"If there be a haunted spot in London it must surely be a few square<br />yards that lie a little west of the Marble Arch, for in the long course<br />of some six centuries over fifty thousand felons, traitors and martyrs<br />took there a last farewell of a world they were too bad or too good to<br />live in. From remote antiquity, when the seditious were taken _ad furcas<br />Tyburnam_, until that November day in 1783 when John Austin closed the<br />long list, the gallows were kept ever busy, and during the first half of<br />the eighteenth century, with which this book deals, every Newgate<br />sessions sent thither its thieves, highwaymen and coiners by the score." We have a strange fascination with crime and criminals; and with their punishment... just or otherwise. Here, we have a collection of papers regarding the most infamous criminals of the early eighteenth century selected from the original and authentic memoirs originally published in 1735. - Summary by Lynne Thompson
