by Lucy Moore
Jonathan wanted application, which is generally observed to be the fault of many men of brisk parts; work and he were too much at variance for him to thrive by his trade; he seemed to follow it only at a distance, often playing the loose, wandering from one alehouse to another, with the very worst, though the merriest, company in the place; and he was very fond of the strolling actors that now and then frequented the country.
It may have been mere laziness; but perhaps that is too simple an explanation. Wild might also have had some vague sense that his destiny lay beyond the limits of Wolverhampton, a feeling that he had talents that could only be fully exploited in a larger arena.
Certainly he was desperate to get to London. He first left Wolverhampton, and his wife and infant son, in 1704, as a manservant to a local gentleman who was soon dissatisfied with his service and sent him back home. An anonymous biographer says that the man Wild accompanied to London was a lawyer; and that after his dismissal, Wild used the experience he had gained in legal affairs to get a job as a ‘setter’, who hunted down and brought in debtors to appear before the Marshalsea Court — a job that would have required to the full the ruthlessness and brutality that were later to serve him so well.
Another story related by Defoe tells how, on his return to Wolverhampton, Wild borrowed a horse from a neighbour and, in need of money, sold it without asking the owner’s permission. The man found out what Wild had done, and agreed that, instead of prosecuting Wild, he would accept a weekly payment from him until the cost of the horse had been repaid. The first two instalments were paid in full and on time, but when the third payment was several weeks overdue the man confronted Wild and demanded his money. Wild replied that he had no intention of paying him a penny more.
‘That contract is obsolete, and of no effect.’
‘How so?’ asked the man, perplexed.
‘Why,’ replied Wild, ‘you’ll allow that articles of agreement, or contracts, not fulfilled, are broken; and articles, once broken, cannot subsist afterwards. Now our articles are broken for I have made but two payments, when there are three due long ago, therefore I owe you nothing, and nothing I will pay you.’
About four years later, Wild left Wolverhampton for a second time, determined never to return.
Nothing is known of his early years in London, but in March 1710 five people accused Jonathan Wild of debt and brought a joint action against him. He was committed to Wood Street Compter, one of London’s two ancient debtors’ prisons (the word Compter derives from ‘Counter’), just off Cheapside. The length of his stay in the Compter is unclear; by his own admission he was in Wood Street for four years and he left the gaol in September 1712. What is certain is that on arriving in London Wild’s tastes must quickly have outstretched his means. ‘By the misfortunes of the world, he was subject to the discipline of the Compter, for above the space of four years, during which time it was impossible but he must be in some measure let into the secrets of the criminals there under confinement...’[15]
Wild looked back on his years in Wood Street Compter as his introduction to the world of crime. Eighteenth-century prisons were well known as schools of vice. Because manpower was limited, and in any case the authorities were utterly corrupt, no attempts were made to separate prisoners from each other according to their crimes. Thus a twelve-year-old boy who had stolen a handkerchief — a type of thief known to his peers as a ‘Wiper Puller’ — awaited his first trial beside a convicted house-breaker or highwayman waiting to be hanged. The innocence of the prisoners awaiting trial was not assumed; they were just thrown in with the rabble regardless. While some had more privileges than others, these distinctions were largely theoretical because all of them, whatever their crimes or status, were jumbled up together.
This confusion and lack of discipline was particularly in evidence at Wood Street, with a large semi-permanent population of debtors who could not leave until their debts, including those incurred while in gaol, were paid off. As well as these indigenous residents, almost everyone arrested in London was taken first to Wood Street for a night or two before being assigned to another prison in London, where they would await trial. Thus every member of London’s criminal underworld would probably pass through Wood Street at some point in their career. It was the perfect place for a man like Jonathan Wild to develop contacts and start to carve out a reputation for himself.
Working in a prison could be a lucrative career if one was prepared to cast aside all moral scruples, as most prison officials seemed to be able to do. Each office-holder bought his office from the government, usually at a very high price — the office of Under-Marshal, the second-highest in the prison hierarchy, cost £700 in 1712 — and felt entitled, after spending so much to achieve his position, to recoup his costs by milking prisoners for as much as he could get. Because gaols were independent of state control, there were no limits on the powers of the keepers and turnkeys, known in criminal slang as ‘Quod-Culls’.
They charged an entrance fee, or ‘garnish’, to each new arrival, as well as a discharge fee when someone left. Their biggest source of profit was the tap-room, which sold tobacco, beer and spirits, principally gin, often brewed at the prison. Newgate gin was known by several slang names: ‘Kill-Grief’, ‘Cock-my-Cap’ or ‘Washing and Lodging’. In 1787 a keeper suggested that the proliferation of drink available in prisons improved discipline because ‘when the prisoners are drunk they tend to be docile and quite free from rioting’. Liquor was also a comfort to those preparing themselves to meet Jack Ketch (the slang name for the hangman): ‘great fear is overcome by great drinking’.[16]
Keepers also made money charging inmates for extras: a bed, and on top of that sheets and blankets; edible, and sufficient, food; cleanliness — often mere necessities of life, as well as luxuries such as newspapers and books. Law books were popular reading, as many prisoners could not afford legal representation and had to defend themselves on the stand. Although many could not read, they asked or paid literate prisoners to read to them. Dogs were not forbidden to inmates until 1792 and ‘pigs, pigeons and poultry’ were kept by them until 1814. Visitors were charged 3s. a head, but they were allowed in and out as often as they were willing to pay.
Some prisoners (rather unkindly) brought their wives to gaol to live with them; in 1717 the keeper regretfully informed several inmates that although he would like to house their wives in gaol there simply wasn’t room for them all. In such a situation, perhaps he would have been as lenient as Diderot’s gaoler at Vincennes, who in return for a small fee allowed the philosopher to scale the prison walls each night to visit his mistress in Paris.[17] Clearly, in some cases keepers did allow their charges to leave the confines of the prison, because Swift parodies their corruption and avarice in a poem of 1709:
The turnkey now his flock returning sees,
Duly let out o’nights to steal for fees.
Any request was considered, provided it was backed up with ‘rhino’, or ready cash. William Pitt, the keeper of Newgate in 1716, was estimated to have made three to four thousand pounds in ‘garnish’, the slang word for the bribe demanded by the keepers, over a period of three or four months when Newgate was full of rich, noble Jacobite prisoners awaiting trial for their part in the risings of 1715. ‘They [the prisoners] are debarred from nothing but going out,’[18] wrote an eighteenth-century observer. Perhaps the only reason prisoners were not allowed to buy their liberty was that it would remove from the turnkeys their lucrative source of income.
As with all institutions, some inmates adapted more readily than others to the situation in which they found themselves. Defoe’s Moll Flanders describes her gradual acclimatization to Newgate: ‘I degenerated into stone; I turned first stupid and senseless, then brutish and thoughtless, and at last raving mad as any of them were; and in short, I became as naturally pleased and easy with the place as if indeed I had been born there.’[19]
There were few rules, incomprehensible to the outsider, and until they were
mastered life for the initiate was unbearable. Garnish had to be paid not only to the keepers, but also to certain prisoners who demanded tribute from new arrivals and would not hesitate to use force to extract it. If a prisoner, like Wild when he first arrived, did not have ready cash, he or she was treated harshly. Until he found his feet, Wild probably lived with about seventy others in a room roughly thirty-foot long by fifteen-foot wide by twelve-foot high. There was almost no light and no circulation of the heavy, fetid air; it was cold and damp all year round, sometimes with up to a foot of water on the ground; cockroaches and rats were everywhere, and every prisoner was plagued by lice. They relied for food on scraps that keepers might give them out of rare kindness, or on what they could beg for out of the ‘begging grate’ that opened into Newgate Street. Wild’s most recent biographer, Gerald Howson, estimates that there were four to eight deaths a week in Wood Street Compter at this time because of the dreadful conditions the prisoners were forced to suffer (Fleet Prison, another of London’s debtors’ prisons, is shown in Plate VII of A Rake’s Progress).
If, like Wild, one had no money, total subservience to the keepers was the only option. Debtors had to find a way of making money while in gaol because although they were kept there at their creditors’ expense, they could not leave for good until they had paid their entrance and departure fees, and their upkeep while in prison, as well as cleared their original debts. Some, in desperation, sold themselves into slavery in the colonies for a limited period, a sort of voluntary transportation; others just gave up and stayed in gaol until they died.
Wild was gradually able to gain a foothold in the prison hierarchy because he was willing to do any chore, no matter how degrading or disgusting, to earn a little money. Bit by bit he gained the trust of the turnkeys, who allowed him more and more authority within the prison, which was run internally by a select group of inmates, known as ‘Partners’, chosen by the turnkeys to assist them. By working for the keepers, Wild was able to pay back his debts and even to lend money to other prisoners. By the time he left the Compter in 1712 he had been given the office of ‘Liberty of the Gate’, which required him to check the ‘Rats’, or newly arrested prisoners, into Wood Street before taking them to a magistrate to be charged. This meant that he had a good deal of freedom both within the prison and beyond its walls.
He acquired a name for himself among the prisoners as well.
There seemed to be a kind of sympathy betwixt their natures and that of Jonathan, so that they soon crept into one another’s secrets; he became acquainted with all their tricks and stratagems; and when the iron hand of justice had laid hold of them, and they were entangled in difficulties, he often put such quirks and evasions in their heads, and gave them such advice, as sometimes proved of great advantage to them; so that he became a kind of oracle among the thieves.[20]
The tortuous deviousness of mind that had lain dormant, unfulfilled, in Wolverhampton came to his aid in Wood Street. His fellow prisoners not only borrowed money from him and, apparently, lent it to him, they also sought his advice on their cases. This preoccupation with trials made mock trials a popular prison pursuit. In 1725 Bernard de Mandeville wrote that the inmates of Newgate spent ‘their most serious hours...in mock trials, and instructing one another in cross questions to confound witnesses’. These exercises were sometimes a form of internal prison discipline, sometimes practice for real trials — in which Wild, one imagines, would have excelled. They often contained elements of rural Lord of Misrule festivals, savage parodies of the institution which had condemned them to prison in the first place. The ‘judges’ tied white towels around their heads to imitate wigs, and spoke in language that made a mockery of the courts and the ideals of justice on which they were based. ‘The most trifling bribe of the judge will secure an acquittal,’ recorded one observer of this phenomenon in 1817.
A year later Wild was able to re-ingratiate himself with William Smith, one of the five who had originally brought the action against him, so much so that Smith lent him another £3. Wild evidently did not like being beholden to Smith: in 1720, when Wild was near the pinnacle of his power, he had Smith arrested and transported to America and sent back again when Smith escaped in 1721 before he had served his full seven years sentence. However, he did not bear a grudge against everyone he associated with in Wood Street. Another man he lent money to during his stay behind bars was Obidiah Lemon, a ‘Rattling Lay’, or thief specializing in robbing coaches. The two men built up a relationship that endured long beyond their stay in Wood Street; Lemon worked for Wild for many years, both stealing and acting as an informer
During his imprisonment, Wild also learned about the violence, drunkenness and depravity that characterized the daily lives of his fellow criminals. Bernard de Mandeville, writing to advocate harsher measures in prisons, was shocked by his visits to Newgate: ‘the licentiousness of the place is abominable, and there are no jests so filthy, no maxims so destructive to good manners, or expressions so vile and profane, but what are uttered there with applause, and treated with impunity’.
The motley group of pickpockets, whores, highwaymen, forgers and confidence tricksters who periodically inhabited Wood Street Compter and London’s other gaols were known to each other by aliases like Cocky-my-Chance, Black-Waistcoat Dick, Irish Ned and Jemmy the Shuffler. The criminal underworld had its own language, or cant, by which its members defined and recognized each other. The ‘slang patter’ they used marked criminals off from other people, emphasizing their sense of alienation from normal society, and perhaps also the pride they took in this separation. French cant illustrates the criminals’ attitude to their way of life. To introduce someone to a life of crime was to set them free; the slang name for a thief was l’ami; to steal was the verb servir, French criminals had eighty words for drunkenness and none for sobriety. Some cant terms have slipped out of common usage — for instance, a ladder was known as a ‘jacob’ and the dark was called the ‘mung’. But many cant words and phrases are still used in modern English: a ‘baggage’ is a slut; to ‘twig’ is to notice; and to ‘nail’ is to catch or seize. And cockney rhyming slang retains elements of eighteenth-century cant in its spirit and humour.
The villains with whom Wild associated would all have been able to justify their actions.
We care not a straw
For reason and law
For conscience is all in all.[21]
proclaimed one seventeenth-century thieves’ ballad. Joseph ‘Blue-skin’ Blake, who later worked for Wild, held that ‘All the world’s a cheat, and he was a fool that had no hand in it.’ John Gay, author of The Beggars’ Opera, romanticized this view. His hero, Macheath, saw himself as a Robin Hood figure, taking from the rich to give to the poor, even if the poor only included himself and his associates. ‘We are for a just partition of the world, for every man hath a right to enjoy life...Money was made for the free-hearted and generous, and where is the injury of taking from another what he hath not the heart to make use of?’ Jemmy Twitcher, a member of Macheath’s gang, agreed with his master: ‘What we win, gentlemen, is our own by the law of arms, and the right of conquest.’ Men like Macheath and Twitcher looked down on the people on whom they preyed as stupid, for not appreciating what they had; and weak, for not being able to defend it from rogues like themselves. The cant word for a man was ‘Cull’, which also meant a robbed man. Thus, according to the criminals’ own definition, every man was a potential victim, a sitting target for thieves.
In 1710, of greater London’s population of just over 600,000, perhaps 10,000 were criminals of one sort or another.
Vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, forswearing, flattering, suborning, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, stargazing, poisoning, whoring, canting, libelling, free-thinking and the like occupations,
Gulliver told his Houyhnhnm master in Swift’s 1726 satire, Gulliver’s Travels.
&
nbsp; An act of 1744 categorized vagabonds into three groups: drunks and beggars, ‘idle and disorderly people’ who refused to enter a workhouse, and thus were refused poor relief; ‘rogues’, including fortune-tellers, mountebanks, charlatans, strolling players and peddlers, all of whom made a living, but still had no roots or ties; and ‘incorrigible rogues’, escaped criminals, returned transportees and second or multiple offenders.[22] Almost all criminals fitted one of the vagabond categories at some point, but most fell unintentionally into crime and its associated lifestyle, rather than being born into it. Older men and women who turned to crime usually did so as a last resort, after a life of constant struggle which finally broke their spirit. Many young people were attracted to crime by the aura of glamour and danger that surrounded those involved in it. Some, bankrupted by gambling debts or high living, turned to robbery to clear their debts; others went to gaol because of their debts, and fell in with villains there. The average miscreant was opportunistic in his approach to crime, and modest in ambition. Petty crime was a normal part of life for most poor people, especially in London, where the contrast between rich and poor was so clear, and the opportunities for theft or other forms of wrong-doing were so obvious. Most criminals were ‘unremarkable people, distinguished from their fellows by little else except the fact that by bad luck or worse judgement they got caught up in the toils of the law’.[23]
There also existed a criminal élite, whose lives and careers were intimately bound up with one another’s. These men and women had often been trained in the arts of crime from an early age; their friends and families were usually connected with law-breaking in some way. A sub-culture of crime existed in Hanoverian London, allowing people to achieve power and material satisfaction via alternative avenues, since the accepted routes to the top — land, wealth, education and social connections — were out of their grasp. They sought access to the goals which society held to be worthwhile, but which, to them, were unavailable.
