Jonathan Wild

Jonathan Wild 1683-1725, English criminal. He maintained a highly organized gang of thieves in London and long escaped punishment by posing as an instrument of justice and helping the authorities catch other criminals independent of, or rebellious to, his control. He planned robberies and then secured rewards for helping owners recover "lost" property. His thriving business required warehouses, branch offices, artisans to make alterations, and a vessel for trade with the Continent. He was finally convicted (1725) of receiving a reward for returning some stolen lace and was hanged at Tyburn. Literary accounts of Wild's career, such as those of Fielding and Defoe, are partly fictional.

Bibliography: See W. R. Irwin, The Making of Jonathan Wild (1941); G. Howson, Thief-Taker General (1970).

Jonathan Wild the Great, The Life of, a short novel by H. Fielding, published as the third volume of his Miscellanies, 1743, based on the life of a notorious thief-taker, Jonathan Wild, who was hanged in 1725.

Fielding's hatred of hypocrisy here finds its most mordant expression. The quality Wild most values in himself and in others is ‘that of hypocrisy’. His own position as the Great Man among thieves, cheats, and bullies is constantly compared, directly and by implication, with that of the Great Man among public figures of power (with Sir Robert Walpole as a particular target), whose palaces are no more than ‘Newgate with the mask on’. The life of Fielding's Wild is traced from his birth to his death on the gallows, through a series of episodes involving robbers, highwaymen, whores, murderers, and the corrupt and brutal officers of Newgate.

Wild, Jonathan (c.1682–1725). Thief‐taker and anti‐hero. Trained as a buckle‐maker, imprisonment for debt brought Wild into contact with the underworld, then into handling stolen property. His activities prompted a statute whereby receiving a reward for returning deliberately stolen goods was an offence comparable to the felony (1718), but his delusion that his public services outweighed his crimes eventually ended at Tyburn.