Nobody's got Jenny right, though: she's halfway between Brenda Ann Spencer, the sub-adolescent 16 year-old whose explanation for shooting up the Grover Cleveland Elementary School inspired "I Don't Like Mondays", killing two adults and injuring eight kids, and Eponine, from Les Misérables: her elder sister could be Nancy from Oliver Twist, a prostitute from age 13 and clapped-out (literally) at 16. The adolescent whose rebellion goes far beyond storming up to her room, this one has no room and no shelter, but only deep revenge in her heart. In this I'm of course hearking back to the Beggar's Opera, where
Mac the Knife is born in MacHeath, and Jenny's Jenny Diver, a dip (specialist pickpocket able to "lift" something from the bottom of the deepest pocket, where others might use a knife to cut the bottom out so the contents drop through). In the original, Jenny sells MacHeath out, and so he head's Peachum's list for the next Tyburn Dance. However, the heritage was purely inspirational, in the idea that the sins of the eighteenth Century may be common to Power and not context: give the defenceless poor to rich abusers and see what happens.
What will be interesting to see over the next few months is whether the management of the criminal classes Gay and Rich attacked in the 18th Century (down to, for instance, the heirarchy on the tumbrell where the Highwayman was king of the graduates of the Court of Miracles) continues in the protection of the child abuse circles of our day: they had a go at the PM of theirs. Those of us who keep the background to Thomas Hamilton's motivation in the Dunblane shootings in mind won't be surprised at the current attempts to stifle the Parliamentary investigation.