View source for Sharper

{{Short description|Older term for a con-artist}}
{{About||the film|Sharper (film)}}
{{No footnotes|date=January 2015}}
[[File:Jacob van Oost (I) - Card-Sharpers - WGA16648.jpg|thumb|''The Card-sharpers'' by [[Jacob van Oost]], 1634]]

The term '''sharper''' is an older word, common since the seventeenth-century, for a thief who uses trickery to part an owner with his or her money or other possessions. Sharpers vary from what are now known as [[Confidence trick|con-men]] by virtue of the simplicity of their cons, which often were impromptu, rather than carefully orchestrated, though those certainly happened as well. The 1737 ''Dictionary of Thieving Slang'' defines a sharper as "A Cheat, One who lives by his wits". The word "'''{{linktext|rook}}'''" could occur with a similar meaning.<ref>
[https://words.fromoldbooks.org/NathanBailey-CantingDictionary/r/rook.html ''A Collection of the Canting Words and Terms, both ancient and modern, used by Beggars, Gypsies, Cheats, House-Breakers, Shop-Lifters, Foot-Pads, Highway-Men, &c''; Taken from The Universal Etymological English Dictionary, by N. Bailey, London, 1737, Vol. II, and transcrib'd into XML Most Diligently by Liam Quin.] - "ROOK, a Cheat a Knave." 
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In the nineteenth century, and into today, "sharper" has become more closely associated with [[gambling]].

Sharpers had a romantic reputation in the eighteenth-century: admirers valued them as imaginative figures for their perceived social independence and ability to create new social networks of [[gangs]]. The appeal of an independent society, operating outside the law, has been imaginatively evocative for centuries, but in eighteenth-century London philosophical thought {{en dash}} influenced by [[Thomas Hobbes]] (1588-1679) and by the new formulations of [[social contract]] by [[Rousseau]]<ref>
Rousseau published his [[The Social Contract | ''Social Contract]] in 1762.
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(1712-1778) {{en dash}} the romanticization of thievery reached new levels. [[John Gay]]'s ''[[The Beggar's Opera]]'' (1728) and [[Henry Fielding]]'s novel [[The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great | ''Jonathan Wild'']] (1743) provide just two examples of sharpers as heroes {{en dash}} in these cases, to provide satirical ammunition against [[Robert Walpole]], the [[British Prime Minister]] (in office: 1721 to 1742).

==See also==
* [[Card sharp]]

==External links==
{{Wiktionary}}
*[http://rictornorton.co.uk/grubstreet/sharpers.htm Rictor Norton's eighteenth-century newspaper reports of sharpers]

== Notes ==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Thieves]]


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