'Lower Leads' and 'The Highest Leads and the Leads of the Turner's House'

Two steel-engraved plates by George Cruikshank illustrating William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, showing the famous thief's rooftop escapes from Newgate Prison. The upper scene depicts a figure scaling a wall above stone stairs; the lower opens across a panorama of London chimney-stacks and pitched roofs, a cloaked figure darting across the leads. Cruikshank's cross-hatched line work — crisp, theatrical, built for wood-engraved reproduction — descends directly from Hogarth's narrative sequences and Rowlandson's comic vignettes. His sequential page layouts, pairing images with captions below, are a structural ancestor of the comic strip: discrete panels, implied motion, text anchoring scene. The Sheppard illustrations romanticized a working-class criminal hero for a popular audience, a populist impulse that would animate penny dreadfuls and eventually the superhero genre.