Prison calendars obviously reflect the criminal features of the age in which they appear. Those of Newgate since the beginning of the eighteenth century are numerous and voluminous enough to form a literature of their own. To the diligence of lawyers and publishers we owe a more or less complete collection of the most remarkable cases as they occurred. These volumes have been published under various titles. The ‘Newgate Calendar,’ compiled by Messrs. Knapp and Baldwin, attorneys-at-law, is one of the best known. This work, according to its title-page, professes to contain “interesting memoirs of notorious characters who have been convicted of outrages on the law of England; with essays on crimes and punishments and the last exclamations of sufferers.” There are many editions of it. The first I think was published by Nuttall, Fisher, and Dixon, of Liverpool; a later edition issues from the Albion Press, Ivy Lane, London, under the auspices of J. Robins and Co. But another book of similar character had as its compiler “George Theodore Wilkinson, Esq.,” barrister-at-law. It was published by Cornish and Co. in 1814, and the work was continued by “William Jackson, Esq.,” another barrister, with Alexander Hogg, of Paternoster Row, and by Offor and Sons of Tower Hill as publishers. Early and perfect editions of these works are somewhat rare and curious, fondly sought out and carefully treasured by the bibliophile. But all of them were anticipated by the editors of the ‘Tyburn Calendar,’ or ‘Malefactor’s Bloody Register,’ which issued soon after 1700 from the printing office of G. Swindells, at the appropriate address of Hanging Bridge, Manchester. The compilers of these volumes claimed a high mission. They desired “to fully display the regular progress from Virtue to Vice, interspersed with striking reflections on the conduct of those unhappy wretches who have fallen a sacrifice to the injured laws of their country. The whole tending to guard young minds from allurements of vice and the paths that lead to destruction.” Another early work is the ‘Chronicle of Tyburn, or Villainy displayed in all its branches,’ which gave the authentic lives of notorious malefactors, and was published at the Shakespeare’s Head in 1720. Yet another dated 1776, and printed for J. Wenman of 144, Fleet Street, bears the title of ‘The Annals of Newgate,’ and claims upon the title-page, that by giving the circumstantial accounts of the lives, transactions, and trial of the most notorious malefactors it is “calculated to expose the deformity of vice, the infamy, and punishments naturally attending those who deviate from the paths of virtue; and is intended as a beacon to warn the rising generation against the temptations, the allurements, and the dangers of bad company.”