cambridge-crime-fiction

lyn pykett
ranged from castles to ‘flash kens’ (drinking dens frequented by thieves and
other habitués of the criminal underworld), and they often mingled lowerand
upper-class characters. According to their critics, they romanticised and
glamorised crime and low life, and invited sympathy with criminals rather
than with the victims of crime by making their criminal subjects the hunted
object of a chase, by focusing on their motivation or psychology, and by representing
them as the victims of circumstance or society. Newgate novels took
their name, as they took some of their leading characters and plots, from the
various versions of the Newgate Calendar, which, from its first appearance
in 1773, satisfied the popular fascination with crime and criminals by gathering
together accounts of the lives, trials, confessions, punishments and/or
escapes from, or evasions of the law of celebrated criminals. Andrew Knapp
and William Baldwin, the editors of the best-known nineteenth-century edition
of these chronicles of crime (published in parts in the early years of the
century, and then in volume form between 1824 and 1828), offered them to
the public as works of moral improvement, whose purpose was to provide
a ‘necessary example of punishment to offenders’, and ‘to record examples’
in order that those who are ‘unhappily moved with the passion of acquiring
wealth by violence, or stimulated by the heinous sin of revenge to shed the
blood of a fellow creature, may have before them a picture of the torment
of mind and bodily sufferings of such offenders’. This double purpose was
deemed to make the Newgate Calendar:
highly acceptable to all ranks and conditions of men; for we shall find, in the
course of these volumes, that crime has always been followed by punishment;
and that, in many circumstances, the most artful secrecy could not screen the
offenders from detection, nor the utmost ingenuity shield them from the strong
arm of impartial justice. 4
It is clear, however, that much of the appeal of the various versions of the
Newgate Calendar to their first readers derived from the way in which they
made a spectacle of ‘deviant’ or socially transgressive behaviour, and also of
the violent and public manner of the punishment of such behaviour.
If the sound and fury generated by Newgate fiction – especially in the late
1830s and 1840s –was out of all proportion to the number of novels to
which the Newgate label was attached, this is partly a consequence of the
literary clout (and access to the pages of the periodical press) of the main
protagonists, and partly because of the cultural pervasiveness of the Newgate
phenomenon through the numerous stage adaptations of the novels, and
the taking up of Newgate themes in the rapidly growing penny press. The
controversy about Newgate fiction was both literary and social. It was a
debate about the nature and future of the novel as a literary form, and it was
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