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

by Lucy Moore

  Methinks I see him already in his cart, sweeter and more lovely than the nosegay in his hand! — I hear the crowd extolling his resolution and intrepidity! — What vollies of sighs are sent from the windows of Holborn, that so comely a youth should be brought to disgrace! — I see him at the Tree [Tyburn Tree]! The whole circle are in tears! — Even butchers weep! — Jack Ketch [the slang name for the hangman, taken from the name of a real executioner of the seventeenth century] himself hesitates to perform his duty, and would be glad to lose his fee, by a reprieve...

  Crying girls handed Jack bunches of flowers as he rode past them and men struggled up to him as he sat in his cart to wish him well and shake his hand. Women often outnumbered men on hanging days, and were noted for their vociferous presence, either baying for blood or weeping tears of sympathy for the victims.

  When all the prisoners arrive at their destination they are made to mount on a very wide cart made expressly for the purpose, a cord is passed round their necks and the end fastened to the gibbet, which is not very high. The chaplain who accompanied the condemned men is also on the cart; he makes them pray and sing a few verses of the Psalms. The relatives are permitted to mount the cart and take farewell. When the time is up — that is to say about a quarter of an hour — the chaplain and relations get off the cart, the executioner covers the eyes and faces of the prisoners with their caps, lashes the horses that draw the cart, which slips from under the condemned men’s feet...[195]

  The cart stopped at the City of Oxford tavern on the Oxford Road (today’s Oxford Street) by Marylebone Fields, and Jack drank a pint of sack (warm fortified wine) with James Figgs, the boxer who had visited him in Newgate. A youth bounded up on to his cart and whispered a word into his ear before jumping off and disappearing into the crush. Jack threw his head back and laughed with abandon at his comment; possibly he had just been told of plans to resuscitate his corpse after he had been hanged for the allotted time. He said gaily, if inexplicably, to Reverend Wagstaff, who rode with him to offer spiritual solace if it was needed, that, ‘I have now as great satisfaction at heart as if I was going to enjoy an estate of £200 a year.’

  Unlike some of his peers, Sheppard did not choose to use his hanging as a chance to demonstrate his innocence. When the cart stopped at Tyburn and the hangman began his preparations, Jack held out a pamphlet called A Narrative of All the Robberies, Escapes, &c., of John Sheppard, written by himself and printed by John Applebee of Blackfriars, dated 10 November 1724 in the Middle Stone Room at Newgate. He declared that this (with the writing of which he was probably helped by Defoe) should be published as his official confession. He agreed to publicize Applebee’s account of his life in return for an assurance that the publisher would arrange his ‘rescue’, a common practice that involved waiting to collect the near-dead body once it had hung for the mandatory fifteen minutes, and taking it quickly to a doctor, who would try to revive it with warm blankets and wine. Should he survive his execution, his story would attract even more interest than it already had; and Applebee would have had the scoop of the century.

  Until the automatic drop was introduced in 1760, hanging more often resulted in unconsciousness than death. There were several famous cases of people being revived after they had been hanged: John Smith, who hanged for two hours in 1709, recovered and lived for ten more years. He was known for the rest of his life as Half-Hanged Smith. Sir William Petty, a famous surgeon, revived an apparent corpse brought to him for ‘anatomization’, or dissection, in front of students. She lived another fifteen years. By tradition, if the first hanging was unsuccessful, a condemned man could go free because his survival was a sign of divine favour.

  Some were not so lucky. Six months after Jack’s death, a man condemned to death by hanging was being tied up at Tyburn ready for the cart to move away. But as the sheriff’s officers approached him, he

  flipped [his head] out of the halter, leapt out of the cart among the mob, land began] to tear off his shroud; but his hands were tied, and he [could] do but little at it. Jack Ketch leapt upon his back, and the officers surrounded him, so that he was soon taken, [rehaltered], and hanged.[196]

  At the last, Jack was subdued and obedient. Once the noose was fastened around his neck, the cart moved out from beneath his feet and he was left dangling beneath the gibbet. Because he was so slight, it took several minutes for him to lose consciousness — he did not weigh enough to force his body to drop sharply, and thus break his neck. He writhed and twisted on the end of the rope, with people in the crowd pulling at his legs hoping to ease his pain by breaking his neck, until finally he grew limp and still. ‘The hangman does not give himself the trouble to put them [the hanging men] out of their pain; but some of their friends or relations do it for them: they pull the dying person by the legs, and beat his breast, to dispatch him as soon as possible.’[197] The friends of a pirate called John Gow were in such a panic to ensure his quick and painless death that they pulled his legs so hard that they broke the rope holding him and he had to be strung up again.

  Many victims of the gallows stayed sensible of their situation for several minutes, even after the long drop was introduced. Hangmen were notoriously slapdash about their profession. The body would hang suspended, its bound legs and arms jerking convulsively. Dying men often defecated and urinated in the throes of death; some even ejaculated. Their eyes bulged out of their sockets and a ‘bloody froth or frothy mucus’ bubbled out of their mouths and noses.

  After the allotted fifteen minutes was up, the hearse ordered by Defoe and Applebee to take Jack away and try to resuscitate him approached the dangling body. The crowd, fearing that the hearse was about to take him off to be anatomized, pelted the driver with stones and surged forward to protect the body. Anatomization was an overriding terror of men condemned to death, either from a simple fear of being cut up, whether dead or alive, or perhaps from a distant hope that they might be revived if they had not been dissected; Blueskin had hoped that Wild would protect him from the ‘Surgeons’ Hall’ (cf. The Reward of Cruelty). Onlookers fought fiercely to shield the victims’ bodies from the doctors’ hearses that skirted the edge of the crowd on execution days, seeking to save one of their own from something they them-selves feared. Foremost in their minds must have been the awareness that the dead man might just as easily have been them. They were compelled by a sense of solidarity with the victim as well as traditional religious beliefs in the sanctity of the corpse, and the importance of a proper burial because the soul’s resurrection on Judgement Day was believed to depend on the corpse’s integrity after death.[198] Dick Turpin’s body was exhumed a few days after his burial, by a crowd who feared it had been taken away to be dissected; it was carried triumphantly through the city of York, where Turpin had died, on the shoulders of four men.

  The desire of the poor to save the bodies of the hangman’s victims was compounded by the feeling that the educated classes were exploiting and desecrating their dead heroes by using them as scientific experiments. The lower classes believed that the corpses of condemned men had mythical, almost magical powers which were defiled by dissection. The ancient Romans thought that the blood of criminals was a cure for epilepsy, while the ‘death sweat’ of a condemned man was held to cure the King’s Evil. A withered limb would be made whole again by placing it on the neck of a recently hanged man, and touching the hand of a hanged man could cure a multitude of ailments ranging from cancerous growths to ulcers. The hand of a hanged man could also make a barren woman fertile. Shopkeepers thought their business would improve if they kept the fingers of a felon in their shop; a small bone taken from a criminal’s corpse and carried in a purse was supposed to keep it from being empty. The hangman did a roaring trade after execution days by selling the rope used to hang the felons for a shilling an inch; it was meant to bring good luck.

  In the crush, Jack’s body was torn and dragged about; eventually, relative peace was restored, and what remained of the corpse was taken to the Barley Mow t
avern. Later that night, when his friends attempted to take it away to bury it, another riot broke out outside the tavern. Finally, at about midnight, Jack was interred in the churchyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

  Two weeks later The Harlequin Sheppard, a popular ‘opera’, opened in a Drury Lane theatre, the first in a long line of dramatizations of Jack Sheppard’s short life.

  So amazing have been the actions of this desperado, that, we hear, they have got The Escapes of Jack Sheppard, or Harlequin in Newgate, now in rehearsal at the new playhouse; Mr Lun not doubting but to make as much of him as he has done of Dr Faustus [another popular play]. The person who plays Sheppard, it seems, went to see the original in Newgate; who told him, he should be glad to have it in his power to play his own part.[199]

  The most successful and enduring play based on Jack Sheppard’s life was undoubtedly John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera, first staged in 1728. It was performed more than any other piece in the eighteenth century, and there was at least one production every year from 1728 until 1886. Although Macheath, the central character, was a highwayman rather than a house-breaker, he had been based in part on Sheppard, and his enemy, Peachum, was clearly modelled on Sheppard’s antagonist Jonathan Wild. Gay had planned to write about Wild ever since meeting him at the races at Windsor in 1719. Wild had ‘discoursed with great freedom on his profession, and set it in such a light, that the poet imagined he might work up the incidents of it for the stage’. Gay had discussed his idea for a Newgate Pastoral’ with his friends Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, neither of whom thought his play would succeed. But succeed it did. It was said to have made Gay rich, and Rich (the producer) gay. Gay, who had lost everything when the South Sea Bubble burst in 1721, made between £700 and £2,000 from the musical. Lavinia Fenton, who played Polly Peachum, became the most celebrated woman in London. The Duke of Bolton made her his mistress, with an annual allowance of £400; scandalously, he later married her. William Hogarth painted scenes from the play, song-books were published, prints of the characters engraved, ‘Beggars’ Opera’ playing cards and fans issued.

  Daniel Defoe was one of the contemporary writers who took a firm stand against what he saw as the corrupting influence of The Beggars’ Opera.

  We take pain to puff ’em [rogues] up in their villainy, and thieves are set out in so amiable a light in The Beggars’ Opera that it has taught them to value themselves on their profession, rather than be ashamed of it, by making a highwayman the hero and dismissing him at the last unpunished.

  In Jack Sheppard’s autobiography, most probably ghost-written by Defoe, Jack says he hopes his story will ‘prove a warning to all young men’. From the little we know about Jack, it seems unlikely that this sentiment originated from him. More probably it was inserted by Defoe, trying to add a moral to the story of the outlaw’s life. Defoe was very concerned about the negative influence glamorous, escapist crime stories had on their impressionable readers. ‘’Tis something strange,’ he wrote in the preface to his life of Jonathan Wild, ‘that a man’s life should be made a kind of romance before his face, and while he was on the spot to contradict it; or, that the world should be so fond of a formal chimney-corner tale, that they had rather that a story should be made merry than true.’

  Defoe was not wrong about the image characters like Sheppard and Macheath projected. A boy of seventeen who was tried at the Old Bailey declared himself ‘so delighted with the spirit and heroic character of Macheath, that on quitting the theatre he laid out his last guinea on the purchase of a pair of pistols, and stopped a gentleman on the highway’.[200] And the attraction persisted throughout the nineteenth century. A Manchester boy in the 1840s claimed he saw the play Jack Sheppard ‘four times in one week’, spending 6d. of his weekly 6s. 6d. salary. R. H. Horne, a nineteenth-century writer, commented that although common people had no knowledge of biblical figures they knew intimately ‘the character and course of life of Dick Turpin, the highwayman, and more particularly of Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison-breaker’.[201] This state of affairs was traced directly back to the popularity of The Beggars’ Opera:

  Rapine and violence have been gradually increasing ever since its first representation...Young men, apprentices, clerks in public offices, and others, disdaining the arts of honest industry and captivated with arts of idleness and criminal pleasures, now betake themselves to the road, affect politeness in the very act of robbery, and in the end become victims to the justice of their country.[202]

  William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel, Jack Sheppard, was published in 1839. He and Charles Dickens visited Newgate together in 1837, Ainsworth researching Jack Sheppard, and Dickens collecting notes for what became Oliver Twist. Nine new plays based on Jack’s life were released in the year after Ainsworth’s novel was published, but after 1840 any play with the name ‘Jack Sheppard’ in its title was banned by the government following the murder of 72-year-old Lord William Russell by his valet, Courvoisier. At his trial, Courvoisier claimed he had gone to his master’s bedroom to kill him after reading Jack Sheppard. Dickens described watching the valet hang:

  No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness; nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes...I hoped, for an instant, that there was some sense of Death and Eternity in the cry of ‘Hats Off!’ when the miserable wretch appeared; but I found, next moment, that they only raised it as they would at a play — to see the stage the better, in the final scene.

  Jack Sheppard also inspired the painter and engraver William Hogarth. Hogarth’s father-in-law, Sir James Thornhill, had painted Sheppard in Newgate. It is not known if Hogarth, Thornhill’s apprentice, accompanied him on this assignment, but Hogarth must have seen the portrait (which has since been lost). The features of Tom Idle, the idle apprentice in Industry and Idleness, are supposedly derived from Thornhill’s portrait of Jack Sheppard, and Tom’s life mirrors that of the real Jack. Unlike Defoe, who puts words into Jack’s mouth to make his story a better example to other young men, Hogarth allowed his account to stand alone. Jack’s end was the only moral he needed: Hogarth let it speak for itself.

  William Hogarth was almost unique among his contemporaries for his interest in, and sympathy with, the lives of the eighteenth-century underclasses. Most artists of this period concentrated on works commissioned by their wealthy clientele, usually of a religious, heroic or commemorative nature; Hogarth, like the writers Defoe and Fielding, preferred to look at society as a whole. While he painted portraits of members of the aristocracy and merchant classes, he chose to use engravings — their complex narrative schemes often novelistic in their conception — to illustrate a side of life largely ignored by other painters of the time.

  Where Hogarth was brought up played a significant part in forming his mentality. He was born in Bartholomew’s Close, an area of London like Spitalfields, where Jack Sheppard was born, that was noted for its dissenting, radical population. Newgate Prison was two minutes’ walk away; the procession of the condemned men passed through Smithfield on its way to Tyburn. The raucous Smithfield meat market was practically on his doorstep. St Bartholomew’s Fair, held annually at Smithfield, was thronged with strolling players like the ones to whom the young Jonathan Wild had been attracted in Wolverhampton. Criminals, who saw fairs as places of business, congregated at St Bartholomew’s Fair, plying their various trades. Jonathan Wild’s thief-taking predecessors used fairs as he did, to display their strength and keep in contact with the men and women who worked for them. These characters, alienated from normal society, whom Hogarth depicts time and again in his engravings, had been known to him from his earliest years, and his empathy with figures such as Moll Hackabout and Tom Idle sprang from his background and upbringing.

  William Hogarth was born on 10 November 1697, the son of a Latin scholar who spent much of his son’s youth in a debtors’ prison. Although Hogarth was middle class, in that he was well educated and the son of a scholar, the povert
y in which he grew up as a result of his father’s debts meant that he never felt he belonged to the newly prosperous mercantile class of early eighteenth-century London. He was a child neither of the street, because his education and birth lifted him above it, nor of the emergent middle class, which his family lacked the funds to belong to.

  These childhood influences allowed Hogarth to bring a special understanding to his illustrations of the lives of outcasts. Ronald Paulson argues that his sympathetic attitude can be seen most clearly in the series Industry and Idleness, where Hogarth, ostensibly lauding the rise to wealth and responsibility of Francis Goodchild, the Industrious ’Prentice, in contrast to the dissolution of Tom Idle, the Idle ’Prentice, is in fact looking up at the progression of events from the perspective of Tom Idle. The hero of the piece is really a villain; and the good-for-nothing Tom no more than a victim of circumstance.

  In Plate I, Francis Goodchild and Tom Idle sit at their looms, watched over by their stick-wielding master. Goodchild sits in the light, beneath a window, weaving away industriously, a clean copy of the ’Prentices’ Guide at his feet, his coat brushed and neat. Idle sleeps off a hangover in the dim light that reaches his rickety loom, clad in a ragged jacket, a tattered copy of the ’Prentices’ Guide on the floor beside him. Paulson sees Idle’s drinking and whoring as symptoms of his condition, rather than the causes of it. Idle had been consigned by his master to a poor quality loom in a dark corner, given a torn-up guide to his duties, his clothes left unmended, his education neglected; Goodchild sits, literally and metaphorically, in the light. Idle’s fate has been imposed on him with his name; he would have to work twice as hard as Goodchild to escape the taint of the expectations his name carries with it.