Jack Sheppard: A Romance
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few figures in the annals of Georgian England captured the public imagination quite like Jack Sheppard — a young carpenter's apprentice turned audacious criminal, whose repeated escapes from Newgate Prison made him a legend in his own brief lifetime. W. Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard: A Romance chronicles the turbulent life of this notorious eighteenth-century outlaw, plunging the reader into the labyrinthine streets and gin-soaked taverns of London's criminal underworld, where loyalty is a currency and the gallows loom as the inevitable horizon for those who live outside the law. Illustrated by the celebrated George Cruikshank, the novel brings its roguish hero to vivid, swaggering life through a rich tapestry of chases, imprisonments, and miraculous escapes that kept Victorian readers breathless. Ainsworth's prose carries the grand, theatrical energy of the Newgate novel tradition, placing Jack Sheppard alongside the works of Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton as a defining artefact of popular Victorian fiction. The novel caused considerable controversy upon its publication in 1839–1840, with critics warning that its romanticisation of a criminal hero bordered on the morally dangerous — a charge that only burnished its reputation and widened its readership. For those drawn to the dark glamour of Hogarthian London, the shadowy underworld of thief-takers and highwaymen, and the age-old question of whether a man born into misfortune is ever truly free to choose his own fate, Ainsworth's masterwork remains as irresistible as its hero's most daring jailbreak.
Author: W. Harrison Ainsworth
Format: Hardback
Genre: Historical fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket - some marks on spine and corners
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Few figures in the annals of Georgian England captured the public imagination quite like Jack Sheppard — a young carpenter's apprentice turned audacious criminal, whose repeated escapes from Newgate Prison made him a legend in his own brief lifetime. W. Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard: A Romance chronicles the turbulent life of this notorious eighteenth-century outlaw, plunging the reader into the labyrinthine streets and gin-soaked taverns of London's criminal underworld, where loyalty is a currency and the gallows loom as the inevitable horizon for those who live outside the law. Illustrated by the celebrated George Cruikshank, the novel brings its roguish hero to vivid, swaggering life through a rich tapestry of chases, imprisonments, and miraculous escapes that kept Victorian readers breathless. Ainsworth's prose carries the grand, theatrical energy of the Newgate novel tradition, placing Jack Sheppard alongside the works of Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton as a defining artefact of popular Victorian fiction. The novel caused considerable controversy upon its publication in 1839–1840, with critics warning that its romanticisation of a criminal hero bordered on the morally dangerous — a charge that only burnished its reputation and widened its readership. For those drawn to the dark glamour of Hogarthian London, the shadowy underworld of thief-takers and highwaymen, and the age-old question of whether a man born into misfortune is ever truly free to choose his own fate, Ainsworth's masterwork remains as irresistible as its hero's most daring jailbreak.