CLEWS Your Home for Historic True Crime: The Newgate Calendar

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The Newgate Calendar

I was recently delighted to discover a copy of the Newgate Calendar in my criminal law library. If my computer counts as part of the library, anyway. The book is available on the internet for free. And it's indexed and keyword-searchable.This version of the Calendar is from the University of Texas-Austin's Tarlton Law Library and is an edition printed in 1926.

For the uninitiated, the Newgate Calendar (also known as the "Malefactor's Bloody Register" - which is a much better name, I think) is the number one most popular book of historical true crime stories ever published (and published and published and published....). The first edition came out in 1760 and covered the most infamous crimes in recent British legal history, from about the late 1670s forward, stories so old that they've become part of our mythology.

The book includes some of the most classic crime stories ever told, and I'll bet you a dollar that you've heard of at least one of them. I first heard these stories as a child, probably in an encyclopedia or book of short stories for children. Surely you've heard the story of Sawney Beane and his band of cannibals who lived in a cave and ate travelers, or maybe you've heard of the pirate, Captain Kidd?

Some classic true crime writers have snubbed their noses at the Newgate Calendar, calling it false and tasteless and lacking morals. Edmund L. Pearson thought little of it. This is his review:

Hackneyed in style and heavily didactic, each essay seems to be run in the mould of the one before. The authors warn us over and over that we must not think that because they write about murder or highway robbery they are recommending them as proper occupations. The favorite phrase with which the brief items begin is : "The wretched subject of this unhappy memoir...." The usual closing sentence is : "Having expressed the most heartfelt contritution, he resigned himself to his fate, and suffered at Tyburn on the 22nd of December, 1725, being then in the twenty-second year of his age."

The hack writers who composed these effusions must have been able to run them off in their sleep.

Boston writer Peleg W. Chandler, in his American Criminal Trials (1841), condemned the Calendar's "influence upon society" and thought it deserved "the condemnation pronounced against it by the tribunals of morals and taste."

There is in fact a tawdry smell infecting this book, even when it's read online. These are dark and bloody stories. So here are my favorites.

Elizabeth Marsh was treated much less tenderly than we treat 15-year-old murderesses today. But William York, age 10, convicted of the torture-murder of a 5-year-old girl, would receive much harsher treatment now. Or one would hope.
The Calendar includes some awful stories of family annihilators, like this one from 1807 and this one, from 1694, "a black, unnatural monster."
Anne Broadric presented such a pitiful spectacle that she was acquitted of the premeditated murder of her lover.
Amy Hutchinson's story is the best written entry in the Calendar.
A common theme in the Calendar is the very poor treatment of servants and orphans by cruel mistresses (like this story and this story.)
The Calendar also includes morality tales from 1744 and 1673 on the dangers of polygamy (like this story and this story.)
But murder isn't the only crime depicted; there are stories of robbers, cutpurses, and a minister who seduced young girls.
And on the lighter side, Ann Marrow disguised herself as a man to marry and dupe women of property.