1. Jack Sheppard was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724, but escaped four times from prison, making him notorious, though popular with the poorer classes.
49 Facts About Jack Sheppard
1. 2.
Jack Sheppard was as renowned for his attempts to escape from prison as he was for his crimes.
3.
The character of Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera was based on Jack Sheppard, keeping him well known for more than 100 years.
4.
Jack Sheppard returned to the public consciousness around 1840, when William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel entitled Jack Sheppard, with illustrations by George Cruikshank.
5.
Jack Sheppard's parents named him after an older brother, John, who had died before Sheppard's birth.
6.
Jack Sheppard had a second brother, Thomas, and a younger sister, Mary.
7.
Unable to support her family without her husband's income, Jack Sheppard's mother sent him to Mr Garrett's School, a workhouse near St Helen's Bishopsgate, when he was six years old.
8.
Jack Sheppard was sent out as a parish apprentice to a cane-chair maker, taking a settlement of 20 shillings, but his new master soon died.
9.
Jack Sheppard was sent out to a second cane-chair maker, but Sheppard was treated badly.
10.
Jack Sheppard's mother had been working for Kneebone since her husband's death.
11.
Kneebone taught Jack Sheppard to read and write and apprenticed him to a carpenter, Owen Wood, in Wych Street, off Drury Lane in Covent Garden.
12.
Jack Sheppard had a pale face with large, dark eyes, a wide mouth and a quick smile.
13.
Jack Sheppard served five unblemished years of his apprenticeship but then began to become involved with crime.
14.
Such, Jack Sheppard claimed, was the source of his later ruin.
15.
Peter Linebaugh offers a more politicised version: that Jack Sheppard's sudden transformation was a liberation from the dull drudgery of indentured labour and that he progressed from pious servitude to self-confident rebellion and Levelling.
16.
Jack Sheppard's first recorded theft was in Spring 1723, when he engaged in petty shoplifting, stealing two silver spoons while on an errand for his master to the Rummer Tavern in Charing Cross.
17.
Jack Sheppard's misdeeds were undetected, and he progressed to larger crimes, often stealing goods from the houses where he was working.
18.
Jack Sheppard was not suspected of the crimes, and progressed to burglary, in company with criminals in Jonathan Wild's gang.
19.
Jack Sheppard relocated to Fulham, living as husband and wife with Lyon at Parsons Green, before relocating to Piccadilly.
20.
When Lyon was arrested and imprisoned at St Giles's Roundhouse, the beadle, a Mr Brown, refused to let Jack Sheppard visit, so he broke in and took her away.
21.
The magistrate, Justice Parry, had Jack Sheppard imprisoned overnight on the top floor of St Giles's Roundhouse pending further questioning, but Jack Sheppard escaped within three hours by breaking through the timber ceiling and lowering himself to the ground with a rope fashioned from bedclothes.
22.
Still wearing irons, Jack Sheppard coolly joined the crowd that had been attracted by the sounds of his breaking out.
23.
Jack Sheppard distracted their attention by pointing to the shadows on the roof and shouting that he could see the escapee, and then swiftly departed.
24.
Jack Sheppard was detained overnight in St Ann's Roundhouse in Soho and visited there the next day by Lyon; she was recognised as his wife and locked in a cell with him.
25.
Wild could not permit Jack Sheppard to continue outside his control and began to seek Jack Sheppard's arrest.
26.
Jack Sheppard was imprisoned in Newgate Prison pending his trial at the next Assize of oyer and terminer.
27.
Jack Sheppard was prosecuted on three charges of theft at the Old Bailey, but was acquitted on the first two due to lack of evidence.
28.
Jack Sheppard's slight build enabled him to climb through the resulting gap in the grille, and he was smuggled out of Newgate in women's clothing that his visitors had brought him.
29.
Jack Sheppard took a coach to Blackfriars Stairs, a boat up the River Thames to the horse ferry in Westminster, near the warehouse where he hid his stolen goods, and completed his escape.
30.
Jack Sheppard spent a few days out of London, visiting a friend's family in Chipping Warden in Northamptonshire, but was back in town.
31.
Jack Sheppard's fame had increased with each escape, and he was visited in prison by various people.
32.
Jack Sheppard removed the bar and used it to break through the ceiling into the "Red Room" above the "Castle", a room which had last been used some seven years before to confine aristocratic Jacobite prisoners after the Battle of Preston.
33.
Jack Sheppard went back down to his cell to get a blanket, then back to the roof of the prison, and used the blanket to reach the roof of an adjacent house, owned by William Bird, a turner.
34.
Jack Sheppard broke into Bird's house, and went down the stairs and out into the street at around midnight without disturbing the occupants.
35.
Jack Sheppard disguised himself as a beggar and returned to the city.
36.
Jack Sheppard dressed himself as a dandy gentleman and used the proceeds to spend a day and the ensuing evening on the tiles with two mistresses.
37.
Jack Sheppard was loaded with 300 pounds of iron weights.
38.
Jack Sheppard was so celebrated that the gaolers charged high society visitors four shillings to see him, and the King's painter James Thornhill painted his portrait.
39.
Jack Sheppard was offered the chance to have his sentence reduced by informing on his associates, but he scorned the offer, and the death sentence was confirmed.
40.
The next day, Blueskin was hanged, and Jack Sheppard was moved to the condemned cell.
41.
Jack Sheppard planned one more escape, but his pen-knife, intended to cut the ropes binding him on the way to the gallows, was found by a prison warder shortly before he left Newgate for the last time.
42.
The occasion was as much as anything a celebration of Jack Sheppard's life, attended by crowds of as many as 200,000 people.
43.
The procession halted at the City of Oxford tavern on Oxford Street, where Jack Sheppard drank a pint of sack.
44.
Jack Sheppard handed "a paper to someone as he mounted the scaffold", perhaps as a symbolic endorsement of the account in the "Narrative".
45.
Jack Sheppard's slight build had aided his previous prison escapes, but it caused him a slow death by strangulation from the hangman's noose.
46.
Jack Sheppard's badly mauled remains were recovered later and buried in the churchyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields that evening.
47.
Jack Sheppard was the inspiration for the character Captain Macheath; his nemesis, Peachum, is based on Jonathan Wild.
48.
Jack Sheppard's tale was revived during the first half of the 19th century.
49.
In Jordy Rosenberg's 2018 novel Confessions of the Fox, the Jack Sheppard story was recontextualised as a queer narrative: a 21st-century academic discovers a manuscript containing Jack Sheppard's "confessions", which tell the story of his childhood and his love affair with Edgeworth Bess, and reveals that he was a transgender man.