Jack Sheppard (Annotated)

William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard (1839) is a vivid Newgate novel that transforms the career of the celebrated eighteenth-century housebreaker into a fast-paced romance of crime, confinement, and spectacular escape. Drawing on criminal biography, popular theatre, and Gothic melodrama, Ainsworth stages London's underworld with theatrical energy, setting the agile, charismatic Sheppard agai...