Bidwell’s Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison

Austin Bidwell was one of the young Americans behind the 1873 forgery that nearly emptied the Bank of England, and this memoir is his own account of the rise and long fall that followed. He traces a path from a Brooklyn boyhood into the fast money and sharp practice of Wall Street, then into the audacious scheme that made him a fugitive across Europe before a life sentence closed around him. Much of the book dwells on the years he spent in solitary confinement in an English prison, and on the hard reflections that grew out of that isolation. Part confession, part warning, it opens a candid window onto Victorian crime, policing, and the machinery of punishment. This free PDF and EPUB edition reprints his story in full.