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

by Lucy Moore

  Although Jack was not directly involved in these riots, he shared a common ancestry with the silk-weavers and their families. He had been brought up alongside the rebels, and must have understood the resentment they felt towards the state and the powerful minority that controlled government policy. In smaller ways, too, he and his fellow workers suffered under a burden of oppression. Traditionally, men were paid their wages in taverns on Saturday nights — workers on Westminster Abbey, historically, were always paid at the Cock tavern, in Tothill Street — and publicans arranged for employers to plan to meet their workers in the evening, but they deliberately arrived at eleven or twelve at night. By this time, the waiting men would have drunk all their wages, so the employer would simply give their money directly to the publican, and the worker would be left with nothing to take home to his family. Thus a man earnestly intending to save his small pay packet would have his good intentions thwarted by the duplicity of those above him.

  While on one side London’s workers had to contend with a long tradition of oppression, on the other they had always had popular heroes on whom they focused to relieve the dissatisfaction and frustration of their lives. Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasant Revolt in 1381, was still revered in the eighteenth century. John Gay used the names Wat and Robin for two members of Macheath’s gang of highwaymen in The Beggars’ Opera. A 1730 play entitled Wat Tyler and Jack Strawe: Or the Mob Reformers initially applauds Wat’s courage in confronting the king to demand reform. He is hailed as ‘Wat the First’ and the ‘Prince of Popular Princes’; but soon he is corrupted by his success, and threatens treason, and with Jack Straw is killed — ‘Pull from that saucy, lousy head, the crown, and put it where it should be — upon mine.’ The mob, appalled that they have supported one who desired to overthrow the king, are welcomed back into the royal fold. The ambivalence of the mob’s response to Tyler is typical of the popular view of rebellion, which was as a form of protest, of seeking change and reaction, but not as a movement for social reform. The king’s position was sacrosanct, and every member of society still knew and accepted his place within it.

  It was those people who lived outside society, rather than merely rebelled against it, who were the true heroes of their contemporaries. The historian Peter Linebaugh calls ‘the growing propensity, skill and success of London working people in escaping from the newly created institutions that were designed to discipline people by closing them in’, for instance in workhouses, or houses of correction, ‘Excarceration’. Criminals, in particular, refused to fulfil the roles society had mapped out for them; and common people adored them because they defied the law, throwing off the restrictions of poverty and submission under which they had been born.

  Part Two

  ‘It is the general complaint of the taverns, the coffee-houses, the shopkeepers and others, that their customers are afraid when it is dark to come to their houses and shops for fear that their hats and wigs should be snitched from their heads or their swords taken from their sides, or that they may be blinded, knocked down, cut or stabbed.’

  Charles Hitchin, The Regulator: Or, a Discovery of the Conduct of Thieves and Thief-Takers, 1718

  Chapter Four – Underworld

  In 1712 an Act was passed for ‘the relief of insolvent debtors’ (10 Anne c.29). Jonathan Wild, using the legal skills he had honed during his four years’ residence at Wood Street, submitted a successful application and was released from prison. He and his lover, a woman named Mary Milliner, set up a small brothel together in Lewkenor’s Lane, now Macklin Street, in Covent Garden. Mary Milliner, a ‘jade of some fame’,[31] was a familiar figure at Wood Street Compter, although she seems not to have been imprisoned there. Whores of the cheaper sort found a good many of their clients were prisoners. For a small bribe the keeper or turnkey would let them in to solicit business.

  Prostitutes, like thieves, were known by many names: trumpery, buttered buns, squirrels, bunters. The women, displaying their solidarity, called each other Sister or Cousin. The cheapest prostitute available was a three-penny-upright, but one could pay up to £250 for a night with a girl at the most exclusive whorehouses, situated in rooms above a piazza at Covent Garden. Many women living on the streets prostituted themselves when it suited them, or when the opportunity arose, like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, admittedly of loose moral makeup to start with, who was propositioned by a rich-looking gentleman and thought she might be able to make a bit of money — by picking his pocket as well as charging for her services. Some girls would brazenly pull open their dresses to display their wares as a well-dressed man walked past them in the street.

  Men of all classes and occupations thought little of going to a prostitute; it was completely acceptable. Men were expected to be sexually active, while their wives were not supposed to be interested — in fact it was thought unwise, generally, to try to interest one’s wife too much in sex lest she develop a voracious appetite for it. The health and sanity of prostitutes, unlike wives’, was not considered. Medically, the practice was approved, because retention of semen was considered injurious to a man’s health. Thus whores and whorehouses proliferated, profiting from a steady stream of customers, with Covent Garden recognized as the centre of this industry. A guidebook, Harris’s New Atlantic: The Whoremonger’s Guide to London, was produced annually, detailing the addresses of brothels, and describing the physical characteristics and specialities of the girls. Eight thousand copies were distributed each year to subscribers.

  The German philosopher Georg Lichtenberg describes, in amazement, how women were available:

  got up in any way you like, dressed, bound up, hitched up, tight-laced, loose, painted, done up or raw, scented, in silk or wool, with or without sugar, in short, what a man cannot obtain here, if he have not money, upon my word, let him not look for it anywhere else in this world of ours.[32]

  Another German visitor to London, in the 1710s, was likewise impressed by the array of whores available but found they cost a ‘prodigious deal’.

  The easiest way of finding a whore was on the street. The young James Boswell describes picking up a prostitute in 1763:

  At the bottom of the Haymarket I picked up a strong, jolly young damsel, and taking her under the arm I conducted her to Westminster Bridge, and then in armour complete [wearing a condom] I did engage her upon this noble edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling beneath us amused me greatly.[33]

  By the late seventeenth century condoms were in popular use, less for contraceptive purposes than to avoid venereal disease. Casanova called them ‘English overcoats’. The best condoms were made of sheep’s intestines, and cheaper, more uncomfortable ones were available made of linen soaked in brine, which needed washing after use. Both types were re-usable. They came in three sizes, and were sold in silk-bound packets of eight, tied up with silk ribbons.

  Brothels were the expensive alternative to streetwalkers. They were known as vaulting academies, or nurseries, or seminaries, or nunneries. In his satirical novel Jonathan the Great, Henry Fielding describes ‘those eating houses in Covent Garden, where female flesh is deliciously dressed, and served up to the greedy appetites of young gentlemen’. Different whorehouses catered not only for different price ranges, but also for different tastes. Some offered floor shows, others naked dancing. A particular fashion was for girls striking ‘postures’, either naked or scantily dressed, something Emma Hamilton, Nelson’s mistress, was later famous for. The servant in the background of Scene III of A Rake’s Progress is carrying a large plate on which a posturer is about to perform. Mrs Theresa Berkely ran a flagellants’ brothel in Charlotte Street, specializing in what was known as the ‘English perversion’. Jonathan Wild described going to a house of ‘He-Whores’ near the Old Bailey with his future associate, Charles Hitchin, Under-Marshal of London:

  which they no sooner enter’d, but the M-l [Hitchin] was complemented by the company with the titles of Madam and Ladyship...The men calling one another ‘My Dear’, huggi
ng and kissing, tickling and feeling each other, as if they were a mixture of wanton males and females; and assuming effeminate voices, female airs etc., some telling others that they ought to be whipp’d for not coming to school more frequently.

  Another house like this existed in Holborn, run by the aptly named Mother Clap, where men could ‘dress themselves in women’s apparel for the entertainment of others of the same inclinations, in dancing etc. in imitation of the Fair Sex’. This house was raided in the 1710s, and the transvestites were taken to court and tried,

  completely rigged in gowns, petticoats, head cloths, fine lac’d shoes, furbelow scarves, and masks; some had riding hoods; some were dressed like shepherdesses; others like milkmaids with fine green hats, waistcoats and petticoats, and others had their faces patched and painted, and wore very expensive hoop-petticoats, which were then very lately introduced.

  The guilty were condemned to be ‘publicly conveyed through the streets in their various female habits’. According to Wild, the utter humiliation of this ordeal was ‘so mortifying to one of the young gentlemen that he died within a few days’ of the punishment. At trials held in the late 1720s, it came out in the evidence against these houses of ‘He-Whores’ that mock marriages were performed between men, complete with veils, rings and bridal chambers.

  Sally Salisbury, born Sarah Pridden in 1692, was one of the most famous prostitutes of her day. She grew up living on the streets of St Giles. ‘At different seasons of the year, she shelled beans and peas, cried nose-gays and newspapers, peeled walnuts, made matches, turned bunter &c., well knowing that a wagging hand always gets a penny.’[34] By the time she was fourteen, she had been abandoned by her first rich lover, the notorious rake Colonel Charteris. From then on, she worked principally for Mother Wisebourne, whose Covent Garden establishment was the best-known and most expensive whorehouse in London at the time. Mother Wisebourne’s girls came to her from various sources — she regularly visited prisons and had made arrangements with the keepers to ‘sell’ her the freedom of female prisoners with potential; she also frequented the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, where she looked over the children, whose parents rented them out to beggars for the day, ‘as a butcher might choose a mare at Smithfield [meat market]’ — but, paradoxically, she had a house chaplain who read prayers to her girls twice a day and a Bible lay open in her house at all times.

  Sally’s beauty, wit and high spirits made her a favourite with clients such as Viscount Bolingbroke, the Secretary of State, who paid ‘the highest price for the greatest pleasure’. On one occasion, she was given a ticket to a grand society ball. Her hostess commented cattily on the splendour of Sally’s jewels.

  ‘They had need be finer than yours, my Lady,’ said Sally. ‘You have but one Lord to keep you and to buy you jewels, but I have at least half a score, of which number, Madam, your Ladyship’s husband is not the most inconsiderable.’

  ‘Nay, my Lady —’ cried another guest. ‘You had much better let Mrs Salisbury alone, for she’ll lay claim to all our husbands else, by and by.’

  ‘Not much to yours, indeed, Madam,’ replied Sally tartly. ‘I tried him once and am resolved I’ll never try him again; for I was forced to kick him out of bed, because his — — is good for nothing at all.’[35]

  Her biographer, writing for a large popular audience to whom characters like Sally Salisbury were the eighteenth-century equivalent of movie stars, in his preface addressed to her a justification of prostitution:

  For the usefulness of it, it will be readily granted. The ladies of your universal character are of wondrous service to those who cannot comply with the indolence, clamour, insatiableness, laziness, extravagance or virtuous nastiness of a wife...It must be allowed, that by such gay volunteers as your ladyship, give a young fellow an handsome prospect of the town, lead him through all the enchanting mazes, and even surfeit him with delight; so that by the time he is come out of your hands, he is grown very tame, and prepared for the dull solemnity of marriage.[36]

  Cesar de Saussure described her death:

  Some time ago a courtesan, of the name of Sally Salisbury, famed for her rare and wonderful beauty, her wit and fun, became the fashion in London, and was favoured by distinguished personages. One night, at a wine supper, one of her admirers having displeased her by some uncomplimentary speech, she seized a knife and plunged it into his body. Next morning she was conveyed a prisoner to Newgate. You will suppose her lovers abandoned her in her distress. They did no such thing, but crowded into the prison, presenting her with every comfort and luxury possible. As soon as the wounded man — who, by the way, belongs to one of the best known English families [John Finch, the son of the Countess of Winchelsea] — was sufficiently recovered, he asked for her discharge, but Sally Salisbury died of brain fever, brought on by debauch, before she was able to leave the prison.

  She was twenty-two at the time; the ‘brain fever’ was probably syphilis. Her life provided a model both for Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress and for John Cleland’s Fanny Hill.

  Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress is perhaps the best depiction of prostitution in London in the early eighteenth century, following the progression of a simple country girl to utter dissolution. In the first scene, an innocent girl, recently arrived from the country, is approached by a procuress. The country maiden seduced by her new master, or made her mistress’s confidante in her sordid intrigues, or taken in by a friendly Madam, was such a familiar stereotype that some fallen women went so far as to leave London for a few days in order to return to town on a wagon, rosy-cheeked and with their innocence mysteriously restored, able once more to pass as fresh flesh. Some returned after ‘being made free of the wagon [-driver] (which is the phrase amongst these sort of gentry for the last favour) the honest fellow gives them a character [reference], knows abundance of aunts and cousins, all extremely honest etc.’. Mother Wisebourne’s partner, Mrs Bennett, could ‘restore’ a girl’s virginity, as many times as was needed.

  The depravity of the first scene is underlined by the arrangement of the figures, which echoes that of the biblical Visitation, when the Virgin Mary visits Elizabeth, the expectant mother of John the Baptist, after she has been impregnated by the Holy Spirit, to ask her advice. This visual parallel is reinforced by the names of the characters: Mother Needham, the real-life model for the procuress, was called Elizabeth, and Moll, the name Hogarth gave his Harlot, was a derivative of Mary. This interpretation of the scene casts an ambiguous light on the subject matter: in the Visitation, Mary has sought out Elizabeth to ask her advice. Does Hogarth mean to imply that Moll, fresh and innocent though she may seem, has sought out Mother Needham; that she is not an innocent victim, but an accomplice to her own eventual guilt?[37]

  Mother Needham was a famous brothel-keeper of the 1720s, who died in May 1731, three days after being viciously pelted by onlookers as she stood in the stocks. The crowd was so excited that ‘a boy, getting upon a lamppost [to see the action better]...fell from the same upon iron spikes’ and ‘expired after a few hours, in great agony’.[38] The Grub Street Journal commented caustically after her death that those who had caused her fatal injuries ‘acted very ungratefully, considering how much she had done to oblige them’ throughout her career.

  Her employer was Colonel Charteris, Sally Salisbury’s first seducer, who is seen hovering in the doorway behind Needham and Moll Hackabout, ogling the girl. In 1729 Charteris was convicted of raping a servant girl at gunpoint, but was pardoned by the king and released in 1730. It was highly unusual for a gentleman to be convicted — or even accused, or tried — of rape; but his pardon demonstrates how this type of behaviour, by a well-connected man, was considered by his peers to be no more than a silly mistake, if that.

  Blood! Must a Colonel, with a lord’s estate

  Be thus obnoxious to a scoundrel’s fate?

  Brought to the bar, and sentenced from the bench

  For only ravishing a country wench?

  Shall gent
lemen receive no more respect?

  Shall their diversion thus by laws be checked?[39]

  He died, most probably of a venereal disease, in 1731; his funeral provoked a public demonstration, with an indignant mob throwing ‘dead dogs &c. into the grave’ with him. Arbuthnot’s damning epitaph of him reads: ‘Francis Charteris, who with an inflexible constancy, and inimitable uniformity of life, persisted in spite of age and infirmities, in the practice of every human vice...’[40]

  Hogarth comments further on the Harlot’s trade and her opinions in the third scene, in which a magistrate bursts into her chamber. Hanging on a hook above her bed is a handy bundle of birch twigs, either a part of a masquerade costume or for flogging clients; condoms litter the table; an anodyne necklace, used for treating venereal disease and relieving children’s teething pains, is also shown, a reference not only to the Harlot’s health but also to her illegitimate child (not shown until the final scenes). Next to her bed are two engravings, one of a fictional highwayman, Macheath, the hero of Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera, and the other of the popular preacher Dr Sacheverell, who was impeached in 1710 for his High Church views interpreted by the Puritanical monarchs William and Mary as seditious: both images of renegades, flouting law and order. The romanticism of his Harlot is plain, her yearning for escapist idealism exemplified by these two images.

  But the magistrate condemns her to Bridewell, a ‘house of correction’ where she stands in Plate IV beating hemp in an expensive gown — perhaps a gift from a lover in better days, but now apparently the only dress she owns. Like the Harlot, Sally Salisbury was in and out of prisons and houses of correction throughout her life; she died in Newgate on a charge of manslaughter but on other occasions she had been held in Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison and in Bridewell. It was not unusual for whores to be found beating hemp in inappropriate clothing. The Grub Street Journal of 1730 describes Mary Moffat, a well-known prostitute, as beating hemp ‘in a gown very richly dressed with silver’.