Before the pulpy delights of Penny Dreadful magazines, the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and the detective stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, there was the Newgate novel, an immensely popular though short-lived 19th century genre named after the infamous London prison. The Newgate novel broached hitherto taboo subjects, solidified the transformation of real life criminals into mainstream folk heroes and used time honored story structures, plot devices and character types that would become the standard archetypes for films and television so easily recognized by nearly every modern viewer and reader.
These works were tailor made for early Victorian-era readers who were both morally opposed to and yet strangely intrigued by crime, sex (for fun) and violence. Naturally, there was much critical backlash to these popular books. Authors, editors and booksellers were accused of glamorizing crime and corrupting youth. Sound familiar?
It's easy to understand why there was such a fuss; these books are fun to read, which is reason enough to provoke the guardians of good taste to rash action in any age. To be fair, in reality the historical figures depicted were indeed murderous, desperate people who committed terrible crimes and their images were indeed given a good spit shine to make them more palatable. Their authors told thrilling tales of adventure set against historic backdrops painted in vivid, vibrant Technicolor. Thus transformed by a bit of whitewash, these characters were recognizably human and familiar, struggling with the same moral dilemmas and feelings as their readers did and raising the ire of the Powers that Were in the 1830s.
Here are a few touchstones of the genre:
Moll Flanders (1721) by Daniel Defoe
Though written over a century before the genre would become popular, the origin of the Newgate tradition owes a great debt to Defoe and this book, one of the earliest English language novels. Moll Flanders is the fictional account of a penitent who looks back on her life of whoring, adultery, incest and thieving (in that order). Although her exploits are cast as sinful and wanton, the confession of her deeds reveals a woman of considerable skill and resourcefulness (not to mention desperation) in an age when women born into poverty had few options to support themselves, The tone of this first person narrative, though ostensibly repentant, reveals a character who is impossible to resist and easy to root for. Truly entertaining.
Download Moll Flanders at Project Gutenberg
Paul Clifford (1830) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
This novel was credited with starting the Newgate craze that would last just under twenty years. It also has the dubious distinction of having a painfully cliched opening line that would become synonymous with bad fiction: "It was a dark and stormy night…" There's even a writing contest at San Jose State University that celebrates bad fiction that bears the author's name. No matter. Bulwer-Lytton was mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Thackeray in his day and his books were immensely popular.
Paul Clifford is the entirely fictional story of a bright, cunning and handsome young man born into poverty whose career as a highway robber clashes with his increasing popularity in the circles of high society. His vocation belies his ancestry (but not his fate) as we learn of his true parentage, and this conflict comes to a head in the very melodramatic ending. Clifford's gang of fellow thieves offer some comic relief and even some moments of poignant philosophical pause about the nature of crime. The author's prose is long-winded and the dialogue can be a little stiff. Nearly every criminal character gets a chance to sing a song, printed in full, during several fraternal drinking parties and that tends to slow things down a bit.
Writing in the preface to the 1840 edition, Bulwer-Lytton claimed to have written the novel to show how Britain's penal system actually served to indoctrinate petty offenders, even those of "respectable" bloodlines, into a life of crime. This novel aims higher than mere exploitation, and his motivation for writing it is to Bulwer-Lytton's credit.
Download Paul Clifford at Project Gutenberg
Eugene Aram (1832) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Eugene Aram was a scholar and convicted murderer who was hanged in 1759 for murdering his business partner. His story was well known to readers via Thomas Hood's poem, The Dream of Eugene Aram. Taking several liberties with the facts of the case, Bulwer-Lytton uses Aram's story as a jumping off point to explore the psychology of a man of higher learning so deluded that he is capable of rationalizing the murder of another human being in order to obtain wealth that would enable him the independent means to study in seclusion. The main character's attempt to keep his dark secret from the woman he loves and her family is foiled by an extortion plot perpetrated by the lone witness to the crime and by Aram's own increasingly fragmented psyche. The psychological nature of this novel places its reach far ahead of its time well into the 20th century.
Download Eugene Aram at Project Gutenberg
Rookwood (1834) by William Harrison Ainsworth
William Harrison Ainsworth, who would go on to write the genre-defining Jack Sheppard in 1839 and dozens of highly entertaining historical novels, had a smashing success with this novel which portrayed the legendary highwayman Dick Turpin in the middle of a family drama for name, rights and fortune. There are some stunning descriptions of the Yorkshire countryside, especially in the depiction of Turpin's legendary (and highly improbable) overnight ride from London to York on his trusty mare, Black Bess. Many gothic elements are present--a Popish plot, scary Gypsy curses, midnight graveyard scenes--that strongly resonated with readers' imaginations and made this novel one of the most popular books of the 19th century. One caveat, however: As in Paul Clifford, more drunken ballads are sung by various highwaymen and creepy characters, mostly songs about themselves and how awesome and/or creepy they are.
Download Rookwood at Project Gutenberg
In the late 1830s, readers of the London literary magazine, Bentley's Miscellany avidly read simultaneously serialized installments of two enormously popular novels: Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist and William Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard. Both novels were controversial. Both novels took very different views of crime in society. One novel would become an enduring classic that transcended its genre while the other, like the Newgate novel itself, would fade into obscurity, but not without leaving its own stealthy but lasting influence.
Oliver Twist (1839) by Charles Dickens
This dark humored story of an orphaned boy who is victimized by the very authority figures who are entrusted to look out for his interests. Running away doesn't help much, as he is in turn victimized by a gang of petty thieves and pickpockets who try and fail to turn young Twist to a life of crime. Like Jack Sheppard, Twist's birth and bloodline are more auspicious than they seem to be. Unlike Jack Sheppard, prolonged exposure to criminals does little to corrupt him. Dickens' stark and realistic portrayal of the harrowing living conditions of the London underworld, his bitter contempt for the authorities in charge of the welfare of children and his portrayal of humane and sympathetic character, Nancy who loses her life trying to help the young boy, all gave fuel to the book's detractors who found it a depraved and corrupting influence, despite the happy ending. Though it lapses into unabashed sentimentality. this is a very well written story. The characters are richly drawn and the treacly sentiment is balanced by a very tart and perceptive wit and palpable human emotion. Even the cringe-inducing anti-Semitic stereotype of Fagin the Jew hasn't diminished its popularity.
Download Oliver Twist at Project Gutenberg
Jack Sheppard (1839) by William Harrison Ainsworth
If Oliver Twist was somewhat gratuitous in its sentimentality, Jack Sheppard is overtly gratuitous in its thrilling violence. Published in the same magazine at the same time as Dickens' novel, Jack Sheppard would become a lightning rod for controversy concerning the whole Newgate genre and prompt Dickens to distance himself from the author and to leave the staff of Bentley's Miscellany.
There is precious little social conscience in this tale of the real life folk hero whose exploits--including escaping from the authorities no less than three times before being captured and put to death--were seen as heroic by the oppressed classes. Again, we have present another Popish plot and yet another scramble to claim a respected and rightful name and bloodline, but the heart-stopping violence and creepiness are ratcheted up a few notches--so much so that it was considered a corrupting influence upon Victorian youth.
Ainsworth's real virtues as a writer lie in his ability to tell a story, keep the action moving, and provide compelling historical context and detail that can only come from meticulous research. This edge-of-your-seat thriller spawned several stage productions that eventually prompted Parliament to ban any stage show with the words "Jack Sheppard" in the title, lest young people should be enticed to imitate any of the story's violent acts.
Download Jack Sheppard at Project Gutenberg
At their core, most of these works dared to ascribe all of the favored traits of English manhood--bravery, cheerfulness in the face of adversity, daring, honor and virtue--to criminals who were deemed socially and morally inferior beings wholly incapable of real feeling or integrity and certainly not the appropriate objects of hero worship. Even the fact that the characters convicted of crimes are almost invariably put to death or meet with a fatal end, did nothing to mollify critics. Indeed, they objected most strongly to criminals being portrayed as martyrs. There's apparently no pleasing some people. In a way, these novels present open challenge to such prejudices and, though entertainment is clearly the chief objective, their authors did sometimes manage to slip in a little constructive social criticism.
Save for Moll Flanders and Oliver Twist, all of these novels have fallen out of print and out of fashion not because they are necessarily bad books, but perhaps because their innovations have been so thoroughly absorbed into our culture that they don't seem so special on their own. For our purposes, they're just good fun to be had slightly off the beaten path of the classics of 19th century literature.
Here are a few more online resources about the Newgate novel tradition:
The Newgate Calendar
Here's a site devoted to the Newgate Calendar, a salacious publication of the era filled with fascinating stories of crime and criminals that inspired Newgate fiction.
"The Newgate school of romance and its place in the English literature of the 1830s"
I found this academic article after writing this post. The fact that it is so critical of the genre made it very interesting reading. It basically treats Newgate novels like trash fiction, and while you'll get no argument from me on that score in most cases, I think that a culture's trash tells just as much if not more about itself than its treasures. This article presents an opposing viewpoint to mine on a couple of points, so I encourage you to read it and form your own opinion. There's a fair amount of space devoted to William Makepeace Thackeray's very vocal opposition to the genre and it explores the complexities of how Oliver Twist fits in with and differs from the style the Newgate school.
The Victorian Web
This is an incredible resource on the Victorian era including hundreds of articles about literature, culture, politics, philosophy, religion, etc. Fascinating stuff.
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