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

by Lucy Moore

  Sir Salathial Lovell, a City Recorder and well-known hanging judge, was the most prominent and productive thief-taker to date when he died in 1713. Tom Brown said the ‘shoals’ of criminals condemned by Lovell were ‘mere sacrifices to his avarice or his malice’. Defoe revealed his activities in his ‘Reformation of Manners’:

  He trades in justice and the souls of men,

  And prosecutes them equally to gain:

  He has his public Book of Rates to show,

  Where every rogue the price of life may know:

  Fraternities of Villains he maintains,

  Protects their robberies, and shares their gains,

  Who thieve with toleration as a trade,

  And then restores according as they’re paid.

  A year later, in 1703, Defoe was tried by Lovell for another satirical poem, ‘The Shortest Way with Dissenters’, which contradicted government policy. He was treated particularly harshly, sentenced to stand in the stocks, a choice of punishment usually reserved for ill-educated ruffians, arguably because he had touched a raw nerve by accusing Lovell of being involved in criminal activities.[51]

  After Lovell’s death, Charles Hitchin, Under-Marshal of Newgate gaol, took his place as the principal thief-taker in London. A tall, striking man, he paraded through the streets of the city wearing a long powdered wig and a tricorn hat and carrying a sword, with a raggle-taggle gang of pickpockets, whom he called his ‘Mathematicians’, dancing attendance at his heels. The office of Under-Marshal was responsible to the Court of Aldermen of the City of London, and subordinate to an Upper-Marshal. The two marshals had six men on their staff, and their duties were those of a small, rudimentary, private police force over the area encompassing greater London. Hitchin’s official powers of arrest, and the right to issue warrants, reinforced his dominance over the criminals he controlled.

  Chapter Five – Apprenticeship

  Sometime in 1713, soon after Wild was released from Wood Street Compter, Under-Marshal Hitchin asked him if he would like to work for him as an assistant in his thief-taking/receivership business. In both his official and his criminal capacities, Hitchin would certainly have visited Wood Street; if he had not actually met Wild, he would have heard of him. Wild himself said that it was during his time at the Compter that he had become acquainted with the ‘secrets of the criminals there under confinement, and particularly Mr Hitchin’s management’. It is more than likely that one of Hitchin’s ‘Mathematicians’, William Field, who later worked as an informer for Wild, knew him from his Wood Street days. Perhaps the two men became better acquainted when Wild began fencing the goods Mary Milliner and her girls brought him. Possibly Hitchin saw that Wild had talent, and, worried that he might develop into a serious rival, determined to contain Wild by bringing him closer to him.

  Hitchin had been suspended from his office as Under-Marshal in 1712, ostensibly because thief-taking and government office-holding were incompatible activities, realistically because he was charging such extortionate prices for the stolen goods he recovered. However, because the government did not want to embarrass itself by looking for a replacement so soon after Hitchin had been appointed (only the year before), not to mention the difficulty of finding someone to pay £700 for the office as he had done, they simply hired someone else to perform his duties while Hitchin’s fate was decided. He retained his official title, and used the privileges of his office where they were useful to him, but did not have to bother himself with the boring details of day-to-day responsibilities.

  Wild’s 1718 account of Hitchin’s application to him runs as follows:

  I am very sensible that you...are let into the knowledge of the intrigues of the Compter, particularly with relation to the securing of pocketbooks. But your experience is inferior to mine. I can put you in a far better method than you are acquainted with, and which may be facilitated with safety. For though I am suspended, I still retain the power of acting as a constable; and notwithstanding I can’t be heard before my Lord Mayor as formerly, I have interest among the Al[derme]n. But I must first tell you...that you’ll spoil the trade of thief-taking in advancing greater rewards than are necessary. I give but half-a-crown a [pocket] book; and when the thieves and pickpockets see you and I confederate, they’ll submit to our terms and likewise continue their thefts for fear of coming to the gallows by our means. Concluding, you shall take a turn with me as my servant or assistant, and we’ll commence our rambles this night.

  Wild’s job was to assist Hitchin, accompanying him on his daily rounds, visiting recalcitrant thieves who were not stealing enough, or who were taking their goods elsewhere to be fenced; buying friendly magistrates drinks in the taverns they frequented; finding out who owned the goods that were brought in by the thieves so they could offer to sell the items back. It required an inexhaustible memory for faces, names and places, as well as determination and egotism, and the right combination of menace and charm that would ensure absolute loyalty, awe mixed with terror.

  Hitchin possessed these qualities to some degree, but he lacked Wild’s criminal genius and opportunistic drive. He was protected by his official position, but his timidity prevented him from dealing in anything other than either relatively anonymous goods, such as bankbills, or items with which he could blackmail their owners, such as pocketbooks or diaries containing compromising material of some sort. His technique was also risky, because he approached the owners of the stolen goods himself, usually by letter, in which he anonymously recommended ‘Hitchin’s’ skills as a thief-taker. He would continue, ‘But I must also give you this caution, that you are to go to him with your pockets well-lined, or he’ll have nothing to say to you.’ This practice implied Hitchin’s own complicity: he already knew how the goods had been stolen and by whom. Finally, his high-handed, bullying attitude antagonized the criminals he wanted to intimidate, just as his greed alienated his clientele. To judge by Wild’s later refinements of receiving and thief-taking, watching Hitchin’s clumsy methods must have driven him crazy.

  By 1714, when Hitchin was reinstated as Under-Marshal, Wild had outgrown his partnership with Hitchin. He continued to use their association to his advantage — calling himself Hitchin’s ‘Deputy’, although the office did not exist; and, like Hitchin, carrying a sword as mark of his authority — but in December 1714 he had an office of his own in a room in Mrs Seagoe’s Blue Boar tavern in the Little Old Bailey. From this period onward, he worked alone.

  His partnership with Mary Milliner had also come to an end. He had used the silver sword he carried to cut off her ear — ‘to mark her for a bitch’ — during an argument, and although they continued to work together sometimes, and he still paid her a weekly allowance, their sexual relationship was over. It is hard to fathom what could have persuaded her to remain in contact with Wild after his brutal treatment of her; one has to assume that she either saw a side of him she believed redeemed him, like Nancy in Oliver Twist, or that she was simply paralysed by her fear of him.

  From this new office Wild was able to develop and hone his skills. Because he had a base, which he called the ‘Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property’, he was always available to his clients, and was able to stop seeking out the victims of crime as Hitchin had been forced to do. His fame became the magnet that brought his clientele to him. Everyone in London knew that if something was stolen, Jonathan Wild was the man to recover it (for a small fee).

  Wild worked in a far more organized and wide-ranging manner than Hitchin. He played on people’s desperation when something valuable or with sentimental value was stolen. To them, the loss was irreparable; they were willing to pay anything to anyone to recover the watch their father had left them or get back the letter from their mistress that was hidden in their pocketbook. Defoe described the procedure when someone went to Wild’s office to ask him to recover something. Jonathan would come out from behind his desk, shake hands warmly, and offer his client a seat in the strong Staffordshire accent he never lost.
After accepting a guinea finding fee — more than twice the average weekly wage of a labourer; his fee was only 5s. when he first opened his office in the Old Bailey — and writing his client’s name and details down in his ledger, he would take extensive notes about the place and time of the theft, what exactly was taken, and then promise to do his best to recover it. Defoe says tartly that this note-taking was ‘not for his information, but for your amusement’; it was certainly an effective method of gaining his client’s trust and confidence.

  Wild would usher the client out, and ask him to return in two or three days to see what he’d been able to produce. When the client came back, Wild would say he’d been able to track down the thief, but that he wanted an extortionate price for the goods, and would he mind waiting a day or two more while he tried to beat the price down for him? The client, thrilled that Wild seemed to have his interests so much at heart, would agree to wait. A few days later, the client would receive a message telling him to be at a certain place at a certain time, with five or ten guineas to exchange for the stolen goods which would be delivered by a messenger. Thus Wild never actually seemed to come into contact with the goods he recovered for people; in his defence, he claimed he only acted as a go-between. The profits he made were ‘clean’, because they were invisible and untraceable. The money would go straight back to Wild, who had usually already paid for the goods the day they arrived at his office through the back door. When he insisted that he couldn’t accept an additional fee for finding something — ‘No, no, it is an honour to serve you in this manner; my satisfaction lies in serving the public; I could not possibly accept anything more’ — it was a ruse to make his clients think his actions were altruistic. In reality, he was becoming rich at the public’s expense. By 1717 Wild was making £200-£300 a year, and had moved across the road to another, larger office at number 68 Little Old Bailey.

  Hitchin had warned Wild at the start of their association that he paid the thieves too much for the booty they brought him; certainly, they made more in using Wild as a fence than by using a pawnbroker, who would estimate the worth of their loot without adding in the sentimental value the owner would attach to it. Wild, unlike the pawnbrokers, aimed to return the goods to their rightful owners, and therefore could pay a thief proportionately more because he knew that he would get more for a watch or snuffbox if he returned it to someone who was desperate to get it back. Similarly, Wild found there was a profit to be made in stolen account books, which were worth nothing to anyone except the shopkeeper. However, because he dealt with the thieves and their victims separately, he negotiated his own profit privately; no one could disprove him if he said he had sold a watch back to its owner for two guineas, even if he had taken twenty for it.

  Wild frequently used advertising to find the owners of the items he was brought. The following, dating from 1724, was a typical example of the type of advertisement Wild perfected during his career. He placed them in any of the many newspapers published daily and weekly in London:

  Lost, the 1st of October, a black shagreen pocketbook, edged with silver, with some notes of hand. The said book was lost in the Strand, near the Fountain Tavern, about 7 or 8 o’clock at night. If any person will bring the aforesaid book to Mr Jonathan Wild, in the Old Bailey, he shall have a guinea reward.

  This advertisement could have served two purposes. Either Wild had been approached by the wallet’s owner, and didn’t have the book or know who had it; but this is unlikely given the knowledge he had of the happenings in London’s underworld. More probably, he knew where to get hold of the book — or actually had it in his possession — but advertised to display publicly his detachment from the world of crime and his ignorance of the workings of London’s thieves, thus supporting the highly moral stance he took with his clients. He could also have received the book from a thief, but not yet been approached by its rightful owner. If so, this advertisement is a masterpiece of veiled blackmail; the Fountain was a well-known brothel, and anyone who was there in the evening almost certainly had intentions of visiting it. The references to notes of hand show that Wild knew who owned the pocketbook, for notes of hand were always signed. Thus a gentleman not wanting his wife to find out where he had been on 1 October would have had to contact Wild, and pay whatever he asked, to avoid being compromised. Advertisements served the further purpose of bringing Wild’s name into the public eye, and promoting his reputation, so that when people lost something Jonathan Wild was the name they associated with its recovery.[52]

  Wild also encouraged the thieves who worked for him to learn specialized techniques. In eighteenth-century London there was almost no such thing as a common criminal: each tiny difference in style and technique merited an individual, descriptive name. There were over sixty different types of thieves alone described by contemporary cant phrases or names. A ‘Hook Pole Lay’ was a thief who used a long pole, with a hook attached to its tip, to pull unsuspecting riders off their horses to rob them; an ‘Angler’ was a thief who, using a fishing-rod and line from a high window or carriage, fished wallets out of the inside pockets of men walking beneath him, or wigs and hats off their heads. Wigs were a particularly popular target (Hogarth’s The Five Orders of Periwigs). Wig-thieves were known as ‘Wool-Pullers’, and had many techniques. Gay describes some thieves cutting holes in the back of coaches, and putting their hands through to grab the wig of the man sitting unsuspectingly inside.

  Nor is thy flaxen wig with safety worn;

  High on the shoulder, in a basket borne,

  Lurks the sly boy; whose hand to rapine bred,

  Plucks off the curling honours of thy head.

  A ‘Milken’ was a house-breaker, and a ‘Ripping Cove’ a housebreaker whose speciality was breaking into houses by tearing open the roof to gain entry. Burglars were sometimes so bold as to knock on a door in broad daylight and force their way inside. They might enlist the help of dissatisfied servants, resentful of their languid mistresses and boorish masters; or one member of a gang might become the lover of a maid, who, after slipping through the door left open for him, could leave it open for his accomplices. The lad who kept a lookout for the watch or an inadvertent witness was called a ‘Pushing Tout’. One of Jonathan’s men, dressed in servants’ livery, entered a house of tenement flats in King Street, near Longacre, and slipped into an apartment, whose owner he had observed leaving a minute before. Seeing nothing else of value to steal, he rolled the bedlinen up into a bundle and went off with it. On the stairs, he bumped into the flat’s owner, returning home. She asked him what he was doing there, and he replied that he worked for an upholsterer and was delivering some goods, but that he thought he was in the wrong building. She directed him next door, he went off on his way, and unsuspecting, she climbed the stairs to discover her loss.

  Shoplifters and pickpockets roamed the streets, eyes peeled for the chance opening. ‘No cleverer pickpockets exist than in this country,’ wrote Cesar de Saussure, slightly ruefully, after his snuffbox had been stolen from him. He had ‘placed it into the pocket of my carefully buttoned waistcoat; my coat was buttoned likewise, and I was holding both my hands over the pockets of my coat’. London’s street thieves were highly skilled, as Gay attests:

  Here dives the skulking thief, with practised sleight

  And unfelt fingers makes the pocket light.

  A ‘Stroller’ would enter a shop or tavern claiming to be the servant of a rich gentleman, and explaining that his master followed close behind him, would trick the owner out of money or goods. An ‘Adam Tiler’ was used by a pickpocket to distract his victim while he robbed him. A ‘Tail Drawer’ slipped the swords away from the sides of unsuspecting gentlemen. New shops were easy prey:

  It was always reckoned a safe job when we heard of a new shop, especially when the people were such as were not bred to shops; such may depend on it, that they will be visited [robbed] once or twice at their beginning, and they must be very sharp indeed if they can prevent it.[53]

  ‘S
tarring the Glaze’ was a method of shoplifting by which a glazier’s diamond was used to cut a hole in the window of a shop, so that a hand could be thrust in to take whatever lay on display inside. Little boys hidden by the crowd cut the silver buckles off gentlemen’s shoes, or snipped silver and gold buttons off jackets. A couple, working together, would jostle passers-by and in the ensuing confusion lift pocketbooks out of breast pockets. The lowest form of thief was a ‘Pudding Shammer’, just a step above a beggar in the street hierarchy, who stole food to stay alive.

  Disguise and acting were key elements in street robbery. Both pickpockets of a sort, the ‘Abraham Men’ pretended madness, and the ‘Confek Cranks’ epilepsy, to distract and disarm their prey.

  The lurking thief, who while the day-light shone,

  Made the walls echo with his begging tone:

  That crutch which late compassion moved, shall wound

  Thy bleeding head, and fell thee to the ground.

  All eighteenth-century criminals were actors of a sort, because the skills that they needed were so similar to those required on the stage; Jonathan Wild, whose childhood was spent tagging along with the strolling players that passed through Wolverhampton, must have understood this. He employed a dancing master to teach his ‘Spruce Prigs’ (special thieves) dancing so that they would blend in with the crowds at society balls, the opera or theatres, where rich pickings were to be had. He used ex-footmen for these jobs, whose training in grand households enabled them to mingle with aristocratic guests without being detected. One of these Spruce Prigs removed a gold and diamond watch from a woman on George I’s arm at a court ball; another stole a diamond buckle from a guest staying at Windsor Castle. A specialized type of Spruce Prig was the ‘Beau-Trap’, whose expertise lay in fleecing young country gentlemen, newly arrived in the capital, and ignorant of London ways.