Newgate Prison
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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 1777. The prison was extended and rebuilt many times, and remained in use for over 700 years, from 1188 to 1902.
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Famous prisoners
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.
- Jørgen Jørgensen - a Danish adventurer who helped build the first settlement in Tasmania and for a short time in 1809 ruled over Iceland, after which he became a British spy and was later deported to Tasmania.
- William Kidd – the infamous pirate and privateer - known as Captain Kidd - was taken to Execution Dock at Wapping and hanged in 1701.
- 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, an English counterfeiter who became the last woman to be officially executed by burning in England and Great Britain in 1789.
- 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
- Robert Southwell – English Jesuit priest, poet and martyr who was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in 1595.
- Owen Suffolk – Australian bush-ranger
- Jane Voss (alias Jane Roberts) a highwaywoman and thief who was executed in 1684.
- Ellis Casper, who helped to perpetrate the 1839 Gold Dust Robbery held in Newgate before being transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1841.
- 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
- Joseph Wall, a colonial administrator who was hanged for having a British soldier flogged to death.
- 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
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In literature
- 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
- Donald Thomas's short story "The Execution of Sherlock Holmes."
- Robert McCammon's novel Speaks The Nightbird Volume 2 – Evil Unveiled
- T.C. Boyle's novel Water Music
- Erica Jong's novel "Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones"
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