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

by Lucy Moore

  The new view was that punishment ‘should strike at the soul rather than the body’.[175] The ‘certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment...must discourage crime’.[176] Imprisonment and transportation gradually replaced the death sentence as the penalties for most felonies. These new forms of punishment carried with them the hope of personal reform and regeneration. The state, which had been tainted by the cruelty it unintentionally revealed at public executions and in its arbitrary displays of mercy, hoped to exalt itself by punishing miscreants with humanity and reason.

  This was a result partly of the new awareness of the injustice inherent in the existing penal system. In the eighteenth century a starving child who stole a shilling paid the same penalty as a murderer or an armed robber. A young girl in Norwich was hanged for stealing a handkerchief. Fifteen-year-old Joseph Harris, who had stolen two half-sovereigns and some silver, rode to Tyburn with his head in the lap of his weeping, desolate father. As late as 1833 a nine-year-old boy who stole two pennyworth of paint by poking a stick through a cracked shop-window was hanged. Popular sympathy with the victims of cases like these was very high. Public executions had become the focus for disorder, unintelligible and irrelevant displays of tyrannical control. Even if it had wanted to retain the death penalty for robbery, the government would have been forced sooner or later to bow to public opinion and reform the penal code.

  Dr Johnson believed the eighteenth-century uniformity of punishment led to criminals taking a nonchalant attitude towards their actions: ‘If the penalty for robbery and murder is the same, the thief will think little of adding murder to his crime.’ Because there was no difference between the penalties assigned to crimes, there was no moral evaluation of crimes. ‘Death is ultimum supplicium, and is therefore intended only for crimes of the highest rank; but when it is indiscriminately inflicted, it leaves no room to difference the punishments of crimes widely different in their own nature.’[177] Dr Leon Radzinowicz suggests that the fact that eighteenth-century society made no effort to differentiate between the morality of different actions might reflect its overriding concern with the protection of property at the expense of social welfare.

  Jack Sheppard, who turned to crime because all other avenues of opportunity were blocked in front of him, was a victim of this system. Plato believed that misery is the mother of crime; for jack, and so many others like him, it was not misery that thrust him into a life of crime, but frustration. In court he claimed that he had turned to crime because he ‘had no opportunity to obtain his bread in an honest way’. He was pooh-poohed by the judges, who saw any crime simply as a lack of discipline. But it was the impossibility of rising out of his allotted sphere, despite his talents, that forced Jack to seek an alternative route to the material rewards held up — just out of his reach — by society as desirable. So he chose to use the carpentry skills he had learned, but been unable to practise legitimately, in burglary. His undoubted talents had been thwarted, and he had taken the only option open to him: crime. In burglary, and particularly in prison-breaking, he discovered independence and self-respect for the first time in his life. And because he was loath to relinquish these new-found freedoms when Jonathan Wild demanded that he do so, he became a martyr to Wild’s insatiable lust for power.

  Chapter Twelve – Gaol

  After his trial Sheppard had been taken back to Newgate. The prison stood on the site of a Roman gatehouse, at the junction of Holborn and Newgate Streets, conveniently close to the Old Bailey. There had been a gaol there since about 1130. In 1422 Dick Whittington had left a bequest for the rebuilding of the gaol, hence its cant nickname, the ‘Whit’. It had been rebuilt again after the Great Fire, and was finished in 1672. However, although the exterior had been adorned with pilasters, and illusory battlements and statues of the virtues had been added to the facade, the fifteenth-century interior was largely untouched. Like many other prisons built before the reforming movement that took place after 1750, Newgate had not been designed as a gaol. Restrictive measures were attempted — iron bars were set into the windows and crushed glass stuck on to the tops of walls — but gaolers had to rely on physical confinement to keep prisoners under control. In the absence of a large, alert staff or properly secured buildings, inmates of Newgate had to be chained up. They were collared, handcuffed, their feet put in irons and ‘stapled’ to the floor or walls.

  But just as in Wood Street Compter, the debtors’ prison Wild had inhabited in his younger days, relative freedom, and indeed comfort, were available within Newgate’s walls — for a price. In The Beggars’ Opera, Mr Lockit, the turnkey, offers Macheath a selection of irons in varying degrees of weight and discomfort, depending on how much he was willing to pay in garnish. ‘We have them [fetters] of all prices, from one guinea to ten, and ’tis fitting every gentleman should please himself.’ After paying an entrance fee, and buying his freedom from a ball and chain, a prisoner could begin to negotiate about where he stayed within the gaol.

  Standard accommodation was in the ‘Common Ward’, where prisoners were packed like slaves or sardines into a vast room whose walls were lined with shelves that were used for beds. Bedding was available only if one paid for it; it would have been vital in the winter, since there was no heating. In 1709 a room with a window on the ‘Master’s Side’ cost 22s. 6d. a week in rent, about double what was charged for the Common Side; the prisoner had first to pay a deposit of £500 for the cell and its furnishings. Those who could afford no rent at all were simply thrown into the ‘Hole’. The best rooms in Newgate were in the Press Yard — a part, theoretically, of the keeper’s residence, but available to the prisoners, like everything else, at an extortionate price. A single room in the Press Yard cost the same to rent as ‘the best house in St James’s or Piccadilly’. The prisoner could employ servants and chefs, bring his wife and children to live with him, and have a steady stream of visitors, all charged the standard rate of 3s. a visit.

  Major Bernadini was a Jacobite arrested in 1688 when William of Orange came to the throne. He was not tried, because no evidence was brought against him, but was never released, because he refused to swear allegiance to the new king. By 1722, when he had been in Newgate for thirty-four years, he had been impoverished by the constant demands of the keepers on his finances. A sympathetic newspaper reported that he was ‘reduced to such want, that [he has] nothing to live upon’. This article aroused the pity of a wealthy female, who married him, moved with him from the Common Ward to the Press Yard, and there bore him ten children.[178]

  The conditions Major Bernadini endured during his years in the Common Ward were soul-destroying. There was no light, no ventilation; the air was fetid and damp because it could not circulate. There was no space for exercise. There was no heating, and no cleaning facilities; an open sewer ran through the middle of the ward. Some parts of Newgate were below ground-level and water covered the floor, sometimes up to six inches deep. Rats, cockroaches and lice plagued the prisoners. ‘The lice crackling under their feet made such a noise as walking on shells which are strewn over garden walks’;[179] many who could not afford shoes would only have worn rags tied around their feet to protect them from the vermin underfoot. Food was a thin soup made from bread and water; it was no wonder that in 1729 a Parliamentary Committee discovered 350 prisoners dying of starvation in Marshalsea Prison. In 1726 twenty-one felons from Newgate were hanged — and nearly four times that number, eighty-three, died in prison in the same year of hunger or illness. The stench of disease and filth was so disgusting that female visitors held vinegar-soaked handkerchiefs to their mouths and noses to prevent them retching, as well as to kill the germs the air might be carrying.

  ‘Gaol fever’ was a virulent form of typhus, possibly complicated by smallpox, that plagued Newgate and London’s other gaols during the eighteenth century. It was ‘a contagious, putrid and very pestilential fever, attended with tremblings, twitchings, restlessness, delirium with, in some instance, early fre
nzy and lethargy; while the victims break out often into livid pustules and purple spots’.[180] It was caused by the dreadful conditions in which the prisoners were forced to live, and exacerbated by the poor diet which provided them with no protein. In 1750 an outbreak of gaol fever for the first time infected people outside Newgate. ‘The very air they breathed acquired a pestilential degree of putrefaction.’[181] The disease spread through the Old Bailey, the felons’ only point of contact with the outside world. Sixty people died, including the Lord Mayor, jurors and lawyers. Panic ensued. Prisoners were washed with vinegar, a disinfectant, before being taken to court; judges breathed into a nosegay so as not to inhale the tainted air that clung to the prisoners. (This remains a tradition at the opening of each legal term at the Old Bailey.)

  It was such incidents that frightened the public into acknowledging the dreadful state of gaols. From the start of the eighteenth century, an awareness that there was room for improvement within the penal system began to grow. Workhouses like those where Jack Sheppard and Dickens’s Oliver Twist were sent, and houses of correction, like that into which Hogarth’s Moll Hackabout was committed, were intended to scare the poor and destitute into obedience and diligence. They were meant to be agencies of social reform, transforming potential criminals into upstanding, industrious members of the community, cowed into accepting the low wages, hard work and harsh living conditions their rank dictated. These were institutions created to fill a void; previously, no controls had existed for the merely poor and destitute except laws against vagabondage.

  But the existing prison system appeared adequate, and so what to do with actual criminals (as opposed to potential ones such as the youthful Jack Sheppard) was not really an issue until the late eighteenth century. Since most prisoners had committed crimes against property — sacred in the eyes of the Whig aristocracy and gentry who ruled the country — no conditions were thought to be too harsh for them. Cesare Beccaria, whose book Crimes and Punishments was first published in English in 1764, suggested in it for the first time that prisons might be used to reform their inmates, rather than acting as a deterrent to others, or simply restraining their charges before their trial and sentence. The first purpose-built gaol, Pentonville, designed to use incarceration as a punishment in itself, was not opened until 1842. Where Newgate had been disorderly, chaotic and uncontrolled, Pentonville was regimented, tightly constrained and inhuman. Criminals were scrubbed in a carbolic bath when they arrived, their heads shaved, their clothes and possessions burned, and they were given a number by which they were called, instead of their names, for the length of their stay. They lived totally isolated in their cells, all of which were overlooked by the wardens and a preacher in a central office. No communication at all was permitted, and prisoners wore masks when they were out of their cells for chapel or exercise to prevent them recognizing each other. Every year between five and fifteen out of the 450 inmates were taken to an insane asylum, with the threat of returning to Pentonville if they ‘recovered’ hanging over them.

  The difference between Pentonville and Newgate was that while internment at Pentonville was the punishment, Newgate was only a storage house for criminals waiting either for trial or punishment. Exceptions such as Major Bernadini did, of course, exist; and debtors were a different case because they remained in prison until they paid off their debts. Occasionally a gaol sentence would be given for crimes such as perjury or commercial fraud; Sally Salisbury was sentenced to a year in Newgate for assaulting and wounding John Finch but died before her term had elapsed. But the average prisoner stayed at Newgate for between a week and three months.

  Jack Sheppard, because of his previous escape, was not an average prisoner. He was placed in the condemned hold, and shackled firmly within. In 1663 Samuel Pepys witnessed the hanging of Colonel Turner whom he visited in the condemned hold at Newgate. Pepys called it

  a most fearful, sad, deplorable place. Hell itself in comparison cannot he such a place. There is neither bench, stool, nor stick for any person there; they lie like swine upon the ground, upon one another, howling and roaring — it was more terrible to me than [Turner’s] death.

  Howling and roaring were common words used to describe Newgate’s uproar. The prisoners, both men and ‘hell-cat’ women, used to shriek obscenities at passers-by. They pissed out of windows and threw the contents of their chamber pots into the streets. But if the inmates were a disreputable, unruly mob, the keepers were no better.

  The horrid aspects of turnkeys and gaolers, in discontent and hurry; the sharp and dreadful looks of rogues, that beg in irons, but would rob you with greater satisfaction if they could; the bellowings of half a dozen names at a time, that are perpetually made in enquiries after one another; the variety of strong voices, that are heard, of howling in one place, scolding and quarrelling in another, and loud laughter in a third; the substantial breakfasts that are made in the midst of all this; the seas of beer that are swilled...[182]

  In the sweltering heat of the summer of 1724 Jack Sheppard concentrated on escaping his confines once more. Unlike Jonathan Wild, who was able to turn his time in prison to his advantage, captivity only made Sheppard more determined to be free. While Wild had learned the rituals of gaol, and clawed and scrambled up its intricate hierarchy, Sheppard resisted. For Wild, it was merely a case of establishing a set of rules by which he could live, and succeed, and dominate. Having not found his niche within the conventional, hardworking (if harsh and a little mundane) community at Wolverhampton, he had come to London. There he had discovered a new society, with its own laws, ones which he understood, and knew that he could manipulate to his advantage. He wanted to be a rich, respected member of the London mercantile class; but he cared not if he used the conventional route, or found his way there via an educational stay in the Wood Street Compter and an apprenticeship to a professional thief-taker. But for Jack Sheppard, independence was the ideal. He cared little for the rewards of crime, spending or giving away what he stole almost immediately. For him, having to conform to any rules, be they those of a modest carpenter in the City of London or those of a criminal in and out of Newgate, working in an organized gang, and informing on his friends when Wild asked him to or when his neck depended on it, were abhorrent. For him, liberty was everything.

  Two weeks after Jack was condemned to death, on 30 August, Edgworth Bess and Poll Maggott, another ‘loose woman’ whom he knew from the Black Lion, and who had encouraged him to crime as Bess had, came to visit him in the condemned hold at Newgate. They brought a set of women’s clothes, which Jack slipped into while the attention of the keepers, at the other end of the ward, was distracted. He had chosen his time wisely: the annual St Bartholomew’s Fair was on at Smithfield, so the streets of London were full of vagabonds and strolling players, and the city’s authorities had their hands full; the court was at Windsor, so the focus of government was outside the capital; and there were disciplinary problems within Newgate itself. The prisoners who helped the turnkeys with gaol administration had been caught stealing the charity money that was used to buy bread for the poorest inmates, and were refusing to let visitors bring beer into the prison. Sheppard had already loosened one of the iron rods in the internal window of his cell, in preparation, and after taking it out, the girls pulled him through the window into the open ward. Like Toad dressed as a washerwoman, he walked brazenly out of Newgate with Bess and Poll under the eyes of the keepers, once more a free man.

  Although Edgworth Bess had betrayed him to Wild, nevertheless he went with her to ‘lie down in softest pleasures the remembrance of dangers past’.[183] But from this time, he and Bess became alienated from one another. She had in the past been referred to as his wife, and had lived with him as such; but after her betrayal, he denied this hotly. ‘There is not a more wicked, deceitful, lascivious wretch living in England. She has proved my bane,’ he told the Reverend Wagstaff, the Ordinary of Newgate, before his death. ‘She indeed rewarded me as well for it [helping her escape from N
ew Prison], in betraying me to Jonathan Wild so soon after.’ But Wild caught up with Bess only days after she had helped Jack escape.

  Last Tuesday, Joseph Shepheard’s [sic] wife, who assisted her husband to make his escape out of the condemned hold, was discovered and taken by Jonathan Wild the thief-taker and late on the same night, she was brought to Newgate, being charged with felony for the same; we are certainly informed, that the said Shepheard went off by water between 7 and 8 o’clock on Monday night, at Blackfriars Stairs, the waterman saw his irons under his nightgown, and was terrified thereat; he landed him at the Horseferry at Westminster, for which he rewarded him with 7 pence.[184]

  The day after his escape, Jack met up with his friend William Page, a butcher’s apprentice in Clare Market. Disguised as butchers in blue smocks with white aprons, they set out to Chipping Warden in Northamptonshire, hoping to stay there with Page’s family until the furore over Sheppard’s latest escapade had died down. But Page’s relatives were poor, and although they were welcoming they could not afford to harbour the young men for long. The two friends also found the country a trifle dull. ‘As life doe not consist in breathing the air, but enjoyment, he began to be tired of his inactivity and longed to be a part again in the busy world...’[185]

  So Jack and Page returned to London after only three days. Almost immediately, they were recognized in Islington by a milkman who spread the word that they were back. London’s shopkeepers, who had been on tenterhooks since Sheppard’s escape, hired guards for their shops. The pair passed a watchmaker’s on Fleet Street, foolishly left guarded only by a boy, and stole three watches. Later on, having drunk the proceeds from the sale of one of the watches, they found the milkman who had raised the alarm and drenched him in milk and cream from his pans. Knowing that they would soon be captured, they decided to go on a second ‘rural expedition’ and left London, heading towards Finchley Common, still dressed as butchers.