Reading List: Because I'm Now Bursting With Crime and the 1700s, I Make a List...

Finished off Lucy Moore's Thieves' Opera and am I writing the review about the criminals of the 1700s? No, instead I immediately made up a reading list for books from the 1800s. (eyeroll at self here) Moore chats a lot about later fiction - which reminded me that I once had a theoretical list of them, for one of those self challenges. I was going tor read all of the Newgate Novels.


And thank you wikipeida:

"The Newgate novels (or Old Bailey novels) were novels published in England from the late 1820s until the 1840s that were thought to glamorise the lives of the criminals they portrayed. Most drew their inspiration from the Newgate Calendar, a biography of famous criminals published at various times during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but usually rearranged or embellished the original tale for melodramatic effect. The novels caused great controversy and notably drew criticism from William Makepeace Thackeray, who satirised them in several of his novels and attacked the authors openly."

There's not a huge amount of Newgates (I should add here, that are readily available), but some of them are really, really long. (I'm looking at you, Ainsworth.) So that's not an entirely realistic goal for me (I have yet to finish an entire Ainsworth novel). I do want to remember them, so I figured a list might help.


I also added the Sensation Novels, since I've already read some of those and can console myself with that.


Again, wikipedia:

"The sensation novel was a literary genre of fiction popular in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, following on from earlier melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies. It also drew on the gothic and romantic genres of fiction. ...Sensation novels used both modes of romance and realism to the extreme where in the past they had traditionally been contradictory modes of literature."


Reading list: Newgate Novels and Sensation Novels


And now, because it has a chapter on the Newgate novels, I really want to read


The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

by Martin Priestman