of Sheppard, although in the previous pamphlet he has Sheppard making the first published accusations against Wild’s corruption. But he does end with a bitter accusation against Wild’s exploiting ‘the young generation of thieves’, and worst of all crimes, corrupting the poor children of London. ‘He practised principally upon young creatures and little destitute children, such as seemed to be left to wander about in want and beggary; and many a poor boy he has picked up in the street pretending charity … which, when it has come to the issue, has been no more or less than to breed them up to thieving, and to ripen them for the devil.’ As with Fagin in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, there is even a hint here of sexual exploitation.
In the end, Defoe’s biography grants Jonathan Wild very little mercy. Where he is often indulgent towards Sheppard, even romantic, he regards Wild’s life as ‘a tragedy’ for all those around him, and a grotesque one at that. Their different manners of death on the Tyburn scaffold - Sheppard cool, chippy and resolute, Wild opium fuddled and vomiting - seal this contrast. But in both cases the new, nascent form of biography takes them seriously, simply as human beings. This is itself is a literary revolution. Though they are both in their way small, disreputable figures, without social standing or money or education or permanent power, they are presented as vivid individual spirits, complex personalities. They are worthy of remembrance, and of understanding, whether as good or evil.
8
It is perhaps characteristic that the aging Defoe thoroughly disapproved of the legends that quickly crystallized around Sheppard and Wild, even though as their biographer he was largely responsible for them. The myth-making began rapidly, and within months a pantomime Harlequin Sheppard was mounted on the stalls at Bartholomew’s Fair, in nearby Smithfield Market. This was followed in 1728 by John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera, a ‘Newgate pastoral’ with Wild transformed into the crooked jailer Peachum and Sheppard into the glamorous robber MacHeath.
Gay also picked up Defoe’s hint about the two pretty girls in the coach (Sheppard’s final trade-in for Elizabeth Lyon, perhaps), and invented Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit as rivals for MacHeath’s affections. Defoe’s wonderful feel for the London streets and the crowds, an essential part of his biographies, was also reflected in the use of English folk-songs and street-cries for the music, such as the haunting lyric, ‘Over the hills and faraway’.
Many other spin-offs followed after Defoe’s own death in 1731. They included Henry Fielding’s satirical novel, Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), and the numerous composite biographies published throughout the later eighteenth century in various editions of The Newgate Calendar. By the nineteenth century the Sheppard and Wild saga had taken on a life of its own, flamboyantly revived in Harrison Ainsworth’s bestselling novel, Jack Sheppard (1839), obliquely reflected in Dickens, and vividly embroidered in many Victorian music hall pieces. Here Jack was often played - provokingly - by an actress in tight silk britches, festooned with decorative fetters and chains. The myth also migrated abroad, attaching itself to newspaper stories of the outlaws Ned Kelly in Australia, and Jesse James in America, and re-surfacing in the twentieth century with Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in Germany.
Besides providing the material for so much fiction and music, there was also an interesting visual tradition, attaching particularly to Sheppard. Hogarth’s great sequence of satirical pictures, The Idle Apprentice, was partly inspired by his story. While Applebee’s superb anonymous copperplate illustration of the last escape, was later picked up by Cruickshank in a series of fine, spidery engravings for Ainsworth’s novel. These were set out in action-sequence, and may claim to be one of very the earliest strip-cartoons or bandes-dessinées. The archetypal shadow of the Sheppard and Wild confrontation may also be faintly traced in innumerable modern escape films, not least perhaps in The Great Escape (1963) and Papillon (1973), both featuring the rangy, laconic actor Steve McQueen, whose round, pale-eyed, boyish face bears an odd resemblance to Thornhill’s original portrait of Sheppard in Newgate.
This suggests another feature to the new form of non-fiction that Defoe was helping to create. On the one hand, biography showed itself to be a young aggressive genre, with a growing popular readership, and a natural tendency to consume and absorb older and more primitive literary forms - folk tales, ballads, journalism, trial transcripts, ‘True Confessions’, pious sermons - by gradually insisting on greater human depth, greater historical accuracy and authenticity. On the other hand, it was also a generous, disreputable and uninhibited form, freely and perhaps wantonly providing material about the human condition - often intimate, scandalous or confidential - for further imaginative expansion: in novels, theatre, opera, painting, illustration, and ultimately film.
So from these early beginnings, still uncertain of its origins or authority, still of doubtful or anonymous authorship, but with the presiding restless genius of Daniel Defoe, biography itself was set free to tell a new kind of human story.
THE HISTORY OF THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF JOHN SHEPPARD
Containing
A Particular Account of his Many
ROBBERIES and ESCAPES,
Viz.
His robbing the Shop of Mr Bains in White-Horse-Yard of 24 Yards of Fustian. Of his breaking and entering the House of the said Mr Bains, and stealing in Goods and Money to the Value of 20l. Of his robbing the House of Mr Charles in May Fair of Money, Rings, Plate, &c. to the Value of 30l. Of his robbing the House of Mrs Cook in Clare-Market, along with his pretended Wife, and his Brother, to the Value of between 50 and 60l. Of his breaking the Shop of Mr Philips in Drury-Lane, with the same Persons, and stealing Goods of small Value. Of his entering the House of Mr Carter, a Mathematical Instrument Maker in Wytch-Street, along with Anthony Lamb and Charles Grace, and robbing of Mr Barton, a Master Taylor who lodged therein, of Goods and Bonds to the Value of near 300l. Of his breaking and entering the House of Mr Kneebone, a Woollen-Draper, near the New Church in the Strand, in Company of Joseph Blake alias Blewskin and William Field, and stealing Goods to the Value of near 50I. Of his robbing of Mr Pargiter on the Highway near the Turnpike, on the Road to Hampstead, along with the said Blewskin. Of his robbing a Lady’s Woman in her Mistress’s Coach on the same Road. Of his robbing also a Stage Coach, with the said Blewskin, on the Hampstead Road. Likewise of his breaking the Shop of Mr Martin in Fleet-street, and stealing 3 silver Watches of 15I. Value. ALSO
A particular Account of his rescuing his pretended Wife from St Giles’s Round-House. Of the wonderful Escape himself made from the said Round-House. Of the miraculous Escape he and his said pretended Wife made together from New-Prison, on the 25th of May last. Of his surprizing Escape from the Condemn’d Hold of Newgate on the 31st of August. Together with the true manner of his being retaken; and of his Behaviour in Newgate, till the most astonishing and never to be forgotten Escape he made from thence, in the Night of the 15th of October. The Whole taken from the most authentick Accounts, as the Informations of divers Justices of the Peace, the several Shop-Keepers above-mention’d, the principal Officers of Newgate and New Prison, and from the Confession of Sheppard made to the Rev. Mr Wagstaff, who officiated for the Ordinary of Newgate.
LONDON: Printed and Sold by JOHN APPLEBEE in Black-Fryers, J. ISTED, at the Golden-Ball near Chancery-Lane in Fleet-street, and the Booksellers of London and Westminster. (Price One Shilling.)
