Hibbert .:. The Road to Tyburn

Hibbert, Christopher.
The Road to Tyburn. The Story of Jack Sheppard and the Eighteen-Century London Underworld. d, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1957. 251 Seiten mit Abbildungen, Literaturverzeichnis und Register. Leinen mit Farbkopfschnitt und Schutzumschlag. 555 g

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Bestell-Nr.155008

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Hibbert | Neuere Geschichte | Achtzehntes Jahrhundert | Grossbritannien | Soziologie | Sozialgeschichte | Pauperismus | Kriminalitaet

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The Road to Tyburn
BY CHRISTOPHER HIBBERT

This is the story of Jack Sheppard, a remarkable criminal who flourished briefly and violently in the underworld of London in the eighteenth century. He became a legend in his own lifetime and has remained one ever since.
The author has drawn from contemporary literature and legal reports a personality of enormous charm, wit, and courage whose vitality inspired widespread devotion and admiration. Nonetheless, a facile and strangely warped intelligence made of Jack Sheppard an extraordinarily successful thief and gaolbreaker. His appeal as a popular hero was such that when he was to be hanged at Tyburn at the age of twentytwo, upwards of 200,000 people gathered to cheer him along the way, hoping, vainly this time, that he would again make one of his spectacular escapes.
The Road to Tyburn, however, is more than Jack Sheppard's story. It is the description of a society in which corruption, sadism, and neglect combined to permit a powerful underworld to exist, and to tolerate a degrading and malignant penal system. The characters of Gin Lane come to life in these pages—prostitutes, pimps, degenerate constabularies and gaolkeepers, beggars, thieves, and murderers roam through the demiworld of garish color, noise, and squalor. Rapidly paced and written from a knowledge of the period that sparkles in every sentence, this account makes thoroughly absorbing if often shocking reading.

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