Thief-Taker Hangings: How Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Wild, and Jack Sheppard Captivated London and Created the Celebrity Criminal by Aaron Skirboll (Hardback, 2014)
After the Glorious Revolution, a t 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 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 ather 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, r 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 kw it had begun.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
The Lyons Press, Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN-10
0762791489
ISBN-13
9780762791484
eBay Product ID (ePID)
209114057
Product Key Features
Author
Aaron Skirboll
Format
Hardback
Language
English
Topic
True Crime
Genre
True Crime
Dimensions
Weight
558g
Height
237mm
Width
159mm
Additional Product Features
Place of Publication
Guilford
Spine
27mm
Content Note
Black & White Illustrations, Frontispiece
Author Biography
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.
