Rookwood (Annotated)

William Harrison Ainsworth's Rookwood (1834) is a vigorous Gothic-historical romance centered on a disputed inheritance, a decaying ancestral estate, and the shadowy glamour of eighteenth-century criminal life. Blending melodrama, antiquarian detail, sensational plotting, and ballad-like lyricism, the novel helped define the "Newgate" mode of fiction, in which thieves and highwaymen are treated wi...