Newgate Narratives Vol 1

Presents a representative body of Romantic and early Victorian crime literature. This work contains ephemeral material ranging from gallows broadsides to reports into prison conditions. It is suitable for those studying Literature, Romantic and Victorian popular culture, Dickens Studies and the History of Criminology.

Presents a representative body of Romantic and early Victorian crime literature. This work contains ephemeral material ranging from gallows broadsides to reports into prison conditions. It is suitable for those studying Literature, Romantic and Victorian popular culture, Dickens Studies and the History of Criminology.

Presents a representative body of Romantic and early Victorian crime literature. This work contains ephemeral material ranging from gallows broadsides to reports into prison conditions. It is suitable for those studying Literature, Romantic and Victorian popular culture, Dickens Studies and the History of Criminology.

Presents a representative body of Romantic and early Victorian crime literature. This work contains ephemeral material ranging from gallows broadsides to reports into prison conditions. It is suitable for those studying Literature, Romantic and Victorian popular culture, Dickens Studies and the History of Criminology.

Presents a representative body of Romantic and early Victorian crime literature. This work contains ephemeral material ranging from gallows broadsides to reports into prison conditions. It is suitable for those studying Literature, Romantic and Victorian popular culture, Dickens Studies and the History of Criminology.

Modern criminal courts are characteristically the domain of lawyers, with trials conducted in an environment of formality and solemnity, where facts are found and legal rules are impartially applied to administer justice. Recent historical scholarship has shown that in England lawyers only began to appear in ordinary criminal trials during the eighteenth century, however, and earlier trials often took place in an atmosphere of noise and disorder, where the behaviour of the crowd - significant body language, meaningful looks, and audible comment - could influence decisively the decisions of jurors and judges. This collection of essays considers this transition from early scenes of popular participation to the much more orderly and professional legal proceedings typical of the nineteenth century, and links this with another important shift, the mushroom growth of popular news and comment about trials and punishments which occurred from the later seventeenth century. It hypothesizes that the popular participation which had been a feature of courtroom proceedings before the mid-eighteenth century was not stifled by ’lawyerization’, but rather partly relocated to the ’public sphere’ of the press, partly because of some changes connected with the work of the lawyers. Ranging from the early 1700s to the mid-nineteenth century, and taking account of criminal justice proceedings in Scotland, as well as England, the essays consider whether pamphlets, newspapers, ballads and crime fiction provided material for critical perceptions of criminal justice proceedings, or alternatively helped to convey the official ’majesty’ intended to legitimize the law. In so doing the volume opens up fascinating vistas upon the cultural history of Britain’s legal system over the ’long eighteenth century'.

Jan-Melissa Schramm explores the conflicted attitude of the Victorian novel to sacrifice, and the act of substitution on which it depends. The Christian idea of redemption celebrated the suffering of the innocent: to embrace a life of metaphorical self-sacrifice was to follow in the footsteps of Christ's literal Passion. Moreover, the ethical agenda of fiction relied on the expansion of sympathy which imaginative substitution was seen to encourage. But Victorian criminal law sought to calibrate punishment and culpability as it repudiated archaic models of sacrifice that scapegoated the innocent. The tension between these models is registered creatively in the fiction of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell and Eliot, at a time when acts of Chartist protest, national sacrifices made during the Crimean War, and the extension of the franchise combined to call into question what it means for one man to 'stand for', and perhaps even 'die for', another.

A revealing look at how the memory of the plague held the poor responsible for epidemic disease in eighteenth-century Britain Britain had no idea that it would not see another plague after the horrors of 1666, and for a century and a half the fear of epidemic disease gripped and shaped British society. Plague doctors had long asserted that the bodies of the poor were especially prone to generating and spreading contagious disease, and British doctors and laypeople alike took those warnings to heart, guiding medical ideas of class throughout the eighteenth century. Dense congregations of the poor—in workhouses, hospitals, slums, courtrooms, markets, and especially prisons—were rendered sites of immense danger in the public imagination, and the fear that small outbreaks might run wild became a profound cultural force. Extensively researched, with a wide body of evidence, this book offers a fascinating look at how class was constructed physiologically and provides a new connection between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and the ravages of plague and cholera, respectively.