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A “DARLING OF THE MOB”: THE ANTIDISCIPLINARITY OF THE JACK SHEPPARD TEXTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2013

Elizabeth Stearns
Elizabeth Stearns*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
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Extract

The story of Jack Sheppard, a jailbreaker hanged for theft in 1724, inspired William Harrison Ainsworth in 1839 to write a historical romance chronicling and fictionalizing Sheppard's exploits. Though first published in a middle-class magazine, Ainsworth's serialization of Sheppard's career in Jack Sheppard: A Romance (1839–1840) subsequently caused a sensation among lower-class audiences for whom the novel was not originally intended. The wide dissemination of Sheppard's story among the lower classes in ballads, songs, cheap plagiarisms, and theatrical performances created a moral panic for contemporary middle-class critics who were concerned with the implications of such material in lower-class culture. Thus, despite the novel's initial reception in the middle-class press as another pleasant and harmless romance, it soon became reviled as a source of inspiration for would-be Jack Sheppards everywhere.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 435 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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