THE REVIVAL OF NEWGATE LITERATURE.
SEVERAL of the daily journals have alluded of late to the unexpected and unwelcome revival of a literature sup- posed to have expired with the taxes on knowledge, the litera- ture, as it used to be called, of the Newgate Calendar. A quarter of a century ago Great Britain was flooded with cheap tales, adorned with rough, coloured cuts, and sold mainly in the country by pedlars, and in London by the lowest grade of newsvendors and tobacconists. These tales were all of one kind, glorifioations more or less undisguised of great criminals, more especially of burglars, highwaymen, pirates, and other villains supposed to retain the savage virtue of courage, and in some parts of the country of fire- raisers, who were described to half-starving labourers as the unseen avengers of the poor. The character of these aerials and their immense circulation were frequently described before Com- mittees of the House of Commons as unanswerable reasons for abolishing all taxes on knowledge. Let the people have healthy food, it was urged, and the demand for garbage would die away. So strong was the sense of the evil enter- tained in some quarters, that one able minister of the Gospel declared that a penny village paper, filled with nothing but sessions cases, would have a better effect than these stories, for the country folk would see in police reports that crime, if it had its adventures, had also its inevitable penalties. There was pro- bably some exaggeration in all these statements, the educated habitually over-estimating the vividness of the impressions made on the uneducated, but the evil done was very considerable, and was one of many reasons for the abolition of the paper duty. With the new cheapness of better literature the rubbish died away, and the advocates of progress congratulated themselves on what appeared to be a real triumph of legislation.
They were a little premature. The demand for the literature of Newgate was only suspended, not dead, and it has of late revived in somewhat alarming proportions. Whether a new class has sprung up below that which used to purchase the old chap-books, or some unscrupulous publisher has satisfied himself that the old serials were withdrawn under a mistake as to public taste, or a new craving has suddenly developed itself among the poor, as it has among the rich, we are unable to decide ; but the old books have re- appeared in their old shapes, and are reselling once more in scores of thousands. Some of them are new, we presume, but in many in- stances theold stories have been revived without change, and the boys of 1868 are invited, like the boys of 1838, to read the adventures of Jack Sheppard, and Blueskin, and Cartouche, and the rest of the scoundrels who served as heroes for the thieves' literature of thirty years ago. The stories differ widely in quality, and even in moral tone, but there are some features common to them all. They are all sold in penny numbers, covered with the moat flaring paper the stationer can find, vilely printed, and adorned with rough but some-
times vigorous woodcuts of murders, escapes, or sensational rescues, in which some convict hero or other appears delivering menaced beauty from licentious and aristocratic ruffianism. Some of them are broad to indecency, and in all the attraction of criminals for girls of their own clans, or any class, is dwelt on as one of the convict specialties ; but in the majority the charm and the danger of these productions do not lie in their dirtiness, but in the scientific misdirection, so to speak, of the love of adventure. The books are intended for boys, and their special wickedness con- sists in the perversion of a taste not only natural, but deserving of careful cultivation. The struggle with the difficulties of nature, or with savage foes, or with wild animals, which so greatly attracts all English lads, is exchanged for a struggle with the law, its agents, and civilized society. Where Captain Marryat shows a lad doing impossibilities to escape from a desert island, these writers show him performing miracles to escape from prison. The rich play in these serials the part of the subtle savages in Mayne Reid's novels, while, instead of wild beasts to be defeated, we have policemen to be brained. The wild leap from a rock to escape a bear becomes a twenty-foot jump from a window to escape a detective ; the hunter so lithe that he could outrun an elephant becomes Springheeled Jack, whom no police-serjeant can seize ; the boy so brave that he faces a buffalo becomes the lad who, accused of murder, dare " cheek " his judge. All the daring and generosity and faithfulness which enchant boys are ascribed to convicts who, under any conceivable system of society, would be hung ; and the bad old moral of Paul Clifford, that a very fine fellow may break every law, human and divine, and be a fine fellow still, is the key-note to the entire series. It is, however, in the perversion of the spirit of adventure that the true mischief lies. There is a class among the poor of our great towns which, though honest enough itself, and with sound though primitive notions of respectability, is forced by the circumstances of life into contact with the much worse class with which it is too often confounded. It is on their children mainly that the weight of temptation falls. They see the criminals daily, see that they live, on the whole, better than the honest, learn to look to them for their occasional enjoyments—thieves when pros- perous spend money as men who have earned it never do—and are told by these books that the life which they see to be varied and exciting is also heroic ; admits of daring exploits, hair- breadth escapes, heroisms of every illegal kind and virtues of certain Pagan sorts, and they grow up to regard society as hostile, the police as natural enemies, and fidelity to criminals as the one virtue for the want of which there can be no forgiveness. It must not be forgotten that they have all, boys and girls alike, one temptation towards crime the enormous force of which the classes above them cannot and do not adequately appreciate. Honest life involves to them steady monotonous toil, toil without holidays, toil under a pressure as severe as that of any whip-bearing overseer. As far as grown men are concerned, that necessity falls also upon classes very far above these ; but for children, the higher we ascend the lighter, the pleasanter and the more varied life becomes. The barrister, or the journalist, or the well-to-do tradesman frequently works as steadily and as hard as the costermonger, but their children and the coster's children lead very different lives. The former, though not exempt from work of a kind, are exempt from physical toil, from a never-ending monotony of labour, from a mill- horse round pursued from year's end to year's end, under the same conditions, in the same place, with the same absence of relief, or change, or healthy excitement. It is difficult enough to get Etonian to work, but set them to ten hours' actual toil a day, and see how they would regard any life, bad or good, which promised excitement and occasional spaces of idleness and enjoyment. The single safe- guard, after a high moral sense, is the social one, the notion that crime besides being wicked is disgraceful, that a thief is a coward, a burglar a selfish oppressor, a highwayman a violent brute, and it is precisely this idea which these books tend directly to destroy. Whether their sale can be restrained by any law which would not be too wide in its application is an extremely difficult question, in a country where two laws, one for the cultivated and one for the uneducated,—which is the thing in this instance really required,— would never be endured. To word a law which should catch Jack Sheppard and leave Paul Clifford or the Beggars' Opera un- touched would, we fear, be impossible ; but the evil, once exposed, may be met in other ways, and especially by satisfying the love of adventure in healthier but still attractive modes.
There is a very curious point in speculative ethics mixed up in this question which deserves a moment's attention. What is the effect of the "cuts " with which these serials are all provided, that is, of plates calculated, consciously or unconsciously, to pander to the
passion for cruelty, which many observers have believed,—justly, as we think, —to be nearly as widely diffused as greed or lust? The cuts in the thirteen or fourteen instances before us are all decorous enough, but the intention of all, even of the one or two better specimens, is to represent scenes of horror, or suffering, or violence. Do they tend to produce callousness or susceptibility ? The reply will be, no doubt, callousness ; but it must be observed that there is some evidence and some strong argument on the other side, the side our forefathers appear to have taken almost universally. All painters in all Catholic countries appear to have entertained the belief, still strong in Belgium, that the contemplation of the physical sufferings endured by saints tended to make men better, and not worse. The effect of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the old editions of which were crowded with horrors, was undoubtedly to make men hate cruelty, and the pictures of mental pain in which all artists occasionally delight are not supposed to harden the spectator. If a man is the more callous for seeing drawings of a dying police- man, why is he the less callous for seeing much better pictures of tortured saints, or of deaths like that of Maximilian, or of mental suffering like that expressed in Mr. Holman Hunt's " Isabel "? It is possible, with regard to suffering, that the motive previously impressed on the gazer is everything, and the picture itself nothing, that the horrible Belgian saints may improve minds prepared to reverence them, but would harden minds innocent of that previous training ; but we are not quite sure. We have a suspicion that all pictorial cruelty, if very frequently repeated, demoralizes ; that the saints are only non-hurtful from the spectator's secret idea that they are not suffering as he would suffer, but in a religious ecstasy which precludes pain, and that the way Foxe's drawings- worked was to produce a hatred of torture, not because it was- torture, but because it was a priestly instrument. If that is. correct, the plates in this Newgate literature are an additional and an unmitigated evil.
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