Jack Sheppard

Jack Sheppard, born in London’s Spitalfields in 1702, was the son of a carpenter who died when Sheppard was young. His mother, left unable to support the family, sent him to a workhouse school at age six. After two failed apprenticeships to cane-chair makers, he became a shop-boy for a wool draper who taught him to read and write, then apprenticed him to a carpenter in Covent Garden. Sheppard served five years of his seven-year indenture with promise, but by age twenty he began frequenting a tavern run by a button-moulder, where he met criminals including Joseph “Blueskin” Blake and the notorious “Thief-Taker General” Jonathan Wild.

There he took up heavy drinking and a relationship with prostitute Elizabeth Lyon, known as Edgeworth Bess. Sheppard claimed this led to his ruin. His first theft, in spring 1723, was stealing two silver spoons from a tavern while on an errand for his master.

Undetected, he progressed to larger thefts from houses where he worked, then to burglary with members of Wild’s gang. He quit his apprenticeship in August 1723, with less than two years remaining, but continued as a journeyman carpenter. After moving to Fulham and then Piccadilly with Lyon, he broke into a roundhouse to free her when she was arrested.

His criminal career lasted less than two years, during which he was imprisoned five times and escaped four times, making him a folk hero among London’s poor. His escapes, combined with injuries Wild suffered from Blake, contributed to Wild’s downfall. Sheppard was hanged at Tyburn in November 1724. A ghostwritten autobiography sold at his execution, and his story inspired John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and later a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth, keeping his notoriety alive for over a century.