Subjects
Newgate Narratives
Editor: Gary Kelly
978 1 85196 812 1: 234x156mm: £450.00/$795.00
Please note that this edition was previously announced as a 10 volume edition in two parts. We can confirm that Newgate Narratives will now be complete in five volumes. Orders placed for Part II on ISBN 9781851968138 have been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience.
In 1902, London’s Newgate Prison was demolished. The building was a cultural symbol, representing the evils of crime, and the problems of state punishment. Its grim silhouette loomed over factual and fictional contributions to the prison reform debate which extended through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Commentary ranged from gallows broadsides, ‘last dying words’ and cheap reprints of the Newgate Calendar; through crusading journalism, reform pamphleteering and parliamentary reports; to best-selling novels and hit melodramas. This body of Newgate literature has long been out of print but it was widely known by all classes of readers in its time and was the context for the crime literature of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Hugo and Zola.
This five-volume edition presents a representative body of Romantic and early Victorian crime literature. Volume 1 contains ephemeral material ranging from gallows broadsides to reports into prison conditions. It sets the social and cultural context for a selection of pioneering Newgate novels, including two little-known novels by Thomas Gaspey. All texts are unabridged, reset and annotated.
Newgate Narratives will be essential to those studying Literature, Romantic and Victorian popular culture, Dickens Studies and the History of Criminology.
- Editorial apparatus includes a substantial general introduction, volume introductions and endnotes
- All novels are reset
Sample pages
- Newgate Narratives: General Introduction (sample)
- Newgate Narratives: Panopticon
- Newgate Narratives: Editorial
Contents
Volume 1
Criminal Street Literature: Last Dying Words; criminal trials; Tyburn gallows broadsheets; Romantic and Victorian chapbook versions of Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin, Moll Flanders; selections from pioneering prison reform literature; pamphlets on the crime controversies from the 1810s and 1820s; accounts of prison life, organization, and culture by administrators, reformers, and social commentators
Volume 2
Thomas Gaspey, Richmond (1827)
Thomas Gaspey, now largely forgotten, was a pioneering and skilful crime writer. This detective novel about Tom Richmond, a Bow Street Runner, exploited a growing interest in police investigation.
Volume 3
Thomas Gaspey, History of George Godfrey (1828)
This novel develops the eighteenth-century picaresque tradition. The hero undergoes false arrest, imprisonment, and transportation to the penal colony of Australia
Volume 4
Edward Bulwer Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
This characteristic Newgate novel contains acute social observation as Edward Bulwer Lytton turned a satirical eye on the Establishment.
Volume 5
Charles Whitehead, Autobiography of Jack Ketch (1835)
Charles Whitehead was a collaborator and inspiration to a range of social commentators, including Charles Dickens.