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.

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

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"