Jack Sheppard Escaping Through the Chapel Doors

George Cruikshank's four-panel steel engraving sequences the legendary thief Jack Sheppard picking and forcing his way through successive locked doors at Newgate Prison — chapel entrance, chapel exit, first passage door, second passage door — each panel captioned like stage directions. The shackled, barefoot figure strains with tools against massive ironbound timber in compositions that read left-to-right, top-to-bottom with unmistakable sequential narrative logic. Cruikshank, heir to Gillray and Rowlandson's tradition of moralizing print satire, here works in illustration rather than caricature, yet the panel-grid structure anticipates newspaper comic strips directly. Sheppard was a genuine working-class folk hero; his repeated escapes from Newgate in 1724 made him a celebrity, and Victorian retellings romanticized him as roguish rebel rather than criminal — a class fantasy Cruikshank's precise, unsentimental linework quietly complicates.