The Gaol: The Story of Newgate, London's Most Notorious Prison ( book review )

The Gaol: The Story of Newgate, London's Most Notorious Prison ( book review )

From The Sunday Times

July 13, 2008

The Gaol: The Story of Newgate, London's Most Notorious Prison by Kelly Grovier

The Sunday Times review by Andrew Holgate

 

 Few buildings in London's history have exerted such a malign hold on the city's imagination as Newgate jail on Old Bailey. Dickens called the place a “gloomy depository of the guilt and misery of London”, Casanova (who experienced life inside at first-hand) “a hell such as Dante might have conceived”. Dozens of writers, from Thomas Malory, Ben Jonson and Daniel Defoe to John Gay and Henry Fielding, have plundered its dark corners for inspiration (the first three after doing time there), and Hogarth, Cruikshank and Gustave Doré all portrayed its excesses. So central, in fact, did the institution become in the cultural landscape of the 17th to 19th centuries, that it gave birth to a whole litany of allusion, from the Newgate novel and Newgate cant (a glossary of underworld patois) to the “Newgate hornpipe” (slang for a hanging) and the Newgate Calendar, a lurid almanac of misdemeanours that was almost as popular in its day as the Bible.

The question, however, lurking inside this breathless tour of the prison's history is, how and why did this 12th-century jail, which was gutted twice and rebuilt several times before its demolition in 1902 to make way for the Central Criminal Court, become so extraordinarily famous? Certainly it seems to have had nothing to do with age or size - it was never, Kelly Grovier asserts, the oldest prison in the country, nor the biggest. Nor did it gain any lustre from housing royal prisoners, who tended to be confined in the Tower
Some of Newgate's notoriety has to do, undoubtedly, with the sheer horror of life inside. Inmates could enter its maze of filthy corridors and dank dungeons and never be heard of again - the Jacobite John Bernardi, arrested in 1696, languished there for 40 years without ever being charged, until his death at the age of 82 in 1736. Many miserable wretches spent years sleeping in hellishly cramped and fetid conditions on dank stone floors, barely 18in of space separating them from their neighbour. (One jailbird described prisoners as being “like swine upon the ground, one upon another, howling and roaring”.) The smell emanating from inside the walls, enriched by the dogs, poultry and pigs that wandered the yards until they were banished in 1792, was foul: shops nearby were often forced to close because of the stench, and lawyers in the Sessions House next door wore nosegays to ward off the evil humours. Disease was a constant (for every inmate taken out to hang or burn, four are said to have died inside of typhus), and inmates were often preyed on by sadistic keepers, who charged for everything from mattresses and food to cells and the “easing” of manacles.
Adding to this infamy was the stream of infamous criminals who paraded through the prison (often from the Sessions House) on their way to execution. Captain Kidd, the highwayman Claude Duval and the “thief-taker general” Jonathan Wild were all incarcerated there, as was the thief Jack Sheppard, the most famous criminal of the 18th century, whose feat of escaping from jail on four separate occasions turned both him and Newgate, his victim twice, into celebrities. Newspapers and pamphlets fed voraciously on the tales of these villains, whose exploits reflected glory of a sort back on to the prison.

By far the most important reason for Newgate's notoriety, though, was its role as the departure point for the ritualised journey to the Tyburn gallows at the western end of Oxford Street. And when, in 1783, executions were transferred from Tyburn to the front of Newgate itself, the jail's grip on the popular imagination simply tightened. Tens of thousands of spectators would jam into the street outside to catch the last gasp of a condemned felon. In 1807, as many as 40,000 were said to have gathered there for the end of the murderess Elizabeth Godfrey, only for a stampede to claim the lives of 100 people.

Grovier deals with all of this dutifully enough as he gallops through Newgate's familiar tales of terror. He promises rather adventurously in his preface to explore “the meaning of Newgate as an unparalleled icon [and] an incubator of inspiration”, but in truth he never brings enough rigour to his task, rarely goes beyond the familiar sources and fails almost completely to offer a coherently organised argument for the jail's inflated status. Often, instead of analysis or thesis, the book simply resorts to rather tired anecdote, at least part of whose rationale seems to be to fill space. Grovier can at times be markedly effective in his descriptions, particularly of Sheppard, but he frequently succumbs to breathless hyperbole and a type of sub-Ackroydian mysticism that does his subject no favours. The result is a book that, for all the drama of its material, fails far too often to engage.