The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 2/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841Pelham, Camden
History
The Chronicles of Crime or The New Newgate Calendar. v. 2/2: being a series of memoirs and anecdotes of notorious characters who have outraged the laws of Great Britain from the earliest period to 1841
Pelham, Camden
Crime -- Great Britain; Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England)
Berners-street, and applied to the payment of the pressing demands upon
it. This fact does not rest on my assertion, as the transactions
referred to are entered in the books now in the possession of the
assignees, and to which I have had no access since my apprehension.
These books, I understand, are now in court, and will confirm the truth
of my statement; and to whatever account all the sums may be entered,
whether to that of stock, or of Exchequer bills, or to my own private
account, the whole went to the general funds of the banking-house. I
alone have been doomed to suffer the stigma of all the transactions; but
tortured as I have been, it now becomes an imperative duty to explain to
you, gentlemen, and through you to the world at large, that the vile
accusations heaped upon me, known to be utterly false by all those who
are best acquainted with my private life and habits, have been so heaped
upon me for the purpose of loading me with the whole obloquy of those
transactions, from which, and from which alone, my partners were
preserved from bankruptcy. I have been accused of crimes I never even
contemplated, and of acts of profligacy I never committed; and I appear
at this bar with every prejudice against me, and almost prejudged. To
suit the purposes of the persons to whom I allude, I have been
represented as a man of prodigal extravagance: prodigal indeed I must
have been, had I expended those large sums which will hereafter be
proved to have gone exclusively to support the credit of a tottering
firm, the miseries of which were greatly accelerated by the drafts of
two of its members to the amount of near 100,000_l._ I maintained but
two establishments, one at Brighton, where my mother and sister resided
in the season--the expenses of which to me, exclusive of my wine, were
within 400_l._ per annum, and one at Lambeth, where my two children
lived, from its very nature private and inexpensive, to which I resorted
for retirement, after many a day passed in devising means to avert the
embarrassments of the banking-house. The dwelling-house in
Berners-street belonged solely to my mother, with the exception of a
library and single bed-room. This was the extent of my expenditure, so
far as domestic expenditure is concerned; I am next accused of being an
habitual gambler, an accusation which, if true, might easily account for
the diffusion of the property. I am, indeed, a member of two clubs, the
Albion and the Stratford, but never in my life did I play in either, at
cards or dice, or any game of chance; this is well known to the
gentlemen of these clubs--and my private friends, with whom I more
intimately associated, can equally assert my freedom from all habit or
disposition to play. It has been as cruelly asserted, that I
fraudulently invested money in the funds to answer the payment of
annuities, amounting to 2,200_l._ settled upon females. I never did make
any such investment; neither at home or abroad, in any funds whatever,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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