Colonel Jack

Lore & Background

The novel begins with Jack as an abandoned illegitimate child, whose attending nurse is instructed by his father to inform Jack when he grows up that he is a 'Gentleman'. The nurse dubs her own son 'Captain Jack' to differentiate him from the two other Jacks under her care, and provides the protagonist with the name 'Colonel Jack'; the other she calls 'Major Jack'. The nurse dies when Colonel Jack is ten, and the three young boys, thrown into the outside world, turn to crime. After wandering the country with Captain Jack and settling in Scotland for a time, the two join the army but soon desert. Making their way to Newcastle, they are tricked into boarding a boat which they believed to be bound for London, but which is actually headed for Virginia. There they are sold into servitude. Jack serves his time and sufficiently impresses his master to become a plantation owner himself. He becomes a reformed character who repents his past life. On a return voyage to England, his ship is captured by the French, and Jack is landed at Bordeaux, where he is exchanged for a French merchant held by the English. Once back in England, and affecting French manners, Jack takes to calling himself Colonel Jacque. He is beguiled into marriage by a fortune-hunter who does not know the extent of his fortune. His wife proves to be a spendthrift and adulteress, and the marriage ends in divorce. Disgruntled, Jack leaves for France, where he purchases a company of soldiers and fights on the side of the French in the wars of the period. After being taken prisoner by the enemy, Jack becomes embroiled into marriage with a calculating woman, who is again an adulteress. He wounds her lover in a duel, and flees back to London. Jack marries again, though his wife becomes an alcoholic and an adulteress, and finally drinks herself to death. He remarries, but leaves the country after being involved in the unsuccessful Jacobite rising of 1715. He chooses to resettle in Virginia, his new wife, Moggy, having died in the meantime. There Jack encounters his divorced wife, reduced to being a house-keeper on his plantation, with whom he is reconciled and remarries. The colony becomes flooded with captured Jacobite rebels, transported there as punishment. Worried for his own security, Jack and his wife flee to the West Indies under pretence of illness, where he eventually learns of a general pardon of

In Their Own Story

No preamble. No name. Just the bearing, the grid, the window. Outside the hardened comms tent, rain hammers the tarps and the Ghosts are already kitting up, checking optics, whispering coordinates to each other. The Colonel doesn't ask if they're ready. The Colonel asks what they need from logistics, and then the channel goes dead. Somewhere in the next forty-eight hours, a village that has been on a satellite feed for six weeks will either be a coordinate or a memory, and the Colonel will be the one who signed the page. That is the job. That has always been the job.

Reader's Guide

The picaresque novel can be considered as a crime fiction, along with some of Defoe's other works such as Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724). It shares many plot elements and themes with Moll Flanders, the novels being published only eleven months apart. In common with many of Defoe's other works, Colonel Jack prominently tackles the subjects of money and crime.

Did You Know?

• Colonel Jack was first published in 1722.
• The novel's full original title is The History and Remarkable Life of the truly Honourable Col. Jacque, commonly call'd Col. Jack, who was Born a Gentleman, put 'Prentice to a Pick−Pocket, was Six and Twenty Years a Thie
• The novel shares many plot elements with Defoe's Moll Flanders, including both protagonists being orphans, marrying five times, turning to crime, being transported to America, and becoming rich plantation owners.
• In Captain Charles Johnson's The Lives and Exploits of the Most Noted Highwaymen (1734) there appears the history of Colonel Jack, and a nineteenth century penny dreadful was also based upon his life.