The Newgate Calendar
Introduction
The Newgate Calendar was one of those books, along with a
Bible, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the
Pilgrim's Progress, most likely to be found in any English home between 1750
and 1850. Children were encouraged to read it because it was believed to
inculcate principles of right living -- by fear of punishment if not by the
dull and earnest morals appended to the stories of highwaymen and other felons.
The editors of one version even included as a frontispiece a picture of a devoted mother giving a copy to her son
(who seems to be about eight years of age) while pointing out the window at a
body hanging on a gibbet. They waxed lyrical on this theme, as follows:
The anxious Mother with a Parents Care,
Presents our Labours to her future Heir
"The Wise, the Brave, the temperate and the Just,
Who love their neighbour, and in God who trust
Safe through the Dang'rous paths of Life may Steer,
Nor dread those Evils we exhibit Here".
Thus most writers, like most literate people of any occupation, would
have read it as children. And whatever the moral effects, it certainly provided
them with plenty of material. Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, Bulwer
Lytton's Eugene Aram, Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild and Gerald
Griffin's The Collegians are only a few of the many novels directly
based on stories in the Newgate Calendar. Even the illiterate would have
seen stage versions of the stories, which were a staple of the popular drama of
the time. Many of Sam Weller's comments of the "as the -- said ven --" type are derived from such plays. Some of them
- e.g. Dick Turpin, Sawney Bean, Captain
Kidd -- are seen even today in pantomimes. There is, or any rate was in 1995, a
restaurant in Dumfries called Sawney Bean's(!!)
Although editions of the Newgate Calendar are still published from
time to time they tend to be very incomplete versions -- less than 10% of the
original (see Bibliographic Details) -- so this
ex-classics version will, we hope, be useful to students and scholars as well
as the general reading public.
