Newgate Prison beam, London, England, ca. 1780
date: label: associated date
content: 1780-06
notes: label: Description
content: The demolition of London’s notorious Newgate Prison might have passed without notice had it not been for the work of Charles Dickens. As architecturally impressive as it was bleak, Newgate’s high-walled squalor appeared in Dickens’s earliest reporting on London’s social conditions, collected in Sketches by “Boz” (1836), and as a setting in his novels—notably, Oliver Twist (1838) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). The popularity of Dickens’s works on both sides of the Atlantic led readers to seek out the places described in his books. After his death in 1870, a flood of transatlantic tourists made their way to “disappearing Dickensland,” as one traveler described the vanishing London sites.
label: Description
content: When Newgate closed in 1903, Dickens fans eagerly collected bits of it. London Police Constable William Fulcher obtained this piece of an oak beam from the chapel, which had burned during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 that Dickens dramatized in Barnaby Rudge. Fulcher carried it with him to the British pavilion at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1905, and from there he wrote to the secretary of the Smithsonian, offering to donate it as a gift.
label: Description
content: Gift of P.C. William Fulcher, 1905
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: associated place
content: United Kingdom: England, London
label: associated place
content: United States: Missouri, St. Louis
label: associated place
content: United Kingdom: England, London, Newgate Prison
setName: label: See more items in
content: Political History: Political History, General History Collection
label: See more items in
content: Government, Politics, and Reform
label: See more items in
content: Souvenir Nation
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: William Fulcher
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: PL.044395
label: catalog number
content: 10398
label: accession number
content: 44395
objectType: label: Object Name
content: beam fragment
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: wood (overall material)
label: Measurements
content: overall: 5 in x 8 in x 6 in; 12.7 cm x 20.32 cm x 15.24 cm