Wild

- Blurb -

In the year 1698, Jonathan Wild, an apprentice bucklemaker from the bucolic English town of Wolverhampton, is drawn - in equal parts necessity, ambition and circumstance - to try his luck in London. It is the greatest metropolis in the world, and following the great fire of 1666, is a city thriving with trade, immigration and crime. Jonathan is sixteen years old and finds himself in service to Lord Uxbridge, a man renowned for his extreme wealth and connections across Europe. Uxbridge takes a tricky interest in the young Wild, who soon must decide if and how he will make his own way in the world. With a combination of greed, arrogance and ambition, Wild will stop at nothing to secure his place in the Great and Monstrous London. Within a few years, Jonathan Wild has become one of the most feared and wealthy officials in London, and appointed Thief Taker General, charged with the capture and arrest of felons for reward. Daniel Defoe, the renowned pamphleteer, fiction writer and political operative, is dead broke. Following a series of failed business ventures, Defoe must find a way to repay his creditors or he will be sent to the debtor's prison, where he will remain until he can settle his disputes. Worst of all, so weighed with anxiety over his family's future, he finds himself unable to produce writing of any worth. His patron, the Lord High Treasurer, Robert Harley, has been kind enough to introduce him to the prison keeper at Newgate, so he might interview and publish true-to-life chronicles of crime, a sure enough way for Defoe to eke out a living. He meets John Sheppard, the loved and infamous jailbird, and Jonathan Wild's nemesis.The tale of Jonathan wild has been treated many times, including by John Gay in The Beggar's Opera and Henry Fielding in Jonathan Wild. It is arguably the first historical account of organised crime, as we now know it, and exemplifies the British culture of enterprise, class and ruthlessness. Told in the language of the time, Wild navigates the lives of two men who will ultimately be brought together.