Jack Sheppard is a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth serially published in Bentley's Miscellany from 1839 to 1840, with illustrations by George Cruikshank. It is a historical romance and a Newgate novel based on the real life of the 18th-century criminal Jack Sheppard. The novel was intertwined with the history of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, which ran in the same publication from February 1837 to April 1839. Dickens, previously a friend of Ainsworth's, became distant from Ainsworth as a controversy brewed over the scandalous nature around Jack Sheppard, Oliver Twist, and other novels describing criminal life.