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 7

The success of Moll Flanders coincided with a virtual crimewave in London. To combat it, the so-called Black Act was passed in 1723, increasing the number of capital punishment offences to more than 200. These were mostly against property, including the theft of a silver spoon from a private house, or a shilling’s worth of lace from a shop. Earlier legislation had made the receiving of stolen property a capital offence, and also introduced the law of ‘impeachment’ by which anyone accused of a crime could turn King’s Evidence, thereby earning not only a complete pardon but also a £40 reward. All these measures were aimed at breaking up criminal gangs, and all of them placed tremendous power in the hands of Jonathan Wild, who, in the absence of a regular police force or criminal investigation department, could manipulate them to his own ends.

So when Defoe’s editor John Applebee began to run news stories in the Weekly Journal about Sheppard in 1724 - no less than sixteen pieces between August and November - Defoe’s interest was quickly aroused. Though two of these pieces were amorous letters signed by ‘Moll Flander’s niece, Betty Blueskins’, it is unlikely that any of these preliminary articles, largely facetious in tone, were by Defoe himself (though it is possible), but he cannot have ignored the developing Newgate drama.

As a publisher of crime stories, Applebee had established special access to the Newgate Condemned Hold. He had a virtual monopoly in publishing the ‘True Confessions’ of condemned prisoners, taken down by the Newgate ‘Ordinary’ or one of his assistant chaplains, who were traditionally granted this right by the Newgate Keeper. The chaplains could expect to earn £25 for a particularly sensational one. Both Moll Flanders and Jack Sheppard himself complained bitterly of cynical chaplains earning this blood money. But Applebee transformed this situation by starting to employ his own anonymous journalists (‘Mr Applebee’s garreteers’) as biographers, and by paying a small fee to the prisoners themselves, or making an allowance to their family. Thus many condemned men, including Sheppard, took pride and even comfort in the publication of their life stories.

These ‘Confessions’ achieved immense popularity by the 1720s, and can now be seen as the foundation of a wholly new tradition of secular biography in English literature, a generation before Johnson, Boswell and Malone. By 1760, the short Lives of some 58 female and 1,129 male Newgate prisoners had been published. Of these, 237 separately published Accounts have survived as 2d. broad sheets, 6d. pamphlets, or 1S bound collections. About half were taken down by the Newgate chaplains, and the rest by journalists employed by Applebee and other Fleet Street printers like Robert Walker. Sometimes these sources were combined by the editor, or written up as a more finished biography by a professional author.

So an advertisement in Applebee’s Journal running for four days immediately after his third recapture, from 13 to 16 September 1724, purporting to come from Sheppard, announced: ‘The Time of my Dissolution approaching … I have therefore for the satisfaction of the World, communicated my whole Life and wicked Actions to the Reverend Mr Wagstaff.’ In fact, this unlikely expression of repentance signaled a commercial deal with Applebee. Similarly, in a published letter from Sheppard to his mother, Jack stated that Applebee was paying him a retainer of eight pence a day ‘during Life’ for the exclusive right to all his personal ‘Memorandums’. In the letter, Jack wittily transferred this retainer to his mother, if he should not be ‘available’ in Newgate for any period to collect in person. Indeed he was unavailable for part of October.