The Thieves' Opera: The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-taker and Jack Sheppard, House-breaker

by Lucy Moore

  In eighteenth-century Europe, London was the apogee of sophistication and fashionable life. But it was seen by contemporaries as a city of sin, of corruption and dissolution, populated by tawdry whores, thuggish porters, insolent footmen, desperate gamblers, painted courtesans and argumentative hackney-coach drivers. Its ‘chaotic uncontrollability”[6] obsessed its literary inhabitants, including Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding and Dr Johnson.

  The capital was a magnet for men and women from the country, like Jonathan Wild, seeking their fortune. As late as the 1770s, two out of three Londoners had been born elsewhere. The Irish populated St Giles and the East End; about 20,000 Jews lived in London, mostly in Whitechapel or around Petticoat Lane; many of the silk-weavers in Spitalfields were Huguenots; Welsh immigrants monopolized the meat, dairy and livestock trades. The rest of England was undoubtedly blinkered and provincial in its attitude to the outside world, but London, though riddled by social divisions and prejudices, was a cosmopolitan city. Exotic nationalities from far-flung corners of the earth were represented there: Indian sailors and traders, and perhaps 10,000 Africans, seamen or escaped slaves. It had been considered the height of chic for a lady to have a black dwarf as a slave since Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s queen, had been painted by Van Dyck with her favourite, so the sight of an African or Indian face would not have been as unusual or shocking as one might imagine. Hogarth’s Moll Hackabout is served by a black house-boy in Plate II of A Harlot’s Progress as an illustration of her social pretensions. The black beggars who populated St Giles, one of the poorest areas of London, with a high immigrant population, were disparagingly known as ‘St Giles’s Blackbirds’.

  St Giles was the area for which the word ‘slum’ was coined in Regency times.[7] Rickety tenement buildings had sprung up since the Great Fire, with as many boarders taken in as possible. Apprentices usually slept in the attics of their masters’ homes, on straw mattresses placed on boards between the joists. The owners of the house, the master, his wife and children, generally lived on the top floor; the rooms below were rented out (The Distressed Poet, an image showing hired attic accommodation). The cheapest place in a house was always the basement, with the poorest tenants packed tight like sardines, with their pigs and chickens, into damp cellars with little ventilation or light.

  A typical middle-class family’s house, such as Dr Johnson’s behind Fleet Street, would have had stairs, bedrooms, brick chimneys that did not smoke, doors with locks, looking-glasses, pottery and ironware that was cheaper and more easily available than ever before. People sat in chairs rather than on benches, and slept in real beds rather than on mattresses on the floor. Glass windows were increasingly common, but still expensive, due to a high window tax that forced the poor to block up existing windows if they could not afford the tariff. Water-closets were not in widespread use, even among the aristocracy, until the late eighteenth century. Every household, however luxurious or modern, would have been plagued by lice and vermin; even the king had a Flea Catcher Royal and a Rat Catcher Royal.

  It would have cost from £100 a year to rent a large house with stables in a fashionable area in the 1710s. Jonathan Swift paid 8s. a week for a dining ‘room and bedchamber in Bury Street, which he considered ‘plaguey deep’. A night in a cheap lodging-house would have cost about tuppence, and a respectable, clean, but basic lodging-house would have been about a groat, or 4d., a night. A good salary for a London labourer was about 13s. a week; Defoe estimated in 1730 that a poor man in steady work would earn only between 4 and 5s. a week. It was hard to make ends meet at the bottom end of the social and economic scale, but generally conditions were still better than on the continent. Cesar de Saussure reported that even the poorest workers wore shoes, unlike in France. A bad harvest would cause hunger and want, but not widespread starvation. Some people, though, were worse off than others: Henry Fielding, the author and magistrate who founded the Bow Street Runners in the 1750s, once emptied a derelict house in St Giles of its thirty Irish inhabitants; when they turned out their pockets, they had less than a shilling between them.

  The parish of St Giles was where Hogarth placed his fictional Gin Lane. The gin-making process had been imported from Holland at the time of Wilham III’s accession in 1688. By the start of the eighteenth century gin-drinking was endemic. Every fourth house in St Giles was a gin shop; some estimates go so far as to say that by 1736 every sixth house in London was a gin shop. It was cheap (the inscription over the shop in Hogarth’s Gin Lane, ‘Drunk for a penny/ Dead drunk for two pence/ Clean straw for nothing,’ was supposedly taken from a real sign), plentiful in supply, and, taken with sweet fruit cordial, palatable. It was the perfect vehicle for dulling the pain of lost hopes and failed dreams. Everyone drank it — men, women and children, old and young, infirm and able. The effects of gin could be heartbreaking. One young mother, Judith Dufour, fetched her two-year-old child from the workhouse where, unable to support it herself, she had left it. The little child had been dressed in a new set of clothes, and desperate for money to buy more gin, Judith strangled it and left the small stripped body in a ditch. She sold the clothes it was wearing for 1s. 4d., which she spent on gin. ‘Should the drinking of this poison be continued in its present height during the next twenty years, there will, by that time, be very few of the common people left to drink it,’ lamented Fielding.

  If the effects of failure in London were achingly apparent in the city’s slums, equally apparent were the signs of success. ‘New squares, and new streets rising up every day to such a prodigy of buildings, that nothing in the world does or ever did equal it,’ wrote Defoe. This building was particularly prevalent in the West End. Fashionable London had been moving west since the last century, first creating Covent Garden, then building up the area around Leicester Fields and moving slightly north to Soho Square and south to St James’s.

  Enormous social gulfs existed between the upper, middle and lower classes, heightened in London by the close proximity to each other in which different members of society lived. The rapidity of London’s growth after the Great Fire, and the increasing segregation between social groups, had created a population of enormous variety, with each group knowing — and caring — almost nothing of the others. ‘The inhabitants of St James’s notwithstanding they live under the same laws, and speak the same language, are a distinct people from those of Cheapside, who are likewise removed from those of the Temple on one side and those of Smithfield on the other,’ wrote Addison, in the Spectator. This combination of ‘close physical proximity, and vast social distance’[8] led to social alienation, exacerbated in London by the localization of government between separate neighbourhoods, the danger of some areas, and the slow speed of travelling around the city. Rigid lines were drawn between classes, occupations and trades, making each section of the population feel completely separate from the others.

  The aristocracy of the eighteenth century felt it had the right to dominate the rest of society by virtue of its birth, breeding and, above all, its wealth. ‘Dominion follows property,’ wrote Bernard de Mandeville. The English upper classes were considered unique in Europe for their involvement with their tenants; one continental visitor to England, Madame du Boccage, commented, ‘In France we cringe to the great, in England the great cringe to the people.’[9] The traditional view that authority rested on consent was prevalent; conscientious paternalism was considered the duty of every landowner. La Rochefoucauld was horrified to find that local gentry and rich farmers were included in social events at the country houses of his grand English hosts, who insisted on involving themselves in the lives of their tenants. However, many landlords believed that this very involvement lessened their obligation to respect the rights of their tenants, riding roughshod over local interests when it suited them. Game laws were exploited, common lands enclosed, poachers violently prosecuted. Thomas Coke transported an entire village to expand his parkland, designed by Capability Brown, at Holkham in Norfolk.

  The
upper classes lived within a cordon sanitaire of political dogma and self-appeasing paternalism. They were separated from their inferiors literally as well as ideologically, their houses and parks surrounded by high fences preventing any contact with such undesirable sights as hungry, ragged vagabonds, gin-soaked motherless children, or cowed, frightened under-servants. No sense of a common humanity existed for the most rigidly aristocratic: ‘It is monstrous,’ commented the Duchess of Bedford on the egalitarianism of Methodism, ‘to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth.’ The greater the gulf between the two sides of society became, the more urgently the upper ranks felt they had to defend that which set them apart. Even John Wesley, the evangelical Methodist preacher whose ideas so shocked the Duchess of Bedford, believed that a government could not afford to share authority with its people, at the risk of jeopardizing social stability and the greater good. ‘The greater the share the people have in government, the less liberty, civil or religious, does a nation enjoy.’ John Wild, Jonathan’s brother, was defying the very foundations on which the state was believed to rest by supporting the Pretender in 1715, as much for the sake of voicing his opinion as for challenging the king’s authority.

  ‘Mankind are happier in a state of inequality and subordination,’ wrote Dr Johnson. This philosophy eased the consciences of the rich, justifying their view that the lower classes existed only to supply their needs and desires. The harder the poor worked, the better the wheels and cogs of daily life would turn, and the more assured the sense of social stability would be. Henry Fielding summed up this school of thought in 1751:

  To be born for no other purpose than to consume the fruits of the earth is the privilege (if it may really be called a privilege) of very few. The greater part of mankind must sweat hard to produce them, or society will no longer answer the purpose for which it was ordained. Pleasure always hath been, and always will be, the principal business of persons of fashion and fortune, and more especially of the ladies...

  In order to ensure that the privilege of pleasure was unattainable to the rest of society, political and economic thinkers stressed the undesirability of allowing the poor to better themselves. ‘Reading, writing and arithmetic, are...very pernicious to the poor,’ wrote de Mandeville, in a 1723 essay on charity schools. ‘Men who are to remain and end their days in a laborious, tiresome and painful station of life, the sooner they are put upon it at first, the more patiently they’ll submit to it for ever after.’ Charity schools and workhouses, first instituted under Queen Anne, were the manifestations of this belief, their proponents arguing that hard work from an early age would instil not only discipline, but also a proper sense of subordination: ‘children fed by charity ought in a more special manner to be clothed in humility’.[10] In short, the poor ought to feel towards their masters not resentment, as the youthful Jonathan Wild did, but gratitude. William Temple, writing in 1758, reiterated this idea. ‘The only way to make them [workers] temperate and industrious is to lay them under a necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from meals and sleep, in order to procure the common necessities of life.’

  An income of £40 a year was enough for a family of five to survive independently, without getting into debt or being forced to accept charity or poor relief. The annual salary of a London labourer was just under £30; providing he worked all year, and his wife took in work or they let out a room, his family would just get by. But work was seasonal, and transitory; he probably wouldn’t have owned a house to let out a room; and an emergency — if prices rose unexpectedly, or a child fell ill, when a single visit from a doctor cost a guinea — would cripple them. Perhaps a fifth of the population received poor relief. Gregory King, the late seventeenth-century census-taker, thought the figure was more like 50 per cent. Poor relief was a form of wage subsidy, supplementing incomes to a level that allowed poor families to scrape by year after year, while keeping the costs of manufacturing down. ‘Were it not for what they receive out of the tax...they would not knit or spin for so small wages as they receive for that work, because they would starve by it,’ wrote Lord Townsend in 1730. In the countryside, the poorest sections of society were more cushioned by the community than in London. A Wolverhampton family like Wild’s, brought suddenly to hard times, would have been helped by their neighbours, acutely conscious of the fact that it might just as easily have been them.

  Markets, fairs and holidays celebrated the cycle of rural life and its strength of community feeling. The annual parish wake was a week-long holiday, honouring the patron saint of the local church, but centred on secular festivities — football games, wrestling and boxing matches, dancing, feasts, contests in hot hasty-pudding eating or chasing greased pigs, stalls selling delicacies such as gingerbread. Lord of Misrule holidays turned the accepted order of society upside down, with villagers dressing up as local dignitaries, and local dignitaries the focus of teasing and pranks, temporarily relieving the pressure of life in a rigidly ordered society. Courting traditionally took place at May Day festivities, but fairs and markets also provided an opportunity for young people to meet each other. ‘The women are especially impudent for that day,’ observed Defoe of market-days, ‘as if it were a day that justified them giving themselves a loose [licence] to all manner of indecency and immodesty, without any reproach, or without suffering the censure which such behaviour would deserve at another time.’ These centuries-old customs provided country folk with a sense of pride in their culture, inspired a feeling of class solidarity, and helped them make light of the hardship under which their daily lives laboured. They were encouraged in this by the local gentry and landowners, whose almost deliberate ‘rural paganism’, a glorification of fresh air and country pursuits, was a reaction against the Puritanism of the seventeenth century.[11]

  In London, though, there were no such escape valves. The impersonal nature of living in a large city, combined with the transience of much of the population, prevented the creation of a sense of communal feeling. The only recourse for many of London’s poor was a gin shop or tavern, which instead of providing solace only sent men and women into a vicious cycle of despair, drunkenness and deeper despair.

  Chapter Two – Initiation

  Although the exact date of Jonathan Wild’s birth is unknown, records show that he was baptized in the ancient church of St Peter’s, Wolverhampton on 6 May 1683. ‘He was the first fruit of his father and mother’s nocturnal labours,’[12] the eldest of five children born to John Wild, a carpenter, and his wife, who sold herbs and fruit in the local market. Although they were poor, they were known as an honest, industrious couple.

  Seventeenth-century Wolverhampton was the second largest town in Staffordshire, with a population of about 6,000, most of whom earned their living in the iron-working and locksmithing trades. Wolverhampton had been rewarded handsomely by Charles II on his restoration in 1660 for its loyalty to the royalist cause during the Civil War, and by 1683 it was a thriving, prosperous town situated on a hill.

  Wolverhampton was well known for its Catholicism. Cromwellian ministers, visiting the town in the 1640s, declared that it was swarming with papists, ‘styled by many a little Rome’.[13] The reactionism of the Glorious Revolution in 1688 checked these tendencies, and a flourishing Jesuit mission that ran a school in Wolverhampton was summarily dissolved. Still, an underlying sympathy to the Jacobite cause and the Catholic religion remained beneath a convenient loyalty to the new regime, exacerbated by strong anti-dissenter feelings and a latent resentment of the enclosures instituted by the Protestant gentry in the late seventeenth century. During the risings of 1715, the whole of Staffordshire displayed its loyalty to the Pretender, celebrating his birthday with much bell-ringing and rejoicing, publicly (and treasonously) drinking his health. Jonathan’s younger brother, John Wild, who had acquired some local status as a bailiff and then as Town Crier, led the Jacobite riots that erupted in Wolverhampton in July 1715 when the Pretender’s arrival was expected at an
y day. He raised toasts to ‘James III’ and headed a mob that tried to pull down the Presbyterian meeting houses in Wolverhampton and nearby West Bromwich.

  Jonathan was sent to the Free School in St John’s Lane, where he was taught to read and write. At fifteen he was apprenticed to a local buckle-maker. By 1700 he had served out his apprenticeship and set up in business. Two years later he married a local girl on whom he quickly sired a son. John Wild must have looked on his son with pride, anticipating a future for him of industry rewarded, if not with luxury, then at least with contentment. But Jonathan had ideas above his station: as Defoe put it, ‘his soul was too great to be confined to such servile work’.

  Daniel Defoe, whose biography of Wild was based on interviews he conducted with him, relates that the young Jonathan’s ‘thoughts, as he said, [were] above his trade’. Clearly Wolverhampton, and the opportunities it held, were too restricted for a man like Jonathan who was possessed, from a very early age, of ‘a genius that would bend and stoop to anything’.[14] Defoe believed that Jonathan’s slow descent into crime was the result of his idleness.