Jack Sheppard ... With illustrations by George Cruikshank. A new edition
A Newgate novel by William Harrison Ainsworth about the thief and jail-breaker Jack Sheppard, reissued in London by G. Routledge & Co. in 1854 with George Cruikshank's etchings, aimed at a broad Victorian reading public. The plates set crowded figure groups in early eighteenth-century London — shop fronts with painted signboards, barred prison gateways with pikes and lanterns, a print-hung dealer's room, a low tavern parlour with broadsides on the wall — offering lettered signage, leg-irons, tricorn-and-breeches costume and dense hatched interiors.
