Daniel Defoe and Criminal Biography Establishment in the 18th Century ('The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild, not Made up of Fiction and Fable, but Taken from his Own Mouth, and Collected from Papers of his Own Writing', 1725)

The author investigates the problem of a criminal biography establishment as a form of event history interpretation. On the example of the famous London criminal Jonathan Wilde’s biography by D. Defoe we show how a real historical character life was being transformed into a myth that gained independent life in the collective consciousness and reflected in different spheres of artistic culture over the next centuries. Throughout the paper the writer structures the facts, leading the reader to the logical conclusion about the hero’s tragic fate. This text began to serve as a resource for subsequent discourses and representations of Wild’s image, who firmly entered the archive of London criminal mythology.