Читать книгу Defoe on Sheppard and Wild: The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild by Daniel Defoe - Даниэль Дефо, Данієль Дефо, Даниэль Дефо - Страница 10

Where Sheppard is presented as an ambiguous hero, Defoe presents his adversary Jonathan Wild as an unambiguous villain: ‘this famous, or if you please, infamous creature’. The third, and by far the longest biographical pamphlet, The True and Genuine Account of the Late Jonathan Wild (1725), is immediately distinguished by Defoe’s severity of tone. He now wholly rejects the Newgate style of ‘mockery and ridicule’, and emphasises the moral value of strict biographical truth. ‘They that had rather have a Falsehood to laugh at than a True Account of things to inform them, had best buy the Fiction, and leave the History to those who know how to distinguish Good from Evil.’

Although no voice that Defoe adopts can ever be taken as reliably his own, here he does seem to speak out in his own person: the sixty-year-old citizen of London, the family man, the experienced writer, the unflinching and undeluded judge of human character. With Jonathan Wild there is little attempt at sympathetic ventriloquism. The biographical narrative has a cool, sardonic and almost forensic style: he writes of Wild as a ‘cunning artist’ perpetrating ‘exquisite villainies’. The story is cast largely in the third person - except for one notably section of dramatized dialogue in the second half.

Defoe’s analysis of Wild is unsparing from the start. ‘Take him as a man only, he had a kind of brutal Courage which fitted him to be an Instrument in attacking some of the most desperate of the several Gangs of Rogues he had to do with. But as this Courage also served to make him audacious in the other Wicked Things he undertook, he was rather Bold than Courageous, and might be called impudent …’

Much of the first half of the Life is spent on carefully analysing Wild’s brilliant methods of fencing stolen property and controlling the gangs all over London (‘the fraternity of thieves’) through the dual pressures of terror and greed. Much ironic play is made with the idea of his ‘dexterity’ and his ‘honesty’. While blackmailing, betraying and racketeering, Wild always appeared to remain just within the letter of the law. ‘It must be allowed to Jonathan’s fame, that as he steered among rocks and shoals, so he was a bold pilot; he ventured in and always got out in a manner equally surprising; no man ever did the like before him …’

As always, Defoe is fascinated by this technical expertise. If Sheppard’s genius was for dismantling things and escaping; Wild’s was for organising human beings and incarcerating them, either physically or psychologically. As with Sheppard, Defoe examines the emotional background to this criminal career. Unlike Sheppard, Wild was a provincial boy from Wolverhampton, ambitious, controlling, and obsessionally meticulous in his habits - ‘he kept his counting house or office, like a man of business, and had his books to enter everything in with the utmost exactness and regularity’. He was always domineering and manipulative. When first arrested for debt, he quickly became a trusty, ‘got so much favour with the Keepers that he got the Liberty of the Gate, as they call it’, and was soon running errands outside for the other prisoners, ‘to get a penny’. This became his first racket, which soon involved a prostitute, Mary Milliner, who taught him ‘a great many new ways of getting money’.

Defoe is interested by the story of Wild’s six wives, names and identifies each one, and finds surprisingly that most were respectable (one a very religious minded and ‘sober’ Roman Catholic), and all were apparently devoted to him. Indeed his last wife, Mary Dean, twice tried to commit suicide when Wild was sentenced to death.

Wild’s power over women is further illustrated by a remarkable sequence of dialogue, in which Defoe shows Wild in his office smoothly bamboozling a respectable lady client over the return of a stolen gold watch. Wild’s sinister courtesy to his client (‘a pot of tea brought out in form’) is offset by his terrifying secret hold over the thief involved - also a woman, and none other (according to Defoe) that Moll King herself. Here the world of Defoe’s Newgate fiction and his Newgate biography virtually meet, and can be taken as his own signature to the work. It is an interesting possibility that this sequence was based on one of his own daughters’ encounter with Wild.

Defoe makes only passing mention of Wild’s pursuit of Sheppard, although in the previous pamphlet he has Sheppard making the first published accusations against Wild’s corruption. But he does end with a bitter accusation against Wild’s exploiting ‘the young generation of thieves’, and worst of all crimes, corrupting the poor children of London. ‘He practised principally upon young creatures and little destitute children, such as seemed to be left to wander about in want and beggary; and many a poor boy he has picked up in the street pretending charity … which, when it has come to the issue, has been no more or less than to breed them up to thieving, and to ripen them for the devil.’ As with Fagin in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, there is even a hint here of sexual exploitation.

In the end, Defoe’s biography grants Jonathan Wild very little mercy. Where he is often indulgent towards Sheppard, even romantic, he regards Wild’s life as ‘a tragedy’ for all those around him, and a grotesque one at that. Their different manners of death on the Tyburn scaffold - Sheppard cool, chippy and resolute, Wild opium fuddled and vomiting - seal this contrast. But in both cases the new, nascent form of biography takes them seriously, simply as human beings. This is itself is a literary revolution. Though they are both in their way small, disreputable figures, without social standing or money or education or permanent power, they are presented as vivid individual spirits, complex personalities. They are worthy of remembrance, and of understanding, whether as good or evil.