money that [...] his ‘pickers and stealers’ had been strong enough to clutch.

2. (mainly Irish) thieves, robbers.

1782		Cumberland Pacquet 31 Dec. 4/1: The plagues of us Authors are ne’er at an End [...] to be curb’d by some Titlepage Dealer [...] ’Tis shameful to think how the scurvy Knaves use us.
1826		Pierce Egan’s Life in London 19 Feb. 446/2: It never occurred to Mrs Millbank that there might be some pickers and stealers among them [...] and looking into the reticule she found that a five-pound note had been extracted.
1829		Manchester Courier 9 May 4/7: The ‘pickers and stealers’ [...] in their hurry to decamp knocked over and trod upon a number of chidlren.
1839		Newry Teleg. 9 Apr. 3/3: Him who filched out of the revenues that are for the support of religion [...] like other pickers and stealers.
1842		Galway Vindicator 19 Oct. 4/2: It would seem a still greater wrong [...] when six pickers and stealers of ducks are merely transported, and the seventh robber of the like domestic fowl shall be hanged.
1848		Era (London) 15 Oct. 8/1: We think many of the London postmen are pickers and stealers.
1855		Commercial Jrnl (Dublin) 15 Dec. 2/3: Then woe to the tribe of pickers and stealers, / Nibblers ands gnawers and evil dealers!
1864		Cork Constitution 10 Aug. 4/1: The House of Correction will grant them protection / [...] / Where pickers and stealers and all evil dealers / Are feasted like alderman.
1874		Cardiff Times 3 Oct. 5/3: Troops of little pickers and stealers with eyes like a hawk’s and fingers of the nimblest.
1882		Glasgow Herald 18 Jan. 7/7: The owners are losing a great deal of money by the ‘exploits of Mr Forster’s corps of pickers and stealers’.
1890		Northern Echo 4 Aug. 3/1: The football season is a very fruitful one for pickers and stealers.
1897		Flag of Ireland (Dublin) 5 June 11/4: The Nizams of Hyderabad have nothing to fear from pickers and stealers on the Thames.
1919		Butte Dly Bulletin (MT) 9 Sept. 5/2: The people have been robbed for years [...] During the war period there has been born a nasty breed of small pickers and stealers.