Newgate Calendar stories appeared anonymously.  They were short, lurid, snatches of entertainment, often accompanied by gruesome or sensational woodcuts.  Their basic language, clear narrative structure, and brevity--combined with the calendar's low purchase price--meant that the growing working-class readership of the time found the stories more accessible than many other publications.  Indeed, for early nineteenth-century British audiences, the main sources of crime information were not juridical records or official legal documents but inexpensive publications such as the Newgate Calendar and Sunday papers.  The Calendar sold ten times more copies than either the Spectator or the Rambler (Radzinowicz 181), just as the Sunday papers far outsold religious journals such as The Methodist Magazine and The Record, which were aimed at directing the lower classes from their assumed preference for immorality and crime (Gray; Roderick).

     The main readership for lurid crime fiction was the working-class poor–the very people demarcated as "the criminal class" in works such as Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851).  An 1849 Punch article describes them as "the forlorn, the wretched outcasts of decent life."  "People, comfortable to do, and with handsome clothes upon their backs," the author declares, "behave better" ("Mannings").  When W. Fraser Ray defined these readers as a class that was "the lowest in the social scale, as well as in mental capacity" (204), he was transposing a class-biassed, pseudo-scientific terminology onto the issue of literary taste.  This cluster of negatively inscribed traits also included sexuality and the sexual narratives and metaphors found in the Newgate Calendars were seen to reflect an immorality associated with the lifestyles of the poor (see Mort 38).

      The attempts to stigmatize readers of trash journalism such as the Newgate Calendar stories as "low-brow" suggests that the critics might have felt anxiety that their own attraction to the writing exposed an inherent baseness in themselves.  This interpretation is reinforced  not only by the large circulation of the material, but also by the infiltration of the Newgate Calendar's style and themes into genres of writing that the mainstream was more willing to acknowledge reading.  The stories influenced various popular forms of writing throughout the nineteenth century.  Some of the genres that are indebted to the works of The Newgate Calendar include the gothic, the sensation novel, stories in the Penny Dreadful magazines, detective fiction, and of course the Newgate novel.

     The best known authors of Newgate novels are Charles Dickens, William Ainsworth, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton.  These novels often involve plot-lines dealing with issues central to this web-site, such as the relation of class and sexuality to "low-brow" literary genres, the cultural eroticisation of middle-class masculinity, and the use of sexuality to criminalize the working class.  Later Victorian attempts to adapt the seductiveness of the Calendar to the aims of middle-class morality resulted in the depiction of the physical body as a site of class tension and transgression.  In addition, this adaptation marked a shift in crime literature toward a more erotic depiction of sexuality itself.
 

FOOTNOTES

1. For more information on Newgate Prison, see Donald Thomas's The Victorian Underworld.
 
 

WORKS CITED

Gray, Donald J. "Early Victorian Scandalous Journalism: Renton Nicholson’s The Town (1837-42)." The Victorian Periodical Press. Eds. Joanne Shattock and M. Wolff. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1982.

"The Mannings at Home." Punch 17 (July-Dec. 1849): 2313-14.

Mayhew, Henry, and John Binny. The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life. London: Griffin, Bohn, 1862.

Mort, Frank. Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral Politics in England since 1830. London: Routledge, 1987.

Radzinowicz, Leon.  A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750. vol. 1. London: Stevens, 1948.

Roderick, Anne Baltz. "‘Only a Newspaper Metaphor’: Crime Reports, Class Conflict, and Social Criticism in Two Victorian Newspapers." Victorian Periodicals Review 29.1 (Spring 1996): 1-18.

Thomas, Donald, The Victorian Underworld. London: John Murray, 1998.