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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.