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VISIONS OF THE PRISON IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Thursday 5 November 2009

The Old Gaol was the appropriate setting for the first in a series of lectures on the prison in Victorian literature, run in conjunction with the University's Dickens Journals Online project. The talk by Dr John Drew, leader of the project and holder of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, was entitled "'Half flash & half foolish'. Jack Sheppard and the Newgate novel".

Jack Sheppard, by Harrison Ainsworth, was published in 1839, the same year as Oliver Twist. It was just as well-known at the time, blamed for street crime and housebreaking, and inspired eight plays based on the eponymous hero's slide into criminality, escapes from Newgate, and eventual hanging. It also created the term 'flashy', originally referring to the criminal slang called 'flash'; Ainsworth was derided as "half flash and half foolish".

Dr Drew showed, with numerous slides, how the illustrations by George Cruikshank were important to the novel's success. They were inspired by Hogarth, but used an original layout which could be reproduced on stage as a tableau vivant. The story's availability in the popular theatre also took it to an audience which could not afford the serial publication in Bentley's Miscellany or the three-volume edition which followed. It created an early version of the "media effects debate", exacerbated when the valet of Lord William Russell claimed that the book had led him to murder his master.

The next lecture in the series, "The shadow of the Bastille" by Professor Andrew Sanders, will be on 17 November in the Sunley Lecture Theatre.

Report by the Web Team