It is the place where fortunes can be made & lost though chess, backgammon
- every game under the sun.
But those whom
...For over eight hundred years, Newgate Prison was the grimly axle around which British society slowly twisted. Immortalised by Charles Dickens, this was where such legendary outlaws as Robin Hood & Captain Kidd met their fates, where the rapier-wielding playwrights Ben Jonson & Christopher Marlowe sharpened their quills, & where flamboyant highwaymen like Claude Duval & James Maclaine made legions of women swoon. By piercing together the lives of forgotten figures as well as re-examining the prison's link with more famous individuals from Dick Whittington to Daniel Defoe, this thrilling history goes in search of a ghostly place, erased by time, which has inspired more poems & plays, paintings & novels, than any other structure in British history.