Читать книгу Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar онлайн

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The author proposes to present to his readers the felon as he really is—​to describe facts as they were found—​to present pure pictures of guilt and its accompaniments.

He does not desire to make use of artificial colouring, believing that the interest in the work lies in its reality. The felon appears just as he is, as crime makes him, and as Newgate receives him—​successful, it may be, for a season, but arrested, condemned, scourged by conscience, and cut off from society as unfit for its walks.

Of all the members of the family of man few have been so rapidly forgotten as those who have been swept from the face of the world by the fiat of the law and the hands of the public executioner. Yet the guilty and the unfortunate have left biographies behind them that speak to future generations in awful and impressive tones.

If they were inflictions on the past generation, they may be made useful in the present age as beacons to the reckless voyager—​voices lifted up from the moral wrecks of the world speaking audibly to listening men “of righteousness, and temperance, and judgment.”