Thieves' Opera: The Mesmerizing Story of Two-Notorious Criminals in Eighteenth-Century London

Title: Thieves' Opera: The Mesmerizing Story of Two-Notorious Criminals in Eighteenth-Century London
Author: Lucy Moore
ISBN: 9780151003648
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1998
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 304
Publisher Description: Georgian London was a city of contrasts: its bourgeois elegance and refinement thrived amidst filth and foul smells, decadence and depravity. Crime was everywhere -- from pickpockets and prostitutes in the center city to plundering highwaymen on the outskirts.

Jonathan Wild came to dominate 18th-century London's criminal underworld in part by orchestrating the theft of personal goods and then offering them back to their rightful owners -- at a price. The reputation and credibility of this self-styled 'Thief-Taker General' was such that in 1720 the government's Privy Council sought his advice on how to deal with the rising crime rate in England's capital city.

Jack Sheppard, on the other hand, was the archetypal idle apprentice, who spent his free time drinking, gambling, and whoring in London's Covent Garden, eventually falling into a life of petty crime. When Sheppard refused to work for Wild (as every other thief was forced to do), Wild had him arrested, tried, and convicted. But his extraordinary ability to escape from prison -- repeatedly and against striking odds -- made Jack Sheppard a celebrated folk hero. As popular opinion -- and with it, money and power -- swayed from the thief-taker to the housebreaker, tension between the two spiraled to a dramatic climax.