Confessions of the Fox

Jonathan Wild was a historic figure who lived from the early 1680s to 1725. Among his many titles was “Thief-Taker General.” Wild ran a vast criminal empire while simultaneously working as an anti-crime official for the city of London. Wild’s state-sanctioned “thief taker” gangs acted as a proto-police force that could arrest people with impunity. Wild earned a massive amount of money for each thief turned in, resulting in many innocent people being sentenced to hang for thefts they did not commit. Wild was partly responsible for the increasingly draconian and oppressive laws around property in London that are at the heart of the conflict in Confessions. Wild profited immensely from these laws, so he encouraged them and stoked moral panics about theft for his benefit. In 1725, a year after Wild orchestrated Sheppard’s hanging, he was himself executed. Wild was caught breaking one of his employees out of prison, yet he was tried not for the prison break but for stealing lace along the way. The incredibly oppressive property laws that Wild had helped create meant that his body became the property of the state after his death. Wild’s skeleton now hangs in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London as an anatomical display. Wild was known to collect grisly mementos from the executions he orchestrated and to buy pieces of famous criminals on the illegal market (Silver. “The Skeleton of Jonathan Wild.” The Mind Is a Collection).

The historical Wild ran a lost-and-found racket out of his offices, The Lost Property Office. Rosenberg reimagines this as the “House of Waste” and combines it with Wild’s trophy room. Wild would have his thieves steal an object, then the owner would come to his office looking to have their stolen goods found, and then Wild would produce the object via his thieving employee. The thief shared in the profits and Wild gained a reputation for quelling the spike in theft that he was in fact secretly causing. Wild in the novel is obsessed with efficiency and profit. Rosenberg imagines Wild as a self-styled entrepreneur who engages in lively debates about the nature of capitalistic commerce (174-79). Rosenberg positions Wild as a capitalist creating profit in the new market of criminality in ways that were not seen before the 18th century. Wild leverages human capital (his gangs both legal and illegal) and London’s fears about theft at the height of its imperialistic power. The laws around property and theft that turned London into what we would recognize as a modern city set the stage for Wild to create a business out of legally sanctioned crime.

Wild’s intentions for the Poor Maria and his dissection of criminal bodies are all metaphorical extensions of his historical entrepreneurial endeavors. Wild relied on exploiting petty thieves like Sheppard and Blake, who were often marginalized due to race, class status, gender, sexuality, and so on. Wild exploits vulnerable criminals for their labor and then plans to use their bodies to make an elixir to sell back to his wealthy clientele as a substitute for coffee. Wild wants the criminals’ bodies to help spur the businessmen and stock traders to work extremely long hours all days of the week, thus increasing the productivity of business. Wild’s legal ownership over the bodies of criminals reflects the understanding that businesses owned the bodies and labor of their workers (see the Cabbage Act, 249-50, or the indictment against idling without laboring, 35). Rosenberg’s version of Wild serves as a central figure for the increasingly harsh privatization of public life in 18th-century England as well as its obsession with economic productivity.