Defoe on Sheppard and Wild: The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild by Daniel Defoe. Richard Holmes
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regret.
Thus there was a natural and dramatic rivalry between Sheppard and Wild, which quickly caught the popular imagination. Here was an intense clash of personalities and life-principles: the incorrigible young escapist pitted against the grim relentless thief-taker. It could be seen as a duel between crime and justice, rebellion and authority, youth and age, or freedom and oppression, depending on one’s point of view.
Nor was the ultimate outcome clear. For although Sheppard was finally caught and executed, he was to achieve the posthumous status of a people’s hero, a cockney pocket-Hercules. While no less melodramatically, Jonathan Wild was himself to be executed the following May 1725, having been arrested on charges of corruption, gang-running and receiving stolen goods. Henceforth he too, like Sheppard, entered urban folklore, but as one of the great villains of the London underworld. Altogether it was a story just waiting for any journalist, novelist, playwright - or biographer - to seize.
In fact over thirty ballads, plays, pamphlets and short lives of Sheppard and Wild appeared over the next two years. But it was John Applebee, an enterprising editor based in Blackfriars and specialising in crime publishing, who commissioned the three best early biographies, which are here reprinted. They consist of two short pamphlets on the life of Jack Sheppard published in October and November 1724, and a longer life of Jonathan Wild published in the following June 1725. All were bestsellers, the second pamphlet running to eight editions in a few weeks. But all were anonymous.
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How then did Daniel Defoe come to be involved with the Sheppard and Wild story? After the huge success of Robinson Crusoe, which ran to five editions by the end of 1719, Defoe was said to have ‘cleared over a thousand guineas’, which made him a prosperous man for the first time in his career. Defoe’s life began to change. He was now sixty, had two adult sons working in the City (Daniel and Benjamin), and three attractive but unmarried daughters (Maria, Hannah, and the youngest Sophia). Prosperity bought a different pace and direction to his work, and a desire to consolidate his position as a successful professional author, no longer a Grub Street hack.
He bought a large Queen Anne house with four acres of gardens in Stoke Newington, four miles north of London, where he began to entertain friends. He set up a small retail business, merchandising luxury foods (cheese, anchovies, oysters, honey) near Tower Dock. In August 1722 he invested £1,000 in a 99 year lease of farmland and timber near Colchester, partly to secure his own family income, and partly to guarantee the future independence of his three daughters. His second daughter, Hannah Defoe, probably his favourite and an able business woman, co-signed the lease. He also established a coat of arms in the name of De Foe, and had it fixed in a seal.
These financial securities did not indicate retirement from writing, but a steady change in direction from journalism to books. Defoe became less interested in party politics and topical journalism, and began to concentrate on more enduring themes: trade and travel, crime and corruption, human misfortune and ingenuity, the tangled lives of men and women. From 1720 he gradually ceased writing for the highly politicized Mist’s journal (which he had partly owned), and began to concentrate on further carefully researched books, both fiction and non-fiction. For the first time he was able to undertake these with publishers’ ‘subscriptions’ (advances). He also contributed occasional unsigned articles to a new ‘serious entertainment’ paper, John Applebee’s Weekly Journal, which specialized in crime reporting.
We catch a rare glimpse of the sixty-four year old Defoe at this period, as seen through the eyes of a young poet called Henry Baker. Baker was cautiously paying court to Sophia Defoe, and his prospective father-in-law evidently appeared as a grand, wealthy and faintly alarming old literary lion. Ensconced at Newington Green Baker found ‘Mr D[efoe], a Gentleman wellknown by his Writings, who had built there a very handsome House, as a Retirement from London, and amused his Time either in the Cultivation of a large and pleasant Garden, or in the Pursuit of his Studies, which he found means of making very Profitable. He was now at least sixty Years of Age, afflicted with the Gout and Stone, but retained all his mental faculties entire.’
This retired, sedentary, not to say valetudinarian figure, was something of an illusion. Defoe’s energy was still remarkable, and far from ‘amusing his Time’, he was writing with fantastic speed. In 1722 he published his Newgate novel, Moll Flanders, another huge commercial success, which ran to three editions. He also wrote A Journal of the Plague Year, and the pirate novel Colonel Jack. All of these, incidentally, were anonymous.
He then signed a four year contract with a consortium of publishers and began collecting material for his famous three-volume Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, which would be published in 1724–6. Meanwhile, in 1724 he also wrote Roxana, and the following spring his life of Jonathan Wild (1725). He could hardly have had time to put down his pen, let alone cultivate his rose garden.
Defoe’s interest in Newgate, and the whole question of criminal lives, was longstanding. He had himself been imprisoned there, in the Newgate Press Yard, for libel in 1703. More recently, in 1718, while researching and writing Robinson Crusoe, he had become involved with the case of James Shepheard (no relation), an eighteen-year-old Newgate prisoner who, for political reasons, had been denied the right to publish his ‘True Confession’ before execution. Defoe took this up in two pamphlets (notably a Vindication of the Press), as raising the issue of free speech.
In 1721 both Defoe’s editor Nathaniel Mist, and his own son Benjamin, were briefly imprisoned in Newgate for seditious libel. While visiting them there, Defoe heard the stories of two famous Newgate women prisoners, Moll King and ‘Callicoe’ Sarah, and probably interviewed one of them. These biographical materials became the factual basis for the Defoe’s vivid novel, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders. This was also significant because Defoe chose to tell it in a woman’s voice, using the convention of the ‘True Confession’ of Newgate.
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The success of Moll Flanders coincided with a virtual crimewave in London. To combat it, the so-called Black Act was passed in 1723, increasing the number of capital punishment offences to more than 200. These were mostly against property, including the theft of a silver spoon from a private house, or a shilling’s worth of lace from a shop. Earlier legislation had made the receiving of stolen property a capital offence, and also introduced the law of ‘impeachment’ by which anyone accused of a crime could turn King’s Evidence, thereby earning not only a complete pardon but also a £40 reward. All these measures were aimed at breaking up criminal gangs, and all of them placed tremendous power in the hands of Jonathan Wild, who, in the absence of a regular police force or criminal investigation department, could manipulate them to his own ends.
So when Defoe’s editor John Applebee began to run news stories in the Weekly Journal about Sheppard in 1724 - no less than sixteen pieces between August and November - Defoe’s interest was quickly aroused. Though two of these pieces were amorous letters signed by ‘Moll Flander’s niece, Betty Blueskins’, it is unlikely that any of these preliminary articles, largely facetious in tone, were by Defoe himself (though it is possible), but he cannot have ignored the developing Newgate drama.
As a publisher of crime stories, Applebee had established special access to the Newgate Condemned Hold. He had a virtual monopoly in publishing the ‘True Confessions’ of condemned prisoners, taken down by the Newgate ‘Ordinary’ or one of his assistant chaplains, who were traditionally granted this right by the Newgate Keeper. The chaplains could expect to earn £25 for a particularly sensational one. Both Moll Flanders and Jack Sheppard himself complained bitterly of cynical chaplains earning this blood money. But Applebee transformed this situation by starting to employ his own anonymous journalists (‘Mr Applebee’s garreteers’) as biographers, and by paying a small fee to the prisoners themselves, or making an allowance to their family. Thus many condemned men, including Sheppard, took pride and even comfort in the publication of their life stories.
These ‘Confessions’ achieved immense popularity by the 1720s, and can now be seen as the foundation of a wholly new tradition