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Newgate Prison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Harold D. Kalman
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Extract

In the early eighteenth century the traveller from the west entered central London through one of two gates in the Roman-medieval walls: Ludgate or Newgate. In either case he passed under an archway which served also as a prison. The latter, last rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, confined felons and debtors from the City of London and the county of Middlesex, and smugglers and debtors to the Crown. Crowded together as many as thirty to a room, the inmates of Newgate Prison lived in abominable conditions amid filth and vermin. A constant threat was the jail distemper, a form of typhus which frequently proved fatal. The disease spread to the courtroom of the adjoining sessions house in April 1750. Sixty men died, including the Lord Mayor, two judges, an alderman, and several barristers and jurymen. A committee was immediately formed to inquire into the tragedy, and in its report of 11 December 1750 it directed George Dance the Elder, Clerk of the City Works, to make a plan for improving the prison. Nothing, however, came of this, and the only steps actually taken to prevent a recurrence of the epidemic were the installation of ventilators in the prison - in the process seven of the eleven workmen contracted the fever and one died - and the placing of herbs in the justice hall during subsequent sessions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 12 , 1969 , pp. 50 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1969

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References

Notes

1 Corporation of London Record Office, Guildhall (hereafter CLRO), Gaol Committee I (see note 4), Minutes, 16 Nov. 1755; Gentleman's Mag., xx (May 1750), pp. 233-234. I am grateful for the assistance of Mr R. B. Pugh and Mrs Sandra Millikin, both of whom contributed much constructive criticism.

2 Gaol Com. I, Minutes, 16 Nov. 1755.

3 ibid; Universal Mag., xxxiv (April 1764), p. 170.

4 ‘Committee to Inquire into the State and Condition of the Gaol of Newgate and to Consider how the same may be Enlarged and rendered more healthy and commodious’ (referred to here as Gaol Com. I). The information which follows is from its Minute Book in the CLRO, Misc. MSS 185.2.

5 Gentleman's Mag., xxxii (Sept. 1762), p.445.Google Scholar

6 Universal Mag., xxxiv (April 1764), p. 170.Google Scholar

7 Gaol Com. I, Minutes.

8 7 Geo. Ill, c.37. The Act embraced several projects, including completing Blackfriars Bridge and repairing the Royal Exchange.

9 ‘Committee for Rebuilding the Gaol of Newgate’ (referred to here as Gaol Com. II). Minute Book in the CLRO, 33C. Subsequent undocumented data are from these minutes.

10 The elder Dance died three or eight days later. George the Younger had replaced him as Clerk of the City Works on 2 February.

11 For Dance's sessions house designs cf. RIBA, J3/35 (1-3) and CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plans, 159-236.

12 Papworth, Wyatt (ed), Dictionary of Architecture (Architectural Publication Society, 1852-92), s.v. ‘Concrete’Google Scholar; Mordaunt Crook, J., ‘Sir Robert Smirke: a pioneer of concrete construction’, Trans. Newcomen Society, xxxviii (1965-66), p. 13.Google Scholar

13 Portland stone is clearly called for by the specifications, a set of which is preserved in the RIBA Library. The dispute over the stone stimulated the publication of an anonymous pamphlet in defence of Dance, An Essay on the Qualifications and Duties of an Architect (1773). The booklet has been attributed, surely wrongly, to Dance himself, in Pennington, Richard, ‘Dance the Younger and the Architectural Profession’, RIBA Jnl, S.3, xlii (1935), p.648.Google Scholar

14 The candidates were (James) Peacock, (Robert) Baldwin, (Robert) Mylne, (William or Richard) Jupp and (Thomas) Leverton. Peacock and Baldwin, who had both been working for Dance for several years, became incensed with jealousy, and each published his side of the dispute.

15 Letter cited in Rough Minutes of Gaol Com. II, CLRO, Misc. MSS 235.3.

16 Gaol Com. II, Minutes; and Griffiths, Arthur, ‘Chronicles of Newgate’ in The World's Famous Prisons (n.d.), II, pp.41–46 Google Scholar, which contains a vivid description of the rioters’ actions.

17 Dance and Peacock's itemized report of 29 November 1780 states that the whole interior and much of the exterior was destroyed. Their estimate for repairs was £26,295. Dance employed his former pupil Soane on the rebuilding (Soane Museum, Soane Notebooks, 1781).

18 Engravings in CLRO, Comptroller's City Lands Plans, 95A-C. Published in Gentleman's Mag., xxxii (Sept. 1762), opp. p.400 (revived after the fire of 1762 to gain support for its execution)Google Scholar; and Universal Mag., xxxiv (April 1764), opp. p. 169 (to satisfy the interest stimulated by the petitions to Parliament)Google Scholar.

19 Pottle, F. A. (ed), Boswell's London fournal [1763], (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 274.Google Scholar

20 Palladio, Andrea, The Four Books of Architecture [tr. Isaac Ware] (1738), p. 37.Google Scholar

21 Ware, Isaac, A Complete Body of Architecture (1756), p. 345.Google Scholar

22 Plans in CLRO, U.5.a-b. Jones's design was submitted in January 1757, thirteen months after 200 engravings of Dance's scheme had been circulated. Isaac Ware's design is apparently lost.

23 CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plans, 39.

24 CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plans, 176. This is probably a study for the design submitted 8 February 1768.

25 CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plans, 24.

26 SirSummerson, John, ‘Newgate Gaol: Catalogue of Drawings in Sir John Soane's Museum’, Architectural History, ii (1959), p. 42, Nos. 1-2Google Scholar. This is probably the project of 15 April 1768.

27 These survive in the contract plan, but it appears that only five were built and none was rebuilt after 1780.

28 Gaol Com. II, Minutes, 15 April 1768.

29 Summerson, ‘Newgate Gaol’, Nos.3-7. Submitted 8 June 1768. Two contract drawings are in the Soane Museum (Summerson Nos. 8-9), and many working drawings are in the CLRO (Surveyor's Justice Plans, 1-87, passim).

30 Kaufmann, E., Architecture in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass, 1955), p. 44, in his description of Newgate.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 CLRO, Surveyor's Justice Plans,.68. Another study, No.51, considers placing a coat of arms in the tympanum above the pediment.

32 SirSummerson, John, Architecture in Britain 1530–1830(4th ed., Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 274.Google Scholar

33 Ackerman, J. S., Palladia(Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 94 Google Scholar. Inigo Jones remarked that ‘Scamozzi and Palermo said, that these designs were of Julio Romano, but adjusted by Palladio; and so it seems’ ( The Architecture of Palladio, ed. Leoni, Giacomo, 3rd ed., 1742, p.70 Google Scholar; Dance owned a copy of this edition). Palladio later reused the motif in the Palazzo Iseppo Porto. He first observed (and sketched) it in the Roman house of Giulio's master Raphael, designed by Bramante.

34 Dickens, Charles, Sketches by Boz[1836-37] (Oxford, 1957), p. 196.Google Scholar

35 Blomfield, Reginald, ‘The Architect of Newgate’, Studies in Architecture(1905), p. 87.Google Scholar

36 Letter from Piranesi to Robert Mylne, 22 Nov. 1760, in RIBA Library.

37 Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Bolton, J. T. (New York, 1958), pp.39, 58Google Scholar. The Enquiry was first published in 1757. Many years later Dance praised the treatise as ‘a very excellent work’ (Farington Diary, British Museum typescript, 3 March 1797). For other aspects of Burke's influence on architecture, see Harris, Eileen, ‘Burke and Chambers on the Sublime and the Beautiful’, Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (1967), pp.207–213 Google Scholar, and Wiebenson, Dora, ‘L'Architecture Terrible and Jardin Anglo-Chinois’, Jnl. of the Society of Architectural Historians(USA), xxvii (1968), pp. 136–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Vicar of Wakefield[1766], Everyman ed. (1965), p. 191 (not referring to Newgate).Google Scholar

39 Burke, , Enquiry, pp.76, 74.Google Scholar

40 ibid., p.81. In actuality, the wards were adequately lighted by numerous green glass windows facing on to the courts.

41 ibid., pp.77, 86.

42 Gerard, Alexander, An Essay on Taste(1759), pp. 13, 15 (italics his).Google Scholar

43 This concept becomes entwined with the theoretical ideal of ‘noble simplicity’, lauded by Winckelmann and universally praised by artists of the time, a principle antithetical to the ‘terror’ definition of the Sublime.

44 Kaufmann, , op.cit., p. 130 Google Scholar. This expressionistic design was particularly exploited by contemporary French architects, such as C. N. Ledoux, who later designed a gargantuan prison for Aix-en-Provence (?1784) in which massive walls are similarly unornamented, and are pierced only by two rows of tiny windows entirely out of proportion with the rest ( Raval, Maurice, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Paris, 1945, Figs. 142–144Google Scholar).

45 Blondel, Jacques-François, Cours d'architecture … (Paris, 1771), I, pp. 426–427 Google Scholar; Wiebenson, , op. cit., p. 137 Google Scholar. This passage occurs towards the beginning of Blondel's lectures, which commenced in 1750, and Dance may have learned of it early in 1765, when he probably visited Paris.

46 de Mézières, Le Camus, le génie d'architecture, ou L'analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (Paris, 1780), pp.59–61 Google Scholar; Wiebenson, , op. cit., p. 138.Google Scholar

47 Rosenau, Helen (ed), Boullée's Treatise on Architecture(1953), p. 44.Google Scholar Boullée's projects of the 1780s experiment with such expression.

48 Gaol Com. II, Minutes; and Howard, John, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales…, (3rd ed., Warrington, 1784), p. 215 Google Scholar. The yard for state prisoners was ordered to be built on 25 May 1780, but the Gordon Riots prevented its con struction at that time.

49 Dickens, , op. cit., p.209.Google Scholar

50 For a vivid picture of the state of English prisons before John Howard, see Clay, W. L., The Prison Chaplain(Cambridge, 1861), pp. 11–41 Google Scholar.

51 Dixon, Hepworth, John Howard and the Prison-World of Europe, (New York, 1856), pp. 32–38 Google Scholar.

52 For illustrations, see Howard, The State of the Prisons. One important Continental exception is the house of correction for boys at the Hospital of San Michele, Rome (1704), in which inmates slept in individual cells and worked by day in a central hall. This system of nocturnal confinement was then a revolutionary advance.

53 First English edition: [Cesare Beccaria], An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1767).

54 Howard, , The State of the Prisons, p. 12.Google Scholar

55 ibid., p.213.

56 Smith, William, State of the Gaols in London, Westminster, and Borough of Southwark(1776), p.39 (italics mine)Google Scholar. Goldsmith's Dr Primrose was, before 1766, confined in a small county jail in which ‘every prisoner had a separate cell, where he was locked in for the night’ (The Vicar of Wakefield, p. 160).

57 For the evolution of prison design, see Markus, T. A., ‘Patterns of the Law’, Architectural Review, cxvi (1954), pp.251–256 Google Scholar; Wines, F. H., Punishment and Reformation(3rd ed., New York, 1910)Google Scholar; Newcomb, R., ‘The Evolutionof the Prison Plan’, American Architect, cx (1916)Google Scholar. The best source for earlier eighteenth-century jails is Howard's State of the Prisons. The multiple-quadrangle system of Newgate is exploited in Soane's two competition designs for penitentiaries (1782), Howard's six-court penitentiary project (1789) and R. Baldwin's proposed eight-court Battersea Penitentiary (c. 1792). The radial plan was introduced into England with R. Blackburn's competition-winning Greek-cross penitentiary design (1782), and its future was ensured by the acceptance of the principles of Bentham's Panopticon (published 1791). For the Italian and Spanish origins of the multiple-quadrangle system cf. Pane, R., Ferdinando Fuga(Naples, 1956), pp.131–142 Google Scholar.

58 Rice, H. C. Jr, ‘A French Source of Jefferson's Plan for the Prison at Richmond’, Jnl. of the Society of Architectural Historians (USA), xii (Dec. 1953), p. 29.Google Scholar

59 Farington Diary, 2 Jan. 1795 and 10 July 1796; Soane, , Memoirs of the Professional Life of an Architect(1835), p.21 Google Scholar.

60 Leeds, W. H., in his additions to Pugin, & Britton, , Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London(2nd ed., 1838), ii, p. 103 Google Scholar; Gwilt, Joseph, An Encyclopaedia of Architecture(new ed., 1881), p.227 Google Scholar. The façade of Newgate was a very familiar image in London life. It even appeared on a series of well circulated tokens issued in 1794-96; see Dalton, R. & Hamer, S. H., The Provincial Token-Coinage of the 18th Century, i: v (n.p., 1913), pp. 140–141 Google Scholar.