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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58 female and 1,129 male Newgate prisoners had been published. Of these, 237 separately published Accounts have survived as 2d. broad sheets, 6d. pamphlets, or 1S bound collections. About half were taken down by the Newgate chaplains, and the rest by journalists employed by Applebee and other Fleet Street printers like Robert Walker. Sometimes these sources were combined by the editor, or written up as a more finished biography by a professional author.
So an advertisement in Applebee’s Journal running for four days immediately after his third recapture, from 13 to 16 September 1724, purporting to come from Sheppard, announced: ‘The Time of my Dissolution approaching … I have therefore for the satisfaction of the World, communicated my whole Life and wicked Actions to the Reverend Mr Wagstaff.’ In fact, this unlikely expression of repentance signaled a commercial deal with Applebee. Similarly, in a published letter from Sheppard to his mother, Jack stated that Applebee was paying him a retainer of eight pence a day ‘during Life’ for the exclusive right to all his personal ‘Memorandums’. In the letter, Jack wittily transferred this retainer to his mother, if he should not be ‘available’ in Newgate for any period to collect in person. Indeed he was unavailable for part of October.
5
The first of the two anonymous pamphlets that Applebee published, The History of John Sheppard, conforms in many respects to the early Newgate type. It mixes sensational facts about the crimes, with pious exhortations, and the occasional crude or heavily facetious aside about his repeated escapes: ‘So Jack returned like a dog to his Vomit.’
Yet it is a strangely gripping work in places, fast-moving, circumstantial and vividly evocative:
Having got clear of his prison, he took coach, disguised in a night gown, at the corner of the Old Bailey, along with a man who waited for him in the street (supposed to be Page the butcher), ordering the coachman to drive to Blackfriars Stairs, where his prostitute gave him the meeting, and they three took boat and went ashore at the Horse-Ferry at Westminster, and at the White Hart they went in, drank, and stayed some time, thence… by the help of a saw, he quitted the chains he had brought with him from Newgate, and then like a free man took his ramble through the City and came to Spitalfields, and there lay with Edgworth Bess.
But much of it is written so naively, and in such a ragbag of different styles, that it would be difficult to assign the whole text to the mature Defoe, unless as a parody. Equally, although clearly based in part on interviews with Sheppard, one also hesitates to hand it over entire to the Reverend Wagstaff, as advertised, for it is far too subversive for a chaplain to condone.
In fact The History has the obvious feel of one of John Applebee’s corporate productions: the work of several pens, flung together and rushed into print by the publisher, as news of Sheppard’s fourth and most famous escape broke in October. It is clear that Sheppard has not been recaptured by Wild at the time of publication, and the humorously fictionalised letter from Sheppard with which it ends (‘Five Hours after His Escape’ - a mass of bad puns) was one of Applebee’s own favourite journalistic devices.
The heterogeneous character of the pamphlet is obvious. There are passages that are evidently straight extracts from official court documents. There are fascinating but confused accounts of Sheppard’s escape methods, which sound like an Applebee ‘garreteer’ interviewing the prison turnkeys: ‘the only answer that is given to the whole at Newgate is, that the Devil came in person and assisted him.’ Equally, there are insertions of religious homily and contrition which surely emanate from the well-meaning Reverend Wagstaff.
Yet throughout the pamphlet there are brilliant, linking passages of narration which have all the stamp of Defoe. The section that begins with the vivid, unforgettable description of the London crowd ecstatically celebrating Sheppard’s first escape from the Newgate Condemned Hold in August has his touch: ‘His escape and his being so suddenly retaken made such a noise in the Town, that it was thought all the common people would have gone Mad about him, there being not a Porter to be had for love nor money, nor getting into an alehouse, for butchers, shoemakers, and barbers, all engaged in Controversies and Wagers about Sheppard …’
Then there are the collections of Sheppard’s impious jokes and irrepressible witticisms, amidst all the horror and filth of Newgate, which so well reveal his stoic character and natural bravado. This growing interest in the personality of the criminal is new. Again, in these one may detect the sympathetic ear of the author of Moll Flanders. They include the sarcastic aside that all the Newgate chaplains were ‘Gingerbread men’ intent on making money from him, ‘to form papers and ballads out of his behaviour’; and the splendid blasphemy: ‘Yes, Sir, I am The Sheppard, and all the jailors in the town are my Flock, and I cannot stir into the country but they are all at my heels baaughing after me.’ They also include Sheppard’s vicious joke to the pretty girl who did his washing in Newgate, who arrived one day with ‘her eyes beaten black and blue’. It is difficult to believe that the Reverend Wagstaff would have recorded any of these.
Indeed, one may wonder if Sheppard himself really said them all; or if Defoe invented, or at least polished, some of them for him? One famous exclamation of his became proverbial all over London. ‘One file’s worth all the Bibles in the world!’. However it is not merely quoted in The History, but subtly dramatised as part of an angry confrontation with the Reverend Wagstaff. It would have taken a shrewd onlooker - a novelist or biographer - to catch this moment.
When he was visited in the Castle by the Reverend Mr Wagstaff, he put on the face only of a preparation for his end … and when he has been pressed to discover those who put him upon means of escaping, and furnished him with implements, he would passionately, and with a motion of striking, say: ‘Ask me no such questions; one file’s worth all the Bibles in the world!’.
So much of Sheppard - his defiance, his youthful courage, his unpredictability - is caught not merely in that phrase, but in that passionate ‘motion of striking’.
6
The outstanding feature of the second pamphlet, A Narrative of John Sheppard, is its confident and brilliant assumption of Sheppard’s own voice, just as Defoe had previously assumed Moll Flanders’ in the novel. So this second biography is presented in the first person, in the convention of a ‘True Confession’, and its tone is wonderfully controlled by Defoe throughout: plain speaking, disarmingly frank, occasionally ironic, but always believable. From the outset the narrator continually ‘corrects’ the first pamphlet, so a sense of intimacy and confidentiality is achieved. ‘Sheppard’ adds convincing new details about his Spitalfields childhood, his relationship with his mother and brother Thomas, and his evidently stormy affair with Elizabeth Lyon (‘Edgworth Bess’).
This interest in the subject’s youth and upbringing, as emotionally formative, is a clear mark of the new biography. We learn for example how Sheppard’s mother tried to cover up for his early crimes (just as she later begged him - in vain - to leave London); how he felt angry with his guardian Mr Kneebone (who had tried to replace his dead father); and how his first arrest was not for theft, but for breaking his indentures as an apprentice carpenter. His subsequent humiliating night in St Clement’s Roundhouse was the one recorded time he did not try to escape: but it left Sheppard ungovernable at eighteen. ‘I then fell to robbing almost everyone that stood in my way.’ Significantly one of his first major burglaries was from his own guardian, ‘my kind patron and benefactor’ Mr Kneebone.
Altogether it is a formidable bit of literary ventriloquism, and as always with Defoe, supremely ambiguous. Is Sheppard vain or penitent? Gentle or psychopathically violent? Loyal (to Elizabeth Lyon, for example) or cruelly treacherous? Defoe makes us continually hang upon his words in order to interpret character, and to judge actions. This is a quite different order of narrative from the traditional Newgate life, and again a fundamental drive towards the new, realistic biography.
Another thing that the biography shows, is that Sheppard’s fantastic abilities as escaper were no mystery. They came from his outstanding skills as a carpenter and builder, learned during his six year apprenticeship, but also inherited from