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
materials and an instinctive understanding of the construction (and deconstruction) of every kind of lock, wall, window, bar, spike, chimney-breast, floor, ceiling, roof or cellar. He once cheekily complimented the Keeper of Newgate on the high quality of the prison’s ironwork, having just ‘worked’ one of its most formidable spikes.
The climax of the second pamphlet is Defoe’s extraordinarily tense and revealing narrative of Sheppard’s last escape from Newgate. This is quite as striking as Casanova’s celebrated account of his escape from the Venetian prison, a generation later in his Memoirs. The author of Robinson Crusoe was always fascinated by technique, expertise and method: how things actually get done. With astonishing ingenuity, Sheppard escaped upwards: first through a chimney, then through six massively bolted doors, then through the prison chapel, and finally out over the Newgate rooftops. Like a good editor, Applebee immediately saw the attraction of this grim obstacle-course for readers, and took the unusual step of commissioning a copper-plate engraving, showing the eight stages of Sheppard’s escape, which became a huge selling point.
This escape sequence, which took place entirely in the dark over nine hours, is finally turned by Defoe into a study of Sheppard’s character under stress. ‘It being full dark, my spirits began to fail me, as greatly doubting of succeeding; but cheering up, I wrought on with great diligence, and in less than half an hour … wrenched the box off, and so made the door my humble servant.’
While at liberty, Sheppard disguised himself and wandered through London, hearing stories and ballads about his own exploits. According to Defoe, this enlarged his whole sense of identity. ‘That night I came to a cellar at Charing Cross, and refreshed myself very comfortably with Roast Veal etc, and heard about a dozen people all discoursing about Sheppard, and nothing else was talked about while a stayed amongst them.’ The next day he talked with a young woman in an alehouse off Piccadilly, who spoke admiringly of Sheppard and ‘wished a Curse might fall on any who should betray him.’
After his last escape, he stole a set of gentleman’s clothes, rings and sword, picked up two pretty girls (one described as his true ‘Sweetheart’, though neither being Elizabeth Lyon), and had the wonderful audacity to hire a coach and ride back under the very gateway of the Newgate Prison arch. This, as told by Defoe, was a stroke of theatrical genius and an ultimate escape into another identity, ‘transformed into a Perfect Gentleman’, as Sheppard exults just a few hours before his final re-capture. His last free act is to buy his mother three-quarters of a pint of best brandy.
7
Where Sheppard is presented as an ambiguous hero, Defoe presents his adversary Jonathan Wild as an unambiguous villain: ‘this famous, or if you please, infamous creature’. The third, and by far the longest biographical pamphlet, The True and Genuine Account of the Late Jonathan Wild (1725), is immediately distinguished by Defoe’s severity of tone. He now wholly rejects the Newgate style of ‘mockery and ridicule’, and emphasises the moral value of strict biographical truth. ‘They that had rather have a Falsehood to laugh at than a True Account of things to inform them, had best buy the Fiction, and leave the History to those who know how to distinguish Good from Evil.’
Although no voice that Defoe adopts can ever be taken as reliably his own, here he does seem to speak out in his own person: the sixty-year-old citizen of London, the family man, the experienced writer, the unflinching and undeluded judge of human character. With Jonathan Wild there is little attempt at sympathetic ventriloquism. The biographical narrative has a cool, sardonic and almost forensic style: he writes of Wild as a ‘cunning artist’ perpetrating ‘exquisite villainies’. The story is cast largely in the third person - except for one notably section of dramatized dialogue in the second half.
Defoe’s analysis of Wild is unsparing from the start. ‘Take him as a man only, he had a kind of brutal Courage which fitted him to be an Instrument in attacking some of the most desperate of the several Gangs of Rogues he had to do with. But as this Courage also served to make him audacious in the other Wicked Things he undertook, he was rather Bold than Courageous, and might be called impudent …’
Much of the first half of the Life is spent on carefully analysing Wild’s brilliant methods of fencing stolen property and controlling the gangs all over London (‘the fraternity of thieves’) through the dual pressures of terror and greed. Much ironic play is made with the idea of his ‘dexterity’ and his ‘honesty’. While blackmailing, betraying and racketeering, Wild always appeared to remain just within the letter of the law. ‘It must be allowed to Jonathan’s fame, that as he steered among rocks and shoals, so he was a bold pilot; he ventured in and always got out in a manner equally surprising; no man ever did the like before him …’
As always, Defoe is fascinated by this technical expertise. If Sheppard’s genius was for dismantling things and escaping; Wild’s was for organising human beings and incarcerating them, either physically or psychologically. As with Sheppard, Defoe examines the emotional background to this criminal career. Unlike Sheppard, Wild was a provincial boy from Wolverhampton, ambitious, controlling, and obsessionally meticulous in his habits - ‘he kept his counting house or office, like a man of business, and had his books to enter everything in with the utmost exactness and regularity’. He was always domineering and manipulative. When first arrested for debt, he quickly became a trusty, ‘got so much favour with the Keepers that he got the Liberty of the Gate, as they call it’, and was soon running errands outside for the other prisoners, ‘to get a penny’. This became his first racket, which soon involved a prostitute, Mary Milliner, who taught him ‘a great many new ways of getting money’.
Defoe is interested by the story of Wild’s six wives, names and identifies each one, and finds surprisingly that most were respectable (one a very religious minded and ‘sober’ Roman Catholic), and all were apparently devoted to him. Indeed his last wife, Mary Dean, twice tried to commit suicide when Wild was sentenced to death.
Wild’s power over women is further illustrated by a remarkable sequence of dialogue, in which Defoe shows Wild in his office smoothly bamboozling a respectable lady client over the return of a stolen gold watch. Wild’s sinister courtesy to his client (‘a pot of tea brought out in form’) is offset by his terrifying secret hold over the thief involved - also a woman, and none other (according to Defoe) that Moll King herself. Here the world of Defoe’s Newgate fiction and his Newgate biography virtually meet, and can be taken as his own signature to the work. It is an interesting possibility that this sequence was based on one of his own daughters’ encounter with Wild.
Defoe makes only passing mention of Wild’s pursuit of Sheppard, although in the previous pamphlet he has Sheppard making the first published accusations against Wild’s corruption. But he does end with a bitter accusation against Wild’s exploiting ‘the young generation of thieves’, and worst of all crimes, corrupting the poor children of London. ‘He practised principally upon young creatures and little destitute children, such as seemed to be left to wander about in want and beggary; and many a poor boy he has picked up in the street pretending charity … which, when it has come to the issue, has been no more or less than to breed them up to thieving, and to ripen them for the devil.’ As with Fagin in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, there is even a hint here of sexual exploitation.
In the end, Defoe’s biography grants Jonathan Wild very little mercy. Where he is often indulgent towards Sheppard, even romantic, he regards Wild’s life as ‘a tragedy’ for all those around him, and a grotesque one at that. Their different manners of death on the Tyburn scaffold - Sheppard cool, chippy and resolute, Wild opium fuddled and vomiting - seal this contrast. But in both cases the new, nascent form of biography takes them seriously, simply as human beings. This is itself is a literary revolution. Though they are both in their way small, disreputable figures, without social standing or money or education or permanent power, they are presented as vivid individual spirits, complex personalities. They are worthy of remembrance, and of understanding, whether as good or evil.
8
It is perhaps characteristic that the aging Defoe thoroughly disapproved of the legends that quickly crystallized around Sheppard