up for his early crimes (just as she later begged him - in vain - to leave London); how he felt angry with his guardian Mr Kneebone (who had tried to replace his dead father); and how his first arrest was not for theft, but for breaking his indentures as an apprentice carpenter. His subsequent humiliating night in St Clement’s Roundhouse was the one recorded time he did not try to escape: but it left Sheppard ungovernable at eighteen. ‘I then fell to robbing almost everyone that stood in my way.’ Significantly one of his first major burglaries was from his own guardian, ‘my kind patron and benefactor’ Mr Kneebone.
Altogether it is a formidable bit of literary ventriloquism, and as always with Defoe, supremely ambiguous. Is Sheppard vain or penitent? Gentle or psychopathically violent? Loyal (to Elizabeth Lyon, for example) or cruelly treacherous? Defoe makes us continually hang upon his words in order to interpret character, and to judge actions. This is a quite different order of narrative from the traditional Newgate life, and again a fundamental drive towards the new, realistic biography.
Another thing that the biography shows, is that Sheppard’s fantastic abilities as escaper were no mystery. They came from his outstanding skills as a carpenter and builder, learned during his six year apprenticeship, but also inherited from his father and his grandfather (both carpenters). His great physical strength combined with a small gymnastic body, gave him a natural mastery of building materials and an instinctive understanding of the construction (and deconstruction) of every kind of lock, wall, window, bar, spike, chimney-breast, floor, ceiling, roof or cellar. He once cheekily complimented the Keeper of Newgate on the high quality of the prison’s ironwork, having just ‘worked’ one of its most formidable spikes.
The climax of the second pamphlet is Defoe’s extraordinarily tense and revealing narrative of Sheppard’s last escape from Newgate. This is quite as striking as Casanova’s celebrated account of his escape from the Venetian prison, a generation later in his Memoirs. The author of Robinson Crusoe was always fascinated by technique, expertise and method: how things actually get done. With astonishing ingenuity, Sheppard escaped upwards: first through a chimney, then through six massively bolted doors, then through the prison chapel, and finally out over the Newgate rooftops. Like a good editor, Applebee immediately saw the attraction of this grim obstacle-course for readers, and took the unusual step of commissioning a copper-plate engraving, showing the eight stages of Sheppard’s escape, which became a huge selling point.
This escape sequence, which took place entirely in the dark over nine hours, is finally turned by Defoe into a study of Sheppard’s character under stress. ‘It being full dark, my spirits began to fail me, as greatly doubting of succeeding; but cheering up, I wrought on with great diligence, and in less than half an hour … wrenched the box off, and so made the door my humble servant.’
While at liberty, Sheppard disguised himself and wandered through London, hearing stories and ballads about his own exploits. According to Defoe, this enlarged his whole sense of identity. ‘That night I came to a cellar at Charing Cross, and refreshed myself very comfortably with Roast Veal etc, and heard about a dozen people all discoursing about Sheppard, and nothing else was talked about while a stayed amongst them.’ The next day he talked with a young woman in an alehouse off Piccadilly, who spoke admiringly of Sheppard and ‘wished a Curse might fall on any who should betray him.’
After his last escape, he stole a set of gentleman’s clothes, rings and sword, picked up two pretty girls (one described as his true ‘Sweetheart’, though neither being Elizabeth Lyon), and had the wonderful audacity to hire a coach and ride back under the very gateway of the Newgate Prison arch. This, as told by Defoe, was a stroke of theatrical genius and an ultimate escape into another identity, ‘transformed into a Perfect Gentleman’, as Sheppard exults just a few hours before his final re-capture. His last free act is to buy his mother three-quarters of a pint of best brandy.
7
Where Sheppard is presented as an ambiguous hero, Defoe presents his adversary Jonathan Wild as an unambiguous villain: ‘this famous, or if you please, infamous creature’. The third, and by far the longest biographical pamphlet, The True and Genuine Account of the Late Jonathan Wild (1725), is immediately distinguished by Defoe’s severity of tone. He now wholly rejects the Newgate style of ‘mockery and ridicule’, and emphasises the moral value of strict biographical truth. ‘They that had rather have a Falsehood to laugh at than a True Account of things to inform them, had best buy the Fiction, and leave the History to those who know how to distinguish Good from Evil.’
Although no voice that Defoe adopts can ever be taken as reliably his own, here he does seem to speak out in his own person: the sixty-year-old citizen of London, the family man, the experienced writer, the unflinching and undeluded judge of human character. With Jonathan Wild there is little attempt at sympathetic ventriloquism. The biographical narrative has a cool, sardonic and almost forensic style: he writes of Wild as a ‘cunning artist’ perpetrating ‘exquisite villainies’. The story is cast largely in the third person - except for one notably section of dramatized dialogue in the second half.
Defoe’s analysis of Wild is unsparing from the start. ‘Take him as a man only, he had a kind of brutal Courage which fitted him to be an Instrument in attacking some of the most desperate of the several Gangs of Rogues he had to do with. But as this Courage also served to make him audacious in the other Wicked Things he undertook, he was rather Bold than Courageous, and might be called impudent …’
Much of the first half of the Life is spent on carefully analysing Wild’s brilliant methods of fencing stolen property and controlling the gangs all over London (‘the fraternity of thieves’) through the dual pressures of terror and greed. Much ironic play is made with the idea of his ‘dexterity’ and his ‘honesty’. While blackmailing, betraying and racketeering, Wild always appeared to remain just within the letter of the law. ‘It must be allowed to Jonathan’s fame, that as he steered among rocks and shoals, so he was a bold pilot; he ventured in and always got out in a manner equally surprising; no man ever did the like before him …’
As always, Defoe is fascinated by this technical expertise. If Sheppard’s genius was for dismantling things and escaping; Wild’s was for organising human beings and incarcerating them, either physically or psychologically. As with Sheppard, Defoe examines the emotional background to this criminal career. Unlike Sheppard, Wild was a provincial boy from Wolverhampton, ambitious, controlling, and obsessionally meticulous in his habits - ‘he kept his counting house or office, like a man of business, and had his books to enter everything in with the utmost exactness and regularity’. He was always domineering and manipulative. When first arrested for debt, he quickly became a trusty, ‘got so much favour with the Keepers that he got the Liberty of the Gate, as they call it’, and was soon running errands outside for the other prisoners, ‘to get a penny’. This became his first racket, which soon involved a prostitute, Mary Milliner, who taught him ‘a great many new ways of getting money’.
Defoe is interested by the story of Wild’s six wives, names and identifies each one, and finds surprisingly that most were respectable (one a very religious minded and ‘sober’ Roman Catholic), and all were apparently devoted to him. Indeed his last wife, Mary Dean, twice tried to commit suicide when Wild was sentenced to death.
Wild’s power over women is further illustrated by a remarkable sequence of dialogue, in which Defoe shows Wild in his office smoothly bamboozling a respectable lady client over the return of a stolen gold watch. Wild’s sinister courtesy to his client (‘a pot of tea brought out in form’) is offset by his terrifying secret hold over the thief involved - also a woman, and none other (according to Defoe) that Moll King herself. Here the world of Defoe’s Newgate fiction and his Newgate biography virtually meet, and can be taken as his own signature to the work. It is an interesting possibility that this sequence was based on one of his own daughters’ encounter with Wild.
Defoe
