The Thieves' Opera: The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-taker and Jack Sheppard, House-breaker

by Lucy Moore

  The criminal philosophy was marked by brave defiance and a devil-may-care attitude. ‘The greater rogue the greater luck,’ went the saying. Cocky pickpockets plied their trade at hangings, refusing to be cowed by the example the government hoped to set for them through the public display of capital punishment. The fixed concentration of the crowd at the moment when the cart moved away from the gallows and the condemned man’s convulsing form swung out made it the ideal place to pick pockets: observers would not notice anything was missing until the thief was well hidden among the crowd. Hanging days, because of the opportunities they presented as well as their festive atmosphere, were known as ‘Sheriff’s Balls’ or ‘Hanging Fairs’. Hanging itself was not seen as a deterrent, principally because no criminal really believed he or she would be caught in the first place. Charles Dickens, in his research for Oliver Twist, found this was true in the nineteenth century; and indeed this attitude is still prevalent in the twentieth. And even if one were caught, thought many, what did it matter? Isaac Atkinson, an Oxford-educated murderer, who stabbed the chaplain accompanying him to the gallows, cried out to the audience before he was hanged, ‘There’s nothing like a merry life and a short one!’[24] His attitude was representative of that of many of his peers.

  Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is the laws of their own freedom.[25]

  Criminals seemed to live in a perpetual state of carnival, avoiding the strictures of normal life, labour, order and sobriety, enforced on them in the form of workhouses and charity schools, in favour of libertine carnival values — pleasure-seeking, recklessness and abandonment. Their daily lives were governed by misrule, defiance and disorder, blurring the distinctions between criminal activity and an ideological or political stand against conventionality. The criminal underworld was a mirror image of normal society, a complement as well as a threat to it. Unwritten codes of honour, obligation and respect reflected acceptable modes of behaviour; the formality of eighteenth-century life had as its counterpart and balance the lawlessness, bravado and cruelty of the life of crime.

  Wild spent four years becoming initiated into this world, learning its peculiarities and hierarchies, its taboos and allowances. When he managed to con his way out of Wood Street Compter at the end of 1712, he was part of London’s criminal establishment, with his future in that world ahead of him.

  Chapter Three – Struggle

  While Jonathan Wild was an immigrant, aspiring towards the wealth and respectability of London’s new middle classes, Jack Sheppard was born into the irascible, Nonconformist, Huguenot traditions of the East End of London. The streets he played in as a child were steeped in sectarianism, determined independence of mind and conscience, resistance to oppression — as well as poverty, want and crime.

  Sheppard was born on 4 March 1702 (while Jonathan Wild still languished in Wolverhampton) in White’s Row, Spitalfields. Presumably because he was a weak or sickly baby, he was baptized the next day at St Dunstan’s, Stepney. He was named for a brother, John, who had died aged three a year before Jack was born. Jack’s father, a carpenter, died while Jack, his brother Thomas and their younger sister Mary were still small; his mother, although she doted on her children, was unable to support them without her husband’s income. Mary, the youngest, died two years after her father. At about the same time, Mrs Sheppard sent the young Jack, aged six, to Mr Garrett’s School near Great St Helen’s in Bishopsgate. The school, or workhouse, had been founded in 1700 in the spirit of reforming zeal that marked Anne’s reign; it was more a house of correction (or ‘house of corruption’, as they were popularly known) than an institution of education and growth.

  Workhouses were a new method of social control, devised at the turn of the eighteenth century; in 1711 there were about 4,000 children at over a hundred workhouses or charity schools throughout London. The conditions at the London Workhouse, also in Bishopsgate, were described in 1708: thirty or forty children to a ward, sleeping two to a bunk on tiers circling the walls. Two was the recommended number of children per bunk, but in reality six or eight of them were crammed in with each other on a single bunk. They woke at half past six, had half an hour for prayers and an inadequate breakfast of gruel, and started work at seven. They cobbled, spun, knitted and sewed until six in the evening, with an hour’s break for lunch, and then slept, exhausted, until the routine began again. They were sent off for an hour’s lessons a day, but the teaching was at best perfunctory. The strict discipline enforced by this regime was a deliberate attempt to instil fear of disobedience and idleness into the hearts of the pupils.

  This harsh attitude towards the poor was due to the prevailing belief that even the slightest taste of extra money or free time would corrupt them so much that they would no longer be willing to work to support the extravagances of their masters. A pamphlet called The Servant’s Calling: With Some Advice to the Apprentice, published in 1725, advised masters that ‘a frequent taste of any kind of diversion is apt to grow upon the palate, and to give too strong a relish for them; and when the inclination is turned strongly towards them, the shop or work-room is like the confinement of a prison, and labour like a weight that goes up hill’.

  Fielding laid the blame for the increase in violence and crime in London squarely on the moral dissolution of the poor, which led to social and material aspirations:

  Now what greater temptation can there be to voluptuousness, than a place where every sense and appetite of which it is compounded, are fed and delighted; where the eyes are feasted with show, and the ears with music, and where gluttony and drunkenness are allured by every kind of dainty; nay where the finest women are exposed to view, and where the meanest person who can dress himself clean, may in some degree mix with his betters, and thus perhaps satisfy his vanity as well as his love of pleasure?

  The fear of moral and social deterioration that inspired Fielding’s vitriolic outburst was widespread throughout the eighteenth century. The luxurious lifestyle of the rich was considered beneficial to society as a whole, because their demands created jobs, while any hint of the poor doing any more than getting by was frowned on, because it was assumed that if they had any money to spare on drinking or finery, they were being paid too much. People wrote scathingly of lamplighters wearing silk stockings, common labourers’ families being able to afford tea and sugar, and shopkeepers’ wives priding themselves on having hot chocolate and white bread for breakfast. This expenditure, regardless of whether it had been honestly earned, was regarded as a subtle form of insubordination.

  The gin-drinking and gambling of the poor were seen not as the results of abject poverty, but as an innate corruption that drove men to crime. Fielding called gin an ‘intoxicating draught [which] itself disqualifies them [the poor] from using any honest means to acquire it, at the same time that it removes all sense of fear and shame, and emboldens them to commit every wicked and desperate enterprise’. The poor were not credited with having self-control or an independent work ethic — ‘Good drunken company is their delight;/ And what they get by day, they spend by night,’ wrote Defoe — so the educated elite believed discipline should be forcibly instilled in them. The views of reformers like this contributor to the pamphlet The Craftsman, were unusual, and rarely stated: ‘As for the corruptions of servants, I can look upon them in no other light than as the natural consequences of the corruptions of those in a higher sphere.’

  Workhouses like Mr Garrett’s were intended to be the first stage in a lifetime of submission. ‘The advantage of the workhouse to the parish does not arise from what the poor people can do towards their subsistence, but from the apprehension the poor have of it,’ wrote one social commentator in 1725. They were guided by two basic principles: that poverty was evil; and that labour was the religious and moral duty of the poor, the only thing that wo
uld free them from the sin inherent in their lowly position.

  Ironically, workhouses, like prisons, were also considered to be schools of crime, where potential miscreants met and made contact with one another. ‘These workhouses though in appearance beneficial yet have in some respects an evil tendency for they mix the good and the bad; and too often make reprobates of all alike,’ wrote Defoe. So just as Wild served his criminal apprenticeship in Wood Street Compter, jack Sheppard from an early age was tutored by the youthful members of London’s underworld in another of the city’s academies of vice.

  When he was ten years old, Jack’s mother found him a place as a shop-boy. After her husband died, she had gone to work for William Kneebone, a woollen draper whose house and of was in the Strand; and Mr Kneebone agreed to provide Jack with a home and work. He was a kindly, generous man who took trouble with the lad, teaching him to read and write. Five years later, he arranged for Jack to be apprenticed to his friend Owen Wood, a carpenter who lived in Wych Street, off Drury Lane. Wood agreed to take the boy in because Kneebone promised to use his influence to secure a large building contract on a house in Hampstead for Wood. On 2 April 1717 Jack was bound apprentice to Wood for seven years, the usual period of service, in the presence of Sir William Fazakerley, a Chamberlain of the City of London.

  In the seventeenth century apprenticeship had been seen as a positive force for betterment in society. Richard Burton, in The Apprentice’s Companion, written in 1681, described it as ‘that genteel servitude which by a few years’ service faithfully and diligently performed towards their masters, lays a certain foundation for attaining riches and honour in this world, and by God’s grace everlasting happiness in the life to come’. Defoe noted that in the mid seventeenth century, apprentices were less rebellious, less scornful, easier to control, and more pious than they had become by 1726.

  By the time Jack Sheppard was apprenticed to Owen Wood, apprentices were increasingly seen as no more than servants or skivvies. Henri Misson, writing in 1719, called an apprentice ‘a sort of slave’, tied to his master by his indenture, but bound by no loyalty or gratitude. A century earlier, the master had given his apprentice a home, looking after him both materially and emotionally, providing not only lodging and food but also clothes, laundry and doctors if necessary. The hard work demanded of an apprentice had been seen as an investment in his future; but more and more, apprentices were asked to do work that bore little relation to the trade they were supposed to learn. In many cases, apprentices had learned their trade after two or three years of service but were legally banned from practising it, and remained beholden to a master who continued to set them menial tasks. Sheppard’s extraordinary skill as a carpenter and engineer was evident throughout his criminal career; after a few years working for Wood, he must have felt that his contract was a restraint on his abilities.

  Increasingly, apprentices were paid wages instead of merely living as part of their master’s family, a practice unheard of in Elizabethan times. This heightened the feeling that they were little more than domestic servants, whose unruliness and unreliability were well known in the early eighteenth century. It also meant that they had pocket money to spend on drinking, whoring and gambling. The eighteenth-century stereotype of the ‘Idle Apprentice’ immortalized by Hogarth was made possible by this new allowance of money. However, most social commentators believed idleness was inherent in the makeup of all apprentices. ‘An apprentice is likely to be idle, and almost always is so, because he has no immediate interest to be otherwise,’ declared Adam Smith.

  The taste for luxury and licentiousness that spending money encouraged also drew apprentices and domestic servants towards crime. Because they did not save their wages — what was the point, when they were forbidden to work for themselves? — money only relieved them from boredom, drudgery and frustration in the short term, and they often turned to petty crime to supplement their incomes. Maidservants might prostitute themselves, or apprentices rob the houses where they worked. Many did not actually steal themselves, but sold information about their master’s possessions, or when the house would be empty, to thieves. Footmen were well known for turning to highway robbery when their extravagant tastes and expenditure had exceeded their incomes. The material gains of crime were probably enhanced by a frisson of satisfaction at defying their master’s authority. Although manifestations of resentment by the poor would have been squashed where possible — and so do not often survive in written form today — Bernard de Mandeville reported that ‘they [the poor] murmur at Providence, and loudly complain, that the good things of the world are chiefly enjoyed by those who do not deserve them’.

  Despite the new freedom that having money conferred on journeymen, their behaviour was still tightly constrained by their masters. Apprentices were fined for swearing, drunkenness, fighting, gambling and slack work. If they refused to pay a fine, they were given eleven strokes across the buttocks with a board. This type of harsh physical punishment was typical of the age. Authority within the household was maintained by violence. A wife’s, child’s or servant’s resistance to their master’s rule was considered petty treason, rebellion on a personal level, and as such could provoke a savage response. Even Samuel Pepys, essentially a kind, warm-hearted man, thought nothing of boxing his clerk’s ears, whipping his boy-servant, and beating his fifteen-year-old maid with a broomstick before locking her up for a night in the cellar.[26]

  Horror stories of cruel treatment to servants and apprentices abounded. Mrs Brownrigg was a respectable midwife, married to a prosperous painter and plasterer. They owned their home, ‘lived in credit’, and took in parish apprentice girls to help in the house. These girls were treated with unbelievable cruelty. They were fed on stale bread and water, if at all, and made to sleep on rough straw on the floor of the coal cellar. One desperate girl, Mary Clifford, frozen to the bone by the damp against which her ragged clothes and inadequate diet gave little protection, tried to steal some food. Mrs Brownrigg caught her reaching up to the cupboard, and stripped her naked before beating her savagely with the butt end of a whip. Mary Clifford was sent back to the cellar, bleeding, raw, with a chain around her neck that barely allowed her to breathe. A few days later she complained to one of the Brownriggs’ lodgers about the conditions under which she and her companions were forced to live; Mrs Brownrigg overheard, and slashed viciously at Mary’s tongue with a pair of scissors, cutting it in two places. Eventually, someone informed the courts of Mrs Brownrigg’s brutality to her apprentice girls, and she was tried and hanged in 1767. It was too late for Mary Clifford, though; she was discovered locked in a cupboard, in a condition ‘impossible to describe’, and she died a few days later.[27]

  On the whole, however, as long as it was possible, a blind eye was turned to this kind of behaviour. In 1733 a fisherman from Hammersmith was found guilty only of the manslaughter of his apprentice, whom he had beaten with rope and a tiller before leaving him outside, mortally wounded. The boy had ‘died of wounds and want of looking after and hunger and cold together’. Two years later a ribbon-weaver called James Durant was acquitted of the murder of his apprentice, described as ‘a very little boy’ of thirteen or fourteen, whom he had beaten to death with a mop-stick.[28] It was considered a man’s prerogative to maintain control over his household, including his wife, children and servants, by whatever means he saw fit; any resistance to his word was considered a challenge to his authority, and thus deserving of punishment. If a wife was convicted of adultery, her punishment, for petty treason, was to be burned at the stake.

  If apprentices were often dealt with callously by their masters, parish apprentices were treated with even less consideration. They were farmed out to anyone willing to take them; once the parish had relieved itself of the responsibility for the child, little attention was paid to its future life, as in the case of Mary Clifford and Mrs Brownrigg. Sally Salisbury, the celebrated prostitute, was put out at the age of nine as a parish apprentice to a seamstress near Al
dgate; ‘but having the misfortune to lose a piece of lace, of a considerable value, she ran away from her mistress, and never returned’.[29] If Sally had been treated cruelly by her mistress, the fear of punishment would have seemed to the little girl to be a fate far worse than wandering the streets alone. Parish apprentices usually took with them a settlement of 20s.; many masters simply agreed to take a child for the money, and then overworked and abused it until it ran away. The more vulnerable a child was and the more pitiful its condition, the more a cruel master could take advantage of it without fear of reprisal from family or friends.

  Jack was more fortunate than most because his interests were looked after by his mother and Mr Kneebone. As a child, he was sent out as a parish apprentice to a cane-chair maker, but his master soon died; another cane-chair maker took him on but he ‘used him so ill’[30] that Jack left and went to his mother at Mr Kneebone’s. Sheppard stayed with Owen Wood apparently quite happily for several years, working hard and learning his chosen trade. Two years after he started work for Wood, the silk-weavers of Spitalfields rioted after their petitions to Parliament for laws to limit the imports of Indian cotton that threatened their trade had gone unheeded. They molested women wearing Indian cotton and calico, throwing ink over their dresses or tearing them off their bodies. The government was forced to limit the importing of cheap Indian printed cottons to appease the weavers.

  The silk-weavers of Spitalfields were among the most independent and politicized sections of England’s population at this time. Of Huguenot descent, their traditional religious Nonconformity extended to their political views. They refused to work in the factories that were springing up all over the rest of the country, harbingers of the Industrial Revolution; they would not accept that their masters were their ‘betters% they resented the power that these men wielded over them. The silk they wove was worn by the rich as a mark of wealth and success. A proverb of 1732 expresses the hostility the weavers felt towards the upper classes: ‘We are all Adam’s children, but silk makes the difference.’