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There sat Jack, evidently in the last stage of intoxication, with his collar opened, his dress disarranged, a pipe in his mouth, a bowl of punch and a half-emptied rummer before him, — there he sat, receiving and returning, or rather attempting to return, — for he was almost past consciousness, — the blandishments of a couple of females, one of whom had passed her arm round his neck, while the other leaned over the back of his chair and appeared from her gestures to be whispering soft nonsense into his ear.

Both these ladies possessed considerable personal attractions. The younger of the two, who was seated next to Jack, and seemed to monopolize his attention, could not be more than seventeen, though her person had all the maturity of twenty. She had delicate oval features, light, laughing blue eyes, a pretty nez retroussé, (why have we not the term, since we have the best specimens of the feature?) teeth of pearly whiteness, and a brilliant complexion, set off by rich auburn hair, a very white neck and shoulders, — the latter, perhaps, a trifle too much exposed. The name of this damsel was Edgeworth Bess; and, as her fascinations will not, perhaps, be found to be without some influence upon the future fortunes of her boyish admirer, we have thought it worth while to be thus particular in describing them. The other bona roba, known amongst her companions as Mistress Poll Maggot, was a beauty on a much larger scale, — in fact, a perfect Amazon. Nevertheless though nearly six feet high, and correspondingly proportioned, she was a model of symmetry, and boasted, with the frame of a Thalestris or a Trulla, the regular lineaments of the Medicean Venus. A man's laced hat, — whether adopted from the caprice of the moment, or habitually worn, we are unable to state, — cocked knowingly on her head, harmonized with her masculine appearance. Mrs. Maggot, as well as her companion Edgeworth Bess, was showily dressed; nor did either of them disdain the aid supposed to be lent to a fair skin by the contents of the patchbox. On an empty cask, which served him for a chair, and opposite Jack Sheppard, whose rapid progress in depravity afforded him the highest satisfaction, sat Blueskin, encouraging the two women in their odious task, and plying his victim with the glass as often as he deemed it expedient to do so. By this time, he had apparently accomplished all he desired; for moving the bottle out of Jack's reach, he appropriated it entirely to his own use, leaving the devoted lad to the care of the females. Some few of the individuals seated at the other tables seemed to take an interest in the proceedings of Blueskin and his party, just as a by-stander watches any other game; but, generally speaking, the company were too much occupied with their own concerns to pay attention to anything else. The assemblage was for the most part, if not altogether, composed of persons to whom vice in all its aspects was too familiar to present much of novelty, in whatever form it was exhibited. Nor was Jack by any means the only stripling in the room. Not far from him was a knot of lads drinking, swearing, and playing at dice as eagerly and as skilfully as any of the older hands. Near to these hopeful youths sat a fence, or receiver, bargaining with a clouter, or pickpocket, for a suit, — or, to speak in more intelligible language, a watch and seals, two cloaks, commonly called watch-cases, and a wedge-lobb, otherwise known as a silver snuff-box. Next to the receiver was a gang of housebreakers, laughing over their exploits, and planning fresh depredations; and next to the housebreakers came two gallant-looking gentlemen in long periwigs and riding-dresses, and equipped in all other respects for the road, with a roast fowl and a bottle of wine before them. Amid this varied throng, — varied in appearance, but alike in character, — one object alone, we have said, rivetted Mrs. Sheppard's attention; and no sooner did she in some degree recover from the shock occasioned by the sight of her son's debased condition, than, regardless of any other consideration except his instant removal from the contaminating society by which he was surrounded, and utterly forgetting the more cautious plan she meant to have adopted, she rushed into the room, and summoned him to follow her.

"Halloa!" cried Jack, looking round, and trying to fix his inebriate gaze upon the speaker, — "who's that?"

"Your mother," replied Mrs. Sheppard. "Come home directly, Sir."

"Mother be—!" returned Jack. "Who is it, Bess?"

"How should I know?" replied Edgeworth Bess. "But if it is your mother, send her about her business."

"That I will," replied Jack, "in the twinkling of a bedpost."

"Glad to see you once more in the Mint, Mrs. Sheppard," roared Blueskin, who anticipated some fun. "Come and sit down by me."

"Take a glass of gin, Ma'am," cried Poll Maggot, holding up a bottle of spirit; "it used to be your favourite liquor, I've heard."

"Jack, my love," cried Mrs. Sheppard, disregarding the taunt, "come away."

"Not I," replied Jack; "I'm too comfortable where I am. Be off!" — Vol. 2, Ch. 14, "The Flash Ken," pp. 37-42.

Commentary

Having a thorough knowledge of the engravings of William Hogarth, George Cruikshank would have had a number of drinking scenes to draw upon as models for Jack's induction (or, seduction) into the world of crime. Cruikshank invokes the spirit of the eighteenth-century engraver and social satirist in the scene of debauchery at the Crossed Shovels, a public house and the resort of all manner of criminals in the lawless quarter of London known as "The Mint" in which the novel opened a dozen years earlier. Although Cruikshank might have utilised any number of Hogarth's drinking and whoring scenes, the ​one that seems to have served as a precedent if not a model is the analogous scene in The Rake's Progress when the protagonist, Tom Rakewell, is seduced and fleeced in Scene Three, The Tavern, in which Tom is "surrounded by votaries of Venus," two of whom rob him after getting him thoroughly drunk. The scene is without a moral centre or informing consciousness; the viewer cannot even identify with the besotted protagonist. In the present Cruikshank engraving, the context is a much lower social stratum and the environment not nearly so luxurious and sophisticated as Hogarth's, but the nineteenth-century version of an eighteenth-century scene has a dramatic tension that​the Hogarth lacks. To the left is the raucous Blueskin, seated on a keg and raising his glass, and the inebriated Jack, reaching out for his mother; to the right, the distressed mother rings her hands as the brace of prostitutes ply her son with gin, which was her alcolholic beverage of choice when she was first widowed and suffering from severe depression. Another Hogarthian scene that is relevant is one of betrayal: The Idle 'Prentice betray'd by his Whore, & taken in a Night Cellar with his Accomplice (Industry and Idleness, Scene, IX).

Kenneth Clark in Chapter Ten of Civilisation postulates that eighteenth-century England was really two societies: "the aristocracy of modest country gentlemen" (a largely Tory rural gentry) and its support system (the peasantry, villages, and market towns) and the society of the metropolis, which in fact was divided along class lines, with an underclass , an artisan and business class, and an urban aristocracy (largely Whig):

The other was the urban society, of which Hogarth​has left us many records, confirmed by the plays of his friend [Henry] Fielding. Plenty of animal spirits, but not what we could, by any stretch, call civilisation. [250]

Clark feels that William Hogarth's engraving A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733) with its cast of ten drunken males of the upper and upper-middle class exemplifies this decadent, brutal urban society so well recorded in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera​ (1728). This Cruikshank illustration set in a "dive" in one of eighteenth-century London's most notorious and lawless districts better represents the urban underworld into which the Artful Dodger initiates Oliver in Dickens's novel, and into which Jonathan Wild's confederate​, Blueskin, now initiates Jack Sheppard, whose father was hanged as a thief and whose destiny seems to be similar, with transportation to Virginia being another likely possibility if he kills nobody in the commission of a crime. The "translator" of the purgatorial experience at the Crossed Shovels is the now respectable widow, Mrs. Sheppard, who traverses the class divide, speaking standard English with Owen Wood (with whom she has just been locked up) and Thieves' Cant with the customers at the public house in the Mint.

Ainsworth definitely initiates the nineteenth-century reader into the "Night Side" of early eighteenth-century London in the two instalments for April through May 1839, which encompass Chapters XI through XIV, "The Mohocks" through "The Flash Ken" (instalments 3 and 4), from St. Giles's Roundhouse in Bloomsbury to the Crossed Shovels in the Mint. In this sequence, Lady Trafford dies having just seen her son, Thames, but still refuses to divulge the name of the boy's father to Sir Rowland and Jonathan Wild. However, a glove that Wild picked up on the night of the storm twelve years before apparently holds the key to learning the true identity of "Darrell." And now Ainsworth transports the reader from the world of the urban aristocracy (Lady Trafford and Sir Rowland Trenchard) to the criminal underworld, beginning with the Roundhouse of St. Giles, to which Thames and Jack are now conducted under guard and where, Jack suspects, Wild means to despatch Thames. The riotous Mohocks having been incarcerated in the larger room with their Irish leader, the Marquis of Slaughterford, the boys are cooped up in the Crib of Little Ease. Whereas Thames is relying on the Irish watchman, Terry O'Flaherty, to effect his rescue by getting a message to Owen Wood, Jack is determined to effect their escape. Revealing Wild's plan and explaining why he apparently acquiesced in Wild's false accusation, Jack gets them out, only to have Thames recaptured by Jonathan Wild. Meantime, the turnkey, Sharples, treacherously locks Owen Wood and Mrs. Sheppard in a cell in the Roundhouse, and does not release them until 3:00 A. M., whereupon Owen Wood determines to seek assistance and rescue the boys from Wild's clutches at the thief-taker's house in the Old Bailey while Mrs. Sheppard goes to seek her son in the precincts of the Mint.

The "animal spirits" unleashed by the company's consumption of gin are all too evident in blurry-eyed Jack's posture and the attentions of the two prostitutes, the Amazonian Mistress Poll Maggot (in a laced tricorn hat and holding aloft a large bottle of spirits) and the dark-haired, fleshy beauty Edgeworth Bess (seated beside him). The young women's "beauty-spots" give them a pock-marked look, as if they are suffering from smallpox or venereal disease in the illustration. The large-nosed man in cloth-cap who is ladling punch for the quartet is probably the publican himself, the Master of the Mint. The sordid company in the background, largely Cruikshank's invention, are a surly-looking lot, smoking heavily, if one may judge from the clouds of tobacco-smoke surrounding them. "The Laws of the Island of Bermuda," also not mentioned by Ainsworth, may be Cruikshank's attempt to show that the Mint during this period was a law unto itself, and for all that it is in London might be across the Atlantic.

References

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. A Romance. With 28 illustrations by George Cruikshank. In three volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1839.

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Jack Sheppard. Edited by Edward Jacobs and Manuela Mourao. With 31 illustrations. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007.

Clark, Kenneth. Chapter 10, "The Smile of Reason." Civilisation. London: BBC and John Murray, 1969, rpt. 1975. Pp. 244-267.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; Chapman and Hall, 1846.

Meisel, Martin. Chapter 13, "Novels in Epitome." Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Pp. 247-282.

Sutherland, John. "Jack Sheppard" in The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19893. Pp. 323-324.

Vann, J. Don. "Jack Sheppard in Bentley's Miscellany, January 1839 — February 1840." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Page 19.

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Last modified 22 December 2016