In Memory of Gentleman Jack Sheppard

Jack Sheppard (1702 -1724)

Engraving by George White (1728) 

based on a portrait by James Thornhill (1724)

I.

I have to admit, I have reservations about memoralising the career of a petty criminal; such low-lives, always ducking and diving from the law, are rarely as charming in real life as we like to imagine them. Just ask the woman working at my local supermarket who was spat at and punched in the face last week after challenging a would-be shoplifter ...

Having said that, it would be churlish to deny the popular appeal of Jack Sheppard; a flash young tea leaf and audacious jailbreaker who captured the sympathy and affection of many a Londoner, both before and after his execution at Tyburn, aged 22, in November 1724.


II. 

Sheppard was an East End boy who decided he didn't want to be a carpenter, preferring instead to make his money from skullduggery. It was a fateful choice: Sheppard was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 - suggesting he was either very unlucky or pretty fuckin' feckless as a criminal - and although he managed to escape four times, by the end of the year he was swinging from the gallows.

However, his death at such a tender age only helped establish his legend. An autobiographical sketch - thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe - sold like hot cakes at his execution and there followed several plays based upon it, much to the annoyance of the authorities who were concerned that impressionable young rascals keen to play Jack the Lad would attempt to copy his behaviour.* 

In some ways, Sheppard makes an unlikely role model. For not only was he useless at evading capture by the law, but he was also physically unimposing; small in size and lightly built, Sheppard had a pale complexion and suffered with a slight stutter.

However, these things were compensated for by a winning smile and a quick wit that made him popular with both sexes in the taverns of Drury Lane, such as the Black Lion, where he met his future partner in crime Joseph 'Blueskin' Blake and the buxom young brass Elizabeth Lyon (aka Edgeworth Bess), who became his regular mistress.   

From being a good, hardworking young man with career aspirations, Sheppard now threw himself enthusiastically into an illicit lifestyle of booze, whores, and criminal activity. Whilst he soon progressed to burglary and highway robbery, his first recorded theft was that of two silver spoons pinched from a tavern in Charing Cross, so hardly the crime of the century.

As indicated, however, it was his talent for breaking out of jail that really captured the popular imagination, including an escape from Newgate Prison where he was awaiting execution having been convicted of theft at the Old Bailey. Sheppard managed to remove an iron bar from his cell window, climb through the small gap, then calmly walk past the guards dressed in the women's clothing that accomplices had previously smuggled in.     

Although he was soon recaptured and returned to the his cell at Newgate, he was now visited by the great and the good who were all keen to see for themselves Gentleman Jack Sheppard. When guards found files and other tools hidden in his cell, he was transferred to what we would now describe as a high security unit, clapped in leg irons, and chained to the floor.

Cheekily informing his gaolers that these measures were not going to hold him, Sheppard even demonstrated how he might use a small nail to get free. He was rewarded for this by being bound with still heavier chains and handcuffed. Sheppard, however, continued to make light of his predicament and, astonishingly, he got away once more - still wearing his leg irons!

This miraculous escape so amazed everyone that the belief grew that Sheppard must have had the assistance of the Devil himself. Whether that's true or not, Sheppard's final stint of freedom was shortlived, if admittedly spent in some style; having broken into a pawnbrokers on Drury Lane, Sheppard helped himself to a black silk suit, several rings, and a wig in order to enjoy a night on the Town, posing as a dandy highwayman with a girl on each arm.

He was arrested, for the final time, on the morning of November 1st, still dressed in his stolen clobber and still very drunk.

III.

This time, the authorities took no chance. Sheppard was kept under constant guard and loaded down with 300lbs of iron weights. A petition, signed by several prominent people, asking that his death sentence be commuted was ignored. Offered the chance to have it reduced by informing on his associates, Sheppard, to his credit, refused to grass.

On November 16th, he was taken to the gallows at Tyburn to be hanged. A joyous procession accompanied him through the streets of London; crowds were said to have numbered 200,000 (one third of the population at that time). Hopes of a daring last minute escape were thwarted when prison guards found and confiscated a pen knife hidden about his person.

After Sheppard's body was cut down, the crowd pressed forward to stop its removal by the authorities. When his badly mauled corpse was finally retrieved, it was buried in the churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

And thus ends the (really rather sorry) tale of Jack Sheppard ...

Though, as I say above, his posthumous legend has continued to grow. Sheppard now serves, for example, as a figure of inspiration for the punk fashion entrepreneur Joe Corré and his team at Child of the Jago: click here.

I mention this not because I particularly share Corré's sartorial sense or aesthetic vision - and I certainly don't subscribe to his (and his mother's) eco-political agenda - but for sentimental reasons (i.e., much the same sort of stupidity as those who champion Sheppard as a working-class hero or a potentially revolutionary figure of some kind).   

Notes

* Perhaps the best-known play that was at least partly based on Sheppard's life is John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728); Sheppard was the inspiration for the figure of Macheath.

In Defence of Trivia

Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: 

through spacious streets conduct thy bard along

  John Gay (1716)

This just in by email, with reference to a recently published post:

"It's bad enough when writers like you try to persuade us that superficial and boring phenomena, such as fashion, have great import or interest. But what is worse is that when you do decide to discuss serious topics, such as cultural appropriation, which involve issues of class and race, you invariably reduce them to questions of style or semantics in a manner that is disingenuous, disrespectful and disappointing. Surely philosophy - even of a postmodern variety - should do more than trivialise everything with an ironic smirk; particularly things that have real consequences for real people in the real world." 

There's obviously quite a lot here to which I might respond. But it's the idea of trivia that I think I'd like to address (briefly and obviously not in depth; nor with the appropriate gravitas that my critic seems to expect).

It's clear, is it not, that those who hate trivia do so from a moral position that is thought superior, but is in fact only snobbish and judgemental.

For what constitutes trivia after all other than forms of knowledge believed to be of lesser value or commonplace; fine for those of limited education or intelligence (and postmodernists), but not for those who have greater intellectual gifts and who, like my critic, prefer to discuss important issues from a serious perspective and not waste time playing language games or worrying about aesthetics.   

The Romans used the word triviae to describe where one road forked into two. And this too provides a vital clue as to why people such as my critic hate trivialisation.

For rather than being a reductive process, it's one that adds complexity and ambiguity; multiplying alternatives and proliferating difference; demonstrating that there is no single, super-smooth highway to truth, just a network of minor roads and what Heidegger terms Holzwege - paths that might very well lead nowhere and cause the seeker after wisdom to get lost. Ultimately, my critic is frightened of losing their way by leaving the straight and narrow. But I'm more like Little Red Riding Hood and prepared to take a risk; I might miss the point - but, on the other hand, I might meet a wolf (and there's nothing inconsequential about that).

Alternatively, I just might encounter a deity ...

For Trivia refers not only to fun-facts about popular culture or the minutiae of everyday life, but is the name of a goddess who, in Roman mythology, haunted crossroads and graveyards and was the mother of witchcraft and queen of ghosts, wandering about at night beneath the harvest moon visible only to the barking dogs who told of her approach. Again, one suspects all this rather frightens and repulses my critic, who would doubtless dismiss it as superstitious nonsense. But as the former editor of Pagan Magazine, the thought of encountering such a figure continues to secretly enchant.   

And so, in a nutshell, it's better to trivialise than to moralise and be forever bound by the spirit of gravity.