Amid great popular demand for accounts of executed criminals, a book entitled Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, the Late Famous and Notorious Robber was published in London in 1708. The book evidently was a success. A fourth edition was printed in 1714.

The Ordinary (chaplain) of Newgate, Paul Lorrain, probably wrote Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall.^ ^ As Ordinary of Newgate from 1698 to 1719, Lorrain wrote accounts of Newgate prisoners hung at London’s Tyburn gallows on each hanging day. Lorrain was an astute businessman whose accounts of hangings frequently carried multiple advertisements, including advertisements for his own works.^ Lorrain’s accounts carried five advertisements for the Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall in 1708, and two in 1709.^ In 1707, Lorrain switched printers for his account, reportedly because a rival printer offered him more money.^ His new printer, Benjamin Bragg, was also the printer and seller of the Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall. Lorrain argued that his accounts were published “for the general Satisfaction of the Publick” and for “the necessary Information of Honest People.”^ The title page of the memoirs of John Hall describes the book as “set forth for the Good of the Publick, at the Instance {insistence} of many Honest People.”

Paul Lorrain grew rich through publishing accounts of hung prisoners. Lorrain’s income as Ordinary of Newgate was as much as £200 per annum. At his death, he had an estate valued at £5000.^ Daniel Defoe had been imprisoned in Newgate in 1703 under the reign of Ordinary Paul Lorrain. Defoe’s Moll Flanders implicitly contrasts Lorrain with a “good minister”:

He {the good minister} told me he did not come as ordinary of the place, whose business it is to extort confessions from prisoners, for private ends, or for the further detecting of other offenders; that his business was to move me to such freedom of discourse as might serve to disburthen my own mind, and furnish him to administer comfort to me as far as was in his power; and assured me, that whatever I said to him should remain with him, and be as much a secret as if it was known only to God and myself; and that he desired to know nothing of me, but as above to qualify him to apply proper advice and assistance to me, and to pray to God for me.^

Communication with prisoners had a sordid commercial history prior to the early nineteenth-century turn to suppressing communication with prisoners. But the latter suppressive policy seems to have been unrelated to the former commercial exploitation.