Gustave Doré and Hélidore Pisan’s Newgate—Exercise Yard, 1872
9 3⁄8 × 7 1⁄2″. From Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage
(Grant & Co., 1872).
WHEN LUIGI MANGIONE was perp-walked into a Manhattan courthouse in December 2024, flanked by a retinue of heavily armed law enforcement and New York City mayor Eric Adams, many commentators balked at the spectacle of brute power being enacted. Drawing comparisons to the iconography of Christ’s Passion, the performance of judicial excess on the part of the state enabled an already percolating martyrization of Mangione, who is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson: Polls suggest a not insignificant percentage of Americans are at least somewhat sympathetic regarding Mangione’s act and painfully aware of the circumstances that informed it.
Even in the most incarcerated country in the world, the penal system is, for many people, experienced through mass media representations, whether fictional or documentary. The images of Mangione belong to a genealogy of crime drama that extends back to the nineteenth century, a decisive period of evolution for both law enforcement and mass media. During this era, a significantly more systematized, though far from homogeneous, set of disciplinary regimes emerged. The modern prison became an easy solution to perceived threats, a means of cordoning away supposed blights on society for punishment, servitude, or rehabilitation. State executions moved out of the public sphere and into the confines of prison sites. The shift from law as public spectacle to more opaque forms of discipline coincided with an unprecedented expansion of the periodical press. Crime stories were the bread and butter of the nineteenth-century media landscape, mobilized for sensational effect and for moral grandstanding.
The corpus of crime-and-punishment imagery that emerged during this era tended to feature sensational events and high-profile lawbreakers rather than emphasizing the uniform anonymity that would increasingly characterize the new penal system and the majority of inmates. A notable counterexample is the wood engraving Newgate—Exercise Yard, 1872, by the French artist Gustave Doré and engraver Hélidore Pisan. Newgate Prison, situated in London’s city center, had long been the target of scrutiny as one of the most infamous manifestations of Victorian punitive ideology. In Doré and Pisan’s image, the walls of the exercise yard, extending just beyond the frame, have the ruggedness and asymmetry of a picturesque medieval structure, vestiges of Newgate’s seven-century history. The prisoners’ garb—identical, ill-fitting—suggests the uniform that would have been worn by some but not all of Newgate’s occupants at the time. The contours of the figures are clearly delineated, but they remain otherwise largely undifferentiated from one another and from their surroundings.
The scene is masculine insofar as the prisoners and onlookers are all male-coded, and set within an austere space that connotes brute power and authority. But where masculinity was associated in the Victorian imagination with freedom of movement and productive labor, the image emasculates the prisoners by relegating them to a defined movement without agency. The prisoners are only producing bodily energy to maintain some level of viability. Amid the bedraggled lot, the inmates in the foreground become a catalogue of their limited distinguishing characteristics. The most illuminated of them, hatless and dragging, is followed by a marginally more active figure, the only one to acknowledge the viewer’s presence. This reciprocal gaze reinforces our sense of being shown an all-encompassing space, while the steadfastly linear perspective implies a kind of stable omniscience. Yet the spatial construction is slightly elongated, tipping downward as it nears the lower edge, putting the viewer at a greater distance and slight elevation, undercutting our sense of proximity.
9 × 7 1⁄2″.
Newgate—Exercise Yard first appeared in London: A Pilgrimage, 1872, a collaboration between Doré and English journalist Blanchard Jerrold. In preparation, the two toured the city (often accompanied by a policeman or other guide), and Doré made some sketches from life—an uncommon practice for the artist. Having already produced acclaimed illustrations for the Bible and the works of Dante, Milton, and Rabelais, Doré was held in high regard by the time London: A Pilgrimage appeared. Published as a small-run giftbook and at a price point that would have limited its reach to a relatively moneyed contingent, it nonetheless found an audience immediately. The book is thematically framed by the two extremes of contemporary London: the charmed experiences of the elite, leisured classes in the West End and the extreme poverty and indolence of the East End. The two are not neatly segregated, either in the organization of the book or in the reality it attempts to capture. A dazzling ball is followed shortly by a “woe-begone alley” enlivened by the presence of an organ grinder.
Many parts, moreover, represent moments of liminality, in which socioeconomic (and, by extension, moral) stratifications are blurred, strained, and volatile. Newgate was one of these sites, housing convicted criminals and those awaiting trial, men and women, rich and poor—Jerrold notes, in fact, that the “main body of the prisoners were in the garb of gentlemen.” Yet Newgate—Exercise Yard offers a homogenized vision of criminal detention, at a moment when sensational accounts of famous criminals appeared frequently in the periodical press and the popularization of phrenology encouraged belief in the possibility of identifying physical traits linked to deviance. This was embedded in the Newgate experienced by non-inmates: Visitors had access to a “Rogues’ Gallery” featuring convict photographs and plaster-cast death masks of executed prisoners. But Newgate—Exercise Yard offers only vague hints at physical features; the individuals remain unidentifiable.
9 × 7 1⁄2″. Both from Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage
(Grant & Co., 1872).
Ultimately, the image is Realist with a capital R—a belated iteration of a movement rooted in the turmoil of 1848 and the social ills to which artists like Gustave Courbet and Honoré Daumier responded. The slight distortions of bodily forms and spatial construction do not push Newgate—Exercise Yard into the realm of fantasy, but rather are tools to buttress the overarching sense of monotony and drudgery. It is a Dantean scene made contemporary—but whether it represents the crushing toil of eternal damnation or the redemptive labor of purgatory is left ambiguous. Jerrold’s accompanying text is much more strident, decrying the moral failings that lead to imprisonment and waxing dubious on the value of prison reform, rehabilitation efforts, and charity. In the words of Jerrold and Doré’s police escort, “Once they come here, the best of them are lost.”
London: A Pilgrimage received mixed reviews when it was initially published. Critics faulted the mediocrity of Jerrold’s writing and occasional inaccuracies of architecture and dress in Doré’s images. However, the dynamic visual representation and the sheer volume of subjects have kept the illustrations perpetually a part of the discourse on Victorian urban life, often recuperated as visual surrogates of Charles Dickens’s texts. (One of these images, an Orientalizing vision of an opium den, is cited within London as depicting the opening location of Dickens’s final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.) Newgate—Exercise Yard has become a kind of one-size-fits-all signifier of harsh Victorian prison conditions.
1890, oil on canvas, 31 1⁄2 × 25 1⁄4″.
As is frequently the case with Doré, however, its influence is as much due to its appropriation by other artists. In 1890, Vincent van Gogh re-created Newgate—Exercise Yard in oil while institutionalized in Saint-Rémy. The biographical circumstances and the reddish tinge of the foremost prisoner’s hair have led commentators to interpret the image metaphorically, even solipsistically—the prisoner becomes a cipher for van Gogh, physically and psychologically incarcerated. Reading it this way, we risk distancing ourselves from what Doré’s image foregrounds: the anonymous “criminal,” shut away in obscurity.
A detail from van Gogh’s painting appears on the cover of a 1979 Penguin edition of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (first published in 1975), one of the most influential texts on the history of incarceration. Foucault articulated the judicial and penal shifts from public punishment to private regulation, drawing particular attention to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, an architectural concretization of the unseen but ever-present authority of the state. Newgate was not a Benthamite/Foucauldian panopticon (and historians debate the extent to which that model actually materialized), but Doré and Pisan’s image conveys the sense of a quiet, looming power of enforcement. The cropped version on Discipline and Punish foregrounds the individual, putting the viewer in closer proximity with the prisoners and with van Gogh’s iconic mark-making. It brings the viewer even closer to the inmate experience, revealing a more differentiated and affecting population than in Doré and Pisan’s original illustration, which, though set within the confines of Newgate, dovetails more closely with the largely hidden and sublimated disciplinary regimes of Foucault’s analysis.
Newgate—Exercise Yard became further entrenched in the visual language of authoritarianism and incarceration through Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. A near-identical re-creation of the scene follows the protagonist Alex’s entry into the penal system, where he is subjected to an experimental treatment based on hyper-saturation of violent media. In the end, he becomes a tool of the state’s media operations. Ultimately, he functions as a case study, a cautionary tale, a fluid signifier absorbed by competing discourses of power.
Crime and punishment get etched into the public imagination largely through media reproduction of figures like Alex and Luigi. In most cases, it likely just further entrenches a viewer’s existing perspective on an individual, their purported acts, and law enforcement more generally. The anonymity of Doré and Pisan’s image enables more fluid possibilities for the viewer to inscribe their own meaning onto the prisoners. This, of course, comes with its own risks. While phrenology may no longer have the popular purchase that it did in the nineteenth century, the association of corporeal traits with criminal behavior has not fully dissipated. Adaptions of Newgate—Exercise Yard demonstrate a desire to locate the individual within the anonymous mass. Scholar Tanushree Ghosh has argued that in their initial reception, the London images contributed to the discourse of Victorian liberal guilt, but resulted in few material consequences: “The viewers’ guilt in their inaction becomes their only action.”* By keeping both the individual (no matter how sensationalized) and the anonymous mass in mind we may engender a more holistic reckoning with mass incarceration and ways of dismantling it.
Sarah C. Schaefer is an associate professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the author of Gustave Doré and the Modern Biblical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2021).
*Tanushree Ghosh, “Gifting Pain: The Pleasures of Liberal Guilt in London: A Pilgrimage and Street Life in London,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (2013), 115–16.
