The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great

Summary

The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, published in 1743 as the third volume of Henry Fielding's Miscellanies, is a mock biography of a real criminal. The historical Wild, hanged at Tyburn in 1725, ran London's trade in stolen goods while posing as a thief-taker who recovered property for a fee. Fielding keeps the name, the gallows and the double game of informer and receiver, but invents most of the incidents, and his narrator writes the life in the grave manner of Plutarch or Suetonius, as though Wild stood beside Alexander and Caesar. The joke carries a thesis, laid down in the first chapter: greatness consists in bringing mischief on mankind, goodness in removing it. Whenever the narrator calls Wild GREAT, the reader must translate the word as rogue. Book I follows Wild's breeding, his schooling in cards and theft under Count La Ruse, the first division of booty in which he takes the lion's share, and his courtship of Laetitia Snap, the bailiff's daughter whose show of chastity hides other lovers. In Book II Wild meets his old schoolfellow Thomas Heartfree, an honest jeweller, and with La Ruse cheats him of a casket of jewels; the loss ruins him. Wild then persuades Mrs Heartfree to carry the remaining stock to Holland, assaults her at sea, and is cast adrift in an open boat by a French privateer, surviving by luck. Book III sets Heartfree's prayerful patience against Wild's marriage, his quarrels with Laetitia, and his plot, worked through the perjurer Fireblood, to charge Heartfree with having sent his wife away with his effects to defraud his creditors, a capital crime. Book IV moves to Newgate, where Wild topples the prison boss Roger Johnson and plunders the debtors. Heartfree is reprieved at the last moment after a careful magistrate presses Fireblood into confessing, and Mrs Heartfree returns with a long tale of adventures and a diamond of great value. Wild, caught by a new law against stealing "with the hands of other people", swallows laudanum that fails to kill him, rides to Tyburn after a bumper of brandy, and picks the chaplain's pocket on the scaffold. The satire reaches past the underworld. In the early 1740s "the Great Man" was a common nickname for Sir Robert Walpole, and Wild's gang politics, with its quarrels over hats, its factions and its bought loyalty, parodies ministerial power, though Fielding's target widens to conquerors and statesmen of every age. The Heartfrees are the book's counterweight: their goodness looks silly only to a reader who has accepted Wild's measure of a man.

Plot or Argument

• Book I: A Great Man is bred

  After a mock-learned chapter on the uses of biography and a pedigree raked "out of the rubbish of antiquity", Wild grows up a pickpocket, learns cards and cheating from Count La Ruse, and gathers his first gang. The division of booty with Bagshot shows his first principle: the planner takes most of what the hands have risked their necks to steal. His courtship of Laetitia Snap is played as heroic romance while she entertains other lovers in her closet.

• Book II: The casket and the open boat

  Wild renews friendship with Thomas Heartfree, a good-natured jeweller, and with La Ruse arranges to buy jewels on credit and then rob the goods back; the scheme collapses Heartfree into debt. While Heartfree is held at the bailiff Snap's house, Wild persuades Mrs Heartfree to flee to Holland with the remaining stock, attempts to force her aboard ship, and is set adrift by the French captain who takes the vessel. He throws himself into the sea, is picked up, and comes home to new schemes, including a faction fight over the shape of hats that parodies party politics.

• Book III: Heartfree's patience and Wild's marriage

  Heartfree, alone, reasons his way through ruin in a soliloquy on toys "from the rattle to the throne" and on trust in Providence. Wild marries Laetitia, and a fortnight later the couple trade insults in a matrimonial dialogue. Wild then contrives, with the young perjurer Fireblood, to accuse Heartfree of conveying his wife and effects abroad to cheat his creditors, and Heartfree is arrested at play with his children. Wild crushes a mutiny by the gang member Blueskin by informing on him.

• Book IV: Newgate and the tree of glory

  Caught by a statute against receiving, Wild enters Newgate, overthrows the reigning boss Roger Johnson, and fleeces the debtors, one of whom compares a great man in society to a wolf in a sheepfold. Heartfree is condemned, but on the day of execution a reprieve arrives because the magistrate has pressed Fireblood into confessing. Mrs Heartfree narrates her captivity, shipwreck and rescue. Wild, after a comic dialogue with the Ordinary of Newgate, attempts suicide with laudanum, then goes to Tyburn amid stones and cheers.

• The character and the fifteen maxims

  The final chapter assembles Wild's portrait and the maxims found in his study after death, among them that virtues, like jewels, are easily counterfeited. The narrator closes by comparing Wild with Alexander and Caesar, records the restoration of the Heartfrees, called by their neighbours the family of love, and observes that any man can be honest but hardly one in a thousand a complete rogue.

Characters

• Jonathan Wild, protagonist and ironic hero

  Thief, receiver and gang master whose cunning, ambition and contempt for good-nature the narrator praises as greatness; he betrays friends, wife and gang alike and is hanged unrepentant.

• Thomas Heartfree, foil

  Wild's schoolfellow, a London jeweller of open and generous temper, ruined by Wild's frauds and nearly hanged on his perjured evidence; his trust looks foolish by Wild's standard and admirable by the reader's.

• Mrs Heartfree, wife and narrator of her own adventures

  Lured abroad by Wild and assaulted at sea, she survives captivity and shipwreck, resists further attempts on her honour, and returns in time to see her husband vindicated.

• Count La Ruse, mentor in fraud

  A gamester and sharper who teaches the young Wild and then becomes his rival in cheating Heartfree; the closing chapter reports his end on the wheel in France.

• Laetitia (Tishy) Snap, wife

  The bailiff's daughter, outwardly prudish and inwardly free, who marries Wild and matches him in contempt; their marriage is a battle of two great souls.

• Mr Snap, bailiff

  Laetitia's father, keeper of the sponging-house where Heartfree is held for debt.

• Fireblood, Wild's tool and perjurer

  A young gang member, called Wild's Achates, who swears false evidence against Heartfree and whose later confession to a magistrate saves him.

• Blueskin, rebel in the gang

  A butcher turned robber who refuses to surrender a stolen watch and is handed to the law by Wild as an example to the rest.

• Friendly, Heartfree's apprentice

  Faithful helper who stands by the family in prison and later marries Heartfree's elder daughter.

• The Ordinary of Newgate, prison chaplain

  A clergyman who preaches hell-fire to Wild by rote, prefers punch to wine because Scripture never names it, and flees the scaffold when stones begin to fly.

Lessons

• Translating the word GREAT

  Fielding's narrator never stops praising Wild, so the book can only be read by translation: each tribute to greatness names a vice. The first chapter supplies the key, and the last chapter turns the same vocabulary on Alexander and Caesar. Learning to hear praise as accusation trains students to examine the words a culture uses to honour power.

  • Pick three places where the narrator calls Wild GREAT. What plain word would you put in its place each time?
  • Why does Fielding open with a serious-sounding chapter on Plutarch and the uses of biography before beginning the life of a thief?
  • Where, if anywhere, does the narrator drop the ironic voice, and what changes when he does?

• Heartfree's good nature on trial

  Heartfree is introduced as one of the "pitiful order of mortals" called good-natured, little fish put into a pike-pond. The story then tests that description: his soliloquy in Book III reasons his way to patience under Providence, and his family ends as the "family of love". Fielding argues through the Heartfrees that goodness is not stupidity, though it can be imprudent.

  • Is Heartfree's trust in Wild a virtue, a weakness, or both? Use the casket episode in Book II.
  • In his soliloquy Heartfree says reason does not forbid sorrow but weighs things at their worth. How does this differ from Stoic indifference?
  • Why might Fielding have needed a good character in a satire, even at the cost of unity?

• The prompter behind the curtain

  In Book III, Ch. 11 Fielding compares the great man to the master of a puppet show who moves the figures while staying out of sight; Wild ruins Heartfree through Fireblood and rules his gang through fear and informing. The image asks where responsibility lies when evil is done by proxy, and the Newgate debtors' debate in Book IV shows how a crowd can expel one tyrant only to install another.

  • Who is more guilty for Heartfree's arrest, Wild or Fireblood? Defend your answer from the text.
  • The grave debtor in Book IV, Ch. 3 says a great man in society is like a wolf in a sheepfold. What remedy does he propose, and is it realistic?
  • How does the quarrel over hats in Book II parody political parties?

• An unrepentant death at Tyburn

  Wild prepares for death with a bottle, false witnesses and a chaplain who preaches by rote and loves punch. The satire falls on a hollow ministry, not on the doctrines of judgment and mercy, which Heartfree's prayers take seriously. Fielding's closing irony, that a man may go to heaven with half the pains it costs to purchase hell, makes the gallows scene a sermon in reverse.

  • What does the Ordinary actually say to Wild, and what does he fail to do?
  • Why does Wild pick the chaplain's pocket on the scaffold, and what does the bottle-screw tell us about him?
  • Compare Heartfree's preparation for death with Wild's. What does each man believe about what comes after?

Context

The real Jonathan Wild (c. 1682–1725) controlled gangs of thieves while advertising himself as a recoverer of stolen goods, and was hanged at Tyburn under a statute making receivers liable like the thieves themselves; his career had already been written up after his death, including an account attributed to Defoe. By the early 1740s "the Great Man" was a stock nickname for Sir Robert Walpole, whose long ministry ended in February 1742, and opposition writers including Fielding had long compared ministers to highwaymen, as John Gay had in The Beggar's Opera (1728).

Composition

Published in spring 1743 as the third volume of Fielding's subscribed Miscellanies. A reference to Peter Pounce in Book II shows that at least part was written after Joseph Andrews (1742), though the book may have been planned earlier. In the preface to the Miscellanies Fielding warned that his hero was not meant as a faithful portrait of the real Wild. A revised edition appeared in 1754, the year of Fielding's death; by then he had served for years as a Bow Street magistrate.

Reception

Contemporary interest centred on the political allusion. Later judgments divided sharply: Walter Scott found little in it beyond a picture of complete vice, while George Saintsbury called it the greatest thing Fielding wrote, and Austin Dobson placed it just after the three major novels. Critics have often noted that the Heartfree chapters, especially Mrs Heartfree's long narrative of adventures, break the ironic unity of the satire.

Comparisons

• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

  Tom Jones (1749) gives Fielding's positive ideal of good nature, warm and fallible, where Wild gives its exact negative; Blifil, who wears virtue as a mask, is a drawing-room cousin of Wild's maxim that counterfeit virtues adorn as well as real ones.

• Amelia

  Amelia (1751) returns to Newgate and the London courts after Fielding had become a magistrate, treating the prison and venal justice with a sober pity that the earlier book reserves for the Heartfrees alone.

• Gulliver's Travels

  Swift and Fielding both expose political greatness by shifting the scale, Swift through Lilliput's rope-dancing ministers and Fielding by making a gang boss speak the language of statesmen; Swift's irony is wider, Fielding's more concentrated on a single career.

• Oliver Twist

  Dickens's Fagin plays the same role of receiver and informer who sends boys out to steal and gives up the ones who threaten him, but Dickens writes sentiment and melodrama where Fielding keeps an ironic distance from his thief.

• Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

  Fielding's first chapter appeals to Plutarch, Nepos and Suetonius as models of biography, and the whole book parodies the parallel-lives method by setting Wild beside Alexander and Caesar and finding him their equal.

• Macbeth

  Both trace a career of ambition through betrayal of friends to a public death; Shakespeare lets Macbeth feel the horror of what he has become, while Fielding denies Wild any such interior and keeps the reader outside, laughing.

• The Beggar's Opera (John Gay)

  Gay's 1728 ballad opera, in which the receiver Peachum is modelled partly on Wild, is the obvious precedent; Fielding even pauses in Book IV to insist that Heartfree's reprieve is more probable than the one that ends Gay's play.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Book I, Ch. 1, where the narrator defines greatness and goodness. Keep that definition beside you; every later use of the word GREAT depends on it.
• The division of booty in Book I, Ch. 8, where Wild takes most of the spoil from the men who stole it. The same move recurs with Heartfree, the gang and the Newgate debtors.
• Heartfree's soliloquy in Book III, Ch. 2. It is the one long passage the narrator mocks in the chapter title and then lets stand without irony.
• The puppet-show digression in Book III, Ch. 11, where the great man is the hidden master who works the figures.
• Wild's last morning in Book IV, Ch. 14: the laudanum, the brandy, the stones, and the bottle-screw.

Key terms and names

Prig

Eighteenth-century thieves' cant for a thief; Fielding uses priggism as the underworld word for what the narrator calls greatness.

Great Man

Ironic title for Wild and a familiar political nickname of the period for the chief minister, Sir Robert Walpole.

Thief-taker

A private agent paid to recover stolen goods or catch thieves; the real Wild used the role to cover his trade as a receiver.

Sponging-house

A bailiff's house where debtors were held before being sent to prison; Heartfree is kept at Snap's.

Ordinary of Newgate

The chaplain of Newgate prison, charged with preparing the condemned for death.

Tyburn

The place of public execution west of London; Fielding calls the gallows the tree of glory.

Good-nature

In Fielding, a settled disposition to feel for others and do them good; Wild treats it as the chief obstacle to greatness.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How do Wild and Count La Ruse ruin Heartfree in Book II, and what part does the casket of jewels play?
2. Comprehension What false charge do Wild and Fireblood bring against Heartfree, and how is it finally exposed?
3. Comprehension How does Wild become master of Newgate, and what do the debtors gain by helping him?
4. Interpretation Fielding titles Heartfree's soliloquy as full of low and base ideas without a syllable of greatness. What does the chapter title want us to conclude about the narrator's scale of values?
5. Interpretation Why does Fielding make Wild's marriage to Laetitia a running quarrel rather than a romance, and what does it reveal about love between two people who both live by Wild's maxims?
6. Interpretation The closing chapter compares Wild favourably with Alexander and Caesar. Is this fair to them, unfair, or the point of the whole book?
7. Big Question If success and fame are not proof of greatness, what is, and how should a society decide whom to honour?

Faith Connections

• Isaiah 5:20 (Scripture)

  The prophet pronounces woe on those who call evil good and good evil. Fielding's narrator does exactly this for four books, and the reader's task is to refuse each exchange of names, beginning with the word great.

• Matthew 20:25-27 (Scripture)

  Jesus contrasts rulers who lord it over others with the disciples, among whom whoever would be great must be a servant. Wild's career is the first half of the saying acted out; the Heartfrees' household quietly enacts the second.

• Augustine, City of God IV.4 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine asks what kingdoms are without justice but great robber bands, and tells of the pirate who told Alexander they differed only in scale. Fielding's final comparison of Wild with Alexander is the same argument turned into a comic biography.

• Plutarch, Parallel Lives (Great Conversation)

  Plutarch wrote lives to show virtue and vice in great men. Fielding borrows the form to praise a thief, and the parody depends on readers who know what the form was meant to do.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The world honours as great those who gain power by bringing mischief on others; Wild gains and keeps power by exactly the same means, differing from conquerors and ministers only in scale and in ending on the gallows; Heartfree, whom the world calls silly, removes mischief and is finally restored; therefore greatness as the world reckons it is roguery with a better reputation, and goodness is the only standard by which a life should be praised.

Rhetorical device: sustained irony (mock-heroic praise). In Book IV, Ch. 14 the hanging is called Wild's "apotheosis" and "the highest consummation of human greatness", so that the language of glory describes a thief's execution and exposes itself.

Debate: Resolved: Heartfree's trust in Wild was a moral failing and not merely a misfortune.

Memory Work

greatness consists in bringing all manner of mischief on mankind, and goodness in removing it from them

Writing Prompts

Essay: Fielding's narrator never openly condemns Wild until the final chapter. Argue how the book nevertheless makes its moral judgment clear, using the division of booty in Book I, the puppet-show digression in Book III, and the scaffold scene in Book IV.

Comparison with The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling: Compare Wild with Blifil in Tom Jones as two men who use the appearance of virtue for selfish ends. Which novel makes feigned virtue more menacing, and why does Fielding give one a hanging and the other only disgrace?

Medical Lens

Medicine is incidental to the satire, but several episodes record ordinary eighteenth-century practice: a condemned man's attempt to escape the gallows with laudanum, drink as the prisoner's anaesthetic, and bleeding as the routine response to a fainting fit or a shock of joy. The Ordinary's complaint of the gravel (urinary stones) is a period joke that assumes readers knew the disorder well.

• Book IV, Ch. 14

  On the morning of his execution Wild takes a quantity of laudanum to "retire quietly off the stage", but the dose fails and he is carted to Tyburn; the narrator plays on poppy and hemp.

  Opium Laudanum Suicide
• Book IV, Ch. 12–13

  Facing trial and sentence, Wild turns to the bottle for courage; the Ordinary declines wine but takes punch, recommending it for his gravel.

  Alcohol
• Book IV, Ch. 5

  At news of Heartfree's reprieve, with Mrs Heartfree recovering from a dead faint, a surgeon present is employed to bleed all three of the overjoyed friends.

  Bloodletting Physicians Doctors
• Book III, Ch. 13

  Wild's fear that any member of his gang would hang him for five shillings constantly breaks his rest, a portrait of greatness as chronic vigilance.

  Sleep Insomnia

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Rewrite one of Wild's fifteen maxims as a sincere rule of conduct by reversing it, then explain in a paragraph which version Heartfree actually lived by and where the book shows it.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation Fielding omits between the magistrate and Fireblood before the confession, showing how a careful justice draws truth from a perjurer without bribing him.

• Fiction

  Tell the Book II episode of the open boat from Mrs Heartfree's point of view, keeping to what the text establishes about the French captain and Wild's conduct.

• Classroom

  Hold a mock Newgate election in which one student argues for Roger Johnson, one for Wild, and a third delivers the grave debtor's speech against replacing one great man with another.

Further Reading

• The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Henry Fielding

  Fielding's fullest picture of good nature.

• Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding

  Written in the same years; Peter Pounce is mentioned in Wild, Book II.

• The Beggar's Opera, John Gay

  The 1728 ballad opera of thieves and statesmen.

• Henry Fielding: A Life, Martin C. Battestin with Ruthe R. Battestin

• Henry Fielding, Austin Dobson

  Cited in the introduction to the attached text.

• Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild, Gerald Howson

  Life of the historical Wild.