Word: beggared
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...Beggar's Opera. Achievement such as Wild's does not go unnoticed, and one day in front of Old Bailey a betrayed colleague named Blueskin Blake tried to cut the Thief-Taker General's head off with a dull knife. He failed. In 1725, though, Wild was sentenced to be hanged by a corrupt judge (appropriately, on false evidence that he had received a bit of stolen lace). Wild died wealthy, though. During his career the reward for giving evidence rose from ?40 to ? 140, or from $2,000 to $7,000 in modern money, as Author...
Defoe wrote about Wild, and so did Fielding (The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great). John Gay used him as the model for Peachum ("Impeach 'em") in his Beggar's Opera. The story can stand any amount of retelling, and Howson's is full of wonderful oddments: at Old Bailey in Wild's time, trials were conducted in the open air regardless of weather; the original Jenny Diver sat in church with false, gloved hands folded primly across her stomach, while her real ones picked adjacent purses. There are also some linguistic notes: "Rattling...
...Anything You Say Will Be Twisted, by British playwright Ken Campbell, is a perfect vehicle for the Senelick style. It is one of a long series of plays and novels, among them Gay's Beggar's Opera, derived from the life of Jack Sheppard, a young thief and ruffian of early 18-century London who became a folk hero through the British love of the scurrilous and inane. This particular version of the Sheppard legend has the hero start out as a relatively innocent carpenter's apprentice and slowly immerse himself in the ways of thievetry, lechery, and general debauchery...
...rock and roll, the Stones are one of the groups most frequently cited. (The others would probably be the Airplane and John Lennon.) The idea of the Stones as a political rock and roll band seems to stem from "Street Fighting Man" and a few other cuts on Beggar's Banquet. But the words of "Street Fighting Man," aside from the title, are just the bored and decadent musings of a spoiled rock star and, under analysis, have political perceptions about as acute as "Okie From Muskogie" or "Please Please...
...damn and blast my soul!" the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown used to warn his grandson. "I will turn you straight out of my house if you go in for any kind of commercial life." But he added: "Beggar yourself rather than refuse assistance to anyone whose genius you think shows promise of being greater than your own." Ford Madox Hueffer, the old artist's grandson, was born into the Rossetti circle. After World War I he changed his Germanic last name to Ford. His achievements included the authorship of 81 books, as well as the more...