Jack Sheppard - Legacy

Legacy

There was a spectacular public reaction to Sheppard's deeds. He was even cited (favourably) as an example in newspapers, pamphlets, broadsheets, and ballads were all devoted to his amazing exploits, and his story was adapted for the stage almost immediately. Harlequin Sheppard, a pantomime by one John Thurmond (subtitled "A night scene in grotesque characters"), opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on Saturday 28 November, only two weeks after Sheppard's hanging. In a famous contemporary sermon, a London preacher drew on Sheppard's popular escapes as a way of holding his congregation's attention:

The account of his life remained well-known through the Newgate Calendar, and a three-act farce was published but never produced, but, mixed with songs, it became The Quaker's Opera, later performed at Bartholomew Fair. An imagined dialogue between Jack Sheppard and Julius Caesar was published in the British Journal on 4 December 1724, in which Sheppard favourably compares his virtues and exploits to those of Caesar.

Perhaps the most prominent play based on Sheppard's life is John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). Sheppard was the inspiration for the figure of Macheath; his nemesis, Peachum, is based on Jonathan Wild. The play was spectacularly popular, restoring the fortune that Gay had lost in the South Sea Bubble, and was produced regularly for over 100 years. An unperformed but published play The Prison-Breaker was turned into The Quaker's Opera (in imitation of The Beggar's Opera) and performed at Bartholomew Fair in 1725 and 1728. Two centuries later The Beggar's Opera was the basis for The Threepenny Opera of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1928).

Sheppard's tale may have been an inspiration for William Hogarth's 1747 series of 12 engravings, Industry and Idleness, which shows the parallel descent of an apprentice, Tom Idle, into crime and eventually to the gallows, beside the rise of his fellow apprentice, Francis Goodchild, who marries his master's daughter and takes over his business, becoming wealthy as a result, eventually emulating Dick Whittington to become Lord Mayor of London.

Sheppard's tale was revived in the first half of the 19th century. A melodrama, Jack Sheppard, The Housebreaker, or London in 1724, by W.T. Moncrieff was published in 1825. More successful was William Harrison Ainsworth's third novel, entitled Jack Sheppard, which was originally published in Bentley's Miscellany from January 1839 with illustrations by George Cruikshank, overlapping with the final episodes of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. An archetypal Newgate novel, it generally remains close to the facts of Sheppard's life, but portrays him as a swashbuckling hero. Like Hogarth's prints, the novel pairs the descent of the "idle" apprentice into crime with the rise of a typical melodramatic character, Thames Darrell, a foundling of aristocratic birth who defeats his evil uncle to recover his fortune. Cruikshank's images perfectly complemented Ainsworth's tale—Thackeray wrote that "...Mr Cruickshank really created the tale, and that Mr Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to it." The novel quickly became very popular: it was published in book form later that year, before the serialised version was completed, and even outsold early editions of Oliver Twist. Ainsworth's novel was adapted into a successful play by John Buckstone in October 1839 at the Adelphi Theatre starring (strangely enough) Mary Anne Keeley; indeed, it seems likely that Cruikshank's illustrations were deliberately created in a form that were informed by, and would be easy to repeat as, tableaux on stage. It has been described as the "exemplary climax" of "the pictorial novel dramatized pictorially".

The story generated a form of cultural mania, embellished by pamphlets, prints, cartoons, plays and souvenirs, not repeated until George du Maurier's Trilby in 1895. By early 1840, a cant song from Buckstone's play, "Nix My Dolly, Pals, Fake Away" was reported to be "deafening us in the streets". Public alarm at the possibility that young people would emulate Sheppard's behaviour led the Lord Chamberlain to ban, at least in London, the licensing of any plays with "Jack Sheppard" in the title for forty years. The fear may not have been entirely unfounded: Courvousier, the valet of Lord William Russell, claimed in one of his several confessions that the book had inspired him to murder his master. Frank and Jesse James wrote letters to the Kansas City Star signed "Jack Sheppard". Nevertheless, a number of burlesques of the story were written after the ban was lifted, including a popular Gaiety Theatre, London piece called Little Jack Sheppard (1885-86) by Henry Pottinger Stephens and W. Yardley, with music by Meyer Lutz and others. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1056120 The Sheppard story has been revived several times in the 20th century, including three silent movies, The Hairbreadth Escape of Jack Sheppard (1900), Robbery of the Mail Coach (1903) and Jack Sheppard (1923); a book, The Road to Tyburn, by Christopher Hibbert (1957); a British costume drama, Where's Jack?, directed by James Clavell, with Tommy Steele in the title role (1969); an unrealised film project of FilmFour Productions in 2000, Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, for which Benjamin Ross, who would have been director, co-wrote the screenplay with John Preston, with Tobey Maguire and Harvey Keitel slated for the main parts; a 2002 television drama, Invitation to a Hanging; and a series of novels by Neal Stephenson collectively known as, The Baroque Cycle (2003, 2004), in which the character Jack Shaftoe was partly inspired by events from the life of Jack Sheppard.

Bram Stoker references Jack Sheppard in "Dracula" when referring to the patient, Renfield.

The reasons for the lasting legacy of Jack Sheppard's exploits in the popular imagination have been addressed by Peter Linebaugh, who suggests that Sheppard's legend was rooted in the prospect of excarceration, of escape from what Michel Foucault in Folie et déraison called the grand renfermement (Great Confinement), in which "unreasonable" members of the population were locked away and institutionalised. The laws levelled at Sheppard and similar working class criminals were a means of disciplining a potentially rebellious multitude into accepting increasingly harsh property laws. A nineteenth-century view on the Jack Sheppard phenomenon was offered by Charles Mackay in Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: