For the prison in East Granby, Connecticut, see Old Newgate Prison.

Newgate, the old city gate and prison

The second Newgate in a 19th-century print: A West View of Newgate by George Shepherd

A plan of Newgate Prison published in 1800

Newgate Prison was a prison in London, at the corner of Newgate Street and Old Bailey just inside the City of London. It was originally located at the site of a gate in the Roman London Wall. The gate/prison was rebuilt in the 12th century, and demolished in 1777. The prison was extended and rebuilt many times, and remained in use for over 700 years, from 1188 to 1902.

Early History[link]

The first prison at Newgate was built in 1188 on the orders of Henry II. It was significantly enlarged in 1236, and the executors of Lord Mayor Richard Whittington were granted a license to renovate the prison in 1422. The prison was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, and was rebuilt in 1672, extending into new buildings on the south side of the street.

According to medieval statute, the prison was to be managed by two annually elected Sheriffs, who in turn would sublet the administration of the prison to private "gaolers," or "Keepers," for a price. These Keepers in turn were permitted to exact payment directly from the inmates, making the position one of the most profitable in London. Inevitably, the system offered incentives for the Keepers to exhibit cruelty to the prisoners, charging them for everything from entering the gaol to having their chains both put on and taken off. Among the most notorious Keepers in the Middle Ages were the 14th-century gaolers Edmund Lorimer, who was infamous for charging inmates four times the legal limit for the removal of irons, and Hugh De Croydon, who was eventually convicted of blackmailing prisoners in his care.

Over the centuries, Newgate was used for a number of purposes including imprisoning people awaiting execution, although it was not always secure: burglar Jack Sheppard escaped from the prison three times before he went to the gallows at Tyburn in 1724. Prison chaplain Paul Lorrain achieved some fame in the early 18th century for his sometimes dubious publication of Confessions of the condemned.

Rebuilding[link]

Parliament having granted £50,000 towards the cost, the City of London provided a piece of ground 1600 feet long and 50 feet deep to enlarge the site of the prison and to build a new sessions house. The work was begun in 1770 to the designs of George Dance. The new prison was almost finished when it was stormed by a mob during the Gordon riots in June 1780. The building was gutted by fire, and the walls badly damaged. The cost of repairs was estimated at £30,000. Dance’s new prison was finally completed in 1782.^[1]

The new prison was constructed to an architecture terrible design intended to discourage law-breaking. The building was laid out around a central courtyard, and was divided into two sections: a "Common" area for poor prisoners and a "State area" for those able to afford more comfortable accommodation. Each section was further sub-divided to accommodate felons and debtors.

Executions[link]

In 1783, the site of London's gallows was moved from Tyburn to Newgate. Public executions outside the prison – by this time, London's main prison – continued to draw large crowds. It was also possible to visit the prison by obtaining a permit from the Lord Mayor of the City of London or a sheriff. The condemned were kept in narrow sombre cells separated from Newgate Street by a thick wall and receiving only a dim light from the inner courtyard. The gallows were constructed outside a window in Newgate Street. Until the 20th century, future British executioners were trained at Newgate; one of the last was John Ellis in 1901.

During the early 19th century the prison attracted the attention of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry. She was particularly concerned at the conditions in which female prisoners (and their children) were held. After she presented evidence to the House of Commons improvements were made. In 1858, the interior was rebuilt with individual cells.

From 1868, public executions were discontinued and executions were carried out on gallows inside Newgate. Michael Barrett was the last man to be hanged in public outside Newgate Prison (and the last person to be publicly executed in Great Britain) on 26 May 1868.

Demolition[link]

A cell and the galleries at Newgate in 1896

The prison closed in 1902, and was demolished in 1904. The Central Criminal Court (also known as the Old Bailey after the street on which it stands) now stands upon its site.

The original door from a prison cell used to house St. Oliver Plunkett in 1681 is on display at St. Peter's Church in Drogheda, Ireland. The original iron gate leading to the gallows was used for decades in an alleyway in Buffalo, New York and is currently housed in that city at Canisius College.

Famous prisoners[link]

Newgate Execution bell; in the church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate.

Newgate Exercise yard, 1872, by Gustave Doré

Other famous prisoners at Newgate include:

• John Bradford (1510–1555), religious reformer.
• Thomas Bambridge, former warden of Fleet Prison
• John Cooke – English Prosecutor of Charles I, regicide executed in 1660
• Giacomo Casanova – Venetian Libertine, imprisoned for alleged bigamy
• William Chaloner – Currency counterfeiter and con artist
• William Cobbett – Parliamentary reformer and agrarian
• John Frith – Protestant priest and martyr
• Thomas Neill Cream – prominent doctor who was tried and convicted for poisoning several of his patients, claimed to be notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper while on the gallows.
• Daniel Defoe – author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders (whose protagonist is born and imprisoned in Newgate Prison)
• Daniel Eaton, who was the subject of the defense Percy Bysshe Shelley offered in his famous essay, A Letter to Lord Ellenborough.
• Lord George Gordon – UK politician whom the Gordon Riots are named after
• Ben Jonson – playwright and poet, imprisoned for the 22 September 1598 killing of his fellow actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel. Freed by pleading benefit of clergy.
• William Kidd – aka Captain Kidd, the infamous pirate hunter
• John Law – economist
• Thomas Lloyd (stenographer) – first stenographer of the U.S. Congress
• James MacLaine – aka "the Gentleman Highwayman" – notorious robber
• Sir Thomas Malory – highwayman, possible author of Le Morte d'Arthur, a saga about King Arthur
• Catherine Murphy
• Titus Oates – anti-Catholic conspirator
• William Penn – the Quaker who founded the state of Pennsylvania
• Miles Prance – alleged witness to the murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey
• Jack Sheppard – thief, escapee
• Ikey Solomon – successful and infamous fence of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
• John Bellingham – assassin
• Saint Robert Southwell – Jesuit priest, poet and martyr
• Owen Suffolk – Australian bush-ranger
• Jane Voss (alias Jane Roberts) (d. 1684) – highwaywoman and thief
• Ellis Casper (b. 1784) convict no. 5185, – the famous Gold Dust Robbery of 1839
• Mary Wade – Youngest female convict transported to Australia
• Edward Gibbon Wakefield – British politician, the driving force behind much of the early colonization of South Australia, and later New Zealand
• John Walter Sr. – Founder of The Times, for libel on the Duke of York
• Catherine Wilson – nurse and suspected serial killer. Last woman hanged publicly in London^[2]

In literature[link]

• A record of executions conducted at the prison, together with commentary, was published as The Newgate Calendar, which inspired a genre of Victorian literature known as the Newgate novel.
• The prison appears in a number of novels by Charles Dickens, including Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty and Great Expectations, and is the subject of an entire essay in his work Sketches by Boz.
• The prison is also depicted in:
  • Daniel Defoe's novel Moll Flanders
  • William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams
  • Michael Crichton's novel The Great Train Robbery
  • Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle
  • Leon Garfield's novel Smith
  • Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea – where one section concerns a character's imprisonment and subsequent escape from Newgate.
  • Louis L'Amour's novel To The Far Blue Mountains – where the main character Barnabas Sackett is first imprisoned and later escapes from Newgate.
  • Bernard Cornwell's novel Gallows Thief
  • David Liss's novel A Conspiracy of Paper and the sequel, A Spectacle of Corruption
  • John Gay's Ballad Opera The Beggar's Opera
  • Richard Zacks's novel The Pirate Hunter (The True Story of Captain Kidd)
  • Wachowski brothers' film V For Vendetta
  • George MacDonald Fraser's novel Flashman's Lady
  • Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist
  • Marguerite Henry's novel King of the Wind
  • C J Sansom's novel Dark Fire
  • Jackie French's novel Tom Appleby Convict Boy
  • Coventry Patmore's poem A London Fete
  • James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff's novel Botany Bay
  • Kathleen Winsor's novel Forever Amber
  • Leon Garfield's novel Smith
  • Donald Thomas's short story, "The Execution of Sherlock Holmes."
  • Robert McCammon's novel Speaks The Nightbird Volume 2 – Evil Unveiled

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Halliday, Stephen (2007), Newgate: London's Prototype of Hell, The History Press, ISBN 978-0-7509-3896-9 

External links[link]

• Newgate prison
• Newgate prison
• The Diary of Thomas Lloyd kept in Newgate Prison, 1794–1796

Coordinates: 51°30′56.49″N 0°06′06.91″W / 51.5156917°N 0.1019194°W / 51.5156917; -0.1019194

For the bridge with the same name in Chester, Cheshire, see Newgate, Chester

Newgate at the west end of Newgate Street was one of the historic seven gates of London Wall round the City of London and one of the six which date back to Roman times. From it a Roman road led west to Silchester.^[1] Excavations in 1875, 1903 and 1909 revealed the Roman structure and showed that it consisted of a double roadway between two square flanking guardroom towers.^[2][3]

From the 12th century, at least, the gate was used as a prison for debtors and felons.^[4] This, the infamous Newgate Prison, was later extended to the south on the site of the modern Old Bailey. The gate was demolished in 1767.^[5]

Newgate Street is mostly located within the City Wall, leading west from Cheapside to the site of the gate, and then joining with Holborn Viaduct at the point where the Old Bailey thoroughfare joins to the south and Giltspur Street to the north. A notable discovery here was a Roman tile inscribed with a disgruntled comment that "Austalis has been going off on his own for 13 days".^[6]

To the north of the street are the ruins of Christ Church Greyfriars on the site of a medieval Franciscan monastery. To the south is Paternoster Square leading towards St Paul's cathedral.

See also[link]

• Fortifications of London
• Newgate Prison
• City gate
• City wall

External links[link]

• An 18th-century map showing the location of the gate (bottom right corner of map)

References[link]

Coordinates: 51°30′53.09″N 0°6′1.22″W / 51.5147472°N 0.1003389°W / 51.5147472; -0.1003389

This article about a London building or structure is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Peter Ackroyd CBE (born 5 October 1949, East Acton in west London) is an English biographer, novelist and critic with a particular interest in the history and culture of London. For his novels about English history and culture and his biographies of, among others, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More he won the Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards. He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003.

Early life and education[link]

Ackroyd grew up on a council estate and was raised in a "strict" Roman Catholic household.^[1] He first knew that he was gay when he was seven.^[2] He was educated at St. Benedict's, Ealing and at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a double first in English literature. In 1972, he was a Mellon Fellow at Yale University.

Work[link]

The result of his Yale fellowship was Notes for a New Culture, written when Ackroyd was only 22 and eventually published in 1976. The title, an echo of T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), was an early indication of Ackroyd's penchant for exploring and re-examining the works of other London-based writers.

Ackroyd worked at The Spectator magazine between 1973 and 1977 and became joint managing editor in 1978. He worked as chief book reviewer for The Times and a regular broadcaster on radio. Since 1984 he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Ackroyd's literary career began with poetry, including such works as London Lickpenny (1973) and The Diversions of Purley (1987). In 1982 he published The Great Fire of London, his first novel which is a reworking of Charles Dickens's novel Little Dorrit. The novel set the stage for the long sequence of novels Ackroyd has produced since, all of which deal in some way with the complex interaction of time and space and what Ackroyd calls "the spirit of place". However, this transition to being a novelist was unexpected. In an interview with Patrick McGrath in 1989, Ackroyd said:

“I enjoy it, I suppose, but I never thought I’d be a novelist. I never wanted to be a novelist. I can’t bear fiction. I hate it. It’s so untidy. When I was a young man I wanted to be a poet, then I wrote a critical book, and I don’t think I even read a novel till I was about 26 or 27.” ^[3]

In his novels he often contrasts historical segments with segments set in the present-day (e.g. The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee). Many of Ackroyd's novels play in London and deal with the ever changing, but at the same time stubbornly consistent nature of the city.

Often this theme is explored through the city's artists, especially its writers: Oscar Wilde in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), a fake autobiography of Wilde; Nicholas Hawksmoor, Sir Christopher Wren and Sir John Vanbrugh in Hawksmoor (1985); Thomas Chatterton and George Meredith in Chatterton (1987); John Dee in The House of Dr Dee (1993); Dan Leno, Karl Marx, George Gissing and Thomas de Quincey in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994); John Milton in Milton in America (1996); Charles Lamb in The Lambs of London.

Hawksmoor, winner of both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, was inspired by Iain Sinclair's poem 'Lud Heat' (1975), which speculated on a mystical power from the positioning of the six churches Nicholas Hawksmoor built. The novel gives Hawksmoor a Satanical motive for the siting of his buildings, and creates a modern namesake, a policeman investigating a series of murders. Chatterton (1987), a similarly layered novel explores plagiarism and forgery and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

One of Ackroyd's best known works, London: The Biography, is an extensive and thorough discussion of London through the ages. In 1994 he was interviewed about the London Psychogeographical Association in an article for The Observer where he remarked:

"I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory, the place, the past speaks . . . Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can materially affect the character and behaviour of the people who dwell in them, is it not also possible that within this city (London) and within its culture are patterns of sensibility or patterns of response which have persisted from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond?"^[4]

In the sequence London: The Biography (2000), Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002), and Thames: Sacred River (2007), Ackroyd has produced works of what he considers historical sociology. These books trace themes in London and English culture from the ancient past to the present, drawing again on his favoured notion of almost spiritual lines of connection rooted in place and stretching across time.

His fascination with London literary and artistic figures is also displayed in the sequence of biographies he has produced of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot (1984), Charles Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995), Thomas More (1998), Chaucer (2004), William Shakespeare (2005), and J. M. W. Turner. The city itself stands astride all these works, as it does in the fiction. Ackroyd was forced to think of new methods of biography writing in T. S. Eliot when he was told he couldn't quote extensively from Eliot's poetry and unpublished letters.^[5]

From 2003 to 2005, Ackroyd wrote a six-book non-fiction series (Voyages Through Time), intended for readers as young as eight, his first work for children. The critically acclaimed series ("Not just sound-bite snacks for short attention spans, but unfolding feasts that leave you with a sense of wonder", The Sunday Times^[6]) is an extensive narrative of key periods in world history.

In a recent interview with Matthew Stadlen of the BBC, when asked the question "who do you think is the person who has made the biggest impact upon the life of this country ever?" Ackroyd said: "I think William Blake is the most powerful and most significant philosopher or thinker in the course of English history." He did not say what had led him to form this opinion. In the same interview, when asked what fascinates him about London, he said he admired "its power, its majesty, its darkness, its shadows."^[7] When asked what he did outside of writing he said, "I drink...that's about it."^[8]

List of works[link]

Fiction[link]

• 1971 Ouch! (Poetry)
• 1973 London Lickpenny (Poetry)
• 1982 The Great Fire of London
• 1983 The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
• 1985 Hawksmoor
• 1987 The Diversions of Purley and Other Poems (Poetry)
• 1987 Chatterton
• 1989 First Light
• 1992 English Music
• 1993 The House of Doctor Dee
• 1994 Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (also published as The Trial of Elizabeth Cree)
• 1996 Milton in America
• 1999 The Plato Papers
• 2000 The Mystery of Charles Dickens
• 2003 The Clerkenwell Tales
• 2004 The Lambs of London
• 2006 The Fall of Troy
• 2008 The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
• 2009 The Canterbury Tales – A Retelling

Non-fiction[link]

• 1976 Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism
• 1978 Country Life
• 1979 Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag, the History of an Obsession
• 1980 Ezra Pound and His World
• 1984 T. S. Eliot
• 1987 Dickens' London: An Imaginative Vision
• 1989 Ezra Pound and his World (1989)
• 1990 Dickens
• 1991 Introduction to Dickens
• 1995 Blake
• 1998 The Life of Thomas More
• 2000 London: The Biography
• 2001 The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays, Short Stories, Lectures
• 2002 Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion
• 2002 Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination
• 2003 The Beginning
• 2003 Illustrated London
• 2004 Escape From Earth
• 2004 Ancient Egypt
• 2004 Chaucer
• 2004 Shakespeare: A Biography
• 2005 Ancient Greece
• 2005 Ancient Rome
• 2005 Turner
• 2007 Thames: Sacred River
• 2008 Coffee with Dickens (with Paul Schlicke)
• 2008 Newton
• 2008 Poe: A Life Cut Short
• 2009 Venice: Pure City
• 2010 The English Ghost
• 2011 London Under
• 2011 A History of England, v.1 Foundation

Television[link]

• 2002 Dickens (BBC)
• 2004 London (BBC)
• 2006 The Romantics (BBC)
• 2007 London Visions (BBC)
• 2008 Peter Ackroyd's Thames (ITV)
• 2009 Peter Ackroyd's Venice (BBC)

Honours and awards[link]

• 1984 Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 1984 Heinemann Award (joint winner) for T. S. Eliot
• 1984 Somerset Maugham Award for The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
• 1984 Whitbread Biography Award for T. S. Eliot
• 1985 Guardian Fiction Prize for Hawksmoor
• 1985 Whitbread Novel Award for Hawksmoor
• 1988 Booker Prize for Fiction-Nomination (shortlist) for Chatterton
• 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) for The Life of Thomas More
• 2001 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature for London: The Biography
• 2003 British Book Awards Illustrated Book of the Year-Nomination (shortlist) for Illustrated London
• 2003 CBE
• 2006 Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[9]

Personal life[link]

Ackroyd had a long-term relationship with Brian Kuhn, an American dancer he met while at Yale. After a nervous breakdown in the late 1980s, Ackroyd moved to Devon with Kuhn. However, Kuhn was then diagnosed with AIDS, dying in 1994, and Ackroyd moved back to London. He has long been known for his abuse of alcohol, and in 1999 he suffered a heart attack and was in a coma for a week, almost dying.^[10][11]

See also[link]

• List of children's non-fiction writers

References[link]

• Stern, Keith (2009), "Ackroyd, Peter", Queers in History, BenBella Books, Inc.; Dallas, Texas, ISBN 978-1-933771-87-8 

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Peter Ackroyd

• Peter Ackroyd at the Internet Book Database of Fiction
• Detailed biography at contemporarywriters.com
• Works by Peter Ackroyd on Open Library at the Internet Archive