the public, which seemed always eager to buy back what was already
theirs. He reached this public by means of advertisements in the
Daily Courant, the Post-Boy, the Gazette, and the Daily Post. As
Defoe puts it: “If any Thing was Lost (whether by Negligence in the
Owner, or Vigilance and Dexterity in the Thief) away we went to
Jonathan Wild. Nay, Advertisements were Publish’d, directing the
Finder of almost every Thing, to bring it to Jonathan Wild, who was
eminently impower’d to take it, and give the Reward.”1 Soon the
owners of missing things would themselves be placing advertisements
in the hope that a deal with the thief might be brokered. But
they had to make sure that their messages ended with the promise of
a substantial reward and the magic words, no questions asked;
otherwise the process of redemption would never begin. As for the
missing articles, “seldom or never [would they be] heard of any
more.”2 There are two common assumptions about Wild’s enterprise
I want to tackle and to modify. The first is that he was a kind of supercapitalist,
extending exchange and profit across the boundary dividing
legal exchange from illicit deals. Certainly this is how Fielding
regarded him, a sort of nefarious factory-owner of the underworld
commanding the maximum number of hands to labor purely for his
benefit. The second assumption is that the advertisements of the kind
Wild pioneered were precursors to or outriders of the formal realism
of the early novel, exhibiting in miniature the techniques of narrative
developed by authors concerned, in Ian Watt’s phrase, to bring “an
object home to us in all its concrete particularity.