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Kelly Grovier
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Publisher | John Murray | ||
ISBN | 978-071956133 | ||
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Reviewer
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Ann
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Synopsis
For over 800 years Newgate was the grimy axle around which British society slowly twisted. This is where such legendary outlaws as Robin Hood and Captain Kidd met their fates, where the rapier-wielding playwrights Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe sharpened their quills, and where flamboyant highwaymen like Claude Duval and James Maclaine made legions of women swoon. While London's theatres came and went, the gaol endured as Londons unofficial stage. From the Peasants Revolt to the Great Fire, it was at Newgate that England's greatest dramas unfolded. By piecing together the lives of forgotten figures as well as re-examining the prison's links with more famous individuals, from Dick Whittington to Charles Dickens, this thrilling history goes in search of a ghostly place, erased by time, which has inspired more poems and plays, paintings and novels, than any other structure in British history.
Review
If, like me, you generally skip the preface, don't do so on this occasion. I was expecting archaeology, architecture, maps and diagrams as well as famous prisoners from this "story of Newgate gaol". But what you get is a social history defined by the tales of selected inmates of this infamous prison. As such it is informative, perhaps too repetitive in the filth, faeces and stench department, and with some interesting nuggets re origin of phrases such as ‘left in the lurch' and lives of some less well known criminals.
However, I found it read more like a sociology text book and depressing in its depiction of man's inhumanity to man, woman and child. Prison reform comes very late in its history.
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