Confessions of the Fox

Confessions of the Fox is a 2018 historical literary novel by American writer and transgender scholar Jordy Rosenberg. The 21st-century scholar and transgender man Dr. Voth finds a manuscript purporting to be the authentic confessions of Jack Sheppard, London’s most notorious thief of the 18th century, whom Rosenberg re-imagines as a transgender man. As Dr. Voth transcribes the manuscript and annotates it, he finds parallels between his life and Jack’s. Voth begins to wonder about the authenticity of the manuscript when he finds odd phrases and references in the text. A shady pharmaceutical company uses their connections to Voth’s university to strongarm him into working for their company and publishing the manuscript through their corporate press. Dr. Voth suspects that the manuscript contains a secret about the making of synthetic testosterone and that the company wishes to exploit this secret for profit while using Voth’s work as a publicity stunt. The manuscript details Jack’s life as a transgender man and his daring search for authenticity and freedom in a world of increasingly brutal political control, surveillance, and wage work. The novel deals with themes such as The Relationship Between Gender Identity, Rebellion, and Criminality; History and Knowledge Through Community; and the legacy of Economic Privatization and the Modern Prison System.

The novel was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was named a Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, and The Huffington Post. This guide uses the eBook version of the 2018 One World edition of the novel.

Content Warning: Confessions of the Fox contains explicit depictions of sexuality, gender dysphoria, misgendering of transgender characters, anti-transgender biases, physical abuse and violence, and police brutality.

Plot Summary

Dr. Voth is a humanities professor at an unnamed university that severely neglects its humanities departments. The university is busy renovating its library, gutting the floors dedicated to subjects such as anthropology, history, and literature. The university recruits students to sell these discarded books in front of the library. Perusing these books, Voth finds an un-catalogued manuscript, which a student gives him for free. The manuscript is Confessions of the Fox, an autobiography purported to be written by the legendary thief and folk hero of 18th-century London, Jack Sheppard. After Voth’s habit of playing games on his phone during office hours leads the university’s Dean of Surveillance to place him on unpaid leave, Voth uses his free time to annotate, transcribe, and understand the manuscript.

Jack’s mother is a poor woman in 18th-century London who sells him as an apprentice to the carpenter Kneebone, who abuses and misgenders Jack and keeps him under lock and key. Kneebone views Jack as his property: a tool to increase his business profits. In the ninth year of his 10-year term of servitude, Jack learns how to break out at night and begins to explore London while Kneebone sleeps. He meets Bess Kahn at the Black Lion Inn, a bar known as a haven for sex workers and thieves. Bess is a sex worker and survivor of a resistance group from the English Fens. Jack and Bess begin a relationship that helps Jack understand himself both as Jack and as a man.

Bess encourages Jack to take up thieving as a way of liberating himself from Kneebone. Jack is then framed for the theft of a watch by a fellow thief who works for Jonathan Wild. Wild is the Thief-Catcher General of London. In reality, he uses his official position with the government to manipulate the criminal underworld for his own profit through his own personal gang of thieves. Jack is placed in prison and scheduled for execution for the theft. When Jack breaks out of prison using only a loose nail, he becomes a living legend. Meanwhile, so-called “plague ships” full of quarantined crews from abroad appear on the river Thames, creating tension in the city and leading to increased police patrols.

Dr. Voth is called back to the university for a meeting with Sullivan, a representative of P-Quad Pharmaceuticals. P-Quad wants to make an all-organic testosterone supplement from pig urine, and since they cannot trademark an organic derivative, they want to publish Confessions through their publishing department as a publicity stunt for their new drug. The Dean of Surveillance pressures Voth to participate as a condition of keeping his job. Sullivan exerts heavy-handed control of Voth’s work on the manuscript, even demanding perplexingly specific descriptions of Jack’s genitals. Voth begins to suspect that P-Quad wants more from the manuscript than just publicity.

The narrative then returns to the world described in the manuscript. The increased security on the streets makes thieving hard for Jack. He and Bess decide to rob a lighthouse on the Thames. The lighthouse has seen a massive influx of goods due to the large number of quarantined ships. Jack breaks into the lighthouse and finds a strange, medicinal substance and nothing of value. Jack steals this substance and finds it has effects like those of modern-day testosterone hormone replacement therapy (HRT): He grows facial hair, his voice deepens, and he builds muscle easily. The two learn that Wild wants the medical substance, called “strength gravel,” to fund his thief-catching operations and make him obscenely rich. The gravel comes from a mutineer colony destroyed by the Royal Navy, and Wild intends to secure the last batch from the colony and smuggle it in via plague ship. Jack and Bess learn all this from one of the last surviving members of the colony, a man kept in a zoo as a “Lion-Man.” Wild intends to replicate the formula and sell it as his own creation. Bess wants to destroy the gravel, and Jack becomes paranoid that she wants to destroy his own personal stash as well. The tension over the gravel causes the two to break up and live apart. Jack lives with his friend Aurie Blake, a thief who considers Jack his brother.

Bess and her friend Jenny devise a plan to sneak aboard Wild’s plague ship to destroy the strength gravel. Meanwhile, Jack decides to break into Wild’s stronghold to discover why he wants the strength gravel. Instead of answers, he finds dissected bodies. More perplexed than ever, Jack decides to sneak onto Wild’s plague ship as well. However, before he can do so, he is arrested for the crime of picking a flower. With Aurie’s help, he stages yet another daring escape from prison.

Jack, Bess, and Jenny all sneak aboard Wild’s plague ship, Poor Maria. Jack and Bess have a short reunion before they discover that the there is no strength gravel on board. The Lion-Man has betrayed Jack and Bess to gain his own freedom, and the ship is a trap. Now captives of Wild, they learn that he has found a different way of deriving the gravel’s effects in a “strength elixir.” Wild creates this elixir with testicles harvested from dead people. He intends to use the Poor Maria to sail the seas and buy criminals and other imprisoned peoples from Europe’s nations to use as fodder for his strength elixirs. Jenny creates a distraction amongst Wild’s crew while Bess slips Jack something vital: A small metal rod and several papers rolled up around it. The final confrontation occurs in the ship’s gunpowder room, where Jack uses the opportunity to blow up the ship, hoping to kill Wild. Wild and Jack survive, and Wild hauls him off for a quick execution at Tyburn, a place infamous for its hangings.

After Jack is hanged, an enormous crowd of Londoners carries his body away to protect it from dissection. They parade the body of the legendary thief around town, treating him to drinks. After the masses bury him, Aurie digs up his body and takes him to a doctor to be revived. Jack has survived the hanging by swallowing the rod to keep his airways open and stop the rope from snapping his neck. In the aftermath, Bess and Jack reunite and decide to go live in the Fens; Jack’s execution means he can no longer stay in London. The two plan to reunite other survivors from the Fens and resist the government’s encroachment into the area. Bess and Jack examine the papers that were wrapped around the rod he swallowed: They are a recipe for the strength gravel derived through pig urine. This recipe, found at the very end of the manuscript, is what P-Quad is after.

Dr. Voth reaches the end of the manuscript and decides to go into hiding to ensure that P-Quad cannot get their hands on either the formula or the manuscript. While on the run, Voth meets other renegade scholars and archivists. He learns that many parts of the manuscript have been edited and changed. The manuscript is a living, breathing, communal document that has passed through the LGBTQ+ community for centuries, making it no longer possible to determine which parts are original and which are later additions. The document is a historical, communal story told by dozens of anonymous LGBTQ+ people. Dr. Voth makes his own contribution by adding a final line to Jack’s story, along with footnotes about his own personal life.