The Newgate Calendars

From the later eighteenth century, these collected calendars gather moralizing lives of men and women who passed through Newgate Prison or died on the gallows. Typical pieces recount highwaymen, housebreakers, forgers, and murderers, mixing last speeches, trial matter, and warnings against drink, theft, and bad company. Famous names such as Dick Turpin sit beside obscure offenders whose cases were sold as chapbooks. The book is an anthology of criminal biography for household reading, not a legal code and not a history of prison reform.

Bound in red cloth decorated in gold. Red endleaves. Transparent plastic dust-jacket. Folio Press and J.M. Dent.