JONATHAN WILD PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Henry Fielding,Senior Rare Books Cataloguer Houghton Library Hugh Amory,Maynard Mack Professor of English Claude Rawson,Linda Bree | 352 pages | 01 Sep 2008 | Oxford University Press | 9780199549757 | English | Oxford, United Kingdom Lives of Remarkable Criminals: Jonathan Wild Playwright, author, journalist, dandy-aesthete, w… Wild Oat , Description Wild oat Avena sativa is a member of the grass family native to Scotland. One of the several races of Asian wild ass E. About this article Jonathan Wild All Sources -. Updated About encyclopedia. Persian wild ass. Wilcox, Robert, Bl. Jonathan Stroud. Jonathan Son of Absalom. Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Jonathan Eastman Johnson. Jonathan Carter Hornblower. Jonathan ben Uzziel. Jonathan ben Joseph of Ruzhany. Jonathan ben Jacob. Jonathan ben Eleazar. Jonathan ben David Ha-Kohen of Lunel. Jonathan ben Anan. Jonathan ben Amram. Jonathan ben Abraham Isaac. Jonasdottir, Anna G udrun. Jonas, Wayne B oice Jonas, Regina — Jonas, Regina. Jonas, Oswald. Jonas, Nick —. Jonas, Nathan S. Jonas, Maryla — He was the man who caught criminals. By his testimony, over sixty thieves were sent to the gallows. His "finding" of lost merchandise was private, but his efforts at finding thieves were public. Wild's office in the Old Bailey was a busy spot. Victims of crime would come by, even before announcing their losses, and discover that Wild's agents had "found" the missing items, and Wild would offer to help find the criminals for an extra fee. However, while fictional treatments made use of the device, it is not known whether or not Wild ever actually turned in one of his own gang for a private fee. In , Wild's fame was such that the Privy Council consulted with him on methods of controlling crime. Wild's recommendation was, unsurprisingly, that the rewards for evidence against thieves be raised. This amounted to a significant pay increase for Wild. There is some evidence that Wild was favoured, or at least ignored, by the Whig politicians and opposed by the Tory politicians. In , a Tory group had succeeded in having the laws against receiving stolen property tightened, primarily with Wild's activities in mind. Ironically, this strengthened Wild's hand, rather than weakening it, for it made it more difficult for thieves to fence their goods except through Wild. Wild's battles with thieves made excellent press. Wild himself would approach the papers with accounts of his derring-do, and the papers passed these on to a concerned public. When one of the members of the gang was released, Wild pursued him and had him arrested on "further information". To the public, this seemed like a relentless defence of order. In reality, it was gang warfare disguised as a national service. When Wild solicited for a finder's fee, he usually held all the power in the transaction. The advertisement is extortion. The "notes of hand" agreements of debt mean signatures, so Wild already knows the name of the book's owner. Furthermore, 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. The real purpose of the ad is to threaten the notebook's owner with announcing his visit to a bordello, either to the debtors or the public, and it even names a price for silence a guinea , or one pound and one shilling. By , London political life was experiencing a crisis of public confidence. In , the South Sea Bubble had burst, and the public was growing restive about corruption. Authority figures were beginning to be viewed with scepticism. Consequently, as with other arrests, Wild's interests in saving the public from Sheppard were personal. Sheppard was imprisoned in St Giles's Roundhouse , but escaped within three hours. Ann's Roundhouse in Soho , where he was visited by Elizabeth "Edgworth Bess" Lyon the next day; she too was locked up with him, and, being recognised as man and wife, they were sent to the New Prison at Clerkenwell. They both escaped on 25 May. The following day, Wild sent another one of his men, Quilt Arnold , and had Sheppard arrested a third time and put into Newgate Prison to await trial. However, Wild, along with Field and William Kneebone, Sheppard's former master, presented evidence against him on the final charge of the burglary of Kneebone's house on 12 July; and Sheppard was convicted, sentenced to death, and put in the condemned hold of Newgate Prison. On the night that the death warrant arrived, 31 August, Sheppard, once again, escaped. By this point, Sheppard was a working class hero for apprentices being a cockney apprentice in love, non-violent, and handsome. On 9 September, Sheppard avoided capture by Wild's men, but he was caught for a fourth time by a posse from Newgate as he hid out on Finchley Common , [20] and Sheppard was placed in the most secure room of Newgate. Further, Sheppard was put in shackles and chained to the floor. Meanwhile, on 9 October, Wild and his men arrested Joseph "Blueskin" Blake , a highwayman and Sheppard's partner-in-crime. Their accounts were not consistent with the evidence given at Sheppard's trial, but Blueskin was convicted and sentenced to death anyway. Enraged, Blueskin attempted to murder Wild, slashing his throat with a pocket knife and causing an uproar. Wild collapsed and was taken to a surgeon for treatment. Taking advantage of the disturbance that spread to Newgate next door and continued into the night, Sheppard escaped yet again in early 16 October. This escape astonished everyone, and Daniel Defoe , working as a journalist, wrote an account. In the early morning on 1 November, Sheppard was found for a fifth and final time by a constable and arrested. He was so celebrated that the gaolers charged high society visitors to see him, and James Thornhill painted his portrait. On 11 November, Blueskin was hanged. Wild missed out on the hangings while he was confined to his bed for several weeks while the injury to his throat was healing. Wild's inability to control Sheppard, and his injuries at the hands of Sheppard's colleague Joseph "Blueskin" Blake , combined with a change of public sentiment regarding authority figures, led to Wild's downfall. As he recuperated from his injury, his control over his criminal gang also slipped, and he became despised. After his recovery, Wild used violence to perform a jail break for one of his gang members. Being searched for, he went into hiding for several weeks, and returned to business when he thought the affair had blown over. On 6 February , he was summoned to Leicester house, where he failed to recover a gold watch for one of his attendants because of the jail break and the incident with Blueskin at the Old Bailey. On 15 February Wild and Quilt Arnold were arrested for helping one of his men in a jailbreak. In the illustration from the True Effigy top of page , Wild is pictured in Newgate, still with notebook in hand to account for goods coming in and going out of his office. Evidence was presented against Wild for the violent jailbreak and for having stolen jewels during the previous August's installation of Knights of the Garter. The public's mood had shifted; they supported the average man and resented authority figures. With the changing tide, it appeared at last to Wild's gang that their leader would not escape, and they began to come forward. Slowly, gang members began to turn evidence on him, until all of his activities, including his grand scheme of running and then hanging thieves, became known. Additionally, evidence was offered as to Wild's frequent bribery of public officers. Wild's final trial occurred at the Old Bailey on 15 May. He 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. He could not eat or go to church, and suffered from insanity and gout. When Wild was taken to the gallows at Tyburn on 24 May , Daniel Defoe said that the crowd was far larger than any they had seen before and that, instead of any celebration or commiseration with the condemned,. Wild's hanging was a great event, and tickets were sold in advance for the best vantage points see the reproduction of the gallows ticket. Even in a year with a great many macabre spectacles, Wild drew an especially large and boisterous crowd. Eighteen-year-old Henry Fielding was in attendance. 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 Wild a few days before. In the dead of night, Wild's body was buried in secret at the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church next to Elizabeth Mann, his third wife and one of his many lovers who had died in about , as he had wished. In the 18th century, autopsies and dissections were performed on the most notorious criminals, and consequently Wild's body was exhumed and sold to the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection. Jonathan Wild is famous today not so much for setting the example for organised crime as for the uses satirists made of his story. When Wild was hanged, the papers were filled with accounts of his life, collections of his sayings, farewell speeches and the like. This work competed with another that claimed to have excerpts from Wild's diaries. The illustration above is from the frontispiece to the "True Effigy of Mr.