Jack Sheppard (novel)
Jack Sheppard is a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth serially published in Bentley's Miscellany from 1839 to 1840, with illustrations by George Cruikshank.
The events of the story begin with the notorious criminal and thief-catcher Jonathan Wild encouraging Jack Sheppard's father to a life of crime.
[6] Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard is connected to another work within the same tradition that ran alongside it for many months in the Bentley's Miscellany: Dickens' Oliver Twist.
[7] Like Hogarth's prints, the novel pairs the descent into crime of the "idle" apprentice with the rise of typical melodramatic character Thomas Darrell, a foundling of aristocratic birth who defeats his evil uncle to recover his fortune.
"[17] With its publication, Ainsworth told James Crossley in an 8 October 1839 letter, "The success of Jack is pretty certain, they are bringing him out at half the theatres in London.
"[18] He was correct; Jack Sheppard was a popular success and sold more books than Ainsworth's previous novels Rookwood and Crichton.
[19] Ainsworth's novel was adapted into a successful play by John Buckstone in October 1839 at the Adelphi Theatre starring Mary Anne Keeley.
The story generated a form of cultural mania, embellished by pamphlets, prints, cartoons, plays, and souvenirs, not repeated until George du Maurier's Trilby in 1895.
It spawned many imitations and parodies of the novel, but it also "aroused a very different response," according to George Worth, "a vigorous outcry concerning its alleged glorification of crime and immorality and the baneful effect which it was bound to have on the young and impressionable.
The fear may not have been entirely unfounded; Courvousier, the valet of Lord William Russell, claimed in one of his several confessions that the book had inspired him to murder his master.
[22] In the 1841 Chronicles of Crime, Camden Pelham claimed in regards to influence of Jack Sheppard: "The rage for housebreakers has become immense, and the fortunes of the most notorious and the most successful of thieves have been made the subject of entertainments at no fewer than six of the London theatres.
[25] In a February 1840 letter to Richard Hengist Horne, he wrote: I am by some jolter-headed enemies most unjustly and untruly charged with having written a book after Mr. Ainsworth's fashion.
If this opportunity had presented itself and I had made this vindication, I could have no objection to set my hand to what I know to be true concerning the late lamented John Sheppard, but I feel a great repugnance to do so now, lest it should seem an ungenerous and unmanly way of disavowing any sympathy with that school, and a means of shielding myself.
[26]In 1844, Horne wrote that Jack Sheppard "was full of unredeemed crimes, but being told without any offensive language, did its evil work of popularity, and has now gone to its cradle in the cross-roads of literature, and should be henceforth hushed up by all who have—as so many have—a personal regard for its author.
"[27] There were many negative responses from other literary figures, including Edgar Allan Poe who wrote in a March 1841 review, "Such libels on humanity, such provocations to crime, such worthless, inane, disgraceful romances as 'Jack Sheppard' and its successors, are a blot on our literature and a curse to our land.
[29] Other influences of the novel appear in Bon Gaultier Ballads, especially when they state: Turpin, thou should'st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.
Great men have been among us—names that lend A lustre to our calling—better none: Maclaine, Duval, Dick Turpin, Barrington, Blueskin and others who called Sheppard friend.
"[31] In particular, Mackay declares, "The Inspector's Report on Juvenile Delinquency at Liverpool contains much matter of the same kind; but sufficient has been already quoted to shew the injurious effects of the deification of great thieves by thoughtless novelists.
"[32] Stephen Carver mentioned in 2003 that "it was the theatrical adaptations consumed by the new urban working class that were considered the social problem [...] What is apparent again and again, as one reconstructs the critical annihilation of Ainsworth, is that the bourgeois establishment neither forgave nor forgot.
[36] Carver argues, "Had he not abandoned the form that he had effectively originated but rather moderated the moral message to suit the times as Dickens had done, Ainsworth would have likely remained at the cutting edge of Victorian literature for a little while longer.
