human
usually impudent fabrications, and, when not entirely un-authentic, generally the utterly unreadable productions of the Ordinaries of Newgate and other prisons, who turned an honest, if somewhat discreditable, penny in hearing the generally boastful and lying accounts by prisoners of their crimes and adventures; seldom writing them down from dictation, and commonly but imperfectly memorising them, and only setting down their general sense. That is why the very numerous
gpt
lives, last dying speeches, and confessions of the highwaymen and others, written out by the Ordinaries and usually attested at the end by the criminals themselves, are so bald and unconvincing. An outside rival production was, as a general rule, a good deal more spicy, and although unauthorised, not necessarily less truthful. The