ABSTRACT
The link between conquest or tyranny, the gangster-virtues, and the schoolboy world is close to that of Jonathan Wild, in which Alexander A. Parker and Caesar and Sir Robert Walpole, and the real-life Wild, and the fictional Wild with his schoolboy delight in the nefarious deeds of Homeric and Virgilian heroes, unite in a peculiar amalgam. Wild's relationships with women are, one of the most conspicuously recurrent examples of a process in the novel by which his sinister stature is diminished. Compare the operatic 'composition' of Blackmore's song, the crowds struck dumb 'with amaze' and admiration, and the disciplined echoes dominating the city in due and orderly rhythm, with Wild's 'heroic' end on the gallows. If strutting villains are common enough in most comic writing, the combination of strutting absurdity with Satanism, or with such extreme viciousness as Ubu Roi's, Alexander's, and by extension Wild's, is perhaps a special case.
