the romantic history of Newgate: introductions

Architectural drawing of rebuilt Newgate Prison, along with floorplan, designed by George Dance, 1800. Source: British Museum

If someone’s only point of reference for historical romance was Jane Austen as the ur-text and maybe Bridgerton as the legacy, they might be surprised by just how replete the genre is with crime. The same things that make true crime compelling, like the salacious voyeurism on both victims and enactors of violence and the added drama of the threat of legal consequences, provide for interesting plot devices, even in a story that centers on romance. Criminality is used to make a love forbidden, or to signal who the villain is, or to give the couple something to overcome together, like a false accusation or a stint in prison, or at least the threat of one. Based on my personal reading, I would guess about a third of all the historical romance novels I have read deal with some level of criminal procedure--ranging from a false accusation of stealing a necklace at a house party to a hero controlling the black market in London to actual murder. 

By way of this pretty consistent theme of criminal activity, a smaller subset of romances involve actual incarceration for crimes. This can happen off page as background to the conflict, where a character has been released from custody or escaped. A character can be incarcerated as the climax of the conflict. Given that so much of historical romance is written in a period of about 120 years in England, one prison seems to be written about as the setting for these incarcerations more than any other: Newgate Prison in London. 

I think it might be hard for contemporary Americans to capture the level of notoriety of Newgate while it was an active prison. I have been reading about this for weeks and have struggled myself to grasp the pervasiveness, consistently surprised by how often it comes up in literature. Certain US prisons here have cultural and literary connotations--Alcatraz, notorious for being inescapable, until it wasn’t; Attica, most closely associated with prison riots and the prisoners’ rights movement; Rikers, a pre-detention facility in New York that is often used as a threat in the Law and Order universe, has more recently become notorious for the volume of deaths that occur within its walls and its human rights violations. 

Newgate seems to unite and surpass all of these examples of shorthand meaning for something of the people of London in the 120 years of its modern iteration. To invoke Newgate is to reference something beyond criminality or just punishment; there is a signaling of terror and grime, but some misplaced glamor and intrigue associated with those who escaped or bested the prison or just the notorious crimes that they committed. It also signals the community’s interest in this salacious topic, alongside the growing industrialization of the country at the time and changing notions of what it means for a society to incarcerate part of its population. 

I think Newgate falls somewhere between Bedlam/bedlam (the slang term for Bethlem Royal Hospital, the psychiatric hospital with a similar historical trajectory as Newgate, with medieval origins, but early modern and Victorian notoriety, so evocative that the name has become divorced from its proper noun origins) and Whitechapel (the working class Jewish neighborhood in London that was the site of the Jack the Ripper murders at the end of the 19th century) in the scale at which it pervades cultural consciousness with a singular meaning. The Clink, another prison in London, might reign supreme on its name becoming the generic version of it signified, but both prisons were destroyed in the Gordon Riots of 1780¹ and only Newgate was rebuilt, cementing its more developed contemporary legacy during the Victorian period. 

From the Oxford English Dictionary entry on Newgate, the word itself also became shorthand for any prison: “a common name for al (sic) prisons, as Homo is a common name for a man or woman.”² The word could also be used metaphorically, as in “My Newgate is my Want of Wit,” from Henry Lawes’ The Treasury of Musick (1669). Shakespeare used it as an adjective to describe a style of marching in Henry IV, Pt. 1 (two by two).

Part of the notoriety of Newgate in London comes from its geographical involvement in executions, first as an embarkation point to Tyburn, an execution site, and then as the site of executions themselves. These public spectacles were a part of London life, both in the event sense, but also in the literary sense, as even those Londoners who did not attend the “Newgate drops” of the hangings could read about the happenings in the prison, in the “Newgate Calendar.”³ 

Newgate as a concept was so popular that a whole subgenre of fiction developed called “the Newgate Novel,” which drew inspiration from the events in the Newgate Calendar. These genre fiction outputs focused on a life of crime, elevating the events for a melodramatic effect. Books that were precedents to penny dreadfuls and crime novels, but also a book like Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, focused on a gang of pickpockets and Bill Sikes, robber and murderer, would be considered Newgate novels. Unsurprisingly, given its outsized presence in 19th century literature, Newgate also appears in modern romance novels set in 19th century England. Evoking Newgate places these outings of genre fiction in line with a heritage of Henry Fielding, Daniel Defore, and Charles Dickens, along with lesser known authors whose works have been relegated to pulpy genre fictions reputations, like Thomas Gaspey and William Harriosn Ainsworth. 

But when modern romance novelists use Newgate, how are they using it as a symbol and what meaning does a modern reader derive from it? What is the current cultural conception of Newgate and how does that relate to both the historical prison and the history of it in literature? Newgate’s history runs parallel to the development of the modern conception of incarceration as a punishment in and of itself. And the timeline of the modern iteration of romance novels runs next to radical analysis and critiques of this carceral system. 

This series will come in a few parts, one every couple of weeks. But the aim is to examine the history of incarceration and discuss changes in the cultural conception and justification of the practice that were occurring during the period when so many historical romance novels are set and then take a look at how prison, mostly focused on Newgate itself, has been invoked in the last fifty years of historical romance. 

The first part will be an overview of the history of prison and early modern theories of punishment. I will be discussing Foucault at length, apologies!

1. Anti-Catholic riots in London that lasted a week and involved the destruction of many government buildings and Catholic churches. Rioters were being held in The Clink and Newgate prisons and they were destroyed as a means of escape.

2. T. Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (1592).

3. This linked website had digitized copies of the Newgate Calendar and lists it, along with the Bible, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Pilgrim’s Progress as books likely to be found in the 19th century British home.