enjoyed Beggar's Opera without realising that he was its intended target. Once he did realise it, he banned the sequel opera, Polly, without staging. This prompted Gay to write to a friend, "For writing in the cause of virtue and against the fashionable vices, I have become the most hated man in England almost." In 1742, Walpole lost his position of power in the British House of Commons. He was created a peer and moved to the House of Lords, from where he still directed the Whig majority in Commons for years. In 1743, Henry Fielding's The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great appeared in the third volume of Miscellanies. Fielding is merciless in his attack on Walpole. In his work, Wild stands in for Walpole directly, and, in particular, he invokes the Walpolean language of the "Great Man". Walpole had come to be described by both the Whig and then, satirically, by the Tory political writers as the "Great Man", and Fielding has his Wild constantly striving, with stupid violence, to be "Great". "Greatness," according to Fielding, is only attained by mounting to the top stair (of the gallows). Fielding's satire also consistently attacks the Whig party by having Wild choose, among all the thieves cant terms (several lexicons of which were printed with the Lives of Wild in 1725), "prig" to refer to the profession of burglary. Fielding suggests that Wild becoming a Great Prig was the same as Walpole becoming a Great Whig: theft and the Whig party were never so directly linked. The figures of Peachum and Macheath were picked up by Bertolt Brecht for his updating of Gay's opera as The Threepenny Opera. The Sheppard character, Macheath, is the "hero" of the song Mack the Knife. In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, the arch-villain Professor Moriarty is referred to as a latter-day Jonathan Wild by Holmes: In 2000, Jonathan Wild appeared as a character in the David Liss novel A Conspiracy of Paper, . Jonathan Wild is also the title character in the 2005–2006 Phantom stories "Jonathan Wild: King of Thieves" and "Jonathan Wild: Double Cross". In 2014, author Aaron Skirboll released The Thief-Taker Hangings: How Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Wild, and Jack Sheppard Captivated London and Created the Celebrity Criminal. In 2015, Jonathan Wild appeared as a character in the Paul Tobin (author) Eisner-nominated (2015) graphic novel