Abstract
The criminal career of Jonathan Wild, executed at Tyburn on 24 May 1725, has for many commentators become a fixed point in the history of the underworld.2 Wild was a criminal, an informer, a thief-taker and a thief-maker; a man who artfully navigated the entrepreneurial justice system of the early eighteenth century. Our knowledge of Wild’s activities is shaped by the long repetition of his story in the print culture that he was said to have courted.3 His most thorough biographer, Gerald Howson noted, ‘Certainly he resembled the gangster of the twentieth century more closely than he did his famous contemporaries in Europe … He was the first criminal to become a “celebrity” …’.4 Indeed, Wild’s story is frequently re-imagined through the lens of later twentieth-century gang culture (in itself a constructed narrative), which reframes Wild as an eighteenth-century criminal mastermind.5 In this chapter I am less concerned with the reiteration of his story and more with the significance of the era as one in which Wild and his associates were able to thrive, and in which the ‘underworld’ narrative would find a more stable niche.
OBP, January 1722, Edward Vaughan, Philip Cholmley (t17220112–43).
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Notes
Howson, Thief-Taker; L. Moore (1998), The Thieves’ Opera: The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-taker and Jack Sheppard, House-breaker (London: Penguin).
Not least by his most famous contemporary biographer, D. Defoe (1725, 2004 edn.), The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild (London: Harper Perennial).
J. M. Beattie (1986), Crime and the Courts in England, 1600–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 136–7. For the decline of highway robbery in criminal biography, etc., see McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs, pp. 115–20; Shoemaker, ‘Street Robber’.
E. Mackie (2009), Rakes, Highwaymen and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press), p. 98.
R. Paley (1989), ‘Thief-takers in London in the Age of the McDaniel Gang, c. 1745–1754’, in Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder (eds.), Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 301–41. See also, Beattie, Policing, pp. 406–14.
Shoemaker, ‘Print Culture’, p. 18; Faller, Turned to Account; P. Linebaugh (1977), ‘The Ordinary of Newgate and his Account’, in J. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England 1550–1800 (London: Methuen);
A. McKenzie (2005), ‘From True Confessions to True Reporting? The Decline and Fall of the Ordinary’s Account’, London Journal, 30, 1, pp. 55–70; McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs;
G. Morgan and P. Rushton (2007), ‘Print Culture, Crime and Transportation in the Criminal Atlantic’, Continuity and Change, 2, 1, pp. 49–72;
P. Rawlings (1992), Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge).
On distribution, M. Harris (c. 1984), ‘Trials and Criminal Biographies: A Case Study in Distribution’, in R. Myers and M. Harris (eds.), Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press), pp. 1–36.
I. A. Bell (1991), Literature and Crime in Augustan England (London: Routledge), pp. 67–8, 80–4.
F. Dabhoiwala (2007), ‘Sex and Societies for Moral Reform, 1688–1800’, Journal of British Studies, 46, pp. 290–319, p. 290;
J. Hurl-Eamon (2004), ‘Policing Male Heterosexuality: The Reformation of Manners Societies’ Campaign Against the Brothels in Westminster, 1690–1720’, Journal of Social History, 37, 4, pp. 1017–35.
Hurl-Eamon, ‘Policing’, p. 15; R. B. Shoemaker (1991), Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press),
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G. V. Portus (1912), Caritas Anglicana (London: Mowbray & Co), pp. 46–9.
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R. Paulson (1993), Hogarth: Vol. 2, High Art and Low, 1732–1750 (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press), pp. 131–2, 140, 146, 147.
R. Norton (1992), Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London: GMP Publishers), pp. 54–69.
P. King (2000), Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Langbein, Origins;
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D. Palk (2006), Gender, Crime and Judicial Discretion, 1780–1830 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society).
S. Webb and B. Webb (1906), English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: The Parish and the County (London: Longmans, Green and Co.), p. 328. For the ‘trading justice’
see J. Beattie (2007), ‘Sir John Fielding and Public Justice: The Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, 1754–1780’, Law and History Review, 25, pp. 61–100;
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J. Innes (2009), Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 279–341 for William Payne. See also J. Innes, ‘Payne, William (1717/18–1782)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/70400, accessed 8 September 2014).
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J. Warner, F. Ivis and A. Demers (2000), ‘A Predatory Social Structure: Informers in Westminster, 1737–1741’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 30, pp. 617–34.
OBP, May 1728, William Russell, William Holden and Robert Crouch (t17280501–22); OBP, May 1728, Christopher Rawlins alias Thomas Rawlins, Isaac Ashley alias Ashby, and John Rowden alias Hulks (t17280501–30). See ONA, May 1728 (OA17280520); A. L. Hayward (1927), Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (London: Routledge), pp. 438–44.
E. P. Thompson (1975), Whigs and Hunters (Pantheon: New York), p. 196.
A. Pepper (2011), ‘Early Crime Writing and the State: Jonathan Wild, Daniel Defoe and Bernard De Mandeville in 1720s London’, Textual Practice, 25, 3, pp. 473–91, p. 473.
J. Beattie (1995), ‘Crime and Inequality in Eighteenth-Century London’, in J. Hagan and R. D. Peterson (eds.), Crime and Inequality (California: Stanford University Press), p. 133.
D. Lemmings (2009), ‘Introduction: Law and Order, Moral Panics, and Early Modern England’, in D. Lemmings and C. Walker (eds.), Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 1–21, p. 7.
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Shore, H. (2015). ‘Now we have the Informing Dogs!’: Crime Networks and Informing Cultures in the 1720s and 1730s. In: London’s Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720–c. 1930. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313911_2
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