Editing Sharper (section)

{{Short description|Older term for a con artist}}
{{About||the film|Sharper (film)}}
{{No footnotes|date=January 2015}}
[[File:Jacob van Oost (I) - Card-Sharpers - WGA16648.jpg|thumb|''The card sharpers'' by [[Jacob van Oost]], 1634]]

A '''sharper''' is an older term, common since the seventeenth-century, for thieves who use trickery to part an owner with his or her money or other possessions. Sharpers vary from what are now known as [[Confidence trick|con-men]] by virtue of the simplicity of their cons, which often were impromptu, rather than carefully orchestrated, though those certainly happened as well. The 1737 ''Dictionary of Thieving Slang'' defines a sharper as "A Cheat, One who lives by his wits". In the nineteenth century, and into today, the term is more closely associated with [[gambling]].

Sharpers were romantic figures in the eighteenth-century, valued as imaginative figures for their perceived social independence and ability to create new social networks of [[gangs]]. The appeal of an independent society, operating outside the law, has been imaginatively evocative for centuries, but in eighteenth-century London philosophical thought, influenced by [[Thomas Hobbes]] and [[Rousseau]]'s new formulations of social contract, the romanticization of thievery reached new levels. [[John Gay]]'s ''[[The Beggar's Opera]]'' and [[Henry Fielding]]'s novel ''[[Jonathan Wild]]'' are only two examples of sharpers as heroes, in these cases, to provide satirical ammunition against [[Robert Walpole]], the [[British Prime Minister]].