Novel
Jack Sheppard
William Harrison Ainsworth · 1839
Opening lines
On the night of Friday, the 26th of November, 1703, and at the hour of eleven, the door of a miserable habitation, situated in an obscure quarter of the Borough of Southwark, known as the Old Mint, was opened; and a man, with a lantern in his hand, appeared at the threshold.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
London, a night in November 1703, in the Mint, the refuge district of Southwark. The carpenter Owen Wood visits the widow of a thief hanged at Tyburn and offers to take her nine-month-old son to bring him up and teach him the trade; Jonathan Wild, who drew the father into crime, pursues the mother with his advances. The same stormy night, Wood finds himself entrusted with another infant, Thames Darrell, and has to flee on the Thames as far as old London Bridge. Twelve years later, Jack is Wood's idle apprentice, Thames the model apprentice, and Wild leads the former towards theft.
Context
The novel appeared in Bentley's Miscellany from January 1839 to February 1840, alongside Oliver Twist for four months, then in three volumes from October 1839, with engravings by George Cruikshank, who had illustrated Dickens's novel. Its hero is a real thief, born in 1702, famous for his escapes and hanged at Tyburn in 1724. In the autumn of 1839, several adaptations were playing in London at the same time, among them that by John Baldwin Buckstone at the Adelphi. The book became the typical example of what critics called the Newgate novel, and John Forster attacked it harshly in The Examiner.
Who it is for
A novel in three periods, 1703, 1715 and 1724, translated into French in 1847 and again in 1860, and not reissued in French since 1882.
Prizes and reception
Thackeray targeted it in a parody published at the same time, under a pseudonym, in Fraser's Magazine.
Sources for this page 9
The pages consulted to check this page.