Newgate Prison
Show Notes
Newgate prison served as the main punitive facility in London for six centuries until it closed in 1902. If you expect this genre to be limited to country houses and The Ton, you might be surprised at how often authors invoke Newgate in their stories. Newgate as a recurring thematic space becomes shorthand for terror, grime, and pain. What’s the effect then when it’s invoked in a romance novel? In this episode, the rakes cover Newgate itself and several books that fictionalize Newgate. Much of what we talk about stems from Emma’s current research on Newgate.
Books From This Episode
The King’s Brat by Constance Gluyas
The Highwayman by Kerrigan Byrne
The Perils of Pleasure by Julie Anne Long
Shanna by Kathleen E. Woodwiss
My One and Only Duke by Grace Burrowes
The Prince of Eden by Marilyn Harris
Books We Suggest About Newgate Prison and Prison Abolition
Newgate Reading Recommendations
Early Modern Prisons, great, well-documented primary research on Newgate
Newgate: London's Prototype of Hell by Stephen Halliday (2007)
The Gaol: The Story of Newgate - London's Most Notorious Prison by Kelly Grovier (2009)
Searchable online index of the Newgate Calendar
Prison Abolition Reading Recommendations
Prison Abolition Syllabus 2.0: I rely really heavily on the Prison Abolition Syllabus, put together by the African American Intellectual History Society. Many of the links in that syllabus are to open source editions of readings.
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975): seminal work on the origins of incarceration as we know it now.
A Just Measure of Pain: Penitentiaries in the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1850, by Michael Ignatieff (1978): a less read, parallel book to Foucault’s, but relevant to Newgate because it focuses on England, whereas Foucault looks at France
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (2003): A quick, must read.
Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2022): a collection based on three decades of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work. From Verso Book’s blurb: “Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.”
"Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" by Mariame Kaba (June 12, 2020).
“Against Carceral Feminism” by Victoria Law (October 2014)
We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba (2022): Essays from Kaba that focus on organizing work of abolition on the ground.
Works Cited
A Romantic History of Newgate Part I: An Introduction
A Romantic History of Newgate Part 2: Underpinnings
A Romantic History of Newgate Part 3: Foundations
A Romantic History of Newgate Part 4: Topos
Transcript
Emma: Welcome to Reformed Rakes, a podcast committed to abolition and one that believes there’s no glory in punishing. I’m Emma, a law librarian writing about justice and romance at the substack, Restorative Romance.
Beth: I’m Beth and I’m on booktok under the name bethhaymondreads.
Chels: My name is Chels, I’m the writer of the romance Substack The Loose Cravat, a romance book collector, and BookToker under the username chels_ebooks.
Emma: A lot of what I write about is how theories of punishment and justice appear in this genre that is so focused on interpersonal relationships. And today we're talking about something central to my current research: Newgate Prison. The site of executions in London after 1783 and a main punitive facility for London for six centuries, Newgate and its punishments were a huge part of city life from the medieval period until the prison closed in 1902.
The prison itself is a representative example of major changes to the Western conceptions of discipline and punishment during the transition of the 18th to the 19th centuries. Along with these social changes, the development of the British novel was happening, stemming from some of the same philosophical underpinnings that led to Enlightenment reforms to incarceration. Newgate has a rich literary history, appearing in the novels of Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens and the less canonically accepted subgenre “Newgate novels,” which peaked in the 1830s--pulpy adventure novels that took plots from the lives of the famous Newgate prisoners.
The prison appears more prevalently in historical romance than someone might expect if their notions of the genre are limited to the bon ton or country houses. The genre is frequently set in London, particularly in Newgate’s most notorious years, from about 1783 to about the 1860s and Newgate has been present basically in the genre since its modern inception in 1972. Newgate as a recurring thematic space becomes a shorthand for terror, grime and pain. So what’s the effect and impact when that is invoked in a romance novel?
So the way this episode is going to go, we have some topics about Newgate itself and we’ll discuss a few books under that umbrella topic. So we’ll be talking about the historical Newgate and the fictional Newgate in parallel. To start off with, let’s talk about the conditions of Newgate. I’m going to have Chels read a quote.
Chels: “Newgate is a dismal prison…a place of calamity…a habitation of misery, a confused chaos…a bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all speakers and no hearers. There is a mingling of the noble with the ignoble, rich with the poor, wise with the ignorant, and the [innocent] with the worst malefactors. It is a grave of gentility, the banishment of courtesy, the poison of honour, the centre of infamy, the quintessence of disparagement, the confusion of wit.”
Emma: This is from Alexander Smith’s A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highway-men, an example of a popular style of tome that reported criminals’ biographies in the 18th century. An author like Smith (which was most likely a nom de plume) might have a motivation to make Newgate seem more notorious than it was, but these kinds of descriptions are pervasive, from biographers to journalists to first-hand accounts. So I’m going to have Beth read from a different source.
Beth: I was not fixed indeed; 'tis impossible to describe the terror of my mind, when I was first brought in, and when I looked around upon all the horrors of that dismal place. I looked on myself as lost, and that I had nothing to think of but of going out of the world, and that with the utmost infamy: the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing, and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful crowd of afflicting things that I saw there, joined together to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it.
Emma: This quote is from the 1722 novel, Moll Flanders, written by a former Newgate inmate, Daniel Defoe. Moll Flanders, the heroine, was born in Newgate to a mother who “pleaded the belly” (so she escaped execution by being pregnant) and then Moll as an adult returns to Newgate as a prisoner. Those are some quotes painting the picture of Newgate.
Most people imprisoned in Newgate were there *awaiting trial* so not there as a sentence unto itself. And I think that's important to remember with these books that we talk about, because a lot of times the authors have some creative license with what's actually happening. Generally these stays were somewhere between a week and three months, but could last up to 40 years, in cases where habeas corpus was suspended, but that was very rare.
Other people in Newgate were waiting for a procedural element to happen--an appeal, a transportation in America or Australia, the payment of a fine, the fulfillment of a lesser punishment like a pillory or the most extreme punishment: a hanging at the Tyburn gallows, or a hanging outside the Newgate wall after 1783, when they moved the gallows to the central location of Newgate. Though Newgate was not primarily a debtors' prison, it did hold debtors throughout its history. Debtors also generally stayed longer--until they paid off their debts.
For our novels, Chels is going to talk about a book they read that is perhaps the most extreme depiction of violence I have seen in Newgate, so trigger warning for violence. Based on my research, the violence in this book seems even more extreme than that was in the prisons for a few reasons that we’ll discuss afterward. But for now, Chels.
Chels: So this is from The King’s Brat by Constance Gluyas. It was published in 1972.
April, 1660. The book begins with Angel Dawson in a prison cart. She’s very young, just sixteen, and an orphan who has been attempting to ingratiate herself with another group of homeless children. They dare her to rob an old man and she agrees, thinking that he’s feeble. He grabs her mid-attempt and hauls her to the authorities. She’s then manacled and put into a prison cart. Angel is terrified of Newgate. Both of her mother and sister were imprisoned there before they died, and Angel’s sister, Jane, was driven so mad that she was eventually sent to Bedlam. Angel is even more terrified of Bedlam, having visited before and watched the patients be treated like zoo animals for the amusement of gawkers.
When Angel arrives at Newgate, she’s booked in by Jim Gibbons, a terrifying guard. Jim tries to get Angel to give him money, threatening her and telling her that she’ll need to grease his pockets if she wants “comfort.” Angel has no money, and Jim proceeds to shackle her. The shackles are extremely heavy and tight, limiting Angel’s mobility and cutting into her skin. Jim says that he’ll get her lighter ones if she pays him. When Angel curses at him, Jim tells her that he’s going to flog her later, but first he wants her to meet her new cellmates.
He leads her down a bunch of dark corridors into the “bowels of the prison.” Bowels is right, because the stench is overwhelming. Before he shoves her into the women’s cell, Jim tells her that she’d have better food and a room of her own if she pays him. He then shoves her in, and Angel notes that there are about thirty women crouched before her (she initially guesses one hundred). Most of them were naked, and some were wearing rags.
The women in the cell attack Angel, stripping her of her clothes and searching for valuables. Naked and in excruciating pain, Angel sits on the disgusting floor in despair, listening to the women quarrel amongst each other and wondering if it’s ever quiet. She notices that most of the women have been flogged, some of them quite recently.
Angel has spent a month in Newgate when Charles II returns to England. She can hear the celebration bells ringing from inside the prison. Angel has been flogged since her arrival, but she notes that she’s one of the lucky ones. Another young girl, Marianne, gets flogged daily. Marianne used to be lodged in the “finer quarters” of Newgate, but after she ran out of money she was sent to Common Side, where Angel resides. This is a quote from that section: “Marianne’s voice was soft and cultured, her manner and bearing quietly dignified, and perhaps it was these very qualities that had aroused the cruelty of the guards, for her money had not saved her from frequent floggings while living in better quarters.”
This is where we’re introduced to the concept of a “flog fight.” It’s a deadly game where the guards make the prisoners fight each other with whips. One of the guards volunteers Marianne as a combatant for a flog fight, much to everyone’s horror. Marianne, who is already fading away, tells Angel to seek out her brother Nicholas after Marianne dies. She doesn’t want to be buried in an unmarked mass grave. She wants her brother to take her body.
Marianne’s would-be opponent is a larger and older woman named Mary. Mary balks at fighting Marianne, since she’s so weak, and insists on a new opponent. The guards comply, and Mary ends up fighting a woman named Lucy, who is described as being quite muscular. The fight is brutal, described by Gluyas in grotesque detail. Lucy ends up losing both of her eyes in a scene that could give David Cronenberg a run for his money. Mary kills Lucy, and then Mary dies shortly after.
Marianne, still sickly, follows suit. Right after that happens, the guards get word from Charles II that all first-time offenders are to be set free, in celebration of Charles’s homecoming. Once freed, Angel goes to find Marianne’s brother, who, to her surprise, is Charles’s right-hand man, the Earl of Benbrook. The Earl (who is Angel’s love interest) confronts the guards at Newgate over Marianne’s death, and Jim Gibbons and six of his conspirators are sentenced to hang.
Emma: Okay, so this book, obviously very heavy. Lots of violence and sort of macabre details are described. There are a few things in here that I think are very representative of the history of Newgate. There's some things that I think are exaggerated, based on my research, for sort of for drama in the book.
So one of the things that is very accurate is the punishment of guards for Newgate. The Newgate guards were not really a professional class. They didn't have the sort of respect that maybe is given to state employees now, where we sort of think of them as a professional class. They really were sort of often like charlatans, and trying to make a quick buck, and so if they took advantage of their position, they would be punished. So that part is, I feel like it's accurate along with the sort of bribing that had to happen in order to get a better position at Newgate.
I do think the flog fights seems like a little overstated. For a few reasons, mostly for like lack of space, it seems like it would be hard to conduct a flog fight in Newgate.
But does anyone else have reactions to this, these descriptions?
Beth: Yeah it’s heavy. And I was just curious about Marianne. Why she was even in prison in the first place, because I’m like “you're the sister of an Earl!”
Chels: Yeah, so Marianne had ended up...she was estranged from her brother.
Beth: Oh, okay.
Chels: It was like a series of unfortunate events. She like ran off with another man, and it didn't end up working out
Beth: Right.
Chels: And things kind of spiraled, and she ended up in prison. Yeah, it was just kind of a sad situation all around. She didn't think that he loved her anymore. And so it's actually, the Earl has like a lot of guilt over the fact that Marianne died because I mean if he hadn't treated her a certain way, she wouldn't have.
Beth: She would have been protected.
Chels: Because I mean, it would have been so easy to get her out
Beth: I know! I'm like you're literally an Earl!. You have your sister's wasting away in Newgate. I was just because the aristocracy. I think they're immune from certain things.
Emma: Definitely! Certain prosecutions, especially women, and also it's like, Newgate is not, I think, this is a hard conception. I think it even for me it was like as I was reading all this new care research. It's hard to pick up like the fluidity of Newgate.
Beth: Right.
Emma: It's kind of easy to get out of Newgate like, if you have money you can bribe someone really easily. People can come visit you really easily. It's just like the it's not. People are not kept away as much as the people who are dying in Newgate are people who are sort of like lack of community or lack funds, because people are not going to get them.
Emma: Or like extreme cases of violence, but sort of like petty thefts, small things like that, like any sort of non violent crime. You can bribe somewhat out very simply, I guess, depending on the guards. But it seems like the guards, in The King's Brat would be very easy to bribe.
Chels: Yeah, they only ask for it like four times
Emma: The other thing that I guess it feels like very accurate, that, again, is like a different conception of Newgate than current prisons is the idea of like an executive clemency. So they talk about the return of Charles the Second is sort of this like celebratory clemency. This is true. across prisons. I think, sort of before the twentieth century, that executive clemency, so like either from a king or a president or a governor, and, like granting clemency from the executive branch, was much more seems like a release valve.
Then, now where it's like like executive branch, like governors or presidents, often can only do that at the end of the term, because it's like you can't be elected if you want to grant clemency to people or pardon people. So that sort of like release valve for like celebratory reasons or just compassionate reasons happened much more often, and you hear reports of people appealing to executive members, like the the Prince Regent, sometimes comes up with someone the person that they're trying to appeal to for either lowering a sentence, so being able to be transported, or being released from prison entirely. That's just one of those things where it's like that's accurate, and also is misaligned with sort of our current prison system?
Beth: Is this someone who would have connections like they know the Prince somehow, or they just are like, okay, we're letting all the debtors out?
Emma: It could be either so it could be either like long, like a large portion where it's like, oh, the the prison is full, and so like we're gonna let out the debtors or we're gonna let out first time offenders or like you have a petition, so we can either be from power or because the sometimes, if the executive member is like an enemy of the the judge, and like the judge is being too harsh. Oh, I'm gonna You're gonna get the sentence. But I’m gonna have this like clemency, as like a punishment for the judge. And it it just it happened more often, and it was sort more seen, as like a necessary part of the system. Where now it if people people don't take advantage of it. Executive Branch Members don't take advantage of it nearly as much as they used to.
Beth: Hmm.
Chels: One thing that I do kind of want to say before we move on from this book is that I know that it is quite extreme, but I kind of want to defend that aspect of a little of it a little bit, because I did read the whole book, and the Newgate scenes are by far the strongest in the whole thing. And it creates like this deep sense of unfairness and just desolation, and Gluyas puts her foot on the gas pedal for, like the whole first third of the book, and it is hard to read, but I kind of respect it like.
Emma: Yeah. And I think that's gonna come up with some of the other books that we talk about. That it's like, given the choice between exaggerating Newgate, and like underselling New Gate as far as like the level of violence in there. It's like I would prefer someone to almost exaggerate it because when they under sell it it becomes kind of disrespectful to the trauma. And really I mean the the flog fights. It really seems like just unlikely, mostly because of logistics. Like it, it it seems sort of unwise to give a prisoner a weapon, and Newgate was just much more crowded, I think, than peopleiIt's hard. It's hard to conceptualize how many people are in this small space. Prisons right now are also very crowded, but just the because they [in Newgate] don't have single celling it's like all these people in like one area.
Based on descriptions, I’ve read it. I don't know if there would be room to have a flog fight, because it it just you don't have like room room to like, have that audience and sort of like looking at people like that.
Chels: Yeah, it seemed very like gladiator type, almost, which is it is what it is.
Beth: I’m glad you mention it. And I think this will kind of be like a thing we keep saying, but I, for other people, feel the weight of it, so like the weight of violence, and all the trauma and the bribing that went on at Newgate. So, if we want to move on to The Perils of Pleasure by Julie Anne Long. I think that would provide a good contrast.
Emma: The Perils of Pleasure by Julie Anne Long takes a different tone with Newgate’s function in the story and how the experience of prison is described. The hero, Colin Eversea, has been framed for a murder and at every turn, his privilege that should be able to help prove his innocence is foiled and at the beginning of the book, he is awaiting execution. Madeline Greenway, the heroine, has been hired to help him escape, though she does not know by whom.
Really, the only scene that takes place in Newgate is the first one where Colin is awaiting his execution with another man, a thief called “Bad Jack.” The thief seems to approach his death with an apathetic attitude. Colin has been in Newgate for a timeframe of months and as he is walking to the scaffold he is given the instruction “stumble and fall at the fifth guard.” He does so, and an explosion goes off. He is whisked away by Madeline.
Madeline is able to plan the escape because of the ease of bribing Newgate officials. There is an issue with the meet up where she is supposed to be paid and Colin is supposed to be taken by whoever paid her to free him (she gets shot at instead). They spend the rest of the book unraveling the mystery of Colin’s framing and whoever betrayed Madeline.
Julie Anne Long’s Newgate does not sound like a walk in the park--Colin smells terrible for most of the book, and has lost a considerable amount of weight. His main injury from the prison is from the shackles that went around his legs that changed his gait and rubbed his ankles raw. Psychologically, his main after effect is a vague rage that most acutely manifests in wanting to hurt people that hurt Madeline.
But the tone of the book itself is quite rompy. Madeline and Colin do get into conversations about the capacity for a human to commit violence--Colin worries when he realizes that impulse has been awakened by his stay in Newgate that even though he did not commit murder, he could have.
I enjoyed this book as a romance, but I think it is typical of the kind of half-baked way that Newgate can be used in historical romance. Colin’s post-prison experience is underdeveloped and referenced obliquely in a few ways--he has rage that he is scared of, but always controls. He expresses fear about going to prison once. What he has to work through is much more second son trauma because he’s worrying that his older brother actually is the one that framed him for most of the book.
The most fun to read parts of the book in the context of Newgate were the reports of Colin’s notoriety among the people that Colin and Madeline meet on their romp. London sings songs about him and his trial and incarceration are reported in broadsheets--expounding on his already rakish reputation and his family’s devil-may-care attitude toward society. Though the novel might not be as grim, I think it does capture this macabre fascination with people who are criminalized that we really start to see during this period of popular access to literacy and publishing, along with heightened state punishments that are happening in public in a central location. Like the quote we started with being from a book being the biographies of criminals--this is the beginning of true crime!
Chels: So I’ve read both books and they have almost nothing in common except for Newgate. They vary wildly in tone, one is Restoration one is Regency, one is grotesque and one is, like you said, a romp, but the conditions of Newgate itself were abysmal in both settings. Emma is right that Colin seems to have escaped from Newgate largely unscathed. Much more time in the book is Colin grappling with his feelings about the woman he thinks he loves. I feel like Long gave a lot of the heft of the Big Feelings to Madeline, who has a really sad backstory of her own. She’s fairly inscrutable, she feels like a question mark throughout a lot of the book, while Colin is not just an open book, but has reached legendary status.
In The King’s Brat, Angel is subjected to a host of violence during her month in Newgate, witnessing depravity and torture and being abused herself in turn. One thing I didn’t mention is that she actually barely escapes, the guard, Jim Gibbons, tries to hold her after it’s announced that first offenders can go. She has to bribe him to let her out, saying that she’ll get money from Marianne’s family and return to pay him off. Her fear at being sent back to Newgate is palpable, she’s terrified and she’ll do almost anything not to be sent back.
Part of the Earl’s, her love interest’s, self-imposed penance for his estrangement with his sister, which he sees as the indirect cause of her death, is to teach Angel how to be a proper lady. They’re not lovers for a while but they have a fraught teacher/student role, although they both have a hatred/fascination with each other. There’s one scene that’s very, very bodice ripper, where during a heated argument Benbrook takes a riding crop and moves to hit Angel with it. He accidentally hits her in the face. This is very traumatic for Angel, not just because it’s obviously painful and horrifying, but because it has echoes of the Newgate torture, the frequent floggings. Even in less fraught and distressing moments, Angel is left to deal with the fear and pain that the idea of Newgate instills in her.
Emma: Yeah, I didn't realize this until you were talking about the other elements, especially with the angel and or Angel and the riding crop. But it seems like the reaction to Newgate across romance novels and I'm not gonna say this all the time, because I haven't read all of them. But it seems to be really gendered like women, are afraid of prison, and men get angrier in prison.
Like all so many of the heroes who've been incarcerated in all the books that we're talking about today, the thing that they're scared of is something that, like Newgate awakens in them.
The treatment of Newgate prisoners was different, and the women had different privileges, and but it was not great for anybody, and people were not…just men we’re not the only ones who became…or women were not the only ones who were becoming scared or scared of their lives like there. There was trauma being instilled beyond just violence, like awakening within a male character.
Chels: Yeah, like that's that's such a good point, because I’m both books that I have kind of the reference for are women are usually the ones who kind of have this this type of reaction. But yeah, as not read every Newgate novel, but the ones that we're kind of talking about. There's there's this like. almost like, I don't want to say character building, but that's kind of what it seems like almost.
Beth: I'm not a fan of trauma is character building. Oh, that's not what I thought you were saying, but when it shows up in books. I'm like “this isn't character building stuff that's going on right now.” Obviously, there's feelings you have to deal with afterwards. But like Are you a better person for it? I don't know.
Emma: Yeah, and there's some of that where it's like you're dealing with this like sort of like fiction… when you're…I think when you write about Newgate in like 1972 or later, you have to kind of be writing about incarceration at that time, because the idea that your person, your hero, or your heroine, is leaving Newgate and has to deal with the trauma of Newgate. Is this kind of like falsity? And so anything to do with incarceration, you really sort of are taking this approach where you're you're talking about. What's it like to be incarcerated now, in a way at least, because most people who go to Newgate are not leaving Newgate or not, leaving New Gate to go on and live a life. They are either being transported, or they are going to be executed at the gallows.
So obviously these books sort of take 2 different approaches to depicting Newgate, but I do think they sort of ground New gate in a very specific reality. And so now we're going to talk about something that is not grounded in a reality, but is a fiction that comes up in historical romance pretty frequently. I think we're gonna talk about 2 books that involve a Newgate marriage, or a marriage at the gallows.
So this is a plot where someone, usually a heroine and a heroine in both of our examples today marries an already condemned man for some usually procedural reason. The marriage will allow her to inherit the marriage will allow him to inherit, and then his assets will go to her. She will take care of him during his stint in Newgate, and and make sure that he has privileges while he's there.
The historical basis for this process seems pretty scant. Fleet Prison marriages were definitely a thing, but not even necessarily between incarcerated people and non-incarcerated people. Fleet Prison was also a notorious prison, though mainly for debtors, and those held in contempt of court in the Court of Chancery Through a legal loophole. Fleet marriages did not require the banns to be read. So before the Marriage Act of 1753. It was easier to get married at a prison than a church. The Marriage Act disallowed these quickie marriages leading to the marriage tourism in Gretna Green that we all know, and love.
Emma: Fleet would be burned down in 1780 in a riot. That also destroyed Newgate. But Newgate would be rebuilt and reopened in 1783.
There were definitely frequent conjugal visitors to prison over its history. Similarly, there's evidence of relationships and marriages between male and female prisoners. It could be hard to tell the level of consent going on here because of where we get the documentation. So I’m going to be careful in how I describe it. But the prison's boundaries were much more fluid than how we conceive of prison. Now visitors could enter, and even families could be moved in with the prisoner, especially if they could pay for some fee for accommodations.
Emma: So the first book is a book that I read that sort of a staple of the genre, because it's by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. It's Shanna from 1977, and this is the earliest example I found of a married at the gallows plot in a romance novel, though there are references to it in the mystery book, The Bride of Newgate, by John Dixon Carr from 1950, and I've also seen political cartoons satirizing Newgate marriages from the early 1900s after the prison actually closed.
In Shanna, the titular heroine is a very spoiled heiress whose father works in the Caribbean. He has sent her to London with one instruction: marry someone worthy of you, or I will pick your husband. Shanna can’t get excited about any of her suitors, either finding them boring or gold-digging. She comes up with a plan: marry a man on death row. There is a man on death row right now who has an easy to pass for an aristocrat name: Ruark Beauchamp, though he is actually a colonial himself.
She offers to help make his final days more comfortable in exchange for marriage, by paying for privileges within Newgate. Ruark wants something else: a real wedding night.
After their wedding, when Ruark attempts to romance Shanna, and she is confused by both his earnest attention and her feelings for him. But she double crosses him and returns him to prison before they can consummate the marriage. Shanna means to return to the Caribbean a widow. She lies to her father about how her husband died (a carriage accident). But Ruark has actually been transported, not executed, under mysterious circumstances (later revealed to be a plot by an agent of Shanna’s father). Under the name John Ruark, he begins working for Shanna’s father and pursuing her, blackmailing her to reveal her scheme and fraud to her father, all while demanding she make good on her wedding night promise.
The book is sprawling and flowery in a very Woodiwiss way. Even as an occasional reader of bodice rippers, I don’t relish Woodiwiss’ characters, but this book is important as establishing this almost always ahistorical plot as a convention in romance. Beth is going to tell us about a more recent book that takes this up as well.
Beth: So this is My One and Only Duke by Grace Burrowes. Quinn’s condemned to death for murder. He’s a banker and rich, so he can buy privileges at Newgate. He befriends a few people, including a child pickpocket. His sister sends him better food, although he hangs it in a bag on the rafters so the rats don’t get it. He meets Jane when her father visits with prisoners and she needs a place to hang out. Jane’s a widow and pregnant and without funds. Her father didn’t approve of her marriage, so he introduces her by her maiden name. She doesn’t contradict him, so he doesn’t look like a liar and to ensure he won’t throw her out of their house. So to the public, she looks a bit like a fallen woman and she won’t have access to a widow’s portion for another year. Quinn takes pity on her and they marry so he can ensure money will stay with her and not go to her father.
All the while in the background, this dude’s trying to find Quinn because it turns out he’s inherited a dukedom. I cannot stress the jump in class here. He started off as a FOOTMAN, works his way into being a banker and then becomes a duke—anyway, one reason they want him to inherit is so he can pay off the massive debts on the estate.
He makes it all the way to the hanging and they have to cut him down. Quinn pays a thousand pounds to have a private hanging. When he leaves Newgate he takes the child pickpocket and three sex workers with him, who he befriended, to be hired as a footman and chambermaids.
Quinn is innocent of murder he is Newgate for. A villain conspires for him to go to Newgate and manages it through corrupt guards and legal people.
Emma: Both of these involve a marriage to the gallows, which is not particularly realistic. But there are other elements that sort of heightened the drama even more, I think, in Shanna the thing it is that is, it seems unrealistic, is why she even is motivated to go to a prison. Well, the thing that is unrealistic in My One and Only Duke is the jump in rank that is going on sort of behind the scenes with Quinn. But I guess, it’s like, why do, and I don’t have an answer to this, why do you think this is a compelling plot? Because I think it’s one of those things that when I read it, I’m like this is a little goofy. And I can suspend my disbelief pretty well when reading historical romance, but it’s one of those things that sort of signals automatically to like, this person is not taking the concept of Newgate particularly seriously.
Beth: I wonder if it's just people look at it like oh, marriage of convenience! It's another way to get two people together, as opposed to like an aristocratic match or something like that. But you're right in the end. You end up kind of having Newgate as just like your setting as opposed to having any impact on the characters, and I would say in this book that I read Quinn, I think he was only there for a month, because, like we've been saying, it's just you go there to wait till you either are hanged or you are transported elsewhere.
So I think just the one thing that stood out to me with this book is yeah. He's rich, so he's able to pay for some privileges. But it's still not like great. It's a great place to be, and the same thing happened for him. You guys were talking earlier about like men being angry, and it's kind of like this gendered thing, that of the books we've read so far.
And he's yeah kind of angry, too. But I guess it's also more about like the plot that's happening like who sent him to Newgate, because he's actually innocent of the murder he's condemned for ends up being this whole thing. Someone kind of villainous got him there.
Emma: Yeah, I feel like that maybe Grace Burrows had read Shanna because it's Woodwiss. And so I think maybe this is like the update of like what happens when he's a duke instead of like a colonial, because the whole thing with Beauchamp is that he has like a fancy name, but he's actually from the colonies. And so Shanna is like, she's like really mean to him the whole time. She's like you’re disgusting, not only because you were in Newgate, but because you're a colonial. It's like you live in the Caribbean, Shanna.
Woodiwiss, her ability to make me so annoyed with a woman is unparalleled because her heroines are just kind of mean and bratty. And it’s a bodice ripper, so the man in violent, but I’m like, you’re really mean, maybe be mean to him, but you could be like a little..do some self-reflection, Woodiwiss heroines, I don’t know.
Chels: I haven't read Shanna but I know that Shanna is like infamously obnoxious, because she's actually referenced in this like Laura Kinsale essay called the “Androgynous Reader”, where she's like making an example out of Shanna. So that's kind of my context for for that
One like thought that I kind of had when you were kind of talking about, or like asking why that something kind of like, so unserious like with the marriage at the gallows happens frequently. It's like I don't have an answer for that, really, but like I was kind of thinking of like, you know, Newgate, but we also get Bedlam references all the time much less flippant.
And I and I wonder if that's some, some it has something to do with, maybe a comment that you had when we were discussing this earlier about how people don't really conceptualize Newgate outside of, like our modern understandings of what prison is.
Emma: Yeah. And so I wrote about this when I was first doing the research. Because I was kind of wondering like when I was thinking of my research. I was like, how much do I want to expand this? So I want to look at Bedlam and Newgate, which I sort of see as parallel and how they're brought up.
But I think one thing that's interesting is that Bedlam, I think, has a much bigger cultural footprint, as like an idiom, and like we talk about like we call things Bedlam after Bedlam. What's like Newgate really only exists. I I think most people, if they know of what it is, maybe know about it from novels rather like we're not talking about like Newgate is not part of our like, our our sort of conversational talking all the time.
I think we still think of like like a mental asylum. I think maybe we think of it as like. Oh, like this is not a good place, like if something is an asylum, opposed to like a hospital. It’s bad.
Well, it's like prison, I think people in different sort of political spectrum, write novels that are set in Newgate and have different opinions about whether prison is all the way bad or like something, it was like a necessary evil, or like actually a public good. And so I think that may be part of it as well that it's like. We tend to think of asylum as always cruel, always always outdated ways of dealing with mental health, but we don't usually have that response to prisons in the same way.
Beth: So to kind of transition to reformers, at the end of the book Burrows discusses Newgate, and how it was a terrible place. Then she connects this and this is quoting her: “oddly enough, there is a significant tradition connecting prison reform and banking families in 1813. Elizabeth Gurney Fry, daughter of a prominent Quaker family, connected to both Gurney's Bank and Barclay’s Bank, visited Newgate. I don't know why…we've talked about this, but why…she's connecting it as like a banking thing like Quinn is a banker, but like I would assume, because the Quakers were famous reformers.
Chels: That seems more of a like connection than yeah. Bankers love freedom.
Beth: Yeah, that's. I would never in a million year just be like, yeah Bankers: big on prison abolition.
Emma: Quakers were bankers and Quakers were prison reformers from like two different like thought processes. Quakers were really involved in prison reform, especially in the United States.
They're sort of credited with the idea of like single celling, which is not a thing in due gate because of the way that Newgate is built, this medieval building. Everyone is together in like in different rooms. They sleep together. You can get a single cell or a roommate if you pay for it.
But the idea of single celling and sort of solitary reflection comes from the Quakers, and those were starting to be built in in England in like the 1830s through the 1850s.
And sometimes people point to those buildings as like examples of the Panopticon, which is an English concept from Jeremy Bentham, but of an panopticon in England, was like notoriously never actually built. What they did instead was single celling, so that people are not…their behavior is not being controlled by being witnessed, but by being like isolated, that you can't harm another prisoner. You can't. It's hard to harm yourself if you you're in a controlled single space. So that comes from the Quakers.
Beth: And did they advocate for separation by gender as well? Was that them?
Emma: Yeah. So that was. That was a big Elizabeth Gurney Fry thing, because this was an issue in Newgate. Less of that. I think they always wanted the genders to be separated. But the women, I guess the scale of like which women were, and how many women were in prison at a time grew in the 1780s and women had to walk through the men's section to go to the Privy, and this was something that Fry really took issue with is like, we should have, they should have their own privy. They should be able to go to the bathroom without like walking through the men's section, and so keeping them separate, and then eventually, having like separate institutions completely. We like there were. There was a men's prison, and a women's prison, it came about with with Fry’s reforms.
So I guess the other big reformer I guess to to think about is John Howard, who was not Quaker, but was deeply religious.and he sort of starts the question in the 1770s of like, what do we do about prison? And that's sort of what Newgate is a part of with this transition from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, John Howard basically commits like a survey of all the prisons in England. It's like who's there. Why are they there? How many of them are felons? How many of them are debtors?
And this is the first time that people a lot of people are like aware of, like the conditions of prison. So more people become reformers after John Howard publishes the survey. And at the time it could seems like it can kind of go a few different ways, because basically in 1776, famously, the United States breaks off from England and no longer is the place to transport. There are about 14 years between 1776 and 1790 where they don't know what they're doing with prisons, and it's before the establishment of Botany Bay in Australia, where which became the other big transportation place. That's where you see a lot of the sort of philosophical reforms, and then those get implemented in the early nineteenth century, because people got so upset about these surveys and the information that was coming out about prison.
Beth: That's that's good. So I feel often after your points and like, “Yup, those very smart, Emma.” Okay, so we'll transition, then. So all the books we've talked about so far involve people being exonerated for the crimes they're accused of, but we think it's important in the context of abolition politics to also consider how stories are told where someone is definitely guilty of what they are accused. So Chels can take a from here with another book that they read.
Chels: This is The Prince of Eden, by Marilyn Harris, and I guess, before I get started, a little bit of a backstory on the Prince of Eden. So this is the second book in the the Eden series by Marilyn Harris, and it was published in the seventies. And the first book. This other Eden is a Bodice River. The second book is more of a family saga, but it was kind of back when there wasn't like that as much of the strict genre fiction lines there are now, so we wouldn't consider this genre fiction romance today, but it does kind of fall under the Romance Family Romance Umbrella. It was published by Avon.
It starts in May, 1836. The book begins with a head turnkey of Newgate, standing high on the catwalk, looking into the pit of Common Cell, where there’s a commotion. There’s an accelerating tension that the turnkeys are not able to place, but they know note that it’s usually quieter this time of day. They’re waiting for something, jostling each other.
Jawster, the head turnkey, asks a new employee, a very young man, where the new lady is. “Seldom did they get nobs like her in the Common Cell. Jawster knew her case well enough, as did everyone in London who could read or had ears to hear. She was Charlotte Longford, the young wife of a rich linen merchant in Oxford Street who had been charged by her husband with adultery.” She had been brought to Newgate that same day, after a magistrate used her to set an example for the upstart middle class, quote “resurrecting an ancient form of punishment for adultery, sentencing her to be burned on the palm of her hand with a hot poker in public court, but only after she spends a week in the Common Cell of Newgate. Some context that Harris gives us here is “Knowing full well that if she survived the latter crucible, the former would be as nothing in comparison.” Once Charlotte was brought into Newgate she collapsed, appearing lifeless.
While he’s musing, Jawster notices the crowd in the common cell start to chant. “He’s comin’!” He’s comin’!” The guards grow increasingly fearful in the commotion, until it’s revealed that they are heralding the arrival of Edward Eden, known to them as The Prince of Eden. Edward Eden is the bastard son of an earl who is Thomas Eden from the 1st book in the series, This Other Eden, who deliberately lets himself be arrested in order to bring gifts to the inmates and guards alike. One is a kindness, one is a bribery. Eden is Charlotte's lover, so he’s arrived with a mission this time: bribing Jawster to help get Chartotte out of Newgate.
After Eden issues the bribe, he goes to see his lawyer, where it is revealed that Edward wanted to defend Charlotte in court, but his lawyer discouraged him from doing so. The lawyer seems to think that Charlotte got her just deserts, that the reason she was condemned, and not Edward, was to discourage social climbing. The lawyer tells Edward that humiliation was the goal, and that “The young lady was brazenly playing the game of the aristocracy. No Tory in his right mind could permit it.”
Edward then learns of the death of a family friend, and an acquaintance offers him opium while he’s grieving. Edward agrees to try it, losing four days of his life. Eventually he’s discovered in a dilapidated house with other people who are abusing drugs. Edward is brought home and helped to get sober, and he returns his efforts back to saving Charlotte.
At this point it’s too late. Charlotte was accosted by two men in the prison, who viciously attack and rape her. When Edward shows up he demands to see Charlotte, but is led to her body instead. In his anger at seeing Charlotte thus, Edward attacks and tries to kill the guard. They attempt to arrest Edward, but he’s much luckier than Charlotte. Because of his familial connections, he’s sprung from Newgate, his only punishment being that he must leave London and return to his ancestral home.
Emma: I think, the idea of like dealing with guilt, both for like crimes and bad acts, is something that I try to separate out in these novels, as I'm reading them, because so often the crime is not the worst thing that someone did, and it's often not the reason that someone should be feeling guilt. It's like that. The system is telling you that this is the the cry. But I also try to be careful with like describing that in like my real life like that, not describing, even like a person as criminal, like an act as criminal. A person is not criminal, and being careful with language around that.
But I think this book the way that Chels described it seems like this becomes a theme of the book and ways that other books that we've talked about don't necessarily do. where it's like. What what we take from Newgate are these themes of guilt where Charlotte, has no reason really to be guilty, but she's being punished, and then Eden, or Edward is not…should feel guilty. He's, he's done these bad acts that harm people, and is, keeps getting off scot free. And so he like processing that that guilt, and as like a separate thing from the justice that comes down from a crime.
Beth: I think another interesting point that I think Chels will bring up, but was also in my book that I read as like the rise of the middle class and kind of the backlash to that which I find very interesting in a prison context. I don't know. I got no good thoughts to connect, but but I just gonna throw that out there for you guys to catch.
Chels: Yes, so the cool thing about The Prince of Eden is that Marilyn Harris kind of makes this connection for you. When Charlotte is arrested and Edward is speaking with his solicitor, his solicitor says that the middle classes will rise, and the peers will have no objection to it. He says “In fact most good Tories are only too willing to make room for them. “Make room,” he repeats pointedly. “The aristocracy will make room. They will not absorb them. The difference is subtle and very important.”
So the middle class is allowed to get something of a leg up but they can’t be too ambitious, lest they displace the peers. You see this later when Edward gets involved in the Chartist movement, which is a working class movement that had 6 tenants all around improving the lives of working class people: including universal male sufferage, secret ballots, paying MPs, abolishing the property qualification for being a member of parliament, yearly parliamentary elections, and then equal-sized constituencies. So the overarching goal is to get more working people involved in politics so they can improve their own lot.
So there are two chanting scenes in The Prince of Eden that mirror each other. The first “He’s coming! He’s coming!” around Edward’s arrival at Newgate, and the latter is lead by the Chartists after a speech is given by the Tolpuddle Martyrs, which is a group of agricultural laborers who were unjustly transported to a prison colony for the offense of “administering unlawful oaths” to members of their union.
So after the Martyrs speech, the Chartists chant: “Who owns England?” The answer to that chant haunts Edward, who you’ll remember didn’t have to spend any time in Newgate for his own criminal act thanks to his proximity to power: “Who owns England” they chant, and the answer is “the aristocracy!” Everything is centered around the aristocracy’s tight grip on control - the cruel system that casually discards human life and prevents upward mobility. They keep everyone in their place through political and judicial power.
Emma: Yeah, in the context of the middle class it's interesting reading with these histories of Newgate reforms. from like the 1770s into like the 1830s, because during all this time when like Enlightenment philosophers are sort of arguing like, what does it mean for the State to punish someone like that's the whole ideas like the social contract of the State like, what when does the State have the right to punish someone?
And the idea is that they they have the right to punish someone when it serves as a general deterrent, and that's the idea that comes out is that punishment should not be harsh. It should be consistent, so it's like. If you steal a loaf of bread, you shouldn't be killed; but every time you steal a loaf of bread you should be punished, and that's coming from Beccaria, an Italian philosopher.
But all of this idea is that these are coming out and London's becoming this metropolitan city, and the middle class is growing, and there's this anxiety about like the crowding of London. It's like, what do you do when you think of a crowd, you implement more social control. None of these reformers really seem to be thinking about like: why is someone needing to steal a loaf of bread?
That that is not a thing that is happening. In the discussions that are happening when prisons are actually changing, which is in this turn of the eighteenth century. That comes up more in the 1830s, with like Charles Dickens really focusing on children and sort of like this empathy for lower classes who are suffering and like suffering specifically in London. But at that point the way that Parliament has shifted how they talk about prisons, they are already building more prisons. They're already building the single cells, they're already invested in incarceration in a way that's becoming more and more modern. So it's like the social reform doesn't line up for this like one moment in time when England was prepared to sort of switch how they're thinking about prison.
And it’s just total disconnect of what's going on in our world right now of like, why is there more crime? They really think it's a moral issue which is not that different than how we talk about crime now, or it's like people. what's going to prevent them from committing a crime. What's going to reform them? What's going to rehabilitate them?
It's like. Well, what are they really being rehabilitated from? if especially for nonviolent crimes, even violent crimes? Why, what drives someone to violence? What drives someone to commit an act that you think of as unthinkable?
It's usually circumstance in some way. What are those circumstances, or at least, and circumstances are going to have an effect on it.
Beth: we could talk a lot about actually what you just said, but I think we should transition. And I like what you said about like what drive someone to violence. So The Highwayman by Kerrigan Byrne is very popular, and Emma's origin story for this episode.
Emma: Yeah. So The Highwayman by Kerrigan Byrne is what inspired this research. This is probably the most popular book for recent years. That features a Newgate plot, or a really substantial Newgate plot.
Dougan MacKenzie and Farah are both orphans who forge a friendship in the Scottish Highlands. Farah is a ward of someone who pays for her better treatment at the orphanage, so she aids Dougan and they fall in love and do a handfasting ceremony. (He is 11 and she is 8), this is prompted by Farah’s revelation that she is supposed to marry her father’s lawyer, her benefactor. A priest at the orphanage attempts to assault Farah and Dougan kills him in a rage and is sent to prison.
Flashforward. Her entire life, Farah has considered herself a widow, living as Farah MacKenzie. She works as a sort of secretary for Scotland Yard and meets Dorian Blackwell, noted London crime lord. A few days later, Dorian kidnaps her and takes her to Scotland, explaining that she is in danger and actually he kidnaps her for her own protection. Dorian was imprisoned with Dougan and reports to Farah that Dougan’s affectionate stories of her were a light for all the prisoners in Newgate.
In Scotland, she meets a group of former Newgate prisoners who make up Dorian’s team of criminals. Dorian had been sentenced to seven years for petty theft, also as a child. He tells Farah: “seven years of hard labor for petty theft,” “because of prior indiscretions.” He also reveals that Dougan died in prison, beaten to death by three guards. She had believed that he died of consumption.
In order to talk about the big Newgate scene here, I have to do a spoiler for the crux of the book, though I think it is a pretty intuitive plot point that you may have even guessed at this point--Dougan and Dorian are the same person. Dorian did in prison and Dougan suffered so much trauma under his identity that he basically Don Draper’d himself and took up Dorian’s name as an adult, partially so he could live Newgate earlier, because Dorian was convicted was petty theft and Dougan was convicted of murder.
Dougan reveals to Farah, so he is still living as Dorian, Dougan now Dorian, which is what Farah continues to call him, revelas to Farah after this revelation the extent to his trauma from Newgate. He was the smallest boy in the prison and was abused sexually, physically and mentally. During the entirety of their relationship, Dorian has struggled to touch Farah, wearing gloves and restraining her hands so she cannot touch him. So here’s some quotes from the book about Dorian’s conception:
“To say it was a nightmare would be kind. The brutality was all-encompassing. Sexual, physical … mental.” He lifted his eyes to her, covering the flicker of shame behind those familiar walls of ice. “Can’t you see how it changed me, Farah? Not only physically, but essentially.”
Farah then expresses sympathy for him as a victim of circumstance as a child and and is in awe of his strength as a man: “‘You were young. You were small and helpless.’ She inched toward the edge of the bed. ‘You are none of those things anymore.’”
Dorian struggles to make her understand that once he was grown enough, he enacted revenge on everyone, paying all the abuses in kind back. But Farah insists that he is a special circumstance, telling him: “You survived when others didn’t. You had no other means with which to keep yourself alive. In order to stop the persecution, you had to become a man with a black heart. I don’t … sanction violence, but neither can I condemn you for the past. Especially when it was my fault you were there in the first place.
This is the book that really inspired me to write about Newgate Prison at all because of this scene. This book is really beloved, it has a 4.1 rating on Goodreads. But I struggled with the romance and the plot--neither of them are really to my taste. But this scene, where Farah is able to achieve this cognitive dissonance for her lover (and to some extent his friends) of understanding why they were driven to violence and that they were there for excusable circumstances, but in the same conversation she describes criminals “preying” on each other and using this sort of violent, animalistic language--there’s this sense that Dorian is the exception to the rule about who gets sympathy for bad acts.
There’s so much of the details of prison here that are ahistorical, so to me, Byrne is really calling upon Newgate as an archetype of prison. While there were other books that I felt upped the romp factor for plot purposes, tempering Newgate’s terror, this book continues Newgate’s horrors, but makes them less specific.
So many of the details are just general “prison” descriptors including the length of the sentence, which would be atypical for Newgate, and these particularly American notions--the long sentencing, the ideal of parole comes up, which is really associated with British colonies and the United States in its inception, and the idea of productive hard labor. The ex-Newgate incarcerees talk about being sentenced to work on the London Underground, which is not really what hard labor was like in Newgate.
So I feel like this book has this opportunity to extend sympathy for these sort of circumstances of even really violent acts. But Dorian and Farah sort of fail to see that this is a system, a systemic thing rather than just a Dorian thing, and this is was just the most frustrating scene for me to read, because I just wanted to like tip them over the edge of like empathy, and like it's the system fault that it's the system's fault that's why Dorian was experiencing this violence. And why it's so sad. It's like these people who were hurting him in prison, too, were also incarcerated, and experiencing the same trauma that he is going through. And so this is what inspired me to look at why Newgate is used in these romance novel, because I felt like Byrne was sort of having her cake and eating it, too, of getting to invoke Newgate sort of ahistorically.'
And really and it ended up writing a pretty conservative notion about what prison is like really, in the United States rather than Victorian England.
Beth: right again, always at the end of your point I’m like “that’s…good job, amen.” The plot point of like Dougan/Dorian, I remember watching a Tiktok, and someone was like trying to conceal the fact that and like while watching this, I had not read the book, yet I’m like so it's that guy. I also like that you mentioned that the romance itself is not much of a sell. Because like we talked about historical accuracy, I wonder if she could even gotten away with it if she addresses this system failing. Does that make sense? That one conversation had been changed so he's not. It's like You're not special, he’s like everyone else who went to Newgate.
Emma: He's like everyone else that went to Newgate right, even if it was like. You're not special like this happens to lots of people, and like we can. All we can like move on from it together like, and especially because he's surrounded. It's interesting to me that so Dorian's Crime or Dorian nee Dougan, crime is the only one that's really violent of like the the band of criminals like they all have, like very sympathetic crimes, like one of them, which again, very ahistorical is he fell in love with man, and he tells people you were incarcerated for homosexuality. It seems a little foolish to just be telling people that you meet like why you went to prison. But it's it's these crimes we're like, oh, this is this is an unjust punishment, very easily like for a petty theft, or for falling in love with a man, and it it very. It seems like she was inspired by Oscar Wilde. and because the the man's father, like sort of turns it into a big big to do.
So like it doesn't even extend to the other characters where it's like. Oh, she learns to have sympathy for these people who are victims of circumstance of like what's violent? It's like the violence is very like locally focused on this one character who we have this very sympathetic explanation for.
I think I think violence is one of those things with abolition. You have to sort of think about like are like it's. It's a hard mental exercise to go through. But I think it's important to think about like what do we do with people who've done really bad things? And how do we reintegrate them into society, if that's a goal that you have, and it's interesting in romance--people in romance do violent things all the time.
Beth: I know, it’s a whole genre, many subgenres just focused on violence in romance.
Emma: And coming back for them and coming back to a happily ever after. But these new gate stories tend to focus on like making that an exception rather than a rule, and or having people actually, if we are condemning the system. It's because the person actually didn't do anything that we want to be condemned, and it's like this sort of distance thing where it's like oh, in England, in 1700s they put people in prison for petty theft, and that's not something we need to worry about anymore. It's like that's not true.
Beth: Right.
Chels: I feel like Byrne has…I don’t want to say libertarian because that doesn’t quite work, but so Farrah is a cop. Farrah works for cops, and so there’s kind of like, and I’ve read not every book in this series, but quite a few, there’s kind of this recurring theme of extrajudicial justice, but the system is still the system and the system is ostensibly a force for good.
So like both of those things exists in the books at the same time. So you kind of have like this, like libertarianism like these, like Batman type figures who are doing basically bad things, but like their reasons are okay. It's okay for them. They're like billionaire types. They're extremely influential. But and but you have that like coexisting with like the world of cops and the cop characters, and it's kind of like this, like weird political mesh that it's like exciting, I think she wants the excitement of crime, but, like cannot come to a place where like she feels like she can fully endorse it.
But yeah, that's just something that I've kind of noticed is that her books are kind of like I couldn't, I had trouble like putting together her beliefs about incarceration from kind of like the mishmash of everything.
Emma: Yeah, it's something that is accurate about this like when it's set. So it's set a little bit. I think it'd be the latest one of the settings. So it's like 1855, and that is like post professionalization of police. So like Farah works at Scotland Yard. And it's like, there's this professional class of investigators who are patrolling and like investigating crimes, and that's a new thing. And that's one of those reforms that happens in the nineteenth century that really changes the relationship with prison, partially because before there there was sort of professional cops in England, the Metropolitan Police, which is, it's interesting why it took them so long to have a professional police. France had one much earlier, and there's like literally documents from Parliament that, like we can't do that: that’s too like French.
[LAUGHTER]
It would be embarrassing for us to have police. it's like even though you now have this metropolitan city that, like they want to control the people like they won't, have cops, but not because they don't want to be French. But so it happens really a lot later, and before that the investigation and prosecution of crimes was really private.
And so there was this idea that that was like ineffective, because people didn't want to prosecute because they were like “our punishments are too harsh.” So again, rather than like lowering the punishment, or like, maybe making prison, not as terrible. They're like we need to have a professional class of people who will do this for us because we can't trust, like the populace to dole out justice in the same way, because they keep saying, there the deterrent is not to the people committing the crime it's becomes a deterrent to the people who are prosecuting the crimes. So that leads the Metropolitan Police.
So just but that part is accurate. It's. I feel like the first book that we have, the only book that we've talked about that would really have that sort of professional class like backing the Newgate. But I mean Newgate. This is set in 1855, Newgate is not really going to be a place for an incarceration really past the 1860s, even though it doesn't close until 1902 because it other prisons are built. It just it becomes it's so old. It was built originally in the twelfth century, and had been mostly all the renovations to it really had been a surface level.
Beth: It burned down at one point, right?
Emma: It actually burned down twice! And so it becomes basically closer to what we would consider like a jail. Now, where, like you consider the difference between jail and prison, where jail is like temporary housing before trial, because it was so close to the Old Bailey, which is the big court in London. after around the 1860s, it really just was like you're sitting here waiting for your trial, and if you then you become incarcerated, you would go to another prison that had like single celling and was cleaner, and was generally I imagine, not pleasant, but less disgusting compared to Newgate, which I think just always smelled terrible. That's like the big theme from a lot of the history of this is that Newgate made all of London sell bad.
Beth: Oh no.
Emma: So if you listened to this and you wanted to learn more about the history of Newgate, we’ll have a few non-fiction recommendations in our show notes. Thank you so much for listening to Reformed Rakes. If you enjoy the podcast, you can find bonus content on our Patreon at Patreon.Com/ReformedRakes. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram for show updates, the username for both is @ReformedRakes. Thank you again, and we’ll see you next time.
