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Invitation To A Hanging

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On 16th November 1724, 200,000 Londoners - a third of the city's population - lined the streets to watch the open cart that carried Jack Sheppard to Tyburn to be hanged.

On 16th November 1724, 200,000 Londoners - a third of the city's population - lined the streets to watch the open cart that carried Jack Sheppard to Tyburn to be hanged. The inspiration for The Beggar's Opera, by the time of his execution Sheppard had become a legend. To the King he was 'a very dangerous man', but to the ordinary people of London, he represented 'the personification of liberty' and the epitome of the dashing highwayman and robber, the outlaw as hero. One of London's working poor, Sheppard was born to live the kind of life so efficiently described by Hobbes as 'poor, nasty, brutish and short'. The second film in the Georgian Underworld season, Invitation to a Hanging recounts Sheppard's life of crime, his numerous audacious prison escapes and his imprisonment on death row. In doing so, it brings to life the world of Hogarth and Defoe (both of whom knew Sheppard) and opens the door into London's 18th Century underworld; a jungle of brothels, gin cellars, gaming dens and doss houses.

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