Newgate Narratives

Academic - Scholarly - Primary Materials - Nineteenth-Century British History - Penitentiary History - Nineteenth-Century Literature; Newgate prison, the criminals that passed through it and the crimes they committed held a powerful fascination for all levels of Nineteenth-Century British Society. Campaigning authors such as Dickens and Bulwer Lytton used these powerful images in their battles for social and legal reform. Newgate Narratives brings together striking and representative examples of this diverse literature, including popular street literature of broadsides and chapbooks, graphic factual depictions of criminal and prison life, trenchant polemical reform writing, detailed social surveys contained in parliamentary committee reports, and especially classic Newgate novels and melodramas. All texts are reset apart from one volume devoted to criminal street literature. The texts are supplied with introductions and explanatory notes for better understanding of each text's place in the sweep of Newgate literature, both in its time and in relation to controversies over crime, punishment, and wider society today.

Table of Contents:
Volume 1 General Introduction, Jessie Fothergill, Kith and Kin (1881), Volume 2 Vernon Lee, Miss Brown (1884), Volume 3 Mona Caird, Th e Wing of Azrael (1889), Volume 4 C. L. Pirkis, Th e Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894), Volume 5 Annie E. Holdsworth, The Years that the Locust Hath Eaten (1895), Annie E. Holdsworth, ‘Joanna Traill, Spinster’ (1893).

About the Author :
Gary Kelly is at the University of Alberta. He has worked since 1967 on the relationship of class and gender in the cultural and social revolutions of Britain and Europe from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He has edited the novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, the first prominent English feminist, and Sarah Scott's Bluestocking feminist novel, Millennium Hall. He has published The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, Revolutionary Feminism, and Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827. He has co-edited two volumes of bio-critical essays on British reform writers from 1789 to 1914, and published essays on a wide range of writers from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen.