TORTURE, MURDER, CHILD THEFT, TREASON & BIGAMY

(CRIME) BIRKETT, Norman Birkett. The New Newgate Calendar. London: The Folio Society, 1960. Octavo, contemporary speckled calf, marbled paper boards, spine elaborately gilt-decorated, raised bands, red morocco spine label, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers. $550.

First Folio Society edition of a collection of popular 19th-century true crime stories, the companion volume to the Newgate Calendar, edited and with an introduction by Lord Birkett, illustrated with eight engraved plates, handsomely bound.

Newgate Prison, "the most famous and forbidding prison in the land," long housed England's most notorious murderers, highwaymen, mutineers, forgers, con-artists and thieves. The prison's Newgate Calendar, first published as a bulletin of executions in 1760, became the basis for a five-volume edition in 1774, subsequently revised and edited by lawyers Andrew Knapp and James Baldwin for their influential Newgate Calendar (1824-26). Their compilation would inspire the Newgate novel, "a school of crime fiction popular in the 1830s," in which popular writers "took real-life cases (often from the Newgate Calendar) as the source for their plots" (Head, 800). For this Folio Society volume, Lord Birkett (a distinguished lawyer who represented Britain at the Nuremburg Trials) selected 26 cases and provided commentary on each, with an introduction noting that "the purpose of this volume… is to entertain the reader by exhibiting in these trials the extraordinary behavior of men and women when their obscure lives are suddenly brought into a glare of publicity, when the thing done in secret is proclaimed from the house-tops, and the frailties and perversities, the cruelty and courage of human nature are subjected to the inexorable analysis of a court of law." This book follows the 1951 Folio Society edition of the Newgate Calendar; in 1993 both works were reprinted as a two-volume set.

Fine condition, beautifully bound.