A HISTORY OF NEWGATE PRISON

A HISTORY OF NEWGATE PRISON

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A HISTORY OF NEWGATE PRISON

Newgate Prison, historic prison serving the City of London and County of Middlesex from the 13th to the 19th centuries. Throughout the 18th century and early 19th century, in particular, Newgate Prison was notorious, and “Newgate” became the slang term for any prison.
Newgate Prison took its name from a gate in the London city wall, rebuilt in the reign of Henry I, possibly on the site of an earlier Roman city gate. In the 12th century a prison was constructed over the gate, to be replaced over the next six centuries by a succession of prison buildings. The last of these was an architecturally imposing and highly innovatory building designed by George Dance the Younger in 1770, but not completed until 1783, following extensive damage to the still unfinished interior during the Gordon Riots of that year. Newgate Prison was formally closed in 1880 and demolished in 1902. The Old Bailey, or Central Criminal Court, was built on the site to replace the prison’s adjoining court.
Dance’s building had been intended to accommodate 500 prisoners, but by 1813, behind the prison’s austere classical façade, conditions were appalling, with over 1,000 inmates. This situation reflected the chronic overcrowding in many British prisons at that time, when rapid population growth in general was matched by a rise in the prison population. Newgate prisoners were classed as “tried” (convicted and serving a sentence), “untried” (awaiting trial), and debtors (people who had committed no criminal offence but were simply unable to pay off debts), but all three classes were confined together. There was no provision for any kind of medical attention, basic amenities, or organized occupation for the prisoners.
In the 18th century the death sentence was imposed for a wide range of crimes including petty theft, and from 1783 Newgate, rather than the earlier site of Tyburn (near the present Marble Arch), became the principal place for executions in London. Newgate “Execution Sermons”, held in the prison chapel, were regular public events: the condemned men and women, gathered round a coffin in a central enclosure in the chapel, were addressed by the chaplain while other inmates and members of the public observed and taunted them. Public hangings took place on a scaffold erected in the street outside the Debtors’ Door; it was at Newgate that the last public hanging in England took place in 1868.
Newgate is also historically important as the birthplace of the first real efforts at penal reform in Britain, which began with the visits there of Elizabeth Fry from 1813 onward. The modern concept of a prison as a place of rehabilitation, rather than a squalid setting for degrading and inhumane punishment, can be traced to the improvements instigated by her at Newgate.
Newgate features widely in English literature. Its grim conditions and corrupt system are depicted in the novel Amelia (1752) by Henry Fielding, and in 1773 the five-volume Newgate Calendar appeared. This compendium of famous 18th-century crimes gave its name to a genre of popular criminal records and biographies that flourished into the early 19th century. Many novelists, including Henry Fielding in Jonathan Wild and Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist, used plots taken from Newgate Calendars in their fiction.