The Gaol
Trade Paperback
For over 800 years Newgate was the grimy axle around which British society slowly twisted. This is where such legendary outlaws as Robin Hood and Captain Kidd met their fates, where the rapier-wielding playwrights Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe sharpened their quills, and where flamboyant highwaymen like Claude Duval and James Maclaine made legions of women swoon. While London's theatres came and went, the gaol endured as London's unofficial stage. From the Peasants' Revolt to the Great Fire, it was at Newgate that England's greatest dramas unfolded.
By piecing together the lives of forgotten figures as well as re-examining the prison's links with more famous individuals, from Dick Whittington to Charles Dickens, this thrilling history goes in search of a ghostly place, erased by time, which has inspired more poems and plays, paintings and novels, than any other structure in British history.Buy now!
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- ISBN: 9780719561337
- Author: Kelly Grovier
- Pub date: 01.08.09
- RRP: $39.99
- Format: Paperback / softback
Author
Kelly Grovier
Kelly Grovier was educated at the University of California, Los Angeles and at Oxford University, where he wrote his doctorate on the eighteenth-century philosopher and adventurer 'Walking' Stewart. He is the author of A lens in the palm 'Carcanet, January 2008' and a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement and The Observer. He is the co-founder of the scholarly journal European Romantic Review and a lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.