The Thief-Taker Hangings: How Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Wild, and Jack Sheppard Captivated London and Created the Celebrity Criminal

by Aaron Skirboll

Overview

After the Glorious Revolution, a not so glorious age of lawlessness befell England. Crime ran rampant, and highwaymen, thieves, and prostitutes ruled the land. Execution by hanging often punished the smallest infractions, and rip-roaring stories of fearless criminals proliferated, giving birth to a new medium: the newspaper. In 1724, housebreaker Jack Sheppard—a “pocket Hercules,” his small frame packed with muscle—finally met the hangman. Street singers sang ballads about the Cockney burglar because no prison could hold him. Each more astonishing than the last, his final jailbreak took him through six successive locked rooms, after which he shimmied down two blankets from the prison roof to the street below. Just before Sheppard swung, he gave an account of his life to a writer in the crowd. Daniel Defoe stood in the shadow of the day’s literati—Swift, Pope, Gay—and had done hard time himself for sedition and bankruptcy. He saw how prison corrupted the poor. They came out thieves, but he came out a journalist. Six months later, the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders covered another death at the hanging tree. Jonathan Wild looked every bit the brute—body covered in scars from dagger, sword, and gun, bald head patched with silver plates from a fractured skull—and he had all but invented the double-cross. He cultivated young thieves, profited from their work, then turned them in for his reward—and their execution. But one man refused to play his game. Sheppard didn’t take orders from this self-proclaimed “thief-taker general,” nor would he hawk his loot through Wild’s fences. The two-faced bounty hunter took it personally and helped bring the young burglar’s life to an end. But when Wild’s charade came to light, he quickly became the most despised man in the land. When he was hanged for his own crimes, the mob wasn’t rooting for Wild as it had for Sheppard. Instead, they hurled stones, rotten food, and even dead animals at him. Defoe once again got the scoop, and tabloid journalism as we know it had begun.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762791484
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	09/02/2014
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Aaron Skirboll is the author of The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven and has written about America’s first professional songwriter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Ernest Hemingway’s last days for American Way magazine, and the history of the phone booth and cell phone etiquette for The Morning News. He lives in Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Brawling Back-Alley Bunch ix

Prologue: The Triple Tree xiii

I The Dissenter 3

II The Streets of London 15

III Jonathan Wild Comes to the City 23

IV The Review 33

V The Marshal and the Buckle-Maker 43

VI Thief-Catcher General of Great Britain and Ireland 55

VII Jack Sheppard, Apprentice 79

VIII The Regulator 83

IX Crusoe and Flanders 97

X The Black Lion 103

XI Celebrity Gangbuster 113

XII Cleverest of All 129

XIII Wild versus Sheppard 141

XIV The Trial of Jack Sheppard 147

XV Mr. Applebee's Man 159

XVI Blueskin's Penknife 167

XVII The Castle 175

XVIII Forlorn at the Triple Tree 187

XIX The Downfall of Jonathan Wild 207

XX The Trial of Jonathan Wild 221

XXI Hanging the Thief-Catcher 229

XXII "To Deliver Myself from This Death of a Life" 237

Epilogue: Legends 243

Appendix: Canting Dictionary 247

Acknowledgments 250

Notes 251

Selected Bibliography 282

Index 291

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/14/2014
Skirboll (The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven) masterfully weaves the captivating stories of three Englishmen and how one’s newspaper coverage of the other two “birthed a genre.” Most readers will recognize Daniel Defoe as the author of Robinson Crusoe, but he also started one of the first newspapers in England and was deemed the father of literary journalism. Skirboll details Defoe’s early life, including how he ended up in prison and how that influenced his writing of Moll Flanders and gave him credibility as an interviewer. As the targets of Defoe’s journalistic endeavors, the burglar Jack Sheppard caught the romantic attention of the public during a manhunt for him, while Jonathan Wild, the veritable inventor of organized crime, fell from having the underworld of London (and sometimes the establishment) in the palm of his hand to swinging from the gallows. In the course of his storytelling, Skirboll also covers the early history of publishing, runs through the grisly details of the English justice system of the early 18th century, and details how brutish life could be for the average person of the time. A rollicking romp through London’s underbelly, Skirboll’s rich, multilayered account reveals the birth of society’s fascination with criminals. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Part history, part true-crime, this account of London’s celebrity criminals is fresh and captivating.

The Lima News

Skirboll shows the lives and trials of Londoners from all classes.. .. Though this is not a Defoe biography, his background and career producing pamphlets and newspapers are vital.. .. His exclusive interviews of felons in Newgate and other London prisons truly changed the face of journalism.. .. The daring cleverness of both Wild and Sheppard makes for fun historical reading.”

—Kirkus Reviews


“Aaron Skirboll’s fascinating book will whisk you vividly back into history, capturing the zeal and aesthetic of the period. Equally satisfying, he delivers on the subtitle and smashes the mark. Intensely readable history like this is as hard to find as an incredibly textured story like this. Skirboll has penned an Edgar contender: He’s taken a slice of crime history and turned it into an instant classic, with a reporter’s nosy eye and a novelist’s flare for storytelling. The book is all at once compelling, engaging, skillfully crafted, but also energized by a layered subject that could have been ripped from today’s sensational headlines.”
 
—M. William Phelps, New York Times–bestselling author of Murder, New England and The Devil’s Rooming House and star of the Investigation Discovery series Dark Minds


“The Thief-Taker Hangings is history that reads like exciting fiction. This is a compelling story, wonderfully researched, that takes you deep into the seamy London of Restoration England through the intertwined stories of thief-taker Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard, the greatest escape artist of the day, and their lowlife molls, all of them known to Daniel Defoe, who covered the scene. Skirboll captures all of this with a human touch that gives his account an added compassion worthy of John Gay and Bertold Brecht.”

—Peter Rand, author of Conspiracy of One


“Aaron Skirboll skillfully weaves together the lives and times of Daniel Defoe, who invented the English novel and literary true crime journalism, and two infamous criminals whose stories he told, Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard. From coffeehouse to prison, from high life to low, The Thief-Taker Hangings brings early eighteenth-century London vividly to life.”
 
—Peter Kobel, author of The Strange Case of the Mad Professor

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2014
Jonathan Wild, a real-life ringleader of thieves in 18th-century London, might make you laugh—not from amusement but rather incredulity at his audacious exploits. His London was a lawless one as he reigned during a time when an organized police force was considered to be an expensive and repressive nuisance. Using his influence to extort, bribe, and occasionally inform on his colleagues, Wild became a successful and powerful force both in the underworld and society circles of the time. Skirboll (The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven) details numerous Hollywoodesque scrapes, chases, and escapes; further proving that truth is far stranger than fiction. The author evocatively portrays a strange and alien land whose indifferent government legislated hundreds of capital crimes, carried out endless executions, and yet was effectively lawless. Skirboll's research led him to British archives and contemporary newspapers, unearthing a fascinating story. He immerses the reader in the period but wears his learning lightly. VERDICT Fans of both fictional and true crime stories will enjoy this fresh, well-written, and captivating page-turner full of fascinating characters engaged in a fast-moving plot.—Michael O. Eshleman, Kings Mills, OH

Library Journal

2014-06-30
How the beginnings of true crime reporting and the birth of tabloid journalism can be tagged to Daniel Defoe’s years in prison for libelous sedition.Generally eschewing troublesome political writing after his imprisonment, Defoe instead investigated and wrote about the lower orders, providing Skirboll (The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven: How a Ragtag Group of Fans Took the Fall for Major League Baseball, 2010) with wonderful resources for this story of criminal Jonathan Wild (1682-1725) and escape artist Jack Sheppard (1702-1724). Wild learned the fine art of thievery while serving in debtors prison, and he learned it so well that he became the man thieves turned to for advice. It wasn’t long before Wild incorporated and set up his “Lost Property Office” advertising and selling stolen items back to their owners. Thieves who didn’t bring their goods to him, like Sheppard, were “apprehended” and often hanged, with Wild taking the reward; thus his title of “Thief-Taker.” Eventually, he broke up London’s largest gangs and had hundreds of thieves on his own list. Skirboll shows the lives and trials of Londoners from all classes. In the 18thcentury, the city had no official police department, and it was up to the victim to initiate the prosecution of wrongdoers. Defendants often received no counsel, and they also had to worry about the straw men, professional perjurers and unpunished crime. Though this is not a Defoe biography, his background and career producing pamphlets and newspapers are vital. “His writing propelled journalism into the future and gave us,” writes the author, “the celebrity criminal, the gossip column, investigative reporting, tabloid journalism, and the true crime drama.” His exclusive interviews of felons in Newgate and other London prisons truly changed the face of journalism.The daring cleverness of both Wild and Sheppard makes for fun historical reading.

Kirkus Reviews