Newgate Narratives - Hardcover

Kelly, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1851968121 ISBN 13: 9781851968121

Publisher: Routledge, 2008

Presents a representative body of Romantic and early Victorian crime literature. This work contains ephemeral material ranging from gallows broadsides to reports into prison conditions. It is suitable for those studying Literature, Romantic and Victorian popular culture, Dickens Studies and the History of Criminology.

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Synopsis:

In 1902, London's Newgate Prison was demolished. The building was a cultural symbol, representing the evils of crime, and the problems of state punishment. Its grim silhouette loomed over factual and fictional contributions to the prison reform debate which extended through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Commentary ranged from gallows broadsides, 'last dying words' and cheap reprints of the Newgate Calendar; through crusading journalism, reform pamphleteering and parliamentary reports; and, to best-selling novels and hit melodramas. This body of Newgate literature has long been out of print but it was widely known by all classes of readers in its time and was the context for the crime literature of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Hugo and Zola.This five-volume edition presents a representative body of Romantic and early Victorian crime literature. Volume 1 contains ephemeral material ranging from gallows broadsides to reports into prison conditions. It sets the social and cultural context for a selection of pioneering Newgate novels, including two little-known novels by Thomas Gaspey. All texts are unabridged, reset and annotated.

"Newgate Narratives" will be essential to those studying Literature, Romantic and Victorian popular culture, Dickens Studies and the History of Criminology.

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.

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