From True Confessions to True Reporting? The Decline and Fall of the Ordinary's Account

Abstract

The fact that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Newgate chaplains have laboured under an almost universally bad press has tended to obscure the larger cultural purchase of the Ordinary's Account of the confessions and speeches of the malefactors executed at Tyburn. Given the contemporary investment in the political and metaphysical significance of last dying words, the early Account presented more compelling truth claims than its erstwhile sister publication, the Old Bailey Proceedings. However, the later eighteenth century would witness the elevation of the Proceedings to the status of an official trial record and the decline and disappearance of the Account as a regular serial publication. This article charts the eclipse of the confessional genre by a more “factual” discourse of reportage. In the process it explores the transformation of the older conception of the condemned as a “monument of grace” and an “Everyman” qualified to preach to the general public into a “poor unhappy wretch” lacking both the rational and moral faculties of his readers.