the romantic history of Newgate: topos

contemporaneous depictions

Reformed Rakes has a new episode out tomorrow and it is one of which I am really proud. We are looking at some romance novels that use Newgate as a setting and talking about the function of the space in their plots. I’m grateful to Chels and Beth for letting me lead an episode on this niche topic that I have taken up as my research focus right now.

One of my new goals is to try and connect this newsletter to the topics we’re discussing on the podcast, though really using this space as a place to talk about the far afield things that would take up too much time on the pod. It works out that I was due for a new entry in the Newgate saga as we came out with the episode.

Fagin in his Newgate cell, illustrated by George Cruikshank

Newgate has an outsized presence in 20th and 21st century romance; characters are placed in Newgate for crimes that would actually likely land them in other carceral institutions or punitive circumstances. I think part of Newgate’s continued legacy must come from its place in literature. In fact, Newgate Prison has an extended literary history, prior to any genre fiction romance. In this section of this project, I want to explore a few eighteenth and nineteenth century depictions of Newgate in English literature, including some so-called “Newgate novels,” a flash in the pan mini-genre that cropped up in the second quarter of the 19th century. 

A hybrid of social novels and melodramas, Newgate novels were published for a relatively short amount of time--basically just the end of the 1820s to the beginning of the 1840s. But they were wildly popular, taking inspiration from the Newgate Calendar and adding narrative drama and sympathy to the somewhat dry reportage of the Calendar. The novels that comprise the genre are largely forgotten works by forgotten authors; I read a lot of 19th century novels and I had read only one before I started this project (Oliver Twist). By the 1850s, the Newgate novel made way for the mystery and then detective novel.

There are earlier settings in Newgate than the peak of the Newgate Novel, probably most famously Moll Flanders (1722) by former Newgate inmate, Daniel Defoe. Rather than talk about these novels chronologically, I am going to group them by how I see them using Newgate: an abstract setting, a place for philosophical and moral contemplation; a plot device, almost as a shorthand for magnified wrongdoing, but the focus is on the crime, criminal or escapades; and lastly, a concrete setting, where the specifics of the terrors of the prison itself--the building and the conditions of incarceration and condemnation. 

prison in the abstract

Moll Flanders

I am specifically interested in depictions of the prison in the novel form--Newgate and prison appears in plays and light operas back to the 17th century, but given where we are going (genre romance novels) and my interest in the parallel development of the theory of the novel and theories of punishment during the Enlightenment, it makes sense to me to limit broad discussion to works that take that form. 

The “start” of the English novel is a contentious and fluid point in the history of literature. But Daniel Defoe is a common enough starting point with his Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719. Moll Flanders was published in 1722 and features a heroine who is born in Newgate and returns there as an adult after being caught stealing. Newgate is the setting of her repentance (or her continued scheming to fake repentance in order to avoid the death penalty). 

In frequently quoted passage, Defoe has Moll describe Newgate thusly, when she is incarcerated for stealing two pieces of brocaded silk: 

'Tis impossible to describe the terror of my mind, when I was first brought in, and when I looked around upon all the horrors of that dismal place. I looked on myself as lost, and that I had nothing to think of but of going out of the world, and that with the utmost infamy: the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing, and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful crowd of afflicting things that I saw there, joined together to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it.

While the terror of Moll is acute and evocative, John Bender points out in Imagining the Penitentiary that “Moll conceives of her imprisonment emblematically, as if she were an allegorical figure.”¹ She metaphorically dies and is born again in the prison.

The question of Molls’ repentance is central to the novel. Can she succeed at both a spiritual and a legal redemption? Is Defoe interested in assuring that? Moll is both the picara (the female rogue that tells us her sordid adventures, but whose personality is appealing)² and the author of a spiritual autobiography, in the vein of Protestant dissenters,³ depending on the level of irony ascribed to Moll’s speech. 

And the novel seems to want it both ways too--Moll is sentenced to death and her repentance in front of a priest has her sentence commuted to transportation instead. But the novel continues; with a large sum of (stolen) money, Moll and her favorite husband (a retired highwayman) are able to make their way to the Colonies. Only when rewarded with a second windfall, an inheritance, do Moll and her husband seem to repent earnestly. They repent after rewards. 

Various critics, including impactfully Ian Watt, argue that this disconnect and irony may not be applied from Defoe to Moll, but from Calvinist 18th century beliefs to 20th and 21st century readers. Non-Calvinist readers may find repentance on the brink of death inherently suspect, but Moll’s eventual redemption seems to place her in the group of the unconditional elect. And “[Defoe] was not ashamed to make economic self-interest his major premise about human life; he did not think such premise conflicted either with social or religious values; and nor did his age.”⁴ 

The conflicts and ironies of Moll Flanders seem to stem from a genre on the precipice of being invented and for a social morality in transition from religious to secular. The effect this has on Newgate’s use in the novel is one of abstraction: Newgate is a place for Moll to be born and reborn, to spur transformation, the ultimate threshold. Though Defoe may be able to rely on his experience in the prison to be evocative, Moll’s incarceration is more emblematic of her journey, either as a picara or as a good Calvinist, than literal. According to Sean C. Grass in his book The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner, “Defoe us[ing] the riotous backdrop of old Newgate primarily to complement and explain the licen­tiousness of Moll's character…never…treating the prison in any comprehensive way” is a precedent for the genre fiction of the 1820s and 1830s, which I will discuss in the next section. 

prison in the plot

The opening of The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a satirical pastoral opera, referencing that of course this opera also has a prison scene “which the ladies always reckon charmingly pathetic.” As Ulrich Broich points out, the satire of the comic opera takes on a subversion of the usual pathos here--the prison scene is not a “noble and fearless hero” wrongly accused, but a “highwayman who trembles with fear at the thought of his impending execution.”⁵ 

This subversion predicts the tenor of the Newgate novel of a century later. The highwayman would still be the focus of the social stories, but he himself would transition into the hero role. There were earlier interests in the life of criminals and investigating their motivations (Thomas Gaspey wrote one on the life of a Bow Street runner and one centered on a man who was reprieved from Newgate and then transported to New South Wales in the 1820s). But I’m going to focus on two books that have a parallel publishing history: William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, both published serially in Bentley’s Miscellany, with Twist running from February 1837 to April 1839 and Sheppard overlapping four months, running from January 1839 to February 1840. Ainsworth’s iteration was more popular than Dickens’, but its moral panic condemnation was also harsher. 

I also think Ainsworth and Dickens are using the Newgate differently; after all, the uniting factor of a Newgate novel is not the prison, but the prisoner as inspiration. Keith Hollingsworth defined a Newgate novel in the definitive book on the topic as having a “sole common feature” and that is “an important character came (of, if imaginary, might have come) out of the Newgate Calendar.”⁶ The response to these characters is wide and it is important to note that they do not have to include incarceration within Newgate prison. “Newgate,”  had become a widely used synonym for “prison,” so Newgate Calendar does not even necessarily refer only to those incarcerated within London’s Newgate prison and would report crimes from all over England.

Though these novels might find a precedent in Moll Flanders and The Beggar’s Opera with Prison at Shorthand for Pathos and even may be set in the preceding century (many of the source materials of the 19th century were actually 18th century crimes), the relationship between London and the prison and to imprisonment has changed substantially in the intervening decades. 

I discuss this more in the foundations edition of this series, which is focused on Newgate’s building’s history, but here are a few main changes of note. The building was rebuilt twice, both using the plans of George Dance, though the first attempt at this was foiled by the Gordon Riots of 1780. Hangings were moved from the Tyburn gallows to in front of the prison in 1783. Not just the space of Newgate had changed, but the philosophical understanding of what it means for a state to incarcerate has shifted dramatically. But also we can think about the world event that happened in the century between Moll Flanders and the genre Newgate novels: the first French revolution came and went, Napoleon ruled, was defeated and exiled and died, the Hanoverian period of British kings was coming to an end and the Victorian age is about to start. 

Jack Sheppard

William Harrison Ainsworth wrote two Newgate novels (Rookwood and Jack Sheppard), but I am focusing on the latter because it centers on actual prisoners of Newgate, while Rookwood features Dick Turpin, who was imprisoned and executed in York and because of Sheppard’s connection to Oliver Twist. The story and the life of Jack Sheppard actually deals with two Newgate prisoners: the titular Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, a sometimes law enforcer, sometimes thief himself. 

Jack Sheppard was a thief and burglar, most notorious for his ability to escape Newgate, escaping four times before his fifth imprisonment and execution. This ability, along with his charm, handsomeness and cockney background, led him becoming a folk hero in 1750s London and Ainsworth’s novel only served to extend his legend. 

On the other side of the narrative is Jonathan Wild, a thief-taker (this predated any sort of professional police force in London) who also ran his own criminal enterprise, based on returning stolen goods, using his power as a sanctioned thief-taker to enrich his own finances. Sheppard was able to thwart Wild and escape many times, to the embarrassment of Newgate administrators and Wild. 

Because of the Jack Sheppard incidents, public and government sentiment turned on Wild. While his criminal lining of pockets was tolerated when he was able to deliver prisoners for execution, when he failed to do that, the government came down hard on Wild. He was arrested in connection with a jailbreak he had orchestrated for one of his compatriots, and he was executed six months after Sheppard. 

Sheppard was seen as a folk hero and Wild as a corrupt authority figure, so the tension between their relationship made for a dynamic, with Ainsworth embellishing the relationship between the two men. In the novel, Wild is responsible for Sheppard’s father’s life of crime, which leads to his execution, leaving Sheppard’s mother a widow and raising a child. Jack also has a foil in fictional Thames Darrell, who similarly is plagued by Wild’s machinations, but instead chooses a life of virtue.

Sheppard and Darrell live parallel lives and Sheppard falls into Wild’s gang of criminals, which leads to a murder of one of his previous, abusive benefactors by compatriots. Despite his comfort with crime at this point in the novel, Sheppard regrets her death, causing a break with Wild. Now his escapades, including the jailbreaks, are directed at embarrassing Wild and on behalf of the virtuous foil. Though Sheppard dies at the gallows in the end, just as in real life, the novel makes sure that the anti-hero acts before his death ensure all the sympathetic characters are settled and assures the reader of Wild’s eventual downfall. 

The way that Newgate is actually used in the book is mainly as a setting for Jack’s escapes. Interestingly, the first chapter that focuses on Newgate is a history of Newgate, including mentions of its 12th century origins as a prison, Dick Whittington as Lord Mayor of London, the Great Fire of 1666 and the general conditions expected by a prisoner in the 18th century. 

The description of Newgate is primarily architecturally, laying out the rooms of the prisons. Gone is the hell of Moll Flanders, though Ainsworth’s Newgate does not necessarily sound pleasant. Also, interestingly, the narrative voice of this chapter, written in the 1830s, looks back at the terrors of Newgate Prison as bygone. The third person narrator begins that the chapter by pointing out that modern prisons are “extensive and commodious” compared to Newgate and ends the chapter with “a cheering reflection, that in the present prison, with its clean, well-whitewashed, and well-ventilated wards, its airy courts, its infirmary, its improved regulations, and its humane and intelligent officers, many of the miseries of the old jail are removed. For these beneficial changes society is mainly indebted to the unremitting exertions of the philanthropic Howard.” 

The chapters where Jack actually escapes (this happens two times in the novel, instead of four as in real life) are dialogue heavy, less focused on the setting and more on the trickery that he deploys to escape his cell. Detailed descriptions of Newgate are divorced from the antics and escapades of Sheppard and the prison acts as a setting and a setting alone for the juice of the story: exciting adventures of an rouge, whose ending is tragic and known, despite our sympathy for him.

Prison in the concrete  

Oliver Twist 

The characters of Oliver Twist are more removed from the Newgate Calendar than Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild, but Newgate the place is woven throughout the novel as a touchstone for incarceration and terror.

Oliver Twist is the story of a poor orphan, kicked out of his poor house for deigning to ask for more gruel. In order to survive, he takes up with a gang of thieves and pickpockets, run by Fagin. Fagin’s criminal enterprise that relying on fencing, or moving stolen goods, links him both to Ikey Solomon, a Jewish fence in the early 19th century and Jonathan Wild. Fagin’s fate is closer to Wild’s, betrayed by the system he relied on control, and being hung, whereas Solomon was transported to colonies multiple times.

The other key criminal in the context of Newgate is the Artful Dodger, one of Fagin’s wards. The Artful Dodger takes after Jack Sheppard—incredibly charming, a half-boy, half-man, and one of Dickens’ more enduring creations. The Artful Dodger is Oliver’s guide through Fagin’s world and is incredibly concerned with his criminal reputation, as the greatest pickpocket among Fagin’s men.

Newgate appears a few time directly in the novel.

When Oliver is taken to a magistrate after the Artful Dodger’s gang takes a handkerchief and he is the one is caught, he is taken to a cell described by Dickens: 

This cell was in shape and size something like an area cellar, only not so light. It was most intolerably dirty; for it was Monday morning; and it had been tenanted by six drunken people, who had been locked up, elsewhere, since Saturday night. But this is little. In our station-houses, men and women are every night confined on the most trivial charges—the word is worth noting—in dungeons, compared with which, those in Newgate, occupied by the most atrocious felons, tried, found guilty, and under sentence of death, are palaces. Let any one who doubts this, compare the two.

Ever the social novel author, Dickens takes the time to address pretrial incarceration and a type of incarceration that has possibly escaped the notice of reformers. 

When the Artful Dodger is caught for stealing a snuff box, another member of the gang wonders to Fagin “how will [the Artful Dodger] stand in the Newgate Calendar?” worrying that because the crime that got the Dodger caught was so miniscule, he might not make the publication at all, despite being one of the greatest pickpockets of their group. Fagin assures the younger member of the team that the Artful Dodger’s prowess will not be forgotten. 

Beyond mentions of Newgate, prison and jail are both a constant threat and a constant metaphor of Oliver and his compatriots existence. They are in the prison of poverty, the jail of loyalty. 

Only one scene in the novel is actually set in Newgate and it is Fagin’s final night alive, after he has been convicted. Jack Sheppard of Ainsworth’s novel is also convicted to die, but the “last period alive” chapter focuses on the procession to Newgate (and the laudatory attention of the crowd) over the cell of Newgate. 

Fagin is unrepentant, but scared and grows increasingly muddled. It takes him time after the sentencing to realize that he is going to be put to death. Fagin’s thoughts run wild and scattered--he thinks in one moment of the men he knew who must have sat in the same spot as he, and then the next, he wonders why his cell is so dark. 

Oliver and Mr. Brownlow, Oliver’s adopter, visit Fagin in the cell and Fagin’s seem to believe that he is still controlling a group of young men in his gang, speaking to those who are not there. Oliver, ever the source of Dickensian light and goodness in the novel, prays for Fagin’s forgiveness in the cell and when he and Brownlow leave, the Newgate gallows can be seen in the yard. 

Also, Dickens does not rely on the pains of the 18th century to invoke this terror, unlike Ainsworth. If anything, he extends the carceral terror to other contemporary 1830s institutions, like the temporary holding cell of the magistrates office and the poorhouse where Oliver’s story starts.  

More than any of the Newgate novels, Oliver Twist seems interested in the terror of incarceration, making the extended metaphor of the novel literal in Fagin’s final scene. Even though Fagin has abused and used Oliver throughout the novel, this is one of the pathetic scenes that The Beggar’s Opera predicts: an unsympathetic, if enjoyable to read character, trembling in fear at the thought of being executed. 

next time, I promise I am actually going to talk about some romance novels

This whole project is about Newgate prison in genre fiction romance novels, but I think the history of criminal justice, the history of the building and now the history of what it means to invoke Newgate all has bearing on mostly American writing choosing this as a plot device or setting in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

The crime novel of this time period does have a structural link to romance novels though. The Newgate Novel has a stabilizing plot factor--with few exceptions, those who commit crimes, even sympathetic heroes like Jack Sheppard, are sent to the gallows. The ending is a foregone conclusion and the author has to shape and form the narrative around that fixed point. In my experience of reading this novels, it can feel like an inversion of that foregone conclusion of a happily ever after in a romance novel.

Out of three ways I discussed the use of Newgate in the 18th and 19th centuries, I think romance novelists rely primarily on the first two. This is a value neutral statement, but I do think it affects both the success of the novel and the effect it has on the reader. Newgate may be used as an overarching allegory of good and evil, like Moll Flanders, but when romance novels do this, I feel like they tend to lay modern criminal justice notions on the 18th and 19th centuries, focusing on incarceration as rehabilitation or retribution, in ways that Newgate does not quite work as a metaphor. 

Or what happens is the Jack Sheppard model: Newgate as the starting site for an adventure. The Oliver Twist mode of making the Newgate terror concrete by extending it to other carceral institutions that subjugate by class is more rare. 

Next time: romance novels! But in the meantime, listen to the Reformed Rakes episode!

1.  John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary, 45.

2. Lester Beberfall, “The Pícaro in Context.” 37 Hispania 228.

3. G.A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography

4. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 132

5. Ulrich Broich, “The Politicization of the Prison Motif in the English Literature of the 1790s” 39 Poetica 111, 111 (2007).

6. Keith Hollingsworth, The Newgate Novel, 1830-1847: Bulwer, Ainsworth, Dickens, and Thackeray, 14 (1963).