The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great

The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great is a satirical novel by Henry Fielding, first published in 1743 as part of the third volume of his Miscellanies. The work is one of the most sustained ironic performances in eighteenth century English fiction and remains one of Fielding’s most powerful satirical achievements alongside the major comic novels Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.

The historical Jonathan Wild was a famous London criminal who had operated in the early eighteenth century as a thief taker, that is, a man who pretended to be on the side of law enforcement while actually running the largest criminal organization in London. Wild orchestrated robberies through his network of street thieves, then collected reward money from the victims for returning the stolen property to them, while also occasionally turning in rival criminals to the authorities to maintain his apparent respectability. He was eventually unmasked and hanged at Tyburn in 1725 in one of the most famous criminal executions of the period.

Fielding’s satirical method in the novel is to treat Wild throughout as a man of greatness, with all the conventional rhetorical apparatus that biographies of the period applied to military conquerors, statesmen, and other heroic figures. The book is written in a sustained ironic register in which every quality conventionally associated with greatness is shown to apply equally well to Wild’s career as a master criminal. The implicit point about the moral character of conventional greatness is unmistakable and was clearly aimed at Fielding’s particular political targets including Sir Robert Walpole, the long serving Whig prime minister whose career had ended just before the book was published.

The novel is shorter and more concentrated than Fielding’s major comic novels. The satirical edge is sharper and more sustained, with very few of the warm comic interludes that lighten Tom Jones. For readers who want to see Fielding’s satirical method in its purest form, this is the essential book. It runs about two hundred pages and reads in two or three sittings.

The book has had substantial influence on later English satirical fiction, including most directly the work of Bertolt Brecht in The Threepenny Opera and various twentieth century writers working in the same ironic mode. It pairs naturally with the other works in the Miscellanies and with the longer novels.