The Newgate Calendar gives a long list of those individuals incarcerated
in London’s foremost prison. It is a fascinating window into the lives of
Londoners during the period. There are accounts of prisoners great and small,
rich and poor, innocent and guilty. John Larkin was hanged in 1700, an Irish
schoolmaster who‘committed so many Forgeries and Cheats that he had not
Time to confess them all before he died’; John Holliday (aka Simpson) was
hanged in the same year, having been found guilty of stealing two feather
beds and confessed that while a soldier in Flanders, he had crept into the
King’s tent and stolen £1,000, as well as robbing churches. Some crimes are
shocking–the case of the Reverend Thomas Hunter who had served as
chaplain and tutor in the house of a distinguished Edinburgh merchant is one
such. Rev. Hunter began an illicit affair with a female servant in the house,
but was seen in the act by the two young sons, his pupils. He decided they
had to die to save his reputation. He took them for a walk and cut their
throats in broad daylight. Spotted by a passerby, he was quickly arrested and
condemned. His only regret, he said, was that he had failed to kill the
family’s one surviving child, a little girl. His body was publicly gibbeted.
We can have some sympathy for Mary Channel, executed in 1703 at the age
of eighteen. A clever, beautiful girl, she was married by force to a man she
CRIME IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY AND EMPIREFigure 26. Hanging outside Newgate Prison Hanging outside Newgate prison
(after an early nineteenth century print)