No effort is made here to grapple with the ways in which past assumptions about the felonious body and its symbolism validated cruel punishments in their own time and made them intelligible and bearable to watchers. For this is yet another book that cheerfully bypasses the complex meanings of English punishment which historians have been debating for the past 40 years. If his work differs from those earlier volumes, it is in its complacency about our own modern humanity: nothing today could possibly be as bad as that past was, Grovier's subtexts suggest.īut in what senses is this true? Like all such compendia, this one stops just when the really interesting questions begin - rather as if Foucault and scores of hard-working historians thereafter never lived. Trading in sensation no less than Newgate Calendars did, he never once pauses to interpret what he finds. Like them, too, he invites us to be "appalled", "mind-boggled" or "stomach-turned" by these past horrors. Like so many of his predecessors, Grovier salivates over gaol fevers, faeces, manacles and hangmen, and deplores the casual justice or political interest that sent people to their public burnings or stranglings. Marlowe, Nashe and Ben Jonson spent bleak times in the prison Dr Johnson and Dickens wrote about it. Inside its squalid labyrinths over the centuries all manner of men awaited the noose or the flames - from Catholic martyrs to Captain Kidd and Jack Sheppard, highwaymen and murderers. Despite its near-windowless walls, you could smell its deep stink as you walked past outside. Newgate was an awesome phenomenon, and it did loom over London's imagination as well as its heartland for centuries. Publishers' belief in the market for them is unflagging. Start with the Newgate Calendars of the 18th century, and it's clear that Kelly Grovier's book is the latest in a long line of such products.
In the past decade, some dozen romping anecdotal compendia have been published about the poor wretches imprisoned in Newgate and hanged at Tyburn, where Marble Arch is now. Yet the rage of "going to Newgate" in effect continues. We remain incredulous about hanging people for what would now be thought small offences, and the casual brutality of the execution crowds who watched them in past centuries still shocks. "Y ou can't conceive the ridiculous rage there is of going to Newgate," Horace Walpole wrote in 1750, as he marvelled at the well-heeled voyeurs of both sexes who flocked to the prison to gawp at the highwayman Maclaine before he was hanged.
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