May 30, 2022 • 36 mins
Jack Sheppard became sort of a serial breakout artist in 18th-century England. He was a real person who became a folk hero, but many of the accounts of his life are suspect.
Research:
- Buckley, Matthew. “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience.” Victorian Studies. 3/1/2002.
- Defoe, Daniel (attributed). “A narrative of all the robberies, escapes, &c. of John Sheppard : giving an exact description of the manner of his wonderful escape from the castle in Newgate.” London. 1724.
- Defoe, Daniel (attributed). “The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard, Containing a Particular Account of his Many Robberies and Escapes.” 1724.
- E., Gentleman in Town. “Authentic memoirs of the life and surprising adventures of John Sheppard : who was executed at Tyburn, November the 16th, 1724 : by way of familiar letters from a gentleman in town, to his friend and correspondent in the country.” London, 1724.
- Gillingham, Lauren. "Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard and the Crimes of History." SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 49 no. 4, 2009, p. 879-906. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sel.0.0081.
- Harman, Claire. "Writing for the mob: Moral panic about a Victorian 'handbook of crime'." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6031, 2 Nov. 2018, p. 25. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632755026/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=86b28327. Accessed 21 Apr. 2022.
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 22 April 2022), August 1724, trial of Joseph Sheppard (t17240812-52).
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 22 April 2022), Ordinary of Newgate's Account, November 1724 (OA17241111).
- Ridgwell, Stephen. “Sheppard’s Warning: A thief who had been dead for more than a century caused a moral panic in the theatres of Victorian London.” History Today. Volume 71 Issue 4 April 2021. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/sheppards-warning
- Stearns, Elizabeth. “A ‘Darling of the Mob’: The Antidisciplinarity of the Jack Sheppard Texts.” Victorian Literature and Culture , 2013, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2013). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24575686
- Sugden, P. Lyon, Elizabeth [nicknamed Edgware Bess] (fl. 1722–1726), prostitute and thief. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 21 Apr. 2022
- Sugden, P. Sheppard, John [Jack] (1702–1724), thief and prison-breaker. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 21 Apr. 2022
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. While I
was working on that six Impossible Episodes about prison breaks
that we had recently, I of course found a few
(00:23):
topics that seemed like they could stand on their own
as full episodes. One of them was John Shepherd, more
commonly known as Jack Shepherd, who became kind of a
serial breakout artist in eighteenth century England, and I have
a caveat with this episode. There are a bunch of
books about Shepherd's life. A lot of them were published
(00:46):
right around the time that he died. One of the
most well known of those is The History of the
Remarkable Life of John Shepherd, and it's often credited to
Daniel Dafoe. Another one is a narrative of All the
Robbery Escapes, et cetera of John Shepherd, giving an exact
description of the manner of his wonderful escape from the
(01:06):
castle in Newgate and of the methods he took afterward
for his security, written by himself. As that written by
himself suggests, it is purportedly Shepherd's own autobiography, written from
prison just days before his execution, and also responding to
some of the details that were in that first book
(01:27):
that I mentioned. The thing is this book is also
often credited to Daniel Dafoe. Another of the books is
Authentic Memoirs of the Life and Surprising Adventures of John Shepherd,
who was executed at Tyburn November the sixteenth, seventeen twenty four,
by way of familiar letters from a gentleman in town
(01:48):
to his friend and correspondent in the country. This is
published just under the initials G. E. G. E is
the gentleman in town writing these letters, and some of
the ors are purportedly also by Shepherd. If it's not clear,
there's question marks around all of this about like who
really wrote these and other works, and how accurate they are,
(02:13):
how much of those sources agree with each other because
they're correct, or whether it's more just because their various
authors were all lifting information from one another. Some of
Daniel Dafoe's purportedly historical work has come up on the
show before. We've talked about how some of it's definitely
exaggerated at best. What we do know, though, is Jack
(02:34):
Shephard was for sure a real person, and he had
two rounds of fame, the second one happening more than
a century after his death. Also heads up. Although Jack
Shepherd was mostly a thief and kind of a folk
hero or maybe an anti hero, there's also a lot
of execution and some murder in this episode. Jack Shepherd
(02:58):
was born March four, sevent you know too, in White
Rose spit of Fields, London. His father, Thomas, was a carpenter.
Thomas apparently came from a long line of carpenters, and
he had a reputation as a hard worker and being
good at his trade. But he died at a young age,
leaving his wife Mary to raise their three surviving children.
(03:19):
That was Jack, his brother Thomas, and their sister Mary.
For a time, Jack and Thomas went to Mr Garrett's school,
which in some accounts was really a workhouse. Jack started
working as a servant when he was twelve years old
or so. He worked for a woolen draper named William
knee Bone, which is a great name. Knee Bone was
(03:40):
reportedly a kind man and helped Jack improve his reading, writing,
and arithmetic. On April twelfth, seventeen seventeen, when he was fifteen,
Jack started an apprenticeship with a carpenter named Owen Wood.
Of course he was a carpenter, his name was Owen Wood,
and he seems to have taken after his father. There.
For the first few years at least, Jack was described
(04:03):
as a very good apprentice. It's also possible that his brother, Thomas,
was one of Wood's apprentices, although some accounts described Thomas
as a fellow apprentice, but not as Jack's actual brother.
That's a little vague. And then about five years into
Jack's apprenticeship, things changed. Wood had a next door neighbor
(04:24):
named Joseph Hind or possibly Hayne, who had been a
button mulled maker, and Hind decided to give up his
trade and instead take over the running of the Black
Lion Ale House, which was not far away, and he
started encouraging all the local apprentices to come spend their
free time and days off there. This Ale house was
(04:46):
where twenty year old Jack was introduced to quote a
train of vices, as before I was altogether a stranger
to He was also introduced to a woman named Elizabeth Lyon,
also known as Edgeworth Best because she'd been born in Edgeworth.
Elizabeth was a sex worker, and in seventy one she
had been convicted of stealing a piece of silk and
(05:09):
five yards of cambrick, and her hand had been branded
as a punishment. Numerous accounts describe Elizabeth as seducing Jack
into a life of crime. Although lots of accounts try
to make Elizabeth responsible for Jack's decisions in works purportedly
by him, he also places the blame on various other
(05:30):
people in his life, yet none of them really suggests
very strongly that he was a grown man and should
be responsible for his own actions. There's also a little
bit of contradiction and how different Jack's behavior really was
after he started frequenting the Black Line alehouse. He either
had been a totally upstanding apprentice, skilled in his work,
(05:52):
and well on his way to becoming a carpenter with
his own shop, at least before he fell into ruin,
or he had always had quote evil inclinations and when
the Wood family was at church on Sundays, he stayed
behind and just got up to whatever he felt like doing.
It seems like his actual crimes started in seventeen twenty three,
when he was twenty one, Elizabeth stole someone's ring, and
(06:16):
Jack broke her out of the local roundhouse. This was
basically a small single room jail off and round as
the name suggests, sometimes freestanding and sometimes built into a wall.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, smaller communities often
used roundhouses as an overnight holding cell for people who
were caught doing some kind of mischief or crimes, so
(06:38):
they could be taken to town in the morning. Shepherd
also started stealing from the jobs that Owen Wood had
sent him on, starting with stealing two silver spoons from
the Rummer tavern. For a while, he was keeping up
his apprenticeship while also pilfering money or small items from
his job sites, and he justified it by saying that
(06:59):
Would wasn't paying him enough money to survive, and generally
he seems to have been pretty critical of how Wood
was running his business. Would was mostly doing lots of
small repairs and projects at people's existing homes and businesses,
and Shepherd thought he would be making a lot more
money if he moved into doing new construction. Then, with
less than a year ago on his apprenticeship, Shepherd left,
(07:21):
turning his attention to thieving full time. By February of
seventeen twenty four, he had established a small criminal operation
involving himself, his brother, Thomas, and Elizabeth Lyon, with Jack
and Elizabeth living together as husband and wife, even though
she was reportedly already married to someone else. Jack also
(07:42):
got into a little bit of fraud by claiming that
he had already finished that apprenticeship to owen Wood, and
he did that so he could get a job as
a journeyman to a master carpenter. He used that job
as a way to case houses so that he could
rob the homes where he worked. According to Shepherd's purported autobiograph,
fee he spent the night in every round house in
(08:03):
the city and Liberty of Westminster, and Elizabeth Lyons spent
a night, and most of them too. He had mostly
managed to escape or to talk them both out of trouble,
but eventually Thomas got caught, and when questioned, Thomas implicated
Jack in a string of thefts. After this, Shepherd was
captured and held in St Giles's Roundhouse in central London.
(08:26):
This led to the first escape that most accounts describe
in detail. Shepherd hadn't been searched very well before being
locked in, and he had an old razor. He used
the razor to cut one of the supports from a
chair and then used that support to work a hole
through the roof. He put the roundhouse's feather bed under
(08:47):
the spot where he was working to muffle the sound
of debris as it fell. That worked until he started
to break through to the outside and a roof tile
slid down the outside of the building and hit a
passer by. Shepherd forced his way through the hole and ran. Yeah.
He was like enough of this, trying to be somewhat
discreet and I'm just going to force my way out
(09:08):
through the rest of this. Not long after that, Jack
and Elizabeth were both arrested, and this time they were
taken to new prison in Clerkenwell, also in central London,
and they were placed in what was supposed to be
the strongest ward in the prison. They were in a
cell together because they were believed to be husband and wife.
(09:28):
But Shepherd had suggested to authorities that he was going
to implicate some of his various accomplices, so he was
being treated fairly leniently in this supposedly secure ward, and
he was allowed to have visitors. One of these visitors
smuggled in a saw, and Shepherd used it to saw
through his restraints and to dismantle a barred window. He
(09:51):
and Elizabeth then escaped by climbing down a rope they
had made from bedsheets and Elizabeth's dress. We're going to
talk some more about Jack and elizabe after we paused
for a sponsor break. After Jack Shepherd and Elizabeth Lyon
(10:13):
escaped from new prison, they went back to thieving. They
broke into houses, they held up coaches on the highway.
Shepherd also found another accomplice, a man named Joseph Blake,
also known as Blueskin, and in mid June of seventy four,
Shepherd and Blake robbed the home of Shepherd's former employer,
William nee Bone. They stole a hundred and eight yards
(10:36):
of woolen cloth and some other items. By this point,
Shepherd had caught the attention of a man named Jonathan Wild.
Wild maintained a whole network of thieves, burglars, and others
who made their living through crime, and he also worked
as a thief taker, apprehending suspects and handing them over
to authorities. He used this thief taking to keep his
(10:59):
criminal network in line. For example, he would demand that
he get a cut of someone's hall and if they refused,
Wild would just turn them in. Yeah, working for a
crime boss who's threatening to hand you over to the
police is the whole thing. Wild apparently wanted Shepherd to
become part of this network, or possibly Shepherd had been
(11:19):
part of it and had decided to strike out on
his own. Whatever the background on that, Shepherd refused to
cooperate with Wild, and Wild had him arrested, and some
accounts Lion betrayed Shepherd to Wild in the lead up
to this arrest, which was on July. This time, Shepherd
was jailed in Newgate Prison in London and he stood
(11:42):
trial at the Central Criminal Court also called the Old Bailey,
on August twelfth, seventeen twenty four. Shepherd was tried for
three crimes. Two of them involved stealing diverse goods from
the homes of William Phillips and Mary Cook in two
separate incidents from there vias February. There wasn't enough evidence
(12:03):
against him for either of those two crimes and he
was acquitted, but the third was for breaking into the
home of William Nebone and stealing that hundred and eight
yards of woolen cloth. This time, Shepherd was convicted and
he was sentenced to death. As a note, the old
Bailey records of this list Shepherd's first name as Joseph,
(12:25):
but later on, when Joseph Blake stood trial for his
participation in that same crime, the records list Shepherd's first
name as John. Shepherd was returned to Newgate Prison and
placed in the hold for condemned prisoners, and on August
thirty one, four days before his execution was supposed to
take place, he sawed through one of the iron spikes
(12:47):
in the space above a door, squeezing between the remaining
spikes to make his way out. That saw apparently came
from someone named Mr Davis. Shepherd sneaked to the prison's
reception area where he was meant by Elizabeth Lyon and
another woman and they disguised him in a nightgown and
they led him out of the prison and what was
(13:08):
really not the smartest move, Shepherd then spent a stretch
of time in London's Clare Market, less than a mile
away from the prison, disguised as a butcher. As Shepherd
was hiding out in the market, Jonathan Wild arrested Elizabeth Lyon. Eventually,
with lions still in custody, Shepherd left London, but then
(13:30):
he came back. He was captured again on September tenth
as he was getting out of the coach that had
brought him back to the city. By this point, news
of Shepherd's crimes and arrests and escapes had spread, and
he had become kind of a folk hero. In the
words of the history of the Remarkable Life of John Shepherd,
attributed to Daniel Dafoe quote, his escape and his being
(13:52):
so suddenly retaken, made such a noise in the town
that it was thought all the common people would have
gone mad about him, there being not a porter to
be had for love, nor money, nor getting into an
ale house for Butcher's. Shoemakers and barbers all engaged in
controversies and wagers about Shepherd. Newgate night and day, surrounded
(14:13):
with the curious from St. Giles's, and Ragfair and Tyburn
Road daily lined with women and children, and the gallows
is carefully watched by night lest he should be hanged
in cog Shepherd made another appearance at the Old Bailey,
this time to prove that the man who had been
captured was indeed the same Jack Shepherd who had previously escaped.
(14:36):
Once that was taken care of, he was returned to
the Condemned Hold in Newgate Prison. Unsurprisingly, he started planning
to escape again. On September six, guards found a tool
set hidden in a chair in the condemned Hold and
a watchmaker's file concealed in a bible. Shepherd was moved
from the Condemned Hold to a more secure apartment known
(14:57):
as the Castle that was on the prison's fourth floor.
He was kept underguard with his legs and shackles that
were attached to a staple in the floor with an
enormous padlock. I mean, there's illustrations of this, and of
course they are for books that people were supposed to buy,
so there's an element of them that is meant to
be entertaining. But this padlock is illustrated as like as
big as his head. It's huge. And then one day
(15:19):
Shepherd found a nail on the floor. He used it
to pick the padlock, and this left him free to
move around the room. He tried to escape by going
up the chimney, but he found that there was an
iron bar across the opening there to prevent somebody from
doing that exact thing. A guard surprised him before he
had a chance to get back to where he was
(15:40):
and put the padlock back the way it had been,
and boy, that guard was chagrined when Shepherd showed him
how easy it was for him to pick that lock.
The guards then added handcuffs to Shepherd's restraints, and they
took the nail away. As all of that was going on,
Joseph Blake, a k A. Blueskin was captured and tried,
and he also attempted to murder Jonathan Wild by slitting
(16:03):
his throat after he had asked Wild to put in
a good word for him, and Wild refused. Wild survived
this assault thanks to having some muslin braided around his
neck and the prompt attention of nearby surgeons. Blake was
sentenced to death for the crime. Back in the castle
on the prison's fourth floor, Shepherd escaped again on October
(16:25):
fift The guards brought his evening meal. Everything seemed normal
to them, but then in the morning they found the
door blocked from the inside by a pile of random bricks,
and once they shoved past them, they found that Shepherd
was gone again. In the words of the history of
the remarkable life of John Shepherd quote. The whole posse
(16:46):
of the prison ran up and stood like men deprived
of their senses. Their surprise being over, they were in
hopes that he might not have yet entirely made his escape,
and got their keys to open all the strong rooms
adjacent to the castle in order to trace him. When,
to their further amazement, they found the door ready open
to their hands, and the strong locks, screws and bolts
(17:08):
broken in pieces and scattered about the jail. Six great doors,
one whereof having not been opened for several years past,
were forced, and it appeared that he had descended from
the leads of Newgate by a blanket which he had
fastened to the wall by an iron spike he had
taken from the hatch of the chapel on the house
of Mr Bird, and the door on the leads having
(17:31):
been left open, it is very reasonable to conclude he
passed directly to the street door down the stairs. Mr
Bird and his wife hearing an odd sort of a
noise on the stairs as they lay in their bed
a short time before the watchman alarmed the family. So
apparently Shepherd had managed to twist apart the chain connecting
his handcuffs, and then somehow he had gotten his hands
(17:54):
on another nail and picked the lock holding his leg
shackles to the floor, pulled out that iron bar that
had previously kept him from climbing up the chimney, and
took it with him so that he could force open
all the locks between him and the outside. He came
out through the Red Room, which was a cell where
aristocrats were held, and that was empty at the time. Quote,
(18:15):
he undoubtedly performed most of these wonders and the darkest
part of the night, and without the least glimpse of
a candle a word. He has actually done with his
own hands in a few hours what several of the
most skillful artists allow could not have been acted by
a number of persons furnished with proper implements and all
(18:35):
other advantages in a full day. So once Shephard got
to the prison roof, he realized he didn't have a
way to get down, so he went back to the
castle to get a blanket, and once he'd made his
way through the home of Mr Bird, he went to
the home of Catherine Cook, which is where he managed
to get himself the rest of the way out of
his restraints. It's like that scene in The Highest movie
(18:57):
where you go find your friend that owns boltcutter person
to knock your shackles off. Sometime after that, Shepherd robbed
a pawn shop of some very fine clothes, and once
he was dressed in them, he went out drinking again,
not the smartest move. He was arrested at a Jury
(19:18):
Lane brandy shop, very inebriated. On October one, Shepherd was
once again returned to the prison, and at this point
he was really famous. People lined up at the prison
to try to get a glimpse of him, and the
guards actually charged fees for visitors, reportedly earning two hundred
pounds by doing so. Some of his reported visitors were
(19:39):
also famous, like past podcast subject William Hogarth, whose idol
Prentice from his series Industry and Idleness is supposedly inspired
by Shepherd. Shepherd's fame continued all the way up and
then after his execution, which was on November sixteen, seventeen
twenty four, at the age of twenty two, but execution
(20:00):
took place before an enormous crowd. Estimates range all the
way from thirty thousand to two hundred thousand people. There
are some really sensational accounts of his hanging. Shepherd is
pretty consistently described as being a very small man, and
that was something that helped him squeeze his way out
during various escape attempts. In one account of the execution,
(20:23):
people were hoping that his small frame would help him
survive the hanging, and once he had been cut down
after hanging for the required fifteen minutes, maybe he could
be resuscitated. But the crowd, unaware of this plan, to
try to get his body and resuscitate him, rushed the
gallows and pulled at his feet to try to make
sure he died quickly and didn't suffer. His body was
(20:46):
buried at the churchyard at St. Martin in the Fields.
Elizabeth Lyon was kept in custody until after the execution.
Once she was freed, she had a series of relationships
with other young men that echoed her relationship with Shepherd.
They were part romantic, part criminal. Accounts again describe her
as quotes seducing the men into stealing and hurrying them
(21:09):
to their own destruction. Again, she was not responsible for
these men's decisions. No, it's the whole kind of trope
of her being the evil seductress who lured innocent young
men to their mortal doom. Lyon was eventually sentenced to
seven years transportation to Maryland in seventeen. We don't really
(21:30):
know what happened to her after that. Jack's brother Thomas
was transported to Maryland as well, although there are some
contradictions about exactly when, and some accounts it was in
seventeen twenty five, so after his brother's death, and in
others that was before Jack's execution, and he begged for
a chance to tell his brother goodbye, in the end
(21:50):
being allowed to see him only from a distance so
that there was not any chance he would smuggle his
brother or something he might use to escape, like the
saws that people bringing to him. Circling back to Jonathan Wilde,
he was executed on seventy five, his work bringing in
(22:10):
thieves not really canceling out all the crimes that he
was committing himself. People started writing plays and stories about
Jack Shepard even before his execution. As we noted at
the top of the show, there were a bunch of
books about him that were published in seventeen twenty four
and seventeen. Some of them purportedly factual, some of them
definitely fictional. In seventeen twenty eight, the Beggar's Opera opened
(22:35):
at Lincoln inn Fields Theater in London, with characters that
had been inspired by people like Jack Shepherd and Jonathan Wild.
Another play was called The Prison Breaker, and there were
a lot of other stories and plays and songs and
works of art, poems, anything you can think of to
depict this famous thief and shailbreaker. There was one. But
(22:59):
then Shepherd had a whole second wave of fame that
came more than one d years later, and we're going
to talk about that after we first paused for a
sponsor break. When Jack Shepherd was alive in the seventeen twenties,
(23:20):
crime and the fear of crime were widespread in England.
Some of our recent podcast subjects were connected to all
of this. The South Sea Bubble collapsed just a couple
of years before Shepherd committed his first theft, The Gin
craze and the moral panic surrounding alcohol in its connection
to crime that was starting to grow. Increasing urbanization and
(23:44):
overcrowding were exacerbating existing social and economic issues, and as
is obvious based on how many people were hanged for
theft or transported to the colonies. Earlier in this episode,
the government was using really stream public punishments to try
to deter petty crimes. This is a system that later
(24:06):
became known as the Bloody Code. At the same time, though,
a lot of people were really fascinated with things like
robberies and jail breaks and highwaymen and gangs of thieves,
and the news reporting of the actual crimes and fiction
about all of this, like, all of that was incredibly popular.
A hundred years later, some of this was starting to shift.
(24:30):
In seven the death penalty was abolished for all but
the most serious crimes, so nobody was going to get
hanged over stealing bolts of cloth anymore. But two years
after that, the criminal code started to expand in a
way that increasingly criminalized poor people's lives. Things like selling
animals on the streets, selling goods door to door, just
(24:52):
being noisy, being drunk in public, announcing entertainments on the street,
and playing games on public roads. We're all outlawed. These
kinds of laws disproportionately affected poor people, whose homes tended
to be too small and cramped to really do any
socializing indoors. Poor people were doing most of their socializing outside,
(25:14):
and increasingly the things that they did outside were also outlawed.
To add to all of that, the Metropolitan Police was
established in eighteen thirty nine and absorbed all the other
organizations and jobs that had previously handled things like apprehending
people accused of crime. The shifts in the legal code
also really empowered the Metropolitan Police to carry out surveillance.
(25:37):
There was a lot of language about their proactively noticing
and taking action to prevent crimes. So understandably, poor people,
especially poor people living in cities, thought they were being
unfairly harassed and targeted by police for just living their lives.
Many of the social and political issues that had been
(25:58):
at work in the seventeen dirties were still ongoing a
hundred years later, and that fed into the Chartist movement
Beginning in eighteen thirty six. The Chartists were trying to
secure more political power and better conditions for people in
the working class. Authorities mostly ignored or suppressed the Chartist activity,
which led to unrest, which was also quickly and sometimes
(26:21):
violently suppressed. So then, with all of that going on
in eighteen thirty nine, William Harrison Ainsworth started serially publishing
a romance called Jack Shepherd. This is in a publication
called Bentley's Miscellany that had woodcut illustrations by George Crookshank,
and it quickly became a bestseller, even out selling Charles
(26:45):
Dickinson's Oliver Twist. Jack Shephard and Oliver Twist were both
part of a newly flourishing genre that came to be
known as Newgate novels. These were books that were seen
as glorifying criminals and a criminal underworld world. At first,
this wasn't really seen as a huge problem. Bentley's miscellani
(27:05):
had a middle class readership, and it was too expensive
for poorer people to afford. Even when Jack Shephard was
printed as a book in three volumes, it was still
priced for the middle class. Each volume cost a pound
five shillings. That was just too much for poorer readers.
Within the middle class, this whole story was seen as
(27:26):
mostly harmless, although possibly a little bit trashy, as a
pleasure read. But then there were the plagiarized versions and
the alternate versions, and the plays, many of which were
much cheaper and some of which were specifically aimed at
poor and working class people. At one point there were
at least seven different versions of Jack Shepherd's story running
(27:49):
at London's playhouses and penny gaffs, which were basically small
theaters specifically for poor people. Suddenly, poor people could afford
to buy and read an knockoff version of the Jack
Shepherd story when poor people who couldn't read could just
take it in at a penny gaff, particularly in London,
the more affluent class started completely freaking out, thinking that
(28:14):
the popularity of Jack Shepherd was going to spark an
enormous crime wave. There is a bit of irony here,
right that this happened as various reformers were championing this
idea of literacy for the poor, so it quickly became
like poor people should be reading to expand their knowledge. No,
don't read that for having sakes. There were a lot
(28:37):
of newspaper articles about the supposed threat of Jack Shepherd.
Chambers Edinburgh Journal wrote quote, it is scarcely possible for
the Life of Jack Shepherd to be read all at
once by thousands, and acted night after night at once
in five London theaters without causing the idea of burglary
(28:57):
to be dwelt upon for the time with degree of fervor.
At one point, somebody stole a snuffbox from actor Paul Bedford,
who had been playing Shepherd's sidekick Blueskin in a play
at the Adelphi Theater. An article in the Morning Chronicle
about this did some victim blaming, saying that the actor
quote might to some extent thank himself for what had happened.
(29:20):
The very able manner in which he personated a thief
on the stage had induced many a poor wretch who
witnessed his performance from the gallery to try his hand
at something of the kind. In real life, papers reported
on petty crimes with headlines like another Jack Shepherd and
another Young Jack Shepherd. There were books with these names too.
(29:43):
Sometimes when people were arrested for various crimes, they gave
their name as Jack Shepherd or so many Jack Shepherds
and h have we mentioned. One of my favorite things
there was merch. Oh I want to make some of
this merch. People could buy Shepherd bags which contained lock
picks and files and perhaps even a crowbar, basically your
(30:05):
starter kit for becoming a Jack Shepherd. This moral panic
about Jack Shepherd was already under way when a Swiss
valet named Francois Corvassier slit the throat of his employer,
Lord William Russell, on May five, eighteen forty. At the time,
Russell was seventy one and asleep in his bed, so
(30:27):
obviously this was a horrifying crime on its own. And
then he was also from a really prominent family. He
was a politician and had been a member of Parliament,
and his nephew, Lord John Russell, would later become Prime Minister.
Courvoisier's behavior seemed erratic, and he made a series of
sometimes contradictory confessions to this crime. At one point he
(30:50):
said that quote the idea was first suggested to him
by reading and seeing the performance of Jack Shepherd. Sub
quotes him by saying, I admired his cunning instead of
being horrified at it, and now I reaped, but too well,
the fruit of those papers and books. After he made
this confession, newspapers that had previously predicted that all this
(31:11):
Shepherd hype was going to cause problems printed articles that
basically said I told you so. Answorth faced a huge backlash.
His publisher dropped him, his club kicked him out, the
press excoriated him, and random people accosted him about having
written this Jack Shepherd book on the street. After Courvoisier
(31:32):
was executed for the murder of Lord William Russell, the
Lord Chamberlain Band all performances of all plays called Jack Shepherd,
a band that was in place for forty years. It
was most strictly observed in London, but it was also
observed to at least some extent elsewhere in Britain as well.
Some companies tried to get around this man by telling
(31:55):
the story but naming their shows things like the Idol
a Prentice. In eighteen eighty six, after the band had
been lifted, Nellie Farren started as Jack in a burlesque
called Little Jack Shepherd. Farren wasn't the only woman to
play Jack. Because he was described as such a physically
slight man, he was often played by women, and an
(32:16):
era when child labor laws kept children from working as actors,
it was pretty common for women to hold the role
of principal boy. A lot of times, the principal boy
would then be the person who played Jack Shepherd, even
though that was an adult role. Another woman to play
Jack Shepherd was Marianne Keeley, who learned some escape artistry
(32:36):
for the role method acting. Jack Shepherd's popularity started to
wane at the very end of the nineteenth century, but
he still shows up from time to time. Bear told
Bret Threepenny Opera was adapted from The Beggar's Opera, which,
as we noted, was inspired by Shepherd and his circle,
and there are more recent works as well. In the
(32:58):
novel Confessions of the Fox by Jordie Rosenberg, Jack is
reimagined as a transgender man. This is told within a
frame story of a professor discovering a previously unknown manuscript
that contains Jack's memoirs, and the professor's own story is
told through the footnotes. Yeah, I have not read this
whole book, but I checked it out from the library
(33:19):
and I have read just the beginning few chapters of it.
And I will say, if you want to check this out,
it is a very sexual book. Beyond having like sex
scenes that are confined as scenes, there's just a sexuality
that is infused with the whole thing. It reminds me everything.
(33:41):
It reminds me of, uh, like Tipping the Velvet by
Sarah Waters in terms of like the level of um,
just I'm not saying that to discourage people, but I
like for me personally that there's a mindset I need
to be in if that's what I'm going to be reading,
I love a heads up that that's what. Yeah. Yeah, um.
It's just just so folks know. And I've it's gotten like.
(34:05):
It was really well reviewed and award winning when it
came out, So at some point I'm sure I will
finish reading it. I have some listener mails take us out,
And this is from listener Matt, who wrote a note
that said, good afternoon. I've recently started a history podcast.
I just released my second episode. However, I'm not exactly
happy with the end product thus far. Do you have
(34:26):
any tips or tricks for someone new to podcasting, Matt.
Back when we used to have our own, like standalone
website that we had stuff on besides like a way
to play episodes, we had a cool like tips for
new podcasters thing, And since we don't have that website anymore,
(34:46):
I thought I would say what the tips were, uh, which,
these are the things that I usually tell folks when
they ask for some kind of advice. Number One, NPR
has a whole training section in it is that training
dot NPR dot org. Some of it is focused on
specifically radio, but a lot of that is clearly applicable
(35:10):
to podcasts. Also, Transom is that Transom dot org and
they have a ton of information about storytelling for audio
and audio production, all kinds of stuff like that. They
produced the House Sound podcast, which is a podcast about
audio storytelling, and they have a tools section if people
(35:33):
have questions about like what kind of equipment should I
have for doing a podcast. Pr X also has training
dot pr x dot org that more has classes and
things that a person could sign up for more than
like things that you could read online and and self
educate yourself. As for the audio editing of the podcast, boy,
(35:55):
I do not know, because that's not something that I
personally handle. Our producer or Casey Pegram, does the audio
edit on the show. This particular episode was edited by
our colleague producer Max Williams. So that is what I
would suggest for folks who are interested in learning about
audio storytelling more generally and and podcasts and radio production
(36:18):
more specifically. If you would like to get in touch
with us, we're history podcasts that I heart radio dot com.
We're all over social media Missed in History That's Real.
Find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can
subscribe to our show on the iHeart Radio app or
wherever else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
(36:44):
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. While I
was working on that six Impossible Episodes about prison breaks
that we had recently, I of course found a few
(00:23):
topics that seemed like they could stand on their own
as full episodes. One of them was John Shepherd, more
commonly known as Jack Shepherd, who became kind of a
serial breakout artist in eighteenth century England, and I have
a caveat with this episode. There are a bunch of
books about Shepherd's life. A lot of them were published
(00:46):
right around the time that he died. One of the
most well known of those is The History of the
Remarkable Life of John Shepherd, and it's often credited to
Daniel Dafoe. Another one is a narrative of All the
Robbery Escapes, et cetera of John Shepherd, giving an exact
description of the manner of his wonderful escape from the
(01:06):
castle in Newgate and of the methods he took afterward
for his security, written by himself. As that written by
himself suggests, it is purportedly Shepherd's own autobiography, written from
prison just days before his execution, and also responding to
some of the details that were in that first book
(01:27):
that I mentioned. The thing is this book is also
often credited to Daniel Dafoe. Another of the books is
Authentic Memoirs of the Life and Surprising Adventures of John Shepherd,
who was executed at Tyburn November the sixteenth, seventeen twenty four,
by way of familiar letters from a gentleman in town
(01:48):
to his friend and correspondent in the country. This is
published just under the initials G. E. G. E is
the gentleman in town writing these letters, and some of
the ors are purportedly also by Shepherd. If it's not clear,
there's question marks around all of this about like who
really wrote these and other works, and how accurate they are,
(02:13):
how much of those sources agree with each other because
they're correct, or whether it's more just because their various
authors were all lifting information from one another. Some of
Daniel Dafoe's purportedly historical work has come up on the
show before. We've talked about how some of it's definitely
exaggerated at best. What we do know, though, is Jack
(02:34):
Shephard was for sure a real person, and he had
two rounds of fame, the second one happening more than
a century after his death. Also heads up. Although Jack
Shepherd was mostly a thief and kind of a folk
hero or maybe an anti hero, there's also a lot
of execution and some murder in this episode. Jack Shepherd
(02:58):
was born March four, sevent you know too, in White
Rose spit of Fields, London. His father, Thomas, was a carpenter.
Thomas apparently came from a long line of carpenters, and
he had a reputation as a hard worker and being
good at his trade. But he died at a young age,
leaving his wife Mary to raise their three surviving children.
(03:19):
That was Jack, his brother Thomas, and their sister Mary.
For a time, Jack and Thomas went to Mr Garrett's school,
which in some accounts was really a workhouse. Jack started
working as a servant when he was twelve years old
or so. He worked for a woolen draper named William
knee Bone, which is a great name. Knee Bone was
(03:40):
reportedly a kind man and helped Jack improve his reading, writing,
and arithmetic. On April twelfth, seventeen seventeen, when he was fifteen,
Jack started an apprenticeship with a carpenter named Owen Wood.
Of course he was a carpenter, his name was Owen Wood,
and he seems to have taken after his father. There.
For the first few years at least, Jack was described
(04:03):
as a very good apprentice. It's also possible that his brother, Thomas,
was one of Wood's apprentices, although some accounts described Thomas
as a fellow apprentice, but not as Jack's actual brother.
That's a little vague. And then about five years into
Jack's apprenticeship, things changed. Wood had a next door neighbor
(04:24):
named Joseph Hind or possibly Hayne, who had been a
button mulled maker, and Hind decided to give up his
trade and instead take over the running of the Black
Lion Ale House, which was not far away, and he
started encouraging all the local apprentices to come spend their
free time and days off there. This Ale house was
(04:46):
where twenty year old Jack was introduced to quote a
train of vices, as before I was altogether a stranger
to He was also introduced to a woman named Elizabeth Lyon,
also known as Edgeworth Best because she'd been born in Edgeworth.
Elizabeth was a sex worker, and in seventy one she
had been convicted of stealing a piece of silk and
(05:09):
five yards of cambrick, and her hand had been branded
as a punishment. Numerous accounts describe Elizabeth as seducing Jack
into a life of crime. Although lots of accounts try
to make Elizabeth responsible for Jack's decisions in works purportedly
by him, he also places the blame on various other
(05:30):
people in his life, yet none of them really suggests
very strongly that he was a grown man and should
be responsible for his own actions. There's also a little
bit of contradiction and how different Jack's behavior really was
after he started frequenting the Black Line alehouse. He either
had been a totally upstanding apprentice, skilled in his work,
(05:52):
and well on his way to becoming a carpenter with
his own shop, at least before he fell into ruin,
or he had always had quote evil inclinations and when
the Wood family was at church on Sundays, he stayed
behind and just got up to whatever he felt like doing.
It seems like his actual crimes started in seventeen twenty three,
when he was twenty one, Elizabeth stole someone's ring, and
(06:16):
Jack broke her out of the local roundhouse. This was
basically a small single room jail off and round as
the name suggests, sometimes freestanding and sometimes built into a wall.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, smaller communities often
used roundhouses as an overnight holding cell for people who
were caught doing some kind of mischief or crimes, so
(06:38):
they could be taken to town in the morning. Shepherd
also started stealing from the jobs that Owen Wood had
sent him on, starting with stealing two silver spoons from
the Rummer tavern. For a while, he was keeping up
his apprenticeship while also pilfering money or small items from
his job sites, and he justified it by saying that
(06:59):
Would wasn't paying him enough money to survive, and generally
he seems to have been pretty critical of how Wood
was running his business. Would was mostly doing lots of
small repairs and projects at people's existing homes and businesses,
and Shepherd thought he would be making a lot more
money if he moved into doing new construction. Then, with
less than a year ago on his apprenticeship, Shepherd left,
(07:21):
turning his attention to thieving full time. By February of
seventeen twenty four, he had established a small criminal operation
involving himself, his brother, Thomas, and Elizabeth Lyon, with Jack
and Elizabeth living together as husband and wife, even though
she was reportedly already married to someone else. Jack also
(07:42):
got into a little bit of fraud by claiming that
he had already finished that apprenticeship to owen Wood, and
he did that so he could get a job as
a journeyman to a master carpenter. He used that job
as a way to case houses so that he could
rob the homes where he worked. According to Shepherd's purported autobiograph,
fee he spent the night in every round house in
(08:03):
the city and Liberty of Westminster, and Elizabeth Lyons spent
a night, and most of them too. He had mostly
managed to escape or to talk them both out of trouble,
but eventually Thomas got caught, and when questioned, Thomas implicated
Jack in a string of thefts. After this, Shepherd was
captured and held in St Giles's Roundhouse in central London.
(08:26):
This led to the first escape that most accounts describe
in detail. Shepherd hadn't been searched very well before being
locked in, and he had an old razor. He used
the razor to cut one of the supports from a
chair and then used that support to work a hole
through the roof. He put the roundhouse's feather bed under
(08:47):
the spot where he was working to muffle the sound
of debris as it fell. That worked until he started
to break through to the outside and a roof tile
slid down the outside of the building and hit a
passer by. Shepherd forced his way through the hole and ran. Yeah.
He was like enough of this, trying to be somewhat
discreet and I'm just going to force my way out
(09:08):
through the rest of this. Not long after that, Jack
and Elizabeth were both arrested, and this time they were
taken to new prison in Clerkenwell, also in central London,
and they were placed in what was supposed to be
the strongest ward in the prison. They were in a
cell together because they were believed to be husband and wife.
(09:28):
But Shepherd had suggested to authorities that he was going
to implicate some of his various accomplices, so he was
being treated fairly leniently in this supposedly secure ward, and
he was allowed to have visitors. One of these visitors
smuggled in a saw, and Shepherd used it to saw
through his restraints and to dismantle a barred window. He
(09:51):
and Elizabeth then escaped by climbing down a rope they
had made from bedsheets and Elizabeth's dress. We're going to
talk some more about Jack and elizabe after we paused
for a sponsor break. After Jack Shepherd and Elizabeth Lyon
(10:13):
escaped from new prison, they went back to thieving. They
broke into houses, they held up coaches on the highway.
Shepherd also found another accomplice, a man named Joseph Blake,
also known as Blueskin, and in mid June of seventy four,
Shepherd and Blake robbed the home of Shepherd's former employer,
William nee Bone. They stole a hundred and eight yards
(10:36):
of woolen cloth and some other items. By this point,
Shepherd had caught the attention of a man named Jonathan Wild.
Wild maintained a whole network of thieves, burglars, and others
who made their living through crime, and he also worked
as a thief taker, apprehending suspects and handing them over
to authorities. He used this thief taking to keep his
(10:59):
criminal network in line. For example, he would demand that
he get a cut of someone's hall and if they refused,
Wild would just turn them in. Yeah, working for a
crime boss who's threatening to hand you over to the
police is the whole thing. Wild apparently wanted Shepherd to
become part of this network, or possibly Shepherd had been
(11:19):
part of it and had decided to strike out on
his own. Whatever the background on that, Shepherd refused to
cooperate with Wild, and Wild had him arrested, and some
accounts Lion betrayed Shepherd to Wild in the lead up
to this arrest, which was on July. This time, Shepherd
was jailed in Newgate Prison in London and he stood
(11:42):
trial at the Central Criminal Court also called the Old Bailey,
on August twelfth, seventeen twenty four. Shepherd was tried for
three crimes. Two of them involved stealing diverse goods from
the homes of William Phillips and Mary Cook in two
separate incidents from there vias February. There wasn't enough evidence
(12:03):
against him for either of those two crimes and he
was acquitted, but the third was for breaking into the
home of William Nebone and stealing that hundred and eight
yards of woolen cloth. This time, Shepherd was convicted and
he was sentenced to death. As a note, the old
Bailey records of this list Shepherd's first name as Joseph,
(12:25):
but later on, when Joseph Blake stood trial for his
participation in that same crime, the records list Shepherd's first
name as John. Shepherd was returned to Newgate Prison and
placed in the hold for condemned prisoners, and on August
thirty one, four days before his execution was supposed to
take place, he sawed through one of the iron spikes
(12:47):
in the space above a door, squeezing between the remaining
spikes to make his way out. That saw apparently came
from someone named Mr Davis. Shepherd sneaked to the prison's
reception area where he was meant by Elizabeth Lyon and
another woman and they disguised him in a nightgown and
they led him out of the prison and what was
(13:08):
really not the smartest move, Shepherd then spent a stretch
of time in London's Clare Market, less than a mile
away from the prison, disguised as a butcher. As Shepherd
was hiding out in the market, Jonathan Wild arrested Elizabeth Lyon. Eventually,
with lions still in custody, Shepherd left London, but then
(13:30):
he came back. He was captured again on September tenth
as he was getting out of the coach that had
brought him back to the city. By this point, news
of Shepherd's crimes and arrests and escapes had spread, and
he had become kind of a folk hero. In the
words of the history of the Remarkable Life of John Shepherd,
attributed to Daniel Dafoe quote, his escape and his being
(13:52):
so suddenly retaken, made such a noise in the town
that it was thought all the common people would have
gone mad about him, there being not a porter to
be had for love, nor money, nor getting into an
ale house for Butcher's. Shoemakers and barbers all engaged in
controversies and wagers about Shepherd. Newgate night and day, surrounded
(14:13):
with the curious from St. Giles's, and Ragfair and Tyburn
Road daily lined with women and children, and the gallows
is carefully watched by night lest he should be hanged
in cog Shepherd made another appearance at the Old Bailey,
this time to prove that the man who had been
captured was indeed the same Jack Shepherd who had previously escaped.
(14:36):
Once that was taken care of, he was returned to
the Condemned Hold in Newgate Prison. Unsurprisingly, he started planning
to escape again. On September six, guards found a tool
set hidden in a chair in the condemned Hold and
a watchmaker's file concealed in a bible. Shepherd was moved
from the Condemned Hold to a more secure apartment known
(14:57):
as the Castle that was on the prison's fourth floor.
He was kept underguard with his legs and shackles that
were attached to a staple in the floor with an
enormous padlock. I mean, there's illustrations of this, and of
course they are for books that people were supposed to buy,
so there's an element of them that is meant to
be entertaining. But this padlock is illustrated as like as
big as his head. It's huge. And then one day
(15:19):
Shepherd found a nail on the floor. He used it
to pick the padlock, and this left him free to
move around the room. He tried to escape by going
up the chimney, but he found that there was an
iron bar across the opening there to prevent somebody from
doing that exact thing. A guard surprised him before he
had a chance to get back to where he was
(15:40):
and put the padlock back the way it had been,
and boy, that guard was chagrined when Shepherd showed him
how easy it was for him to pick that lock.
The guards then added handcuffs to Shepherd's restraints, and they
took the nail away. As all of that was going on,
Joseph Blake, a k A. Blueskin was captured and tried,
and he also attempted to murder Jonathan Wild by slitting
(16:03):
his throat after he had asked Wild to put in
a good word for him, and Wild refused. Wild survived
this assault thanks to having some muslin braided around his
neck and the prompt attention of nearby surgeons. Blake was
sentenced to death for the crime. Back in the castle
on the prison's fourth floor, Shepherd escaped again on October
(16:25):
fift The guards brought his evening meal. Everything seemed normal
to them, but then in the morning they found the
door blocked from the inside by a pile of random bricks,
and once they shoved past them, they found that Shepherd
was gone again. In the words of the history of
the remarkable life of John Shepherd quote. The whole posse
(16:46):
of the prison ran up and stood like men deprived
of their senses. Their surprise being over, they were in
hopes that he might not have yet entirely made his escape,
and got their keys to open all the strong rooms
adjacent to the castle in order to trace him. When,
to their further amazement, they found the door ready open
to their hands, and the strong locks, screws and bolts
(17:08):
broken in pieces and scattered about the jail. Six great doors,
one whereof having not been opened for several years past,
were forced, and it appeared that he had descended from
the leads of Newgate by a blanket which he had
fastened to the wall by an iron spike he had
taken from the hatch of the chapel on the house
of Mr Bird, and the door on the leads having
(17:31):
been left open, it is very reasonable to conclude he
passed directly to the street door down the stairs. Mr
Bird and his wife hearing an odd sort of a
noise on the stairs as they lay in their bed
a short time before the watchman alarmed the family. So
apparently Shepherd had managed to twist apart the chain connecting
his handcuffs, and then somehow he had gotten his hands
(17:54):
on another nail and picked the lock holding his leg
shackles to the floor, pulled out that iron bar that
had previously kept him from climbing up the chimney, and
took it with him so that he could force open
all the locks between him and the outside. He came
out through the Red Room, which was a cell where
aristocrats were held, and that was empty at the time. Quote,
(18:15):
he undoubtedly performed most of these wonders and the darkest
part of the night, and without the least glimpse of
a candle a word. He has actually done with his
own hands in a few hours what several of the
most skillful artists allow could not have been acted by
a number of persons furnished with proper implements and all
(18:35):
other advantages in a full day. So once Shephard got
to the prison roof, he realized he didn't have a
way to get down, so he went back to the
castle to get a blanket, and once he'd made his
way through the home of Mr Bird, he went to
the home of Catherine Cook, which is where he managed
to get himself the rest of the way out of
his restraints. It's like that scene in The Highest movie
(18:57):
where you go find your friend that owns boltcutter person
to knock your shackles off. Sometime after that, Shepherd robbed
a pawn shop of some very fine clothes, and once
he was dressed in them, he went out drinking again,
not the smartest move. He was arrested at a Jury
(19:18):
Lane brandy shop, very inebriated. On October one, Shepherd was
once again returned to the prison, and at this point
he was really famous. People lined up at the prison
to try to get a glimpse of him, and the
guards actually charged fees for visitors, reportedly earning two hundred
pounds by doing so. Some of his reported visitors were
(19:39):
also famous, like past podcast subject William Hogarth, whose idol
Prentice from his series Industry and Idleness is supposedly inspired
by Shepherd. Shepherd's fame continued all the way up and
then after his execution, which was on November sixteen, seventeen
twenty four, at the age of twenty two, but execution
(20:00):
took place before an enormous crowd. Estimates range all the
way from thirty thousand to two hundred thousand people. There
are some really sensational accounts of his hanging. Shepherd is
pretty consistently described as being a very small man, and
that was something that helped him squeeze his way out
during various escape attempts. In one account of the execution,
(20:23):
people were hoping that his small frame would help him
survive the hanging, and once he had been cut down
after hanging for the required fifteen minutes, maybe he could
be resuscitated. But the crowd, unaware of this plan, to
try to get his body and resuscitate him, rushed the
gallows and pulled at his feet to try to make
sure he died quickly and didn't suffer. His body was
(20:46):
buried at the churchyard at St. Martin in the Fields.
Elizabeth Lyon was kept in custody until after the execution.
Once she was freed, she had a series of relationships
with other young men that echoed her relationship with Shepherd.
They were part romantic, part criminal. Accounts again describe her
as quotes seducing the men into stealing and hurrying them
(21:09):
to their own destruction. Again, she was not responsible for
these men's decisions. No, it's the whole kind of trope
of her being the evil seductress who lured innocent young
men to their mortal doom. Lyon was eventually sentenced to
seven years transportation to Maryland in seventeen. We don't really
(21:30):
know what happened to her after that. Jack's brother Thomas
was transported to Maryland as well, although there are some
contradictions about exactly when, and some accounts it was in
seventeen twenty five, so after his brother's death, and in
others that was before Jack's execution, and he begged for
a chance to tell his brother goodbye, in the end
(21:50):
being allowed to see him only from a distance so
that there was not any chance he would smuggle his
brother or something he might use to escape, like the
saws that people bringing to him. Circling back to Jonathan Wilde,
he was executed on seventy five, his work bringing in
(22:10):
thieves not really canceling out all the crimes that he
was committing himself. People started writing plays and stories about
Jack Shepard even before his execution. As we noted at
the top of the show, there were a bunch of
books about him that were published in seventeen twenty four
and seventeen. Some of them purportedly factual, some of them
definitely fictional. In seventeen twenty eight, the Beggar's Opera opened
(22:35):
at Lincoln inn Fields Theater in London, with characters that
had been inspired by people like Jack Shepherd and Jonathan Wild.
Another play was called The Prison Breaker, and there were
a lot of other stories and plays and songs and
works of art, poems, anything you can think of to
depict this famous thief and shailbreaker. There was one. But
(22:59):
then Shepherd had a whole second wave of fame that
came more than one d years later, and we're going
to talk about that after we first paused for a
sponsor break. When Jack Shepherd was alive in the seventeen twenties,
(23:20):
crime and the fear of crime were widespread in England.
Some of our recent podcast subjects were connected to all
of this. The South Sea Bubble collapsed just a couple
of years before Shepherd committed his first theft, The Gin
craze and the moral panic surrounding alcohol in its connection
to crime that was starting to grow. Increasing urbanization and
(23:44):
overcrowding were exacerbating existing social and economic issues, and as
is obvious based on how many people were hanged for
theft or transported to the colonies. Earlier in this episode,
the government was using really stream public punishments to try
to deter petty crimes. This is a system that later
(24:06):
became known as the Bloody Code. At the same time, though,
a lot of people were really fascinated with things like
robberies and jail breaks and highwaymen and gangs of thieves,
and the news reporting of the actual crimes and fiction
about all of this, like, all of that was incredibly popular.
A hundred years later, some of this was starting to shift.
(24:30):
In seven the death penalty was abolished for all but
the most serious crimes, so nobody was going to get
hanged over stealing bolts of cloth anymore. But two years
after that, the criminal code started to expand in a
way that increasingly criminalized poor people's lives. Things like selling
animals on the streets, selling goods door to door, just
(24:52):
being noisy, being drunk in public, announcing entertainments on the street,
and playing games on public roads. We're all outlawed. These
kinds of laws disproportionately affected poor people, whose homes tended
to be too small and cramped to really do any
socializing indoors. Poor people were doing most of their socializing outside,
(25:14):
and increasingly the things that they did outside were also outlawed.
To add to all of that, the Metropolitan Police was
established in eighteen thirty nine and absorbed all the other
organizations and jobs that had previously handled things like apprehending
people accused of crime. The shifts in the legal code
also really empowered the Metropolitan Police to carry out surveillance.
(25:37):
There was a lot of language about their proactively noticing
and taking action to prevent crimes. So understandably, poor people,
especially poor people living in cities, thought they were being
unfairly harassed and targeted by police for just living their lives.
Many of the social and political issues that had been
(25:58):
at work in the seventeen dirties were still ongoing a
hundred years later, and that fed into the Chartist movement
Beginning in eighteen thirty six. The Chartists were trying to
secure more political power and better conditions for people in
the working class. Authorities mostly ignored or suppressed the Chartist activity,
which led to unrest, which was also quickly and sometimes
(26:21):
violently suppressed. So then, with all of that going on
in eighteen thirty nine, William Harrison Ainsworth started serially publishing
a romance called Jack Shepherd. This is in a publication
called Bentley's Miscellany that had woodcut illustrations by George Crookshank,
and it quickly became a bestseller, even out selling Charles
(26:45):
Dickinson's Oliver Twist. Jack Shephard and Oliver Twist were both
part of a newly flourishing genre that came to be
known as Newgate novels. These were books that were seen
as glorifying criminals and a criminal underworld world. At first,
this wasn't really seen as a huge problem. Bentley's miscellani
(27:05):
had a middle class readership, and it was too expensive
for poorer people to afford. Even when Jack Shephard was
printed as a book in three volumes, it was still
priced for the middle class. Each volume cost a pound
five shillings. That was just too much for poorer readers.
Within the middle class, this whole story was seen as
(27:26):
mostly harmless, although possibly a little bit trashy, as a
pleasure read. But then there were the plagiarized versions and
the alternate versions, and the plays, many of which were
much cheaper and some of which were specifically aimed at
poor and working class people. At one point there were
at least seven different versions of Jack Shepherd's story running
(27:49):
at London's playhouses and penny gaffs, which were basically small
theaters specifically for poor people. Suddenly, poor people could afford
to buy and read an knockoff version of the Jack
Shepherd story when poor people who couldn't read could just
take it in at a penny gaff, particularly in London,
the more affluent class started completely freaking out, thinking that
(28:14):
the popularity of Jack Shepherd was going to spark an
enormous crime wave. There is a bit of irony here,
right that this happened as various reformers were championing this
idea of literacy for the poor, so it quickly became
like poor people should be reading to expand their knowledge. No,
don't read that for having sakes. There were a lot
(28:37):
of newspaper articles about the supposed threat of Jack Shepherd.
Chambers Edinburgh Journal wrote quote, it is scarcely possible for
the Life of Jack Shepherd to be read all at
once by thousands, and acted night after night at once
in five London theaters without causing the idea of burglary
(28:57):
to be dwelt upon for the time with degree of fervor.
At one point, somebody stole a snuffbox from actor Paul Bedford,
who had been playing Shepherd's sidekick Blueskin in a play
at the Adelphi Theater. An article in the Morning Chronicle
about this did some victim blaming, saying that the actor
quote might to some extent thank himself for what had happened.
(29:20):
The very able manner in which he personated a thief
on the stage had induced many a poor wretch who
witnessed his performance from the gallery to try his hand
at something of the kind. In real life, papers reported
on petty crimes with headlines like another Jack Shepherd and
another Young Jack Shepherd. There were books with these names too.
(29:43):
Sometimes when people were arrested for various crimes, they gave
their name as Jack Shepherd or so many Jack Shepherds
and h have we mentioned. One of my favorite things
there was merch. Oh I want to make some of
this merch. People could buy Shepherd bags which contained lock
picks and files and perhaps even a crowbar, basically your
(30:05):
starter kit for becoming a Jack Shepherd. This moral panic
about Jack Shepherd was already under way when a Swiss
valet named Francois Corvassier slit the throat of his employer,
Lord William Russell, on May five, eighteen forty. At the time,
Russell was seventy one and asleep in his bed, so
(30:27):
obviously this was a horrifying crime on its own. And
then he was also from a really prominent family. He
was a politician and had been a member of Parliament,
and his nephew, Lord John Russell, would later become Prime Minister.
Courvoisier's behavior seemed erratic, and he made a series of
sometimes contradictory confessions to this crime. At one point he
(30:50):
said that quote the idea was first suggested to him
by reading and seeing the performance of Jack Shepherd. Sub
quotes him by saying, I admired his cunning instead of
being horrified at it, and now I reaped, but too well,
the fruit of those papers and books. After he made
this confession, newspapers that had previously predicted that all this
(31:11):
Shepherd hype was going to cause problems printed articles that
basically said I told you so. Answorth faced a huge backlash.
His publisher dropped him, his club kicked him out, the
press excoriated him, and random people accosted him about having
written this Jack Shepherd book on the street. After Courvoisier
(31:32):
was executed for the murder of Lord William Russell, the
Lord Chamberlain Band all performances of all plays called Jack Shepherd,
a band that was in place for forty years. It
was most strictly observed in London, but it was also
observed to at least some extent elsewhere in Britain as well.
Some companies tried to get around this man by telling
(31:55):
the story but naming their shows things like the Idol
a Prentice. In eighteen eighty six, after the band had
been lifted, Nellie Farren started as Jack in a burlesque
called Little Jack Shepherd. Farren wasn't the only woman to
play Jack. Because he was described as such a physically
slight man, he was often played by women, and an
(32:16):
era when child labor laws kept children from working as actors,
it was pretty common for women to hold the role
of principal boy. A lot of times, the principal boy
would then be the person who played Jack Shepherd, even
though that was an adult role. Another woman to play
Jack Shepherd was Marianne Keeley, who learned some escape artistry
(32:36):
for the role method acting. Jack Shepherd's popularity started to
wane at the very end of the nineteenth century, but
he still shows up from time to time. Bear told
Bret Threepenny Opera was adapted from The Beggar's Opera, which,
as we noted, was inspired by Shepherd and his circle,
and there are more recent works as well. In the
(32:58):
novel Confessions of the Fox by Jordie Rosenberg, Jack is
reimagined as a transgender man. This is told within a
frame story of a professor discovering a previously unknown manuscript
that contains Jack's memoirs, and the professor's own story is
told through the footnotes. Yeah, I have not read this
whole book, but I checked it out from the library
(33:19):
and I have read just the beginning few chapters of it.
And I will say, if you want to check this out,
it is a very sexual book. Beyond having like sex
scenes that are confined as scenes, there's just a sexuality
that is infused with the whole thing. It reminds me everything.
(33:41):
It reminds me of, uh, like Tipping the Velvet by
Sarah Waters in terms of like the level of um,
just I'm not saying that to discourage people, but I
like for me personally that there's a mindset I need
to be in if that's what I'm going to be reading,
I love a heads up that that's what. Yeah. Yeah, um.
It's just just so folks know. And I've it's gotten like.
(34:05):
It was really well reviewed and award winning when it
came out, So at some point I'm sure I will
finish reading it. I have some listener mails take us out,
And this is from listener Matt, who wrote a note
that said, good afternoon. I've recently started a history podcast.
I just released my second episode. However, I'm not exactly
happy with the end product thus far. Do you have
(34:26):
any tips or tricks for someone new to podcasting, Matt.
Back when we used to have our own, like standalone
website that we had stuff on besides like a way
to play episodes, we had a cool like tips for
new podcasters thing, And since we don't have that website anymore,
(34:46):
I thought I would say what the tips were, uh, which,
these are the things that I usually tell folks when
they ask for some kind of advice. Number One, NPR
has a whole training section in it is that training
dot NPR dot org. Some of it is focused on
specifically radio, but a lot of that is clearly applicable
(35:10):
to podcasts. Also, Transom is that Transom dot org and
they have a ton of information about storytelling for audio
and audio production, all kinds of stuff like that. They
produced the House Sound podcast, which is a podcast about
audio storytelling, and they have a tools section if people
(35:33):
have questions about like what kind of equipment should I
have for doing a podcast. Pr X also has training
dot pr x dot org that more has classes and
things that a person could sign up for more than
like things that you could read online and and self
educate yourself. As for the audio editing of the podcast, boy,
(35:55):
I do not know, because that's not something that I
personally handle. Our producer or Casey Pegram, does the audio
edit on the show. This particular episode was edited by
our colleague producer Max Williams. So that is what I
would suggest for folks who are interested in learning about
audio storytelling more generally and and podcasts and radio production
(36:18):
more specifically. If you would like to get in touch
with us, we're history podcasts that I heart radio dot com.
We're all over social media Missed in History That's Real.
Find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can
subscribe to our show on the iHeart Radio app or
wherever else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in
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