A People's History of London. Lindsey German

was more modest in his ‘true confessions’: ‘though people have made such an outcry about it, there is scarce a smith in London but what may easily do the same thing.’23 Richard Holmes argues that while the escapes were daring, they were comprehensible in light of ‘his outstanding skills as a carpenter and builder . . . his great physical strength combined with a small gymnastic body [which] gave him a natural mastery of building materials and an instinctive understanding of the construction (and deconstruction) of every kind of lock, wall, window, bar, spike, chimney-breast, floor, ceiling, roof or cellar.’24

      In the period between his third and fourth escapes, when he was recaptured disguised as a butcher and again imprisoned in Newgate, Daniel Defoe described the mood in the city:

      His escape and his being so suddenly retaken made such a noise in the town, that it was thought all the common people would have gone mad about him, there not being a porter to be had for love nor money, nor getting into an alehouse, for butchers, shoemakers and barbers, all engaged in controversies and wagers about Sheppard . . . Tyburn Road [was] daily lined with women and children, and the gallows as carefully watched by night lest he should be hanged incog., for a report of that nature obtained much upon the rabble. In short, it was a week of the greatest noise and idleness among mechanics that has been known in London.25

      The anticipation of Jack’s fate at the gallows was more intense than usual, but of a piece with eighteenth-century attitudes to hanging. As E. P. Thompson put it, ‘all the symbolism of “Tyburn Fair” was a ritual at the heart of London’s popular culture.’26 Executions attracted crowds with all the drama and paraphernalia of fairs and entertainments, despite their grim meaning. Tyburn was not the only place to fulfil the need for grisly spectacle. Across London, at Execution Dock in Wapping, hundreds of pirates were hanged between 1716 and 1726.27 And in what is now part of south London, Surrey’s convicts were hanged on Kennington Common.

      DISSENT BEYOND THE LAW

      The poor were not the only ones criminalized by the eighteenth-century state. Nearly any form of oppositional activity, or indeed radical thought, was made illegal. There was no democracy in Britain in the eighteenth century: the oligarchy which controlled the city and the country decreed that those who opposed its rule would be subject to the most severe repression. In the space of only eight years the Riot Act (1715), the Transportation Act (1719), the Combination Act (1721), the Workhouse Act (1723) and the Black Act (1723) all became law. Collectively they represented a determination to prevent collective forms of action among the emerging working class and labouring poor either in the form of demonstrations or trade union organization.28

      Thought crime was equally frowned upon. Those who, for whatever reason, rejected God and Priest and King were persecuted, banished, prosecuted and sometimes even executed for their beliefs. Even some who did believe in God were driven out: there was one established Church, headed by the king, and those who espoused alternative religions or ideas were not even allowed to live within the city walls. Dissenters from the Anglican Church of England were persecuted by five Acts of Parliament brought in at the Restoration and collectively known as the Clarendon Code, after Charles II’s advisor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. The Five Mile Act (1665), the final act of the Code, ruled that Dissenting ministers were forbidden from coming within five miles of incorporated towns or the place of their former livings. They were also forbidden to teach in schools. This act was not rescinded until 1812.

      While the Five Mile Act had the effect of physically removing fomenters of opposition to the establishment from the most populated parts of the city, it succeeded in establishing areas where dissenting ideas flourished. And while dissent from established ideas was effectively banned, the strength of non-conformist views of a non-religious nature also grew, gaining impetus in the second half of the century under the profound influence of first the American and then, more spectacularly, the French Revolution. This in turn had a big impact on London politics.

      In the mid 1780s Mary Wollstonecraft first came into contact with radical ideas in Newington Green, outside the limits of the Act. Here she was to encounter new ways of thinking about society, women and education that were all important themes in her most famous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She arrived in Newington Green in her mid-twenties with her sisters Eliza and Everina, and her friend Fanny Blood took on responsibility for all of them – having encouraged Eliza, who was suffering from a breakdown, to leave her husband and baby. Mary had long hoped to live with Fanny and was to take care of the financial upkeep of Fanny’s parents, with whom she had lived for some time previously near Fulham. The trio was joined by Everina who had left the home of her disapproving older brother.

      As a solution to the vulnerable situation in which the women found themselves, Wollstonecraft decided they should set up a girls’ school. The educational requirements of girls were considered to be so inferior to those of their brothers that it was quite usual for such schools to be set up by women with no educational training. However, Wollstonecraft developed an interest in radical theories of education, including those of the Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau whom she would later reproach (in A Vindication) for his advocacy of an inferior quality of education for girls – something she argued was inconsistent with Enlightenment ideas of reason. These ideas were promoted in her first book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, written at Newington Green.

      Although an Anglican, Wollstonecraft soon became acquainted with the radical circle of Dissenters that lived in and around the Green. She went to the Dissenter chapel – which remains on the Green today – to hear the sermons of Dr Richard Price. Price had supported parliamentary reform and the American independence movement, and was in contact with foreign radicals including Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps most importantly for Wollstonecraft, many Dissenters held groundbreaking ideas about women’s rights and had, in their milieu, women who defied convention and established themselves as commentators and pamphleteers on subjects including education and politics. Hungry for ideas, she made friends with John Hewlett, a local schoolmaster who introduced her to Dr Johnson, then living in nearby Islington, and Joseph Johnson, another Dissenter, interested in radicalism and ideas around education. He was also a publisher, and was to bring out Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.29