Crime And Punishment At Newgate.: An Illustrated History of Crime, Justice and the Scaffold. Volume II.
By Graeme R. Newman
Murderers and highwaymen, pirates and forgers, thieves and traitors, duelists and rebels—the men and women who passed through the British criminal justice system between 1700 and 1816 inhabited a world in which punishment was intended not merely to penalize the offender, but to be seen.
Crime and Punishment at Newgate brings that world vividly back to life through nearly 190 illustrated cases drawn from Camden Pelham’s celebrated nineteenth-century Chronicles of Crime; or, The New Newgate Calendar. Each case has been newly designed and presented as a compact illustrated narrative, combining the story of the crime with arrest, trial, conviction and, above all, punishment.
The punishments could be extraordinary. Men and women were hanged for offences that today might result in imprisonment. Others were whipped, branded, transported, imprisoned, mutilated or exposed to public humiliation. Bodies might be dissected after execution or displayed in chains. Yet the system was not uniformly merciless: pardons, reprieves, escapes, reduced verdicts and differences of wealth, gender and social rank produced striking variations in who was punished—and how.
Among these pages are murder, piracy, robbery, treason, duelling, forgery, riot, domestic killing and political crime. But this is more than a collection of sensational criminal stories. It is an illustrated history of the changing meaning of punishment itself.
In a substantial new Introduction, criminologist Graeme R. Newman asks questions that remain surprisingly modern: Did the punishment fit the crime? Who deserved punishment? Was justice applied equally to rich and poor? How fair were criminal trials? Why did governments make punishment a public spectacle? And how different are modern societies, which have moved punishment behind prison walls while turning crime and criminal trials into mass entertainment?
The scaffold, the prison, the courtroom and the crowd become parts of the same history. As Newman observes, the eighteenth-century spectator travelled to the punishment; today the spectacle travels to the spectator.
Richly illustrated throughout and supplemented by a Thematic Guide to Crime and Punishment and a Selected Bibliography, this first volume transforms the traditional Newgate Calendar into a modern visual history of crime, justice and society.
For readers interested in criminal justice, criminology, the history of punishment, capital punishment, Newgate Prison, British social history, true crime, and the darker side of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century life.
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