Jack Sheppard facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jack Sheppard
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Chalk and pencil sketch of Jack Sheppard in Newgate Prison, attributed to Sir James Thornhill, c. 1723
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| Born | 4 March 1702 Spitalfields, Middlesex, England
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| Died | 16 November 1724 (aged 22) |
| Cause of death | Execution |
| Nationality | English |
| Other names | "Gentleman Jack", "Jack the Lad", "Honest Jack" |
| Occupation | cane-chair maker, carpenter, thief, shoplifter, burglar, highwayman, pickpocket, gaol-breaker |
| Known for | his numerous escapes from prison and his crimes of theft and burglary, a biography of which is thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe. |
John "Jack" Sheppard (4 March 1702 – 16 November 1724), or "Honest Jack", was a notorious English thief and prison escapee of early 18th-century London.
Born into a poor family, he was apprenticed as a carpenter but began committing theft and burglary in 1723, with little more than a year of his training to complete. He was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 but escaped four times from prison, making him notorious, though popular with the poorer classes. Ultimately, he was caught, convicted, and executed at Tyburn, ending his brief criminal career after less than two years.
Sheppard was as renowned for his attempts to escape from prison as he was for his crimes. An autobiographical "Narrative", thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe, was sold at his execution, quickly followed by popular plays. The character of Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) was based on Sheppard, keeping him well-known for more than 100 years. He returned to the public consciousness around 1840, when William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel entitled Jack Sheppard, with illustrations by George Cruikshank. The popularity of his tale, and the fear that others would be drawn to emulate his behaviour, caused the authorities to refuse to license any plays in London with "Jack Sheppard" in the title for forty years.
Legacy
There was a spectacular public reaction to Sheppard's deeds, which were cited favourably as an example in newspapers. Pamphlets, broadsheets, and ballads were all devoted to his amazing experiences, real and fictional, and his story was adapted for the stage almost immediately. Harlequin Sheppard, a pantomime by one John Thurmond (subtitled "A night scene in grotesque characters"), opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on Saturday 28 November, only two weeks after Sheppard's execution.
The account of his life remained well-known through the Newgate Calendar, and a three-act farce was published but never produced, but, mixed with songs, it became The Quaker's Opera, later performed at Bartholomew Fair. An imagined dialogue between Jack Sheppard and Julius Caesar was published in the British Journal on 4 December 1724, in which Sheppard favourably compares his virtues and exploits to those of Caesar.
Perhaps the most prominent play based on Sheppard's life is John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). Sheppard was the inspiration for the character Captain Macheath; his nemesis, Peachum, is based on Jonathan Wild. The play was spectacularly popular, restoring the fortune that Gay had lost in the South Sea Bubble, and was produced regularly for more than 100 years. An unperformed but published play The Prison-Breaker was turned into The Quaker's Opera (in imitation of The Beggar's Opera) and performed at Bartholomew Fair in 1725 and 1728. Two centuries later The Beggar's Opera was the basis for The Threepenny Opera of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1928).
Sheppard's tale may have been an inspiration for William Hogarth's 1747 series of 12 engravings, Industry and Idleness, which shows the parallel habituation of an apprentice, Tom Idle, to crime, resulting in his being executed, beside the fortunes of his fellow apprentice, Francis Goodchild, who marries his master's daughter and takes over his business, becoming wealthy as a result, eventually emulating Dick Whittington to become Lord Mayor of London.
Sheppard's tale was revived during the first half of the 19th century. A melodrama, Jack Sheppard, The Housebreaker, or London in 1724, by W. T. Moncrieff was published in 1825. More successful was William Harrison Ainsworth's third novel, entitled Jack Sheppard, which was published originally in Bentley's Miscellany from January 1839 with illustrations by George Cruikshank, overlapping with the final episodes of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. An archetypal Newgate novel, it generally remains close to the facts of Sheppard's life, but portrays him as a daring hero. Like Hogarth's prints, the novel pairs the increasing involvement of the "idle" apprentice with crime with the fortunes of a typical melodramatic character, Thames Darrell, a foundling of aristocratic birth who defeats his evil uncle to recover his fortune. Cruikshank's images perfectly complemented Ainsworth's tale—William Thackeray wrote that "... Mr Cruickshank really created the tale, and that Mr Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to it." The novel quickly became very popular: it was published in book form later that year, before the serialised version was completed, and even outsold early editions of Oliver Twist. Ainsworth's novel was adapted into a successful play by John Buckstone in October 1839 at the Adelphi Theatre featuring (strangely enough) Mary Anne Keeley; indeed, it seems likely that Cruikshank's illustrations were deliberately created in a form that were informed by, and would be easy to repeat as, tableaux on stage. It has been described as the "exemplary climax" of "the pictorial novel dramatized pictorially".
The story generated a type of cultural mania, embellished by pamphlets, prints, cartoons, plays and souvenirs, not repeated until George du Maurier's novel Trilby in 1895. By early 1840, a cant song from Buckstone's play "Nix My Dolly, Pals, Fake Away" was reported to be "deafening us in the streets". Public alarm at the possibility that young people would emulate Sheppard's behaviour caused the Lord Chamberlain to ban, at least in London, the licensing of any plays with "Jack Sheppard" in the title for forty years. The fear may not have been entirely unfounded: Courvousier, the valet of Lord William Russell, said in one of his several confessions that the book had inspired him to murder his master. Frank and Jesse James wrote letters to the Kansas City Star signed "Jack Sheppard". Nevertheless, burlesques of the story were written after the ban was ended, including a popular Gaiety Theatre, London, piece called Little Jack Sheppard (1886) by Henry Pottinger Stephens and William Yardley, which featured Nellie Farren as Jack.
The Sheppard story has been revived three times as movies the 20th century: The Hairbreadth Escape of Jack Sheppard (1900), Jack Sheppard (1923), and Where's Jack? (1969), a British historical drama directed by James Clavell with Tommy Steele in the title role. Jake Arnott features him in his 2017 novel The Fatal Tree. In Confessions of the Fox, a 2018 novel by Jordy Rosenberg, the Sheppard story was recontextualised as a queer narrative.
In 1971 British popular music group Chicory Tip paid tribute to Sheppard in "Don't Hang Jack", the B-side to "I Love Onions". The song, apparently sung from the viewpoint of a witness in the courtroom, describes Jack's daring exploits as a thief, and futilely begs the judge to spare Sheppard because he was loved by the women of the town, and idolised by the lads who "made him their king".
In Jordy Rosenberg's 2018 novel Confessions of the Fox, a 21st-century academic discovers a manuscript containing Sheppard's "confessions", which tell the story of his childhood and his love affair with Edgeworth Bess.
The reasons for the lasting legacy of Sheppard's exploits in the popular imagination have been addressed by Peter Linebaugh, who suggests that Sheppard's legend was based on the prospect of excarceration, of escape from what Michel Foucault in Folie et déraison termed the grand renfermement (Great Confinement), in which "unreasonable" members of the population were locked away and institutionalised. Linebaugh further says that the laws applied to Sheppard and similar working class criminals were a means of disciplining a potentially rebellious multitude into accepting increasingly harsh property laws. Another nineteenth-century opinion of the Jack Sheppard phenomenon was offered by Charles Mackay in Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:
Whether it be that the multitude, feeling the pangs of poverty, sympathise with the daring and ingenious depredators who take away the rich man's superfluity, or whether it be the interest that mankind in general feel for the records of perilous adventure, it is certain that the populace of all countries look with admiration upon great and successful thieves.
