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 8

The first of the two anonymous pamphlets that Applebee published, The History of John Sheppard, conforms in many respects to the early Newgate type. It mixes sensational facts about the crimes, with pious exhortations, and the occasional crude or heavily facetious aside about his repeated escapes: ‘So Jack returned like a dog to his Vomit.’

Yet it is a strangely gripping work in places, fast-moving, circumstantial and vividly evocative:

Having got clear of his prison, he took coach, disguised in a night gown, at the corner of the Old Bailey, along with a man who waited for him in the street (supposed to be Page the butcher), ordering the coachman to drive to Blackfriars Stairs, where his prostitute gave him the meeting, and they three took boat and went ashore at the Horse-Ferry at Westminster, and at the White Hart they went in, drank, and stayed some time, thence… by the help of a saw, he quitted the chains he had brought with him from Newgate, and then like a free man took his ramble through the City and came to Spitalfields, and there lay with Edgworth Bess.

But much of it is written so naively, and in such a ragbag of different styles, that it would be difficult to assign the whole text to the mature Defoe, unless as a parody. Equally, although clearly based in part on interviews with Sheppard, one also hesitates to hand it over entire to the Reverend Wagstaff, as advertised, for it is far too subversive for a chaplain to condone.

In fact The History has the obvious feel of one of John Applebee’s corporate productions: the work of several pens, flung together and rushed into print by the publisher, as news of Sheppard’s fourth and most famous escape broke in October. It is clear that Sheppard has not been recaptured by Wild at the time of publication, and the humorously fictionalised letter from Sheppard with which it ends (‘Five Hours after His Escape’ - a mass of bad puns) was one of Applebee’s own favourite journalistic devices.

The heterogeneous character of the pamphlet is obvious. There are passages that are evidently straight extracts from official court documents. There are fascinating but confused accounts of Sheppard’s escape methods, which sound like an Applebee ‘garreteer’ interviewing the prison turnkeys: ‘the only answer that is given to the whole at Newgate is, that the Devil came in person and assisted him.’ Equally, there are insertions of religious homily and contrition which surely emanate from the well-meaning Reverend Wagstaff.

Yet throughout the pamphlet there are brilliant, linking passages of narration which have all the stamp of Defoe. The section that begins with the vivid, unforgettable description of the London crowd ecstatically celebrating Sheppard’s first escape from the Newgate Condemned Hold in August has his touch: ‘His escape and his being 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 alehouse, for butchers, shoemakers, and barbers, all engaged in Controversies and Wagers about Sheppard …’

Then there are the collections of Sheppard’s impious jokes and irrepressible witticisms, amidst all the horror and filth of Newgate, which so well reveal his stoic character and natural bravado. This growing interest in the personality of the criminal is new. Again, in these one may detect the sympathetic ear of the author of Moll Flanders. They include the sarcastic aside that all the Newgate chaplains were ‘Gingerbread men’ intent on making money from him, ‘to form papers and ballads out of his behaviour’; and the splendid blasphemy: ‘Yes, Sir, I am The Sheppard, and all the jailors in the town are my Flock, and I cannot stir into the country but they are all at my heels baaughing after me.’ They also include Sheppard’s vicious joke to the pretty girl who did his washing in Newgate, who arrived one day with ‘her eyes beaten black and blue’. It is difficult to believe that the Reverend Wagstaff would have recorded any of these.

Indeed, one may wonder if Sheppard himself really said them all; or if Defoe invented, or at least polished, some of them for him? One famous exclamation of his became proverbial all over London. ‘One file’s worth all the Bibles in the world!’. However it is not merely quoted in The History, but subtly dramatised as part of an angry confrontation with the Reverend Wagstaff. It would have taken a shrewd onlooker - a novelist or biographer - to catch this moment.

When he was visited in the Castle by the Reverend Mr Wagstaff, he put on the face only of a preparation for his end … and when he has been pressed to discover those who put him upon means of escaping, and furnished him with implements, he would passionately, and with a motion of striking, say: ‘Ask me no such questions; one file’s worth all the Bibles in the world!’.

So much of Sheppard - his defiance, his youthful courage, his unpredictability - is caught not merely in that phrase, but in that passionate ‘motion of striking’.