I’ve started a new project – this time The Newgate Calendar.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, it is a collection of stories about criminals and their fates. There have been various editions, the latest covering up to about 1840.
The stories are a great resource for anyone interested in the period. Although some of the stories seem to be completely made up, they are still relevant because the fiction had to be plausible and so the descriptions can be assumed to be fairly accurate.
I have extracted all the 18th century entries (over 350 of them) and put each in a separate file. Currently, they are listed in one big index but I am planning to categorise them and eventually add a database search.
There stories range from exciting to tedious. To get you started, here is one of my favourites, the story of John Smith who holds the record for least successful Highwayman of all time with a career that lasted for only a single week.
Another interesting one is the case of Ann Flynn who was convicted of theft but the court was so sympathetic to her poverty that she was only fined her a shilling, which was then paid by the jury. Although the laws were severe, it is clear that sometimes juries took matters into their own hands.
Anyway, have a browse through them. Let me know if you spot any errors – it was too big a job to do manually so I wrote a script to extract everything. Given the uneven nature of the original formatting, it is quite possible that mistakes happened.
Oh yes, and I am still working on categorising the Thieves’ Cant database. It’s slowly getting there.
