54 Facts About Jonathan Wild

Jonathan Wild, spelled Wilde, was a London underworld figure notable for operating on both sides of the law, posing as a public-spirited vigilante entitled the "Thief-Taker General".

Jonathan Wild simultaneously ran a significant criminal empire, and used his crimefighting role to remove rivals and launder the proceeds of his own crimes.

Jonathan Wild was consulted on crime by the government due to his apparently remarkable prowess in locating stolen items and those who had stolen them.

Jonathan Wild was responsible for the arrest and execution of Jack Sheppard, a petty thief and burglar who had won the public's affection as a lovable rogue.

However, Jonathan Wild's duplicity became known and his men began to give evidence against him.

Jonathan Wild was baptised at St Peter's Collegiate Church, Wolverhampton.

Jonathan Wild's father, John Wild, was a carpenter, and his mother sold herbs and fruits in the local market.

Jonathan Wild attended the Free School in St John's Lane and was apprenticed to a local buckle-maker.

Jonathan Wild married and had a son, but came to London in 1704 as a servant.

Jonathan Wild became popular, running errands for the gaolers and eventually earning enough to repay his original debts and the cost of being imprisoned, and even lend money to other prisoners.

Jonathan Wild received "the liberty of the gate", meaning that he was allowed out at night to aid in the arrest of thieves.

Jonathan Wild was introduced to a wide range of London's criminal underclass.

Jonathan Wild apparently served as Milliner's tough when she went night-walking.

Soon Jonathan Wild was thoroughly acquainted with the underworld, with both its methods and its inhabitants.

Jonathan Wild began, slowly at first, to dispose of stolen goods and to pay bribes to get thieves out of prison.

Jonathan Wild later parted with Milliner, cutting off her ear to mark her as a prostitute.

Jonathan Wild continued to call himself Hitchen's "Deputy", entirely without any official standing, and took to carrying a sword as a mark of his supposed authority, alluding to pretensions of gentility.

Jonathan Wild ran a gang of thieves, kept the stolen goods, and waited for the crime and theft to be announced in the newspapers.

The thieves that Jonathan Wild would help to "discover" were rivals or members of his own gang who had refused to cooperate with his taking the majority of the money.

Jonathan Wild avoided this danger and exploited it simultaneously by having his gang steal, either through pickpocketing or, more often, mugging, and then by "recovering" the goods.

Jonathan Wild never sold the goods back, explicitly, nor ever pretended that they were not stolen.

Jonathan Wild claimed at all times that he found the goods by policing and avowed hatred of thieves.

However, what Jonathan Wild chiefly did was use his thieves and ruffians to "apprehend" rival gangs.

Jonathan Wild was not the first thief-taker who was actually a thief himself.

When Hitchen was suspended from his duties for corruption in 1712, he engaged Jonathan Wild to keep his business of extortion going in his absence.

Hitchen was reinstated in 1714 and found that Jonathan Wild was now a rival, and one of Jonathan Wild's first acts of gang warfare was to eliminate as many of the thieves in Hitchen's control as he could.

Jonathan Wild replied with a manuscript of his own, An Answer to a Late Insolent Libel, and there explained that Hitchen was a homosexual who visited "molly houses".

Jonathan Wild's "finding" of lost merchandise was private, but his efforts at finding thieves were public.

Victims of crime would come by, even before announcing their losses, and discover that Jonathan Wild's agents had "found" the missing items, and Jonathan Wild would offer to help find the criminals for an extra fee.

In 1720, Jonathan Wild's fame was such that the Privy Council consulted with him on methods of controlling crime.

Jonathan Wild's recommendation was, unsurprisingly, that the rewards for evidence against thieves be raised.

When one of the members of the gang was released, Jonathan Wild pursued him and had him arrested on "further information".

When Jonathan Wild solicited for a finder's fee, he usually held all the power in the transaction.

The "notes of hand" means signatures, so Jonathan Wild already knows the name of the notebook's owner.

Furthermore, Jonathan Wild tells the owner through the ad that he knows what its owner was doing at the time, since the Fountain Tavern was a brothel.

Enraged, Blueskin attempted to murder Jonathan Wild, slashing his throat with a pocketknife and causing an uproar.

Jonathan Wild collapsed and was taken to a surgeon for treatment.

Jonathan Wild had broken the chains, padlocks, and six iron-barred doors.

Jonathan Wild was so celebrated that the gaolers charged high society visitors to see him, and James Thornhill painted his portrait.

Jonathan Wild did not attend either of the executions, as he was confined to his bed for several weeks while the injury to his throat was healing.

Jonathan Wild was placed in Newgate, where he continued to attempt to run his business.

Jonathan Wild was acquitted of the first charge, but with Statham's evidence presented against him on the second charge, he was convicted and sentenced to death.

Jonathan Wild's hanging was a great event, and tickets were sold in advance for the best vantage points.

Jonathan Wild was accompanied by William Sperry and the two Roberts: Sanford and Harpham; three of the four prisoners who had been condemned to die with Jonathan Wild a few days before.

Jonathan Wild's skeletal remains are on public display in the Royal College's Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Jonathan Wild is famous today not so much for setting the example for organised crime as for the uses satirists made of his story.

Jonathan Wild was created a peer and moved to the House of Lords, from where he still directed the Whig majority in Commons for years.

Walpole had come to be described by both the Whig and then, satirically, by the Tory political writers as the "Great Man", and Fielding has his Jonathan Wild constantly striving, with stupid violence, to be "Great".

Fielding's satire consistently attacks the Whig party by having Jonathan Wild choose, among all the thieves cant terms, "prig" to refer to the profession of burglary.

Jonathan Wild was the hidden force of the London criminals, to whom he sold his brains and his organization on a fifteen per cent.

In 2000, Jonathan Wild appeared as a character in the David Liss novel A Conspiracy of Paper,.

In 2015, Jonathan Wild appeared as a character in the Paul Tobin Eisner-nominated graphic novel I Was the Cat, drawn by Benjamin Dewey.

Jonathan Wild has an important role in the background to the fantasy novel The Hanging Tree, the sixth part of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series.

Much of the book's plot revolves around a secret magical treatise by Isaac Newton, which was stolen by Jonathan Wild and disappeared for centuries, only to reappear in the underworld of 21st-century London.