Jack Sheppard

Jack Sheppard (4 March 1702 – 16 November 1724) was a notorious English robber, burglar and thief of early 18th-century London. Born into a poor family, he was apprenticed as a carpenter but took to 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, making him a notorious public figure, and wildly popular with the poorer classes. Ultimately, he was caught, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn, ending his brief criminal career after less than two years. The inability of the notorious "Thief-Taker General" (and thief) Jonathan Wild to control Sheppard, and injuries suffered by Wild at the hands of Sheppard's colleague, Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, led to Wild's downfall.

Sheppard was as renowned for his attempts to escape justice as for his crimes. An autobiographical "Narrative", thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe, was sold at his execution,^[1] quickly followed by popular plays. The character of Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) was based on Sheppard, keeping him in the limelight for over 100 years. He returned to the public consciousness in 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, led the authorities to refuse to license any plays in London with "Jack Sheppard" in the title for forty years.

Early life

Sheppard was born in White's Row, in London's Spitalfields.^[2][3] During the first two decades of the 18th century, Spitalfields was notorious for the presence of highwaymen and for being a tremendously economically depressed area, and so it is clear that his family was impoverished. He was baptised on 5 March, the day after he was born, at St Dunstan's, Stepney, suggesting a fear of infant mortality by his parents, perhaps because the newborn was weak or sickly.^[2] His parents named him for an older brother, John, who had died before his birth.^[2] In life, he was better known as Jack, or even "Gentleman Jack" or "Jack the Lad". He had a second brother, Thomas, and a younger sister, Mary. Their father, a carpenter, died while Sheppard was young, and his sister died two years later.^[2]

An engraving of Wych Street, from about 1870

Unable to support her family without her husband's income, Jack's mother sent him to Mr Garrett's School, a workhouse near St Helen's Bishopsgate, when he was six years old.^[2] Sheppard was sent out as a parish apprentice to a cane-chair maker, taking a settlement of 20 shillings, but his new master soon died. He was sent out to a second cane-chair maker, but Sheppard was treated badly.^[4] Finally, when Sheppard was 10, he went to work as a shop-boy for William Kneebone, a wool draper with a shop on the Strand.^[5] Sheppard's mother had been working for Kneebone since her husband's death. Kneebone taught Sheppard to read and write and apprenticed him to a carpenter, Owen Wood, in Wych Street, off Drury Lane in Covent Garden. Sheppard signed his seven-year indenture on 2 April 1717.^[5]

By 1722, Sheppard was showing great promise as a carpenter. Aged 20, he was a small man, only 5'4" (1.63 m) tall and lightly built, but deceptively strong. He had a pale face with large, dark eyes, a wide mouth and a quick smile. Despite a slight stutter, his wit made him popular in the taverns of Drury Lane.^[6] He served five unblemished years of his apprenticeship but then began to be led into crime.

Joseph Hayne, a button-moulder who owned a shop nearby, also ran a tavern named the Black Lion off Drury Lane, which he encouraged the local apprentices to frequent.^[7] The Black Lion was visited by criminals such as Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, Sheppard's future partner in crime, and self-proclaimed "Thief-Taker General" Jonathan Wild, secretly the linchpin of a criminal empire across London and later Sheppard's implacable enemy.

According to Sheppard's "autobiography", he had been an innocent until going to Hayne's tavern, but there began an attachment to strong drink and the affections of Elizabeth Lyon, a prostitute also known as Edgworth Bess (or Edgeworth Bess) from her place of birth at Edgeworth in Middlesex. In his History, Defoe records that Bess was "a main lodestone in attracting of him up to this Eminence of Guilt."^[8] Such, Sheppard claimed, was the source of his later ruin.^[9] Peter Linebaugh offers a different view: that Sheppard's sudden transformation was a liberation from the dull drudgery of indentured labour and that he progressed from pious servitude to self-confident rebellion and Levelling.^[10]

Criminal career

Sheppard threw himself into a hedonistic whirl of drinking and whoring. Inevitably, his carpentry suffered, and he became disobedient to his master. With Lyon's encouragement, Sheppard took to crime to augment his legitimate wages. His first recorded theft was in Spring 1723, when he engaged in petty shoplifting, stealing two silver spoons while on an errand for his master to Rummer Tavern in Charing Cross.^[7] Sheppard's misdeeds went undetected, and he moved on to larger crimes, often stealing goods from the houses where he was working. Finally, he quit the employ of his master on 2 August 1723, with less than 2 years of his apprenticeship left,^[11] although he continued to work as a journeyman carpenter.^[12] He was not suspected of the crimes, and progressed to burglary, falling in with criminals in Jonathan Wild's gang.

He moved to Fulham, living as man and wife with Lyon at Parsons Green, before moving to Piccadilly.^[11] When Lyon was arrested and imprisoned at St Giles's Roundhouse, the beadle, a Mr Brown, refused to let Sheppard visit, so he broke in and took her away.^[13]

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