ABSTRACT
Critics attacked Bulwer-Lytton, William Harrison Ainsworth, and Charles Dickens for violating morality by romanticizing criminals. William Makepeace Thackeray, for example, believed that criminals should be depicted as "downright scoundrels, leading scoundrelly lives"; he satirized the Newgate school in Catherine (1839-1840) and later in "George de Barnwell" (1847).
