Editing Jack Sheppard (section)

== Early life ==
Sheppard was born in White's Row, in [[London]]'s [[Spitalfields]].<ref name="moore31">Moore, p.31.</ref><ref>Lynch, para.2.</ref> He was baptised on 5 March, the day after he was born, at [[St Dunstan's, Stepney]], suggesting a fear of [[infant mortality]] by his parents, perhaps because the newborn was weak or sickly.<ref name="moore31"/> His parents named him after an older brother, John, who had died before Sheppard's birth.<ref name="moore31"/> In life, he was better known as Jack, or even "Gentleman Jack" or "Jack the Lad". He had a second brother, Thomas, and a younger sister, Mary. Their father, a [[carpenter]], died while Sheppard was young, and his sister died two years later.<ref name="moore31"/>
[[File:1870 WychStreet Engraving.jpg|thumb|left|An engraving of Wych Street, from about 1870]]
Unable to support her family without her husband's income, Jack's mother sent him to Mr Garrett's School, a [[workhouse]] near [[St Helen's Bishopsgate]], when he was six years old.<ref name="moore31"/> Sheppard was sent out as a parish apprentice to a cane-chair maker, taking a settlement of 20 [[shilling]]s, but his new master soon died. He was sent out to a second cane-chair maker, but Sheppard was treated badly.<ref name="moore38">Moore, p.38.</ref> Finally, when Sheppard was 10 years old, he went to work as a shop-boy for William Kneebone, a wool [[draper]] with a shop on the [[Strand, London|Strand]].<ref name="moore33">Moore, p.33.</ref> Sheppard's mother had been working for Kneebone since her husband's death. Kneebone taught Sheppard to read and write and [[apprentice]]d him to a carpenter, Owen Wood, in [[Wych Street]], off [[Drury Lane]] in [[Covent Garden]]. Sheppard signed his seven-year [[indenture]] on 2 April 1717.<ref name="moore33"/>

By 1722, Sheppard was showing great promise as a carpenter. Aged 20, he was a small man, only {{convert|5|ft|4|in|m|abbr=on}} and lightly built, but deceptively strong. He had a pale face with large, dark eyes, a wide mouth and a quick smile. Despite a slight [[stutter]], his wit made him popular in the taverns of Drury Lane.<ref name="moore96">Moore, p.96.</ref> He served five unblemished years of his apprenticeship but then began to become involved with crime.

Joseph Hayne, a button-moulder who owned a shop nearby, also managed a [[tavern]] named the Black Lion off Drury Lane, which he encouraged the local apprentices to frequent.<ref name="moore98">Moore, p.98.</ref> The Black Lion was visited by criminals such as [[Joseph Blake (criminal)|Joseph "Blueskin" Blake]], Sheppard's future partner in crime, and self-proclaimed "Thief-Taker General" [[Jonathan Wild]], secretly the boss of a criminal gang which operated across London and later Sheppard's implacable enemy.

According to Sheppard's autobiography, he had been an innocent until going to Hayne's tavern, but there began a preference for strong drink and the affections of Elizabeth Lyon, a [[prostitute]] also known as Edgworth Bess (or Edgeworth Bess) from her place of birth at [[Edgware|Edgeworth]] in [[Middlesex]]. In his ''History'', Defoe records that Bess was "a main lodestone in attracting of him up to this Eminence of Guilt".<ref name="gutenberg">Defoe, ''History''.</ref> Such, Sheppard claimed, was the source of his later ruin.<ref>Defoe's ''History'' reports that he called Edgworth Bess "the sole author of all his misfortunes" and said he "cared not what became of her".</ref> [[Peter Linebaugh]] offers a more politicised version: that Sheppard's sudden transformation was a liberation from the dull drudgery of indentured labour and that he progressed from pious servitude to self-confident rebellion and [[Levellers|Levelling]].<ref>Linebaugh, Ch.1. "The Common Discourse of the Whole Nation: Jack Sheppard and the Art of Escape", in ''The London Hanged'', pp.7–42. On the comparison with the [[Levellers]], see p.164.</ref>