Newgate Gaol has been for the majority of its already six-hundred-year history a brutal, corrupt place. Located in the center of London, Newgate is the sight of hundreds of executions during this century. Even the supposedly honorable men in charge are beasts! The corrupt administration extorts money from the prisoners for their basic necessities and keep the prisoners chained unnecessarily, not out of fear that they will harm the public, but because the jailers are fined if one of their prisoners escaped.1 They sold liquor to the prisoners until the prison taps were closed down in 1785 (and I'm sure that hasn't truly stopped them!). Sexual liaisons between guards and inmates go unchecked in the women’s quarters. There is no regular employment for the prisoners, and they have nothing to occupy their time other than drinking and dreaming of escape.2 The prisoners hold their own court in imitation of their jailers, punishing inmates who are new or of a higher social class in order to get money the “judge” (one of the senior thieves) can then use to get favors from the jailers.3 In a social commentary that should be heeded more than it is, Gay’s Beggars’s Opera catalogues the liberties the jailers took. Act III, scene v shows a known thief bargaining with a jailer, and when Macheath is first imprisoned, he grudgingly hands over his money and allows himself to be shackled.

The prison’s corruption fascinates the London public (though I find revelling in others' atrocities to be an atrocity in iself). Accounts of true crime are very popular reading material, and pamphlets detailing the acts of the condemned are sold at the very well-attended public executions. The Newgate Calendar or Malefactor’s Bloody Register lets the public (thirsty for blood!) see a record of each execution performed that year. In 1725, Jonathan Wild, an extremely popular thief on whom Macheath of The Beggar's Opera was based, was hung from the Tyburn (truly a pitiful site, if ever I saw one). Eight biographies were written about him the year he died, and Captain Alexander Smith wrote romantically (and very well, I believe) of his exploits in Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Famous Jonathan Wild: I am quite sure that The Newgate Calendar, even two hundred years from now, will still devote at least fifty pages to his story, referring to him as “our hero”.4

As Jonathan Wild, exceeded all Mankind hitherto Born in all Manner of Villainy, we give him the Preference of all other Villains, in permitting him to lead the Van of ’em. - Smith, 1
In the eighteenth-century, our country began to look into the concept of prison reform. While “draconian” measures were proposed by Basil Montagu, author of Hanging is not Enough,5 Edmund Burke and James Oglethorpe (such noble men!) fought the growing list of capital offenses, as well as the prison culture steeped in prostitution and alcoholism.6 In 1755, a commission was finally established to look into the conditions contributing to gaol fever. They found that Newgate was too small for the number of inmates it held, received too little sunlight, was not clean enough and had bad ventilation, sewage and water systems.7 Improvements were made, but I don't expect they helped much. A friend of mine who believes she can see things, that is, things which have not yet happened, tells me that in 1813 a woman named Elizabeth Fry will visit the women’s quarters and find the conditions to still be appalling. Three hundred women kept in two rooms with not enough clothing for themselves or their children and only two jailers to tend to them! The worthy woman (says my friend) will doher best to teach the women and give them some form of employment,8 but no amount of sewing will be able to help the prison at that point. She says that Newgate will finally close on May 6th, 1902, so it seems we have another hundered years with this wretched landmark. Not that I believe all of this talk of the future, of course.