When talking about colourful characters, dangerous nutters and other reprobates connected to the history of London crime there’s only one place to start: with the legendary Jack Sheppard – not the well-known actor, interesting as he is, but the notorious 18th century thief, robber and escape artist, who at one time was a genuine hero of the London populace.
Jack was born in Spitalfields in 1702 and began his career in burglary and robbery in the early 1720s. He got himself imprisoned four times in 1724 alone, but what brought him to the attention of an increasingly adoring public was his tendency to escape from whatever nick the authorities put him in – thereby becoming a sort of symbol of freedom and a refusal to submit to authority to a poor population living in very hard times. The idea of the criminal as folk-hero and his arrest by the infamous Jonathan Wild, the ‘Thief-Taker General’ added further lustre to the great adventure.
Jack’s spectacular rise to fame lasted only two years; he was hanged at Tyburn in 1724, following a great procession through London (it has been estimated that 200,000 people, or one-third of the entire population, were in attendance).
A supposedly autobiographical narrative of his exploits, probably ghost-written by Daniel Defoe, was sold at his execution, initiating a cottage industry of writing and plays about him. His most celebrated appearance came in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), which secured his legendary status for a hundred years, and in 1840 William Harrison Ainsworth wrote Jack Sheppard, a novel with illustrations by George Cruikshank.
Even at that remove, Jack was so potent a symbol that the London authorities refused to license any plays with his name in the title for a further forty years.
You can read a more detailed piece about Jack, with some cracking illustrations, here:
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