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diff --git a/34112.txt b/34112.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9d5f160 --- /dev/null +++ b/34112.txt @@ -0,0 +1,4294 @@ +Project Gutenberg's In Jail with Charles Dickens, by Alfred Trumble + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: In Jail with Charles Dickens + +Author: Alfred Trumble + +Release Date: October 21, 2010 [EBook #34112] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN JAIL WITH CHARLES DICKENS *** + + + + +Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + + + + +TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE + +The Contents are placed after the Introductory. A list of changes to the +original publication is given at the end. + + + + + In Jail with Charles Dickens. + + + + + IN JAIL WITH + CHARLES DICKENS + + BY + ALFRED TRUMBLE + EDITOR OF "THE COLLECTOR" + + Illustrated + + London + SUCKLING & GALLOWAY + 1896 + + + + + COPYRIGHT, 1896, + BY + FRANCIS P. HARPER. + + Printed in America. + + + + +INTRODUCTORY. + + +Readers of Charles Dickens must all have remarked the deep and abiding +interest he took in that grim accessory to civilization, the prison. He +not only went jail hunting whenever opportunity offered, but made a +profound study of the rules, practices and abuses of these institutions. +Penology was, in fact, one of his hobbies, and some of the most powerful +passages in his books are those which have their scene of action laid +within the shadow of the gaol. It was this fact which led to the +compilation of the papers comprised in the present volume. + +The writer had been a student of Dickens from the days when the +publication of his novels in serial form was a periodical event. When he +first visited England, many of the landmarks which the novelist had, in +a manner, made historical, were still in existence, but of the principal +prisons which figure in his works Newgate was the only one which existed +in any approximation to its integrity. The Fleet and the King's Bench +were entirely swept away; of the Marshalsea only a few buildings +remained, converted to ordinary uses. In this country, however, the two +jails which interested him, still remain, with certain changes that do +not impair their general conformance to his descriptions. + +These papers, therefore, consist of personal knowledge, as a voluntary +visitor, be it understood, of Newgate. The Tombs in New York, and the +Eastern District Penitentiary in Philadelphia, supplemented by +references to the records. For the Fleet, Marshalsea, and Kings Bench, +the writer is indebted to the chronicles and descriptions of Peter +Cunningham, John Timbs, Leigh Hunt, and other ingenious and interesting +historians of the London of the early Victorian era. In connection with +the paper relating to the Eastern District Penitentiary of Philadelphia, +his thanks are due for the assistance and information rendered by Mr. +Michael J. Cassidy, the Warden. + + + ALFRED TRUMBLE. + + New York, March 1896. + + + + +CONTENTS. + + + CHAPTER I. + NEWGATE WITHOUT, 1 + + CHAPTER II. + NEWGATE WITHIN, 40 + + CHAPTER III. + THE FLEET PRISON, 73 + + CHAPTER IV. + THE MARSHALSEA, 106 + + CHAPTER V. + THE KING'S BENCH, 134 + + CHAPTER VI. + THE NEW YORK TOMBS, 161 + + CHAPTER VII. + PHILADELPHIA'S BASTILE, 177 + + + + +In Jail with Charles Dickens. + + + + +CHAPTER I. +NEWGATE WITHOUT. + + +Newgate was the first prison to which Charles Dickens gave any literary +attention. An account of a visit to it appears among the early "Sketches +by Boz." It is also the only one of the London jails of which he has +left us graphic descriptions, or briefer, spirited sketches, which +preserves to-day so much of its original character as to be identifiable +in detail by the student of his works. The Fleet and the King's Bench +have disappeared. The Marshalsea may only be recognized by slight +surviving landmarks. But the sombre and sullen bulk of Newgate rears +itself in the heart of London, a sinister monument to the horrors bred +by a civilization rotten of its own over-ripeness, in the forcing-bed of +the most magnificent, wonderful and monstrously terrible city of the +world. + +If external gloom could exercise an influence to deter anyone from the +commission of crime of which it is a part of the penalty, Newgate would +never have any inmates. Surrounded at the time of my introductory visit +to it, as an accidental but not legally involuntary visitor, by low +public-houses, poor shops and a tumble-down market, all bearing the +grime of age and the marks of decay, as if the frown of the great jail +had blighted them; with the foul, miry lane of Newgate street, and the +scarcely-cleaner Old Bailey, alive with muddy carts and shabby people, +skulking roughs, draggled women and squalling children, no man who had +no business there would care, once having seen it, to seek it out again. +Being then new in London, I had been begriming myself among the old +books of St. Paul's Churchyard until I was tired and thirsty, and +strolling along Ludgate Hill in quest of refreshment, turned into the +second street I came to. A few steps more and I found myself stopping at +another street corner to look at an immense and grim mass of gray stone +towering loftily in the fog, with little windows here and there along +its frowning wall. They were so small that they might have been mere +spaces where the builders had forgotten to put in a block of granite, if +it had not been for the strong, rusty bars that crossed them. I asked a +man who came out of a public-house wiping his mouth on the back of his +hand what place that was. He stared at me in evident amazement for a +minute, and then said, shortly, in an aggravated tone of voice, poking a +finger, still moist from his libation, at it, like a dagger: + +"Newgate, that is." + +He went along, shaking his head in a dubious way and looking back +several times at me, clearly either suspicious of the genuineness of my +stupendous ignorance, or unable to comprehend how anyone could be +ignorant of the identity of the famous jail. I have no doubt that it was +vastly stupid of me. In fact, I experienced a certain feeling of +contempt for myself, now that I knew what the place was, and that it was +the place of which I had read so much that I almost had its history by +heart; but after all, London is a "very considerable-sized town," as I +once had a Chicago acquaintance generously admit, and one could scarcely +be expected to know it like a guide-book, within forty-eight hours after +making first acquaintance with its bitter beer, its bloody beef, and its +beds into whose coverlids the essence of the fog seemed to have +penetrated, if, indeed, the sheets were not woven out of the fog itself. + +Newgate, in its external appearance, at least, is an ideal prison. Its +aspect, whether purposely or through the adaptation of its construction +to its uses, is thoroughly jail-like. The few openings in the walls, the +empty blind niches, which might have been left there for statues of +great felons never set up in them; the entrance, with its festooned +fetters carved in stone as an ornament to the gloomy and forbidding +portal, all are appropriate to and a significant part of it. Within a +few feet of where I stood when I viewed it first was the spot where the +scaffold used to be put up. Here, on the occasion of an execution, as +one may read in Chapter 52 of "Oliver Twist," the space before the +prison was cleared, and a few strong barriers painted black thrown +across the road to break the pressure of the crowd, while the more +favored portion of the audience occupied every post of vantage, at +windows and housetops, that commanded a view of the ghastly show. Here, +as Oliver noted when he came away from his last interview with Fagin at +the dawn of day: "A great multitude had already assembled; the windows +were filled with people smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; +the crowd was pushing, quarreling and joking. Everything told of life +and animation, but one dark cluster of objects in the very centre of +all--the black stage, the crossbeam, the rope, and all the hideous +apparatus of death." + +Prisoners of old were executed on Tyburn Hill in public, or on some +occasions, when it was especially desired to enforce an example, as +close as possible to the scene of guilt. Those who were punished for +participation in the Gordon Riots of 1780 were swung off in the various +parts of the city where their crimes were committed. In 1793 the common +places of execution were changed to the Old Bailey, in front of Newgate. +There the first culprit was executed on December 9 of that year. Hanging +was brisk when George III was king. Between February and December, 1785, +ninety-six persons suffered by the trap arrangement now in common use +the world over, which was then known as the "new drop." Previous to that +time it had been the custom to perch the candidates for the halter on a +cart, which was driven from under them at the fatal signal, while +someone hung on to their legs to choke them more speedily and surely--an +expeditious practice quite frequently resorted to by Judge Lynch in +America in after years, and still not entirely out of use for +extemporaneous executions. In "Barnaby Rudge" (volume 2, chapter 19) +Dickens gives the most detailed description of a Newgate execution which +occurs in his works. The passage is well worth quoting at length: + + "The time wore on. The noises in the streets became less frequent by + degrees until the silence was scarcely broken, save by the bells in + the church towers marking the progress, softer and more stealthily + while the city slumbered, of that Great Watcher with the hoary head, + who never sleeps or rests. In the brief interval of darkness and + repose which feverish towns enjoy, all busy sounds were hushed; and + those who awoke from dreams lay listening in their beds, and longed + for dawn, and wished the dead of the night were passed. + + "Into the street, outside the gaol's main wall, workmen came + straggling, at this solemn hour, in groups of two or three, and, + meeting in the centre, cast their tools upon the ground and spoke in + whispers. Others soon issued from the gaol itself, bearing on their + shoulders planks and beams: these materials being all brought forth, + the rest bestirred themselves, and the dull sound of hammers began to + echo through the stillness. + + "Here and there among this knot of laborers, one with a lantern or a + smoky link stood by to light his fellows at their work; and by its + doubtful aid some might be seen dimly, taking up the pavement of the + road, while others held upright great posts, or fixed them in holes + thus made for their reception. Some dragged slowly on toward the rest + an empty cart, which they brought rumbling from the prison yard, while + others erected strong barriers across the street. All were busily + engaged. Their dusky figures moving to and fro at that unusual hour, + so active and so silent, might have been taken for those of shadowy + creatures toiling at midnight on some ghostly, unsubstantial work, + which, like themselves, would vanish with the first gleam of day, and + leave but morning mist and vapor. + + "While it was yet dark a few lookers-on collected, who had plainly + come there for that purpose and intended to remain; even those who had + to pass the spot on their way to some other place, lingered, and + lingered yet, as though the attraction of that were irresistible. + Meanwhile the noise of the saw and mallet went on briskly, mingled + with the clattering of boards on the stone pavement of the road, and + sometimes with the workmen's voices as they called to one another. + Whenever the chimes of the neighboring church were heard--and that was + every quarter of an hour--a strong sensation, instantaneous and + indescribable, but perfectly obvious, seemed to pervade them all. + + "Gradually a faint brightness appeared in the East, and the air, which + had been very warm through the night, felt cool and chilly. Though + there was no daylight yet, the darkness was diminished, and the stars + looked pale. The prison, which had been a mere black mass, with little + shape or form, put on its usual aspect; and ever and anon a solitary + watchman could be seen upon its roof, stopping to look down upon the + preparations in the street. This man, from forming, as it were, a part + of the gaol, and knowing, or being supposed to know, all that was + passing within, became an object of much interest, and was eagerly + looked for, and as awfully pointed out as if he had been a spirit. + + "By and by the feeble light grew stronger, and the houses, with their + signboards and inscriptions, stood plainly out in the dull gray of the + morning. Heavy stage-wagons crawled from the inn yard opposite, and + travelers peeped out, and, as they rolled sluggishly away, cast many a + backward look toward the gaol. And now the sun's first beams came + glancing into the street, and the night's work, which in its various + stages and in the varied fancies of the lookers-on had taken a hundred + shapes, wore its own proper form--a scaffold and gibbet. + + "As the warmth of the cheerful day began to shed itself upon the + scanty crowd the murmur of tongues was heard, shutters were thrown + open, the blinds drawn up, and those who had slept in rooms over + against the prison, where places to see the execution were let at high + prices, rose hastily from their beds. In some of the houses people + were busy taking out the window-sashes for the better accommodation of + the spectators; in others, the spectators were already seated, and + beguiling the time with cards, or drink, or jokes among themselves. + Some had purchased seats upon the housetops, and were already crawling + to their stations from parapet and garret window. Some were yet + bargaining for good places, and stood in them in a state of + indecision, gazing at the slowly-swelling crowd, and at the workmen as + they rested listlessly against the scaffold--affecting to listen with + indifference to the proprietor's eulogy of the commanding view his + house afforded, and the surpassing cheapness of his terms. + + "A fairer morning never shone. From the roofs and the upper stories of + the buildings the spires of the city churches and the great cathedral + dome were visible, rising up beyond the prison into the blue sky, and + clad in the color of light summer clouds, and showing in the clear + atmosphere their every scrap of tracery and fretwork, and every niche + and loophole. All was lightness, brightness and promise, excepting in + the street below, into which (for it lay yet in the shadow) the eye + looked down into a dark trench, where, in the midst of so much life + and hope and renewal of existence, stood the terrible instrument of + death. It seemed as if the very sun forbore to look upon it. + + "But it was better, grim and sombre in the shade, than when, the day + being more advanced, it stood confessed in full glare and glory of the + sun, with its black paint blistering and its nooses dangling in the + light like loathsome garlands. It was better in the solitude and gloom + of midnight, with a few forms clustering about it, than in the + freshness and the stir of the morning, the centre of an eager crowd. + It was better haunting the street like a spectre, when men were in + their beds, and influencing, perchance, the city's dreams, than + braving the broad day, and thrusting its obscene presence upon the + waking senses. + + "Five o'clock had struck--six, seven and eight. Along the two main + streets, at either end of the crossway, a living stream had now set + in, rolling to the marts of gain and business. Carts, coaches, wagons, + trucks and barrows, forced a passage through the outskirts of the + throng and clattered onward in the same direction. Some of these, + which were public conveyances, and had come from a short distance in + the country, stopped, and the driver pointed to the gibbet with his + whip, though he might have spared himself the pains, for the heads of + all the passengers were turned that way without his help, and the + coach windows were stuck full of staring eyes. In some of the carts + and wagons women might be seen, glancing fearfully at the same + unsightly thing; and even little children were held up above the + peoples' heads to see what kind of a toy a gallows was and to learn + how men were hanged. + + "Two rioters were to die before the prison, who had been concerned in + the attack upon it; and one directly after in Bloomsbury Square. At + nine o'clock a strong body of military marched into the street, and + formed and lined a narrow passage into Holborn, which had been + indifferently kept all night by constables. Through this another cart + was brought (the one already mentioned had been employed in the + construction of the scaffold), and wheeled up to the prison gate. + These preparations made, the soldiers stood at ease; the officers + lounged to and fro in the alley they had made, or talked together at + the scaffold's foot; and the concourse which had been rapidly + augmenting for some hours, and still received additions every minute, + waited with an impatience which increased with every chime of St. + Sepulchre's clock for twelve at noon. + + "Up to this time they had been very quiet, comparatively silent, save + when the arrival of some new party at a window, hitherto unoccupied, + gave them something to look at or to talk of. But, as the hour + approached, a buzz and a hum arose, which, deepening every moment, + soon swelled into a roar, and seemed to fill the air. No words, or + even voices, could be distinguished in this clamor, nor did they speak + much to each other; though such as were better informed on the topic + than the rest would tell their neighbors, perhaps, that they might + know the hangman when he came out, by his being the shorter one; and + that the man that was to suffer with him was named Hugh; and that it + was Barnaby Rudge who would be hanged in Bloomsbury Square. + + "The hum grew, as the time drew near, so loud that those who were at + the windows could not hear the church clock strike, though it was + close at hand. Nor had they any need to hear it either, for they could + see it in the peoples' faces. So surely as another quarter chimed + there was a movement in the crowd--as if something had passed over + it--as if the light upon them had been changed--in which the fact was + readable as on a brazen dial, figured by a giant's hand. + Three-quarters past eleven. The murmur now was deafening, yet every + man seemed mute. Look where you would among the crowd, you saw + strained eyes and lips compressed; it would have been difficult for + the most vigilant observer to point this way or that, and say that + yonder man had cried out. It were as easy to detect the motion of the + lips in a sea-shell. + + "Three-quarters past eleven. Many spectators who had retired from the + windows came back refreshed, as though their watch had just begun. + Those who had fallen asleep aroused themselves; and every person in + the crowd made one last effort to better his position, which caused a + press against the sturdy barriers that made them bend and yield like + twigs. The officers, who until now had kept together, fell into their + several positions, and gave the words of command. Swords were drawn, + muskets shouldered, and the bright steel, winding its way among the + crowd, gleamed and glittered in the sun like a river. Along this + shining path two men were hurrying on, leading a horse, which was + speedily harnessed to the cart at the prison door. Then a profound + silence replaced the tumult that had so long been gathering, and a + breathless pause ensued. Every window was now choked up with heads; + the housetops teemed with people clinging to chimneys, peering over + gable-ends, and holding on where the sudden loosening of any brick or + stone would dash them down into the street. The church-tower, the + church-roof, the churchyard, the prison-leads, the very waterspouts + and lampposts, every inch of room swarmed with human life. + + "At the first stroke of twelve the prison bell began to toll. Then the + roar, mingled now with cries of 'Hats off!' and 'Poor fellows!'--and, + from some specks in the great concourse, with a shriek or groan--burst + forth again. It was terrible to see--if anyone in that distraction of + excitement could have seen--the world of eager eyes all strained upon + the scaffold and the beam." + +The Newgate gallows in "Barnaby Rudge" was set up for the ruffian Hugh, +the bastard of Sir John Chester and his gypsy light-o-love, and for +Dennis the hangman, who had been concerned as leaders in the attack on +the prison by the Gordon Rioters. "Two cripples--both were boys--one +with a leg of wood, one who dragged his twisted body along with the help +of a crutch, were hanged in Bloomsbury Square, where they had helped to +sack Lord Mansfield's house, and other rioters in other parts of the +town, in despoiling which they had been conspicuous." It may be recalled +that the mother of Hugh herself had died on the scaffold, at Tyburn, for +the crime of passing forged notes. To descend from the realm of romance +to that of reality, the most memorable executions in the Old Bailey were +those of Mrs. Phipoe, the murderess, in 1797; of Governor Wall of +Trinidad, for murder, on Jan. 28, 1802; of Halloway and Haggerty, the +murderers, on Feb. 22, 1807, when thirty spectators were trampled to +death; of Bellingham, the assassin of a member of Parliament, Percival, +on May 18, 1812; of the Cato Street Conspirators, who were cut down and +decapitated on the scaffold in the presence of the multitude, on May 1, +1820; of Fauntleroy, the banker, hanged for forging in 1824; of the +assassin Greenacre, in 1837; of Courvoiser, who murdered Lord William +Russell, in 1840; and of Franz Mueller, the railway murderer, who was +extradited from this country, as will doubtless be remembered by many, +and sent to his doom in 1864. That same year seven pirates were also +suspended in the Old Bailey. Since then executions have been carried out +privately within the walls of the prison. + +A contemporary of Dickens, in the "Ingoldsby Legends," has given us a +picture, in a different vein, of the same period and subject. He has +told us, in his own rattling verse, how my Lord Tomnoddy, having nothing +to do, and being deucedly bored, learned from his faithful Tiger Tim +that Greenacre was to be hanged at Newgate; here was indeed a sensation +for His Lordship: "To see a man swing, at the end of a string, with his +neck in a noose, will be quite a new thing." So he hires the whole first +floor of the Magpie and Stump, opposite the jail, and invites his +friends to come and help him see a man die in his shoes. They help him +so effectually during the night, what with "cold fowl and cigars, +pickled onions in jars, Welsh rabbits and kidney, rare work for jaws, +and very large lobsters with fine claws," and the like, not to mention +gin-toddy and cold and hot punch, that they fall asleep and lose the +show after all, when, as they cannot have the man hung over again, they +go home to bed in hackney coaches and a state of deep disgust. Another +contemporary, of more ample renown, Thackeray to wit, gave some +attention to the matter. In July, 1840, he published, in Frazer's +Magazine, a paper called "Going to see a man hanged." The man was +Courvoiser; and Thackeray, unlike Lord Tomnoddy, did not fall asleep +over the feast, and so did see him mount the scaffold. + +Surgeons' Hall used to stand close to Newgate and the Old Bailey, and +the victims of the halter were handed over to the doctors for +dissection. The corpse of wicked Lord Ferrers, who was executed in 1760 +at Tyburn for murdering his steward, was taken in his own landau and six +to the Burgeons' Theatre to be cut up. After having been disemboweled, +in conformance with the sentence, the body of the bad lord was put on +show in the first floor window, to be hissed and hooted at by the mob. +The account of the Ferrers execution, by the way, provides a curious +picture of the time. Ferrers dressed himself in his wedding suit to be +hanged. He had the harness of his horses decorated with ribbons. On the +way to Tyburn from the Tower, my Lord intimated a desire for some wine, +being thirsty. The Sheriff, who was in the coach with him, declined to +allow him to refresh himself. "Then," said the Earl, taking a bite of +pigtail tobacco from a plug which he had in his pocket, "I must be +content with this." He harbored no malice against the Sheriff, however, +for he presented him with his watch as they neared Tyburn. To the +Chaplain he gave five guineas, and to the executioner the same sum. The +executioner had to pull him by the legs to effectually strangle him, and +while the body swung for an hour on the gallows, the sheriffs and their +friends had luncheon on the platform within reach of it. "The +executioners fought for the rope," says the chronicler, "and the one who +lost it, cried." + +But we have wandered far from Newgate in this wicked company. Old +Newgate, upon a portion of whose site the present jail stands, was built +in the reign of King John. It derived its name from the fact that London +was then a walled city, and the jail was erected close to the newest +gate in the fortification. It was, in fact, at first a mere tower or +appendage of the gate. Newgate was used as a State prison long before +the Tower. One of the many captives of this sort which it held was +William Penn. The founder of Pennsylvania spent six months there for the +atrocious offense of street preaching. Defoe spent some time here on +account of a political tract, and wrote several others while in +confinement. Dr. Dodd wrote his successful comedy, "Sir Roger de +Coverly," in Newgate. One of the last persons confined here for +political offense was Mr. Hobhouse, afterward Lord Broughton. The street +used to be filled with people when he took his exercise on the roof, who +watched and cheered at his hat, which was all they could see of him +above the wall. An odd circumstance about Mr. Hobhouse's imprisonment is +that Byron had prophesied it in the remark that "having foamed himself +into a reformer, he would subside in Newgate." Among the famous +prisoners here we find Savage, the poet, for murder; Jack Sheppard, +whose remarkable escape, very much exaggerated upon fact, you may have +read of from Mr. Ainsworth's pen; and Jonathan Wild, who, by the by, +once lived nearly opposite the court-house, in the Old Bailey; Catherine +Hayes, the abandoned heroine of Thackeray's novel; Mrs. Brownrigg, the +fiend who tortured her serving-maids; Astlett, the Bank of England +clerk, who committed forgeries for over $1,500,000, and many more. Lord +George Gordon, familiar to all who have read "Barnaby Rudge," died in +1793, of gaol-fever, in one of the cells of Newgate, after several years +of confinement, for libelling the Queen of France. The poor, mad lord, +whose rioters had turned the jail into a ruin once, found it strong +enough to hold him and his fantastic visions securely in the end. Here +is Dickens's description of the attack upon the prison, caused by him, +commencing in the second volume of "Barnaby Rudge," Chapter Fifth. + + "It was about six o'clock in the evening when a vast mob poured into + Lincoln's Inn Fields by every avenue, and divided, evidently in + pursuance of a previous design, into several parties. It must not be + understood that this arrangement was known to the whole crowd, but + that it was the work of a few leaders, who, mingling with these men as + they came upon the ground, and calling to them to fall into this or + that party, effected it as rapidly as if it had been determined on by + a council of the whole number, and every man had known his place. + + "It was perfectly notorious to the assemblage that the largest body, + which comprehended about two-thirds of the whole, was designed for the + attack on Newgate. It comprehended all the rioters who had been + conspicuous in any of their former proceedings; all those whom they + recommended as daring hands and fit for the work; all those whose + companions had been taken in the riots; and a great number of people + who were relatives or friends of the felons in the gaol. This last + class included not only the most desperate and utterly abandoned + villains in London, but some who were comparatively innocent. There + was more than one woman there, disguised in man's attire, and bent on + the rescue of a child or a brother. There were the two sons of a man + who lay under the sentence of death, and who was to be executed, along + with three others, the next day but one. There was a great party of + boys, whose fellow pickpockets were in the prison; and, at the skirts + of all, a score of miserable women, outcasts from the world, seeking + to release some other fellow creature as miserable as themselves, or + moved by general sympathy, perhaps, God knows, with all who were + without hope and wretched. + + "Old swords, and pistols without ball or powder; sledge-hammers, + knives, axes, saws, and weapons pillaged from the butcher shops; a + forest of iron bars and wooden clubs; long ladders for scaling the + walls, each carried on the shoulders of a dozen men; lighted torches, + tow smeared with pitch, and tar, and brimstone; staves roughly plucked + from a fence and paling; and even crutches taken from crippled beggars + on the streets composed their arms. When all was ready, Hugh and + Dennis, with Simon Tappertit between them, led the way. Roaring and + chafing like an angry sea, the crowd pressed after them." + +They halt upon the way to drag Gabriel Varden from his shop, in order to +compel him to pick the lock of the prison gate. They march him at the +head of the mob to the jail. They find that their visit was not wholly +unexpected, "for the governor's house, which fronted the street, was +strongly barricaded, the wicket of the prison gate was closed up, and at +no loophole or grating was any person to be seen." The governor, +inspecting the mob from the roof of his house, is summoned to surrender +his charge. He refuses. The rabble call on the locksmith to pick the +locks. He defies them, and is dragged away barely in time to save his +life by Joe Willets and Edward Chester, who are in the mob in disguise. +Then the assault on the jail begins. + + "Hammers began to rattle on the walls, and every man strove to reach + the prison and be among the foremost rank. Fighting their way through + the press and struggle as desperately as if they were in the midst of + the enemies rather than their own friends, the two men retreated with + the blacksmith between them, and dragged him through the very heart of + the concourse. + + "And now the strokes begin to fall like hail upon the gate and on the + strong building; for those who could not reach the door spent their + fierce rage on any thing, even on the great blocks of stone, which + shivered their weapons into fragments, and made their hands and arms + tingle as if the walls were active in their resistance and dealt them + back their blows. The clash of the iron ringing upon iron mingled with + the deafening tumult, and sounded high above it, as the great + sledge-hammers rattled on the nailed and plated door; the sparks flew + off in showers; men worked in gangs, and at short intervals relieved + each other, that all their strength might be devoted to the work; but + there stood the portal still, as grim and dark and as strong as ever, + and, saving for the dints on its shattered surface, quite unchanged. + + "While some brought all their energies to bear upon this toilsome + task, and some, rearing ladders against the prison, tried to clamber + to the summit of the walls they were too short to scale; and some, + again, engaged a body of police, and beat them back and trod them + under foot by force of numbers; others besieged the house on which the + gaoler had appeared, and, driving in the door, brought out his + furniture and piled it up against the prison gate to make a low fire + which should burn it down. As soon as this device was understood, all + those who had labored hitherto cast down their tools and helped to + swell the heap, which reached half way across the street, and was so + high that those who threw more fuel on the top got up by ladders. When + all the keeper's goods were flung upon this costly pile to the last + fragment, they smeared it with pitch and tar and rosin they had + brought, and sprinkled it with turpentine. To all the woodwork round + the prison doors they did the like, leaving not a joist or a beam + untouched. This infernal christening performed, they fired the pile + with lighted matches and with blazing tow, and then stood by and + waited the result. + + "The furniture being very dry, and rendered more combustible by wax + and oil, besides the arts they had used, took fire at once. The flames + roared high and fiercely, blackening the prison wall and twining up + its lofty front like burning serpents. At first they crowded around + the blaze, and vented their exultation only in their looks; but when + it grew hotter and fiercer; when it crackled and leaped, and roared + like a great furnace; when it shone upon the opposite houses, and + lighted up not only the pale and wondering faces at the windows, but + the inmost corners of each habitation; when through the deep red heat + and glow the fire was seen sporting and toying with the door, now + clinging to its obdurate surface, now gliding off with fierce + inconstancy and roaring high into the sky, anon returning to fold it + in its burning grasp and lure it to its ruin; when it shone and + gleamed so brightly that the church clock of St. Sepulchre's, so often + pointing to the hour of death, was legible as in broad day, and the + vane upon its steeple-top glittered in the unwonted light like some + thing richly jeweled; when blackened stone and sombre brick grew ruddy + in the deep reflection, and windows shone like burnished gold, dotting + the longest distance in the fiery vista with their specks of + brightness; when wall and tower and roof and chimney-stack seemed + drunk, and in the flickering glare appeared to reel and stagger; when + scores of objects, never seen before, burst out upon the view, and + things the most familiar put on some new aspect, then the mob began to + join the whirl, and with loud yells and shouts and clamor, such as is + happily seldom heard, bestirred themselves to feed the fire and keep + it at its height. + + "Although the heat was so intense that the paint on the houses over + against the prison parched and crackled up, and swelling into boils, + as it were, from an excess of torture, broke and crumbled away; + although the glass fell from the window sashes, and the lead and iron + on the roofs blistered the incautious hand that touched them, and the + sparrows in the eaves took wing, and, rendered giddy by the smoke, + fell fluttering down upon the blazing pile, still the fire was tended + increasingly by busy hands, and round it men were going always. They + never slackened in their zeal or kept aloof, but pressed upon the + flames so hard that those in front had much ado to save themselves + from being thrust in; if one man swooned or dropped, a dozen struggled + for his place, and that, although they knew the pain and thirst and + pressure to be unendurable. Those who fell down in fainting fits and + were crushed or hurt were carried to an inn yard close at hand and + dashed with water from a pump, of which buckets full were passed from + man to man among the crowd; but such was the strong desire of all to + drink, and such the fighting to be first, that, for the most part, the + whole contents were spilled upon the ground, without the lips of a man + being moistened. + + "Meanwhile, and in the midst of all the roar and outcry, those who + were nearest to the pile heaped up again the burning fragments that + came toppling down, and racked the fire about the door, which, + although a sheet of flame, was still a door, fast locked and barred, + and kept them out. Great pieces of burning wood were passed, besides, + above the people's heads to such as stood above the ladders, and some + of these, climbing up to the topmost stave, and holding on with one + hand by the prison wall, exerted all their skill and force to cast + these firebrands on the roof or down into the yards within. In many + instances their efforts were successful, which occasioned a new and + appalling addition to the horrors of the scene, for the prisoners + within, seeing from between their bars that the fire caught in many + places and thrived fiercely, and being all locked up in strong cells + for the night, began to know that they were in danger of being burnt + alive. This terrible fear, spreading from cell to cell and from yard + to yard, vented itself in such dismal cries and wailings, and in such + dreadful shrieks for help, that the whole gaol resounded with the + noise, which was loudly heard even above the shouting of the mob and + roaring of the flames, and was so full of agony and despair that it + made the boldest tremble. + + "It was remarkable that these cries began in that quarter of the gaol + which fronted Newgate street, where it was well known that the men who + were to suffer death on Thursday were confined. And not only were + these four, who had a short time to live, the first to whom the dread + of being burnt occurred, but they were, throughout, the most + importunate of all; for they could be plainly heard, notwithstanding + the great thickness of the walls, crying that the wind set that way, + and that the flames would shortly reach them; and calling to officers + of the gaol to come and quench the fire from a cistern which was in + their yard, and full of water. Judging from what the crowds from + without the walls could hear from time to time, these four doomed + wretches never ceased to call for help; and that with as much + distraction, and in as great a frenzy of attachment to existence, as + though each had an honored, happy life before him, instead of + eight-and-forty hours of miserable imprisonment, and then a violent + and shameful death. + + "But the anguish and suffering of the two sons of one of these men, + when they heard, or fancied they heard, their father's voice, is past + description. After wringing their hands, and rushing to and fro as if + they were stark mad, one mounted on the shoulders of his brother, and + tried to clamber up the face of the high wall, guarded at the top with + spikes and points of iron. And when he fell among the crowd he was not + deterred by his bruises, but mounted up again, and fell again, and + when he found the feat impossible began to beat the stones and tear + them with his hands, as if he could in that way make a breach in the + strong building and force a passage in. At last they cleft their way + among the mob about the door, though many men, a dozen times their + match, had tried in vain to do so, and were seen in, yes in, the fire, + striving to pry it down with crowbars. + + "Nor were they alone affected by the outcry from within the prison. + The women who were looking on shrieked loudly, beat their hands + together, stopped their ears and many fainted; the men who were not + near the walls and active in the siege, rather than do nothing, tore + up the pavement of the street, and did so with a haste and fury that + could not have been surpassed if that had been their gaol and they + were near their object. Not one living creature in the throng was for + an instant still. The whole great mass were mad. + + "A shout! Another! Another yet, though few knew why or what it meant. + But those around the gate had seen it slowly yield and drop from its + topmost hinge. It hung on that side but by one, but it was upright + still, because of the bar and its having sunk of its own weight into + the heap of ashes at its foot. There was now a gap at the top of the + doorway through which could be descried a gloomy passage, cavernous + and dark. Pile up the fire! + + "It burnt fiercely. The door was red hot and the gap wider. They + vainly tried to shield their faces with their hands, and standing, as + if in readiness for a spring, watched the place. Dark figures, some + crawling on their hands and knees, some carried in the arms of others, + were seen to pass along the roof. It was plain that the gaol could + hold out no longer. The keeper and his officers and their wives and + children were escaping. Pile up the fire! + + "The door sank down again; it settled deeper in the cinders, tottered, + yielded, was down. + + "As they shouted again they fell back for a moment and left a clear + space about the fire that lay between them and the gaol entry. Hugh + leaped upon the blazing heap, and scattering a train of sparks into + the air, and making the dark lobby glitter with those that hung upon + his dress, dashed into the gaol. + + "The hangman followed. And then so many rushed upon their track that + the fire got trodden down and thinly strewed about the street; but + there was no need of it now, for, inside and out, the prison was in + flames." + +The rioters celebrated the capture of Newgate in roaring style. They +commanded and compelled the citizens all around the place to illuminate +their houses from bottom to top, as if for a glorious national event, +and at a time of public gayety and joy. "When this last task had been +achieved the shouts and cries grew fainter; the clank of the fetters, +which had resounded on all sides as the prisoners escaped, was heard no +more; all the noises of the crowd subsided into a hoarse and sullen +murmur as it passed into the distance; and when the human tide had +rolled away, a melancholy heap of smoking ruins marked the spot where it +had lately chafed and roared." Among the spectators of the capture of +Newgate was the poet Crabbe, then a young man seeking his fortune in +London, and he has left a description of it in his journal. Dr. Johnson +records the fact that "on Wednesday I walked with Dr. Scott (Lord +Stowell) to look at Newgate and found it in ruins, with the fire yet +glowing. As I went by, the Protestants were plundering the Sessions +House in the Old Bailey. There were not, I believe, a hundred; but they +did their work at leisure, in full security, without sentinels, without +trepidation, as men lawfully employed, in full day." + +At the period of the Gordon Riots, Newgate was in the course of +reconstruction. The present prison was designed by George Dance, R. A., +the architect of the Mansion House and other public buildings. The +famous Lord Mayor Beckford, father of the author of "Vathek," laid the +foundation stone on May 23, 1770, this being his last public act. Work +seems to have progressed slowly on it, for the newer portion was only in +part completed when the Gordon mob stormed the older sections. This +event served as a warning, however. Within two years Newgate was in +stronger shape than ever; and substantially in the shape which, after +the passage of more than a century, it still presents to the world. + +Newgate serves to London the purpose of a reception prison for offenders +awaiting trial and for those condemned to death, and the executions of +the great city are performed within its walls. The Old Bailey Court, +which is an adjunct to it, is practically a part of the mountain of +masonry which sends its bleak shadow over Newgate street and the Old +Bailey. It is separated from it only by a yard, across which prisoners +are led to be tried. The court-house, known colloquially, in London, as +the Old Bailey, and politely as the Central Criminal Court, was built in +1773, was destroyed with Newgate in the Gordon Riots, but rebuilt and +enlarged in 1809 by the taking in of Surgeons' Hall. The Court is a +square hall, with a gallery for visitors. At one side is the chief seat +for the judge, with a canopy overhead surmounted by the royal arms, and +a gilded sheathed sword on the crimson wall. Opposite is the prisoners' +dock, with the stairs descending into the covered passageway, which +gives access by the way of the Press Yard to Newgate. To the left of the +dock is the witness-stand, and further to the left the jury box. The +counsel occupy the body of the court below. The Old Bailey Court +formerly sat at seven in the morning, but now sittings do not commence +until ten. It tries crimes of every kind, from treason to petty larceny +and offenses on the high seas, but only the heaviest ones are brought to +judgment before this branch of the Sessions. What is called the New +Court, adjoining the old one, sits upon the lighter misdemeanors. The +Judges at the Old Bailey are nominally the Lord Mayor, who is, in fact, +only a gorgeous dummy to open the court with true dignity, the Sheriff, +the Lord Chancellor, and a long list of Judges, Aldermen, Recorders and +so on. Of these the real Judges are the Recorder and Common Sergeant, +and the Judge of the Sheriff's Court. The law Judges take part when +knotty legal questions come in dispute, or when the trial is for a +capital offense which may cost the prisoner his life. A curious old +custom at the Bailey is that one Alderman must be present at every +sitting of the Court. + +Above the Old Court is a stately dining-room where, during the Old +Bailey sittings, the Sheriffs used to give Judges and Court officials, +and a few privileged visitors, dinners of rump steak and marrow +puddings, according to a bill of fare provided by custom. The custom, I +believe, is kept up still. There are two dinners, at 3 and 5 o'clock +respectively, and a historic court chaplain is told of who for ten years +ate both of these meals each day. + +There is a reverse to this pleasant picture of the Old Bailey. For many +years it was a most unhealthy place to hold court in. The jail fevers +which decimated Newgate's population always found their way into the +court room. In 1750 the fever caused the death of several judges and +Lord Mayor Pennant himself, and whenever there was an epidemic there are +records of its effect among the potentates of the Old Bailey. In Chapter +7 of "A Tale of Two Cities," in connection with the trial of Charles +Darnay, Dickens writes of the Old Bailey Court: "They hanged at Tyburn +in those days, so the street outside of Newgate had not obtained the +infamous notoriety that has since attached to it. But the gaol was a +vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were +practiced, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into the Court +with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my +Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It had more +than once happened that the judge in the black cap pronounced his own +doom as certainly as the prisoner's, and even died before him." In the +course of the same chapter he describes the accused as standing quiet +and attentive, with his hands resting on the slab of wood forming the +shelf of the prisoner's dock, "so composedly that they had not displaced +a leaf of the herbs with which it was strewn. The Court was all bestrewn +with herbs, and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air +and gaol fever." In 1770, Mr. Ackerman, one of the keepers, testified +before the House of Commons, which had the question of rebuilding the +prison before it, that in the spring of 1750, the jail distemper had +spread to the Sessions House, now the Old Bailey, and had caused the +death, in addition to two Judges, and the Lord Mayor already alluded to, +of several of the jury and others to the number of over sixty persons. + +The surroundings of Newgate are full of historical memories. Just off +Giltspur street, but a step away, is Cock lane, where the ghost walked. +Along Newgate street, going from the Old Bailey to Cheapside, was the +noble old charity of Christ's Hospital, otherwise famous as the +Blue-Coat School, rich in works of art and richer in the recollections +of such scholars within its cloisters as Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Leigh +Hunt, Richardson, who wrote "Clarissa Harlowe," and many more. Along the +same street opens Queen's Head Passage, in which Dolly's chop-house, +which is a part of the commercial history of England, stands, and Ivy +Lane, where Dr. Johnson established his club of that name. Newgate +Market, between Newgate street and Paternoster Row, is the great meat +market of London. It is what is known as the carcass market, and for +many years was the chief source of slaughtered meat supply to the retail +butchers of London. At a certain hour of the morning Newgate street was +a veritable butchers' exchange. Newgate market was originally a meat +market, but its convenient proximity to Smithfield, which lies on the +other side of Newgate, only a few streets off, led to its conversion to +its later uses. Smithfield was the historic cattle market of London. +Here in the past were slaughtered beasts for food, and men and women for +their opinions. The beasts had the better part of the bargain. They were +killed before they were cooked. The human victims of Smithfield Shambles +were roasted and boiled alive. In chapter 21 of "Oliver Twist" we find a +description of Smithfield when Sykes is carrying Oliver off to assist in +the burglary at Chertsey. + + "It was market morning. The ground was covered nearly ankle deep with + filth and mire, and a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking + bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest + upon the chimney tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre + of the large area, and as many temporary ones as could be crowded into + the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the + gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen three or four deep. + Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, + vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a dense mass; + the whistling of the drovers, the barking of the dogs, the bellowing + and the plunging of the oxen, the bleating of the sheep, the grunting + and the squeaking of the pigs, the cries of the hawkers, the shouts, + oaths, and quarreling on all sides, the ringing of bells and roar of + voices that issued from every public house, the crowding, pushing, + driving, beating, whooping, yelling, the hideous and discordant din + that resounded from every corner of the market, and the unwashed, + unshaven, squalid and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and + bursting in and out of the throng, rendered it a stunning and + bewildering scene which quite confounded the senses." + +It may be remembered too, vide "Great Expectations," chapter 20, that +when Pip came up to London to find his guardian, Mr. Jaggers, he +beguiled that time while awaiting his return to his office by wandering +about the neighborhood, and so "came into Smithfield, and the shameful +place being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to +stick to me. So I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into +a street where I saw the great black dome of St. Paul's bulging at me +from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate +prison." Whenever he writes of the jail, he does so in the same spirit. +His earliest impressions of it struck the keynote for his whole life's +view of it. What those early impressions were one may discover in that +paper of the "Sketches by Boz" which, in their collected shape, bears +the number 24, and has for title, "Criminal Courts." + + "We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect with + which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy + days. How dreadful its rough, heavy walls, and how massive the doors + appeared to us--the latter looking as if they were made for the + express purpose of letting people in and never letting them out again. + Then the fetters over the debtor's door, which we used to think were a + bona fide set of irons just hung up there for convenience sake, ready + to be taken down at a moment's notice and rivetted on the limbs of + some refractory felon. We were never tired wondering how the hackney + coachman on the opposite stand could cut jokes in the presence of such + horrors, and drink pots of half-and-half so near the last drop. + + "Often have we strayed here in session's time to catch a glimpse of + the whipping place or that dark building on one side of the yard in + which is kept the gibbet with all of its dreadful apparatus, and on + the door of which we half expected to see a brass plate with the + inscription, 'Mr. Ketch,' for we never imagined that the distinguished + functionary could by possibility live anywhere else. The days of those + childish dreams have passed away, and with them many other boyish + ideas of gayer nature. But we shall retain so much of our original + feeling that to this hour we never pass the building without something + like a shudder." + + + + +CHAPTER II. +NEWGATE WITHIN. + + +The entrance to Newgate is through the keeper's lodge, which, with the +house in which the keeper lives, occupies the centre of what has been +well called "this vast quarry of stone." It fronts on the Old Bailey. +The prisoner's quarters are in the wings, which extend from either side +of the keeper's quarters. In the gloomy office, men with that +indescribable prison air all such officials bear, lounge about, and come +and go on business. There is iron everywhere, from the huge bolts on the +outer doors, and the door inside of them, to the barred windows and +other doors beyond number, that open and shut with a sullen clangor that +goes echoing through the stone passages as if it would never die away. +The smell of the jail is as powerful in its way as these evidences of +its actual strength. It blows into your face in a strong breath when the +door opens for you, and you find it lingering about you hours after your +visit has been made. Some scientist ought to analyze this odor of the +prison. It is unique. A soldier's barracks, a hospital, a ship's +forecastle--all places, in short, where men live in close quarters--have +an odor that tells of their origin; but the scent of the jail is +different from all, and as horrible as the thing it recalls to you +whenever you breathe it, or fancy you do. + +"What London pedestrian is there," writes Dickens, in chapter 24 in the +"Sketches by Boz," "who has not, at some time or other, cast a hurried +glance through the wicket at which the prisoners are admitted into this +gloomy mansion, and surveyed the few objects he could discern, with an +indescribable feeling of curiosity. The thick door, plated with iron, +and mounted with spikes just low enough to enable you to see leaning +over them an ill-looking fellow, in a broad-brimmed hat, Belcher +handkerchief and top-boots; with a brown coat, something between a +great-coat and a 'sporting' jacket, on his back, and an immense key in +his left hand. Perhaps you are lucky enough to pass just as the gate is +being opened; then, you see on the other side of the lodge another gate, +the image of its predecessor, and two or three more turnkeys, who look +like multiplications of the first one, seated around a fire, which just +lights up the white-washed apartment sufficiently to enable you to catch +a glimpse of these different objects." In the next paper of the same +series, he conducts us within the lodge. "One side is plentifully +garnished with a choice collection of heavy sets of irons, including +those worn by the redoubtable Jack Sheppard--genuine; and those said to +have been graced by the sturdy limbs of the no less celebrated Dick +Turpin--doubtful. From this lodge a heavy oaken gate, bound with iron, +studded with nails of the same material, and guarded by another turnkey, +opens on a few steps, if we remember right, which terminate in a narrow +and dismal stone passage, running parallel with the Old Bailey and +leading to the different yards, through a number of tortuous and +intricate windings, guarded in their turn by huge gates and gratings, +whose appearance is sufficient to dispel at once the slightest hope of +escape that any newcomer may have entertained; and the very recollection +of which, on eventually traversing the place again, involves one in a +maze of confusion." + +The old Newgate which the Gordon rioters sacked was a horrible place. +The cells were mere black caves, which riddled the tremendous masonry +like a stone honeycomb. In these at one time, while a contagious fever +was raging, 800 prisoners were confined. The captives were packed in +these dens like slaves in the hold of their prison-ship. Mrs. Frye +describes the women as "swearing, gaming, fighting, singing, dancing, +drinking, and dressing up in men's clothes," and as late as 1838 +gambling with cards, dice and draughts was common among the male +prisoners. Jail distempers now and then purged this sink of vileness of +a portion of its inmates, till at last, in 1858, the reconstruction of +its cellular system was completed. Even with that, however, Newgate is +anything but a perfect jail. In the earlier Dickens era it preserved +many of its ancient characteristics. In "Great Expectations," when +Wemmick takes Pip to visit it, we read: "At that time gaols were much +neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on all +public wrong-doing--and which is always its longest and heaviest +punishment--was still far off. So, felons were not lodged and fed better +than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers), and seldom set fire to their +prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavor of their soup. +It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in; and a potman was going his +rounds with beer; and the prisoners behind the bars in the yards were +buying beer, and talking to friends; and a frowsy, ugly, disorderly, +depressing scene it was." The earlier description, "A Visit to Newgate," +in the Boz "Sketches," thus depicts the women's side of the jail: + + "The buildings in the prison--or in other words the different + wards--form a square, of which the four sides abut respectively on the + Old Bailey, the old College of Physicians (now forming a part of + Newgate Market), the Sessions House and Newgate street. The + intermediate space is divided into several paved yards, in which the + prisoners take such air and exercise as can be had in such a place. + These yards, with the exception of that in which the prisoners under + the sentence of death are confined, run parallel with Newgate street, + and consequently from the Old Bailey, as it were, to Newgate Market. + Turning to the right, we came to a door composed of thick bars of + wood, through which were discernible, passing to and fro in a narrow + yard, some twenty women. One side of this yard is railed at a + considerable distance, and formed into a kind of iron cage, about five + feet and ten inches in height, roofed at the top, and defended in the + front by iron bars, from which the friends of the female prisoners + communicate with them. Two or three women were standing at different + parts of the grating conversing with their friends, but a very large + portion of the prisoners appeared to have no friends at all, beyond + such of their old companions as might happen to be within the walls. + We were conducted up a clean and well lighted flight of stone steps to + one of the wards. A description of one is a description of the whole. + + "It was in a spacious, bare, whitewashed apartment, lighted, of + course, by windows looking into the interior of the prison, but far + more light and airy than one could reasonably expect to find in such a + situation. There was a large fire, with a deal table before it, round + which ten or a dozen women were seated on wooden forms at dinner. + Along both sides of the room ran a shelf; below it, at regular + intervals, a row of large hooks were fixed in the wall, on each of + which was hung the sleeping mat of a prisoner; her rug and blanket + being folded up, and placed on the shelf above. At night these mats + are placed upon the floor, each beneath the hook on which it hangs + during the day; and the ward is made to thus answer the purposes both + of a day room and a sleeping apartment. Over the fireplace was a large + sheet of pasteboard, on which were displayed a variety of texts from + Scripture, which were also scattered about the room in scraps about + the size and shape of the copy slips which are used in schools. On the + table was a sufficient provision of a kind of stewed beef and brown + bread, in pewter dishes which are kept perfectly bright, and displayed + on shelves in great order and regularity when not in use. + + "In every ward of the female side a wards-woman is appointed to + preserve order, and a similar regulation is adopted among the males. + The wards-men and wards-women are all prisoners, selected for good + conduct. They alone are allowed the privilege of sleeping on + bedsteads: a small stump bedstead being placed in every ward for the + purpose." + +This, in itself, was a vast improvement on the style of the last century +in Newgate. Then the prisoner had no comfort unless he paid roundly for +it. His cell contained a stone bench or two, on which the first comer +might make his bed. The rest slept on the floor. Once in a great while a +truss of straw was tossed in to them, as it might have been to a beast +in a stall. This straw remained until it rotted to a pulp. Then another +truss was used to scatter over it. So, in time, the prisoners slept on a +veritable dunghill, the compost being generally left to fester till it +bred a fever, when it would be carted off, to disseminate the germs of +disease which it had engendered, outside the jail walls; and the same +process was begun over again. In the matter of cleanliness a change for +the better had been made in Dickens's time; but one great evil of the +jail was the herding together of the prisoners in the wards. Here the +possibly innocent learned evil lessons from the guilty; the depraved +could deprave those not yet wholly debased; the gaol became, in short, +not so much a place of punishment for crime as a powerful breeder of it, +and many a man and boy, and woman and girl, who went into Newgate for a +trivial offense, emerged from it a full-fledged and incorrigible +lawbreaker. So outrageous did this condition of things become that many +thoughtful men began seriously to question whether the means of +restricting crime, as practiced in Newgate, were not really worse than +the crime itself. In the sketch already quoted, Dickens says: + + "They (the men's wards) are provided, like the wards of the women's + side, with mats and rugs, which are disposed of in the same manner + during the day; the only very striking difference between their + appearance and that of the wards inhabited by the women is the utter + absence of employment. Huddled on two opposite forms by the fireside + sit twenty men, perhaps; here a boy in livery; there a man in a rough + great-coat and top-boots; further on, a desperate-looking fellow in + his shirtsleeves, with an old Scotch cap upon his shaggy head; near + him again, a tall ruffian in a smock-frock; next to him a miserable + being of distressed appearance, with his head resting on his hand--all + alike in one respect, all idle and listless; when they do leave the + fire, sauntering moodily about, lounging in the windows, or leaning + against the wall, vacantly swinging their bodies to and fro. With the + exception of an old man reading a newspaper, in two or three instances + this was the case in every ward we entered. The only communication + these men have with their friends is through two close iron gratings, + with an intermediate space of about a yard in width between the two, + so that nothing can be handed across, nor can the prisoner have any + communication by touch with the person who visits him. The married men + have a separate grating at which to see their wives, but its + construction is the same." + +When the prisoners had visitors a keeper always sat in the space between +the gratings, so that private communication was practically impossible. +The only exception was made in favor of lawyers in visiting their +clients; but prisoners of note could secure the privilege of privacy +through the pressure of official influence on the head keeper. In fact, +during later years an effort, only partially successful, was made in +Newgate to grade the prisoners according to their criminal standard, and +to keep the classes apart. So, persistent and desperate offenders were +assigned to one ward and those less confirmed in crime to another, while +boys and youths were separated from the older prisoners, whose influence +on them could not be but for evil. Under the more humane management of +the present century Newgate was even provided with a school. "A portion +of the prison," says Boz, in his "Visit," "is set apart for boys under +fourteen years of age." "In a tolerable sized room, in which were +writing materials and some copybooks, was the school-master with a +couple of his pupils; the remainder having been fetched from an +adjoining apartment, the whole were drawn up in a line for our +inspection. There were fourteen of them in all, some with shoes, some +without; some in pinafores without jackets, others in jackets without +pinafores, and one in scarce anything at all. The whole number, without +an exception, we believe, had been committed for trial on charges of +pocket-picking; and fourteen such terrible little faces we never beheld. +There was not a glance of honesty, not a wink expressive of anything but +the gallows and the hulks, in the whole collection. As to anything like +shame or contrition, that was entirely out of the question. They were +evidently quite gratified at being thought worth the trouble of looking +at; their idea appeared to be that we had come to see Newgate as a grand +affair, and that they were an indispensable part of the show; and every +boy as he 'fell in' to the line actually seemed as pleased and important +as if he had done something excessively meritorious in getting there at +all." + +Dickens had made a close study of this type of London gamin, as we have +discovered in his Artful Dodger, Master Bates, and other demoralizing +and diverting characterizations. In the Boz sketch called "Criminal +Courts" he describes the trial of such an imp at the Old Bailey court: + + "A boy of thirteen is tried, say, for picking the pocket of some + subject of Her Majesty, and the offense is about as clearly proved as + an offense can be. He is called upon for his defence, and contents + himself with a little declamation about the jurymen and his country; + asserts that all the witnesses have committed perjury, and hints that + the police force generally have entered into a conspiracy against him. + However probable his statement may be, it fails to convince the Court, + and some such scene as the following takes place: + + "Court: Have you any witnesses to speak for your character, boy? + + "Boy: Yes, my Lord; fifteen gen'lm'n is a vaten outside, and vos + avaten all day yesterday, vich they told me the night afore my trial + vos a coming on. + + "Court: Inquire for these witnesses. + + "Here a stout beadle runs out, and vociferates for the witness at the + very top of his voice; for you hear his cry grow fainter and fainter + as he descends the steps into the courtyard below. After an absence of + five minutes he returns, very warm and hoarse, and informs the Court + of what he knew perfectly well before--namely, that there are no such + witnesses in attendance. Hereupon the boy sets up a most awful + howling, screws the lower part of the palms of his hands into the + corners of his eyes, and endeavors to look the picture of injured + innocence. The jury at once find him 'guilty,' and his endeavors to + squeeze out a tear are redoubled. The governor of the gaol then + states, in reply to an inquiry from the bench, that the prisoner has + been under his care twice before. This the urchin resolutely denies in + some such terms as: 'S'elp me, gen'lm'n, I never vos in trouble + afore--indeed, my Lord, I never vos. It's all a howen to my having a + twin brother, vich has wrongfully got into trouble, and vich is so + exactly like me, that no one ever knows the difference atween us.' + + "This representation, like the defence, fails in producing the desired + effect, and the boy is sentenced, perhaps, to seven years' + transportation. Finding it impossible to excite compassion, he gives + vent to his feelings in an imprecation bearing reference to the eyes + of 'old big vig,' and as he declines to take the trouble of walking + from the dock, is forthwith carried out, congratulating himself on + having succeeded in giving everybody as much trouble as possible." + +In a similar vein, when the Artful Dodger falls into the toils ("Oliver +Twist," Chapter 43) he asserts himself. + + "It was indeed Mr. Dawkins, who, shuffling into the office with the + big coat sleeves tucked up as usual, his left hand in his pocket, and + his hat in his right hand, preceded the gaoler, with a rolling gait + altogether indescribable, and taking his place in the dock, requested + in an audible voice to know what he was placed in 'that 'ere + disgraceful situation for.' + + "'Hold your tongue, will you?' said the gaoler. + + "'I'm an Englishman, ain't I?' rejoined the Dodger. 'Where are my + privileges?' + + "'You'll get your privileges soon enough,' retorted the gaoler, 'and + pepper with 'em.' + + "'We'll see what the Secretary of State for the Home Affairs has got + to say to the beaks, if I don't,' replied Mr. Dawkins. + + "'Now then. Wot is this here business? I shall thank the madg'strates + to dispose of this little affair, and not to keep me while they read + the paper, for I've got an appointment with a gentleman in the city, + and as I'm a man of my word and very punctual in business matters, + he'll go away if I ain't there to my time, and then p'raps there won't + be an action for damages against them as kept me away. Oh, no, + certainly not.' + + "At this point the Dodger, with a show of being very particular with a + view to the proceedings to be had thereafter, desired the gaoler to + communicate 'the names of them two files as was on the bench,' which + so tickled the spectators, that they laughed almost as heartily as + Master Bates could have done if he had heard the request. + + "'Silence there,' cried the gaoler. + + "'What is this?' inquired one of the magistrates. + + "'A pocket-picketing case, your worship.' + + "'Has the boy ever been here before?' + + "'He ought to have been, a many times,' replied the gaoler. 'He has + been pretty well everywhere else. I know him well, your worship.' + + "'Oh, you know me, do you?' cried the Artful, making a note of the + statement. 'Werry good. That's a case of deformation of character, any + way.' + + "Here there was another laugh, and another cry for silence. + + "'Now then, where are the witnesses?' said the clerk. + + "'Ah, that's right,' added the Dodger. 'Where are they? I should like + to see 'em.' + + "This wish was immediately gratified, for a policeman stepped forward + who had seen the prisoner attempt the pocket of an unknown gentleman + in the crowd, and indeed take a handkerchief therefrom, which, being a + very old one, he deliberately put back again, after trying it on his + own countenance. For this reason he took the Dodger into custody as + soon as he could get near him, and the said Dodger being searched, had + upon his person a silver snuff-box, with the owner's name engraved + upon the lid. This gentleman had been discovered upon reference to the + Court Guide, and being then and there present, swore that the + snuff-box was his, and that he had missed it on the previous day, the + moment he had disengaged himself from the crowd before referred to. He + had also remarked a young gentleman in the throng, particularly active + in making his way about, and that the young gentleman was the prisoner + before him. + + "'Have you anything to ask this witness, boy?' said the magistrate. + + "'I wouldn't abase myself by descending to hold no conversation with + him,' replied the Dodger. + + "'Have you anything to say at all?' + + "'Do you hear his worship ask if you've anything to say?' inquired the + gaoler, nudging the silent Dodger with his elbow. + + "'I beg your pardon,' said the Dodger, looking up with an air of + abstraction. + + "'Did you mean to say anything, you young shaver?' + + "'No,' replied the Dodger, 'not here, for this ain't the shop for + justice; besides which, my attorney is a breakfasting this morning + with the Wice-President of the House of Commons; but I shall have + something to say elsewhere, and so will he, and so will a wery + numerous and 'spectable circle of acquaintances as'll make them beaks + wish they'd never been born, or that they'd got their footman to hang + 'em up to their own hat-pegs afore they let 'em come out this morning + to try it upon me. I'll----' + + "'There. He's fully committed,' interposed the clerk. 'Take him away.' + + "'Oh, ah. I'll come on,' replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the + palm of his hand. 'Ah (to the bench) it's no use your looking + frightened; I won't show you no mercy, not a ha'porth of it. You'll + pay for this, my fine fellers. I wouldn't be you for something; I + wouldn't go free now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask + me. Here, carry me off to prison. Take me away.' + + "With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by + the collar, threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a + parliamentary business of it, and then grinning in the officer's face + with glee and self approval." + +To such scholars as these, all the schools that could be crowded into +Newgate would be of no avail. Their biographies are summed up by +Magwitch, in "Great Expectations," who, blandly admitting to have been +brought up to be "a warmint," says: + + "'In gaol and out of gaol, in gaol and out of gaol, in gaol and out of + gaol. That's my life. I've been done everything to, pretty + well--except hanged. I've been locked up as much as a silver + tea-kettle. I've been carted here and carted there, and put out of + this town and put out of that town. I've no more notion where I was + born than you have, if so much. I first became aware of myself down in + Essex, a-thieving turnips for a living. Summun had run away from me--a + man, a tinker--and he'd took the fire with him and left me very cold. + + "'I knowed my name to be Magwitch, christened Abel. How did I know it? + Much as I knowed the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch, + sparrer, thrush. I might have thought that it was all lies together, + only, as the birds' names come out true, I suppose mine did. + + "'So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel + Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but what caught fright at + him, and either drove him off or took him up. I was took up, took up, + took up, to that extent that I reg'larly growed up took up.'" + +One of the most curious episodes of Newgate is connected with the +hanging of the Rev. W. Dodd, for forgery, on Friday, June 6, 1777. The +clerical malefactor preached his own funeral sermon in the chapel of the +prison before he was led out to die, the text being from Acts XV, 23. +The theatre of this remarkable valedictory went up in the smoke of the +Gordon Riots, but there is a chapel in the reconstructed jail: +"situated," says Boz, "at the back of the governor's house; the latter +having no windows looking into the interior of the prison. Whether the +associations connected with the place--the knowledge that here a portion +of the burial is, on some dreadful occasions, performed over the quick +and not over the dead--cast over it a still more gloomy and sombre air +than art has imparted to it, we know not, but its appearance is very +striking. The meanness of its appointments--the bare scanty pulpit, with +the paltry painted pillars on either side--the women's gallery with its +great heavy curtains--the men's with its unpainted benches and dingy +front--the tottering little table at the altar, with the commandments on +the wall above it, scarcely legible through lack of paint, and dust and +damp--so unlike the velvet and gilding, the marble and the wood of a +modern church--are strange and striking. There is one object, too, which +rivets the attention and fascinates the gaze, and from which we may turn +horror-stricken in vain, for the recollection of it will haunt us waking +and sleeping for a long time afterward. Immediately below the reading +desk, on the floor of the chapel, and forming the most conspicuous +object in the little area, is the 'condemned pew': A huge black pen in +which the wretched people, who are singled out for death, are placed on +the last Sunday preceding their execution, in sight of all their fellow +prisoners, from many of whom they may have been separated but a week +before, to hear prayers for their own souls, to join in the responses of +their own burial service, and to listen to an address warning their +recent companions to take example by their own fate and urging +themselves, while there is yet time--nearly four-and-twenty hours--to +'turn and flee from the wrath to come.' At one time--and at no distant +period either--the coffins of the men about to be executed, were placed +in that pew, upon the seat by their side, during the whole service." The +chapel has been rearranged since the time in which Boz wrote, and the +ghastliest part of its show done away with. + +In the condemned ward Boz found "five-and-twenty or thirty prisoners, +all under sentence of death, awaiting the result of the recorder's +report--men of all ages and appearances, from a hardened old offender +with swarthy face and grizzly beard of three days' growth, to a handsome +boy not fourteen years old, and of singularly youthful appearance even +for that age, who had been condemned for burglary." It must be +remembered that they hanged men for all sorts of offenses in England +then, which made the population of the condemned ward abundant around +sessions time, when the trials were on. The death penalty was as common +then as it is now rare in its infliction. "The room was large, airy and +clean. One or two decently dressed men were brooding with a dejected air +over the fire; several little groups of two or three had been engaged in +conversation at the upper end of the room, or in the windows; and the +remainder were crowded around a young man seated at a table, who +appeared to be engaged in teaching the younger ones to write. On the +table lay a Testament, but there were no tokens of its having been in +recent use. In the press-room below were the men, the nature of whose +offense rendered it necessary to separate them, even from their +companions in guilt. It is a long sombre room, with two windows sunk in +the stone wall, and here the wretched men are pinioned on the mornings +of their execution, before moving toward the scaffold." + +"A few paces up the yard," he goes on, "and forming a continuation of +the building, lie the condemned cells. The entrance is by a narrow and +obscure staircase, leading to a dark passage, in which a charcoal stove +casts a lurid light over the objects in its immediate vicinity, and +diffuses something like a warmth around. Prior to the recorder's report +being made, all the prisoners under the sentence of death are removed +from the day room at five o'clock in the afternoon, and locked up in +these cells, where they are allowed a candle until ten o'clock; and here +they remain until seven the next morning. When the warrant for the +prisoner's execution arrives, he is removed to the cells, and confined +in one of them until he leaves it for the scaffold. He is at liberty to +walk in the yard; but both in the walks and in his cell, he is +constantly attended by a turnkey, who never leaves him on any pretence." +The cell was "a stone dungeon eight feet long by six feet wide, with a +bench at the upper end, under which were a common rug, a Bible and a +prayer-book. An iron candle-stick was fixed into the wall at the side; +and a small high window at the back admitted as much air and light as +could struggle in between a double row of heavy, crossed iron bars." It +was in one of these dens ("Oliver Twist," Chapter 52) that Fagin spent +his last hours. + + "They led him through a paved room under the court, where some + prisoners were waiting till their turns came, and others were talking + to their friends, who crowded around a gate which looked into the open + yard. There was nobody there to speak to him; but, as he passed, the + prisoners fell back to render him more visible to the people who were + clinging to the bars; and they assailed him with opprobrious names, + and screeched and hissed. He shook his fist, and would have spat upon + them; but his conductors hurried him on, through a gloomy passage + lighted by a few dim lamps, into the interior of the prison. + + "Here he was searched, that he might not have about him the means of + anticipating the law; this ceremony performed, they led him to one of + the condemned cells, and left him there--alone. + + "He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which served for a + seat and bedstead; and casting his bloodshot eyes upon the ground, + tried to collect his thoughts. After a while, he began to remember a + few disjointed fragments of what the judge had said; though it seemed + to him, at the time, that he could not hear a word. These gradually + fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more; so that + in a little time he had the whole almost as it was delivered. To be + hanged by the neck, till he was dead--that was the end. To be hanged + by the neck till he was dead. + + "As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had + known who had died upon the scaffold; some of them through his means. + They rose up, in such quick succession, that he could hardly count + them. He had seen some of them die--and had joked, too, because they + died with prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop + went down; and how suddenly they changed from strong and vigorous men + to dangling heaps of clothes. + + "Some of them might have inhabited that very cell--sat upon that very + spot. It was very dark; why didn't they bring a light? The cell had + been built for many years. Scores of men must have passed their last + hours there. It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead + bodies--the cap, the noose, the pinioned arms, the faces that he knew, + even beneath that hideous veil. Light--Light. + + "At length, when his hands were raw with beating against the heavy + door and walls, two men appeared: one bearing a candle, which he + thrust into an iron candle-stick fixed against the wall; the other + dragging a mattress on which to pass the night; for the prisoner was + to be left alone no more. + + "Then came night--dark, dismal, silent night. Other watchers are glad + to hear the clocks strike, for they tell of life and coming day. To + the Jew they brought despair. The boom of every iron bell came laden + with one deep, hollow sound--Death. What availed the noise and bustle + of cheerful morning, which penetrated even there, to him? It was + another form of knell, with mockery added to its warning. + + "The day passed off--day. There was no day; it was gone as soon as + come--and night came on again; night so long, and yet so short, long + in its dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours. At one time + he raved and blasphemed; and at another howled and tore his hair. + Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but + he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable + efforts, and he beat them off. + + "Saturday night. He had only one more night to live, and as he thought + of this, the day broke--Sunday. + + "It was not until the night of this last awful day, that a withering + sense of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon + his blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive + hope of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more than + dim probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either of + the two men, who relieved each other in attendance upon him; and they, + for their parts, made no efforts to arouse his attention. He sat + there, awake, but dreaming. Now he started up, every minute, and with + gasping mouth and burning skin, hurried to and fro in such a paroxysm + of fear and wrath that even they--used to such sights--recoiled from + him with horror. He grew so terrible, at last, in all the tortures of + his evil conscience that one man could not bear to sit there, eyeing + him alone; and so the two kept watch together. + + "He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had + been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his + capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth. His red hair + hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn and twisted into + knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh + crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Eight--nine--ten. If it was + not a trick to frighten him, and those were the real hours treading on + each other's heels, where would he be, when they came around again? + Eleven! Another struck, before the voice of the previous hour had + ceased to vibrate. At eight, he would be the only mourner in his own + funeral train; at eleven---- + + "Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which had hidden so much misery and + unspeakable anguish, not only from the eyes, but, too often and too + long, from the thoughts, of men, never held so dreaded a spectre as + that. The few who lingered as they passed, and wondered what the man + was doing, who was to be hung to-morrow, would have slept but ill that + night if they could have but seen him. + + "From early in the evening until nearly midnight, little groups of two + and three presented themselves at the lodge-gate, and inquired, with + anxious faces, whether any reprieve had been received. These being + answered in the negative, communicated the welcome intelligence to the + clusters in the street, who pointed out to one another the door from + which he must come out, and showed where the scaffold would be built, + and, walking with unwilling steps away, turned back to conjure up the + scene. By degrees they fell off, one by one; and for an hour in the + dead of the night, the street was left to solitude and darkness." + +When Mr. Brownlow and Oliver appeared at the wicket, and presented an +order of admission to the prisoner, signed by one of the Sheriffs, they +were immediately admitted to the lodge. + + "The condemned criminal was seated on his bed, rocking himself from + side to side, with a countenance more like that of a snared beast than + the face of a man. His mind was evidently wandering to his old life, + for he continued to mutter, without appearing conscious of their + presence otherwise than as a part of his vision. + + "'Fagin,' said the gaoler. + + "'That's me,' cried the Jew, falling, instantly into the attitude of + listening he assumed upon his trial. 'An old man, my Lord; a very old + man.' + + "'Here,' said the turnkey, laying his hand upon his breast to keep him + down. 'Here's somebody wants to see you, to ask you some questions, I + suppose. Fagin, Fagin, are you a man?' + + "'I shan't be one long,' replied the Jew, looking up with a face + retaining no human expression but rage and terror. 'Strike them all + dead! What right have they to butcher me?'" + +Since hanging by wholesale went out in England, Newgate has had no use +for condemned wards, nor for its great number of condemned cells. The +former are now broken up into cells, or used as exercise rooms or +offices. Most of the latter are now punishment cells, in which +refractory prisoners are confined. The demoralizing system of +confinement in gangs has been done away with also, the cells in which +the prisoners froze in cold weather have been made comfortable, and the +standard of the management of the jail raised in every way. Such +prisoners as may be condemned to death--there are only a few a year now, +where in Dickens's boyhood there were several every week--are kept apart +from their fellows and from each other. They are confined in an ordinary +cell until they are convicted. Then they are transferred to a strong +cell in the old condemned cell ward, and thence they travel to the +scaffold. + +Between the Old Bailey Court House and the condemned ward of Newgate is +a yard called the Press Yard. The name has a hideous origin. This spot +was for many years the scene of one of the most terrible tortures ever +inflicted by the cruelty of man upon his kind, the awful torture of +"Pressing to Death." This torture was imposed on prisoners held for +higher crimes, like treason and felonies, who refused to answer in +court. Nowadays, this would be construed into contempt of court. Until a +century ago it was held an offense so hideous as to warrant death by +torture. Nowadays we do not ask a prisoner to criminate himself. Then, +if he did not, he was tortured; if he did he was punished anyway. The +prisoner condemned to be pressed was stripped naked, except, for +decency's sake, a cloth around the loins, and laid on his back on the +pavement. Then iron weights were piled upon a board placed on his body, +in increasing number, and on a diet of three morsels of bread a day and +three draughts of water, he was left to perish miserably. He never +needed a full day's rations. Sometimes he lasted for hours, and at +others, as in the case of Mayor Strangeways, who was pressed for the +murder of John Fussel in 1659, he died in a few moments. This poor +wretch was stoned by the mob in the prison yard while undergoing the +torture. Highwaymen, house-breakers, forgers, utterers of forged and +counterfeit money, as well as murderers and traitors, were pressed to +death. Brutal and callous as the era was, the shocking practice excited +such denunciation in time that the victims were finally subjected to the +torture privately in the room known as the Press Room whose door opens +into the Press Yard. But the practice of pressing was kept up until as +late as 1770. + +The Press Yard to this day is devoted to quite as gloomy and deadly, if +less revolting, service under sanction of the law. It is here that the +executions of Newgate are performed. The gallows is set up close to the +door out of which the prisoner is brought. There is no march to the +gibbet through a throng of spectators as in most of our own jails. The +doomed man gets his last glimpse of the sky through a stone funnel down +which no ray of sunlight ever finds its way. As far as I remember, from +my London days, the only sign the outer world has of the work going on +within the prison walls is the hoisting of a black flag over the lodge, +and I know not if even this ceremonial is still observed. From the +gallows to the grave in Newgate used to be but a step. There was an old +burying ground in the prison, now disused, which was opened in 1820. +Thistlewood and the other Cato Street Conspirators were the first +criminals buried in it. They were buried in the night on the day of +their execution, without services, and many others like them in after +years. A pit and a shroud of quicklime were the appropriate Newgate +epitaph. + +The ingenious fancy of Mr. Ainsworth has made Jack Sheppard's escape +from Newgate one of the chief episodes of his famous book. The simple +facts of his hero's evasion from the gaol are much less romantic, +considering the number of prisoners it held. The escapes from Newgate +were very few, and in almost every instance they owed a great measure of +their success to the connivance of officials within the walls. Until the +tidal wave of prison reform swept it clean of its old, corrupt +practices, Newgate was managed largely for the benefit and profit of its +guardians, from the keeper down. Each official was an adept at the art +of extortion, and every palm that held a key was troubled with the itch. +The prisoner could purchase most things he might desire, and even the +chance of liberty was not beyond price. It was only the chance to be +sure; his keeper would wink at the effort, but he must take the risk of +being stopped upon his way by others, unless he could fairly buy his +passage from his dungeon to the lodge gate. A few--a very few--did this, +and got away. Generally the escapes were mere attempts, frustrated +before the last barrier was passed. The most remarkable escape made from +the prison, because it was accomplished without aid within or without +the walls, was that of the Sweep. This ruffian, from practice in his +trade of climbing chimneys, actually contrived to scale the rough stone +wall in an angle of one of the jail yards, by working himself up with +his back and feet, until he reached the leads, over which he made his +way to the roof of a house in Newgate street, which he entered through +the scuttle, and so went down stairs and into the street. Since that +time the inner walls of Newgate have been smoothed, so that even a fly +could not crawl up them, and spiked at the top to make assurance doubly +sure. + + + + +CHAPTER III. +THE FLEET PRISON. + + +Half a century ago, a stroller about the London streets whose loiterings +carried him to the Fleet Market, could not but notice in the brick wall +that extended along what is now entitled Farringdon street, facing the +market, a wide-grated window, set in a framework of granite blocks. +Under the arched top of the framework, between it and the grating, a +stone slab or panel bore the carved inscription: "Please Remember Poor +Debtors, Having No Allowance." Through the grating one might look into a +squalid, dark room, with a rough wooden bench fastened to one wall, and +during the hours of daylight some miserable human creature, like a caged +and starved beast, always glared from behind the bars upon the street, +repeating, in the voice of wheedling mendicancy, the appeal cut in the +stone above his head. There was a broad sill to the window, and an +opening in the bars, like those of the counter windows in a modern bank, +through which the jailed beggar could pass out and draw in a wooden box, +in which the charitably inclined might drop an obolus as they passed by. + +This was what was called "the grate" of the Fleet Prison, one of the +wickedest and most pestilential gaols that ever cursed the earth; and +the grimmest satire upon this jail into which men were thrust for not +paying money which they owed, was that among these debtors there were +many whose absolute inability to pay was demonstrated by the fact that +they would, literally, have starved there but for the chance charity of +the public. Apropos of this point Dickens, in chapter xiv, volume II, of +"Pickwick," says: + + "The poor side of the debtors' prison is, as its name imports, that in + which the most miserable and abject class of debtors are confined. A + prisoner, having declared upon the poor, pays neither rent nor + chummage. His fees upon entering and leaving the gaol are reduced in + amount, and he becomes entitled to a share of some small quantities of + food--to provide which a few charitable persons have, from time to + time, left trifling legacies in their wills. Most of our readers will + remember that, until a very few years past, there was a kind of iron + cage in the wall of the Fleet Prison, within which was posted some man + who, from time to time, rattled a money box, and exclaimed in a + mournful voice: 'Pray remember the poor debtors.' The receipts of this + box, when there were any, were divided among the poor prisoners, and + the men on the poor side relieved each other in this degrading office. + + "Although this custom has been abolished and the cage is now boarded + up, the miserable and destitute condition of these unhappy persons + remains the same. We no longer suffer them to appeal at the prison + gates to the charity and compassion of the passers-by; but we still + have unblotted on leaves of our statute-book, for the reverence and + admiration of the succeeding ages, the just and wholesome law which + declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the + penniless debtor shall be left to die in starvation and nakedness. + This is no fiction. Not a week passes over our heads but, in every one + of our prisons for debt, some of these men must inevitably expire in + the slow agonies of want, if they were not relieved by their fellow + prisoners." + +The custom of beggary at the prison gate, it may as well be remarked +here, was a relic of the ancient prison of the Fleet, to which allusion +is made in several of the old English comedies. Leigh Hunt, in his +pleasant divagations upon London called "The Town," remarks upon the +practice in connection with Ludgate Prison, and, indeed, it was common +to all the town jails in which debtors were incarcerated, without +municipal provisions for their support. In the last century, as John +Timbs tells us, there was additional provision for the relief of the +paupers of the prison, in what was known as the "Running Box." In this +case a man ran to and fro in the neighboring streets to the prison, +shaking a box, and begging passengers to put money into it for the poor +prisoners in the Fleet, while on his back he carried a capacious covered +basket, to hold such broken victuals as the charitable might choose to +spare for him. + +Hard by the paupers' grating of the Fleet was a grimy and gloomy +doorway, heavily framed in stone, which, like the brick of the prison +wall, sweated a sort of fungoid scum, originally a rank, unhealthy green +in color, but, thanks to London fogs and soft-coal smoke, soon converted +into the semblance of a thin glaze or varnish of liquid soot. The door +stone was worn as smooth as glass, and even in the fairest weather was +perilously greased with street slime. On either panel of the doorway was +carved a huge numerical figure. The rude wit of the town called this the +"Fleet Halter," which, once it was about a man's neck, held him almost +as tight and fast as its rival noose at Tyburn. Fastidious debtors who +preferred to preserve a fiction of respectability in their +correspondence, were wont to have their letters addressed to them at 9 +Fleet Market, for 9 was the halter-hinting number of the gateway to the +gaol. + +It was through this gateway that the tipstaff preceded Mr. Pickwick, as +you may read in chapter xii. of the second volume which chronicles that +immortal gentleman's adventures, "looking over his shoulder to see that +his charge was following close at his heels;" and in the gate-lodge, +which they entered through a door at the left, Mr. Pickwick sat for his +portrait to the assembled turnkeys, so that he might be remembered +should he take the fancy to stroll out of the doors without a license. +There was in this lodge "a heavy gate guarded by a stout turnkey with +the key in his hand," and when Mr. Pickwick's likeness was completed, he +passed through this inner gate, and down a short flight of steps, and +"found himself, for the first time in his life, within the walls of a +debtor's prison." + +The Fleet in those days consisted principally of one long brick pile, +which ran parallel with the Fleet Market, now Farringdon street, with an +open court around it, bounded by a lofty wall, over which, here and +there, one could see the sooty chimney-tops and the smoky sky. The +buildings were four stories in height above the ground, with a story +half under ground among the foundations. No architectural art had been +wasted on the exterior of the structure, and no sanitary ingenuity or +sentimental seeking after the comfort of the inmates had been expended +upon the interior. The one aim of the constructors had been to so divide +the space as to cram within it the greatest possible number of persons. +To this end, each floor was traversed by a single hallway or passage, "a +long narrow gallery, dirty and low, and very dimly lighted by a window +at each remote end," on either hand of which opened doors of innumerable +single rooms, which rarely, however, failed to do duty as lodgings for +less than several tenants. The floors, as Mr. Tom Roker explained to Mr. +Pickwick when he inducted him into the prison, were distinguished as the +hall flight, the coffee-room flight, the third flight and the top +flight. All the rooms on these floors were let by the week, at prices +adjusted to their presumed desirability and the capacity of the lessee's +purse, and governed by the number of tenants who entered upon them. + +The basement rooms, even, formed a source of revenue to the warden. This +sunken story, which received its light from the low-browed windows whose +sills were level with the slabs of the prison yard, was known as +Bartholomew Fair. Here misery might welter in its offal at the fee of +one-and-threepence a week if it still held itself above the abject +degradation of the Common Side, whose inmates took their turn at begging +at the grate. The Common Side was a building apart from the main range, +which latter was known as the Warden Side. Here there was no rent to +pay. The prisoners bunked in gangs, like emigrants on an ocean passage. +As to Bartholomew Fair, let Dickens describe it himself (vide +"Pickwick," chapter xiii, volume II): + + "'Oh!' replied Mr. Pickwick, looking down a dark and filthy staircase + which appeared to lead to a range of damp and gloomy stone vaults + beneath the ground, 'And these, I suppose, are the little cellars + where the prisoners keep their small quantities of coals? Unpleasant + places to have to go down to, but very convenient, I daresay.' 'Yes, I + shouldn't wonder if they was convenient,' replied Mr. Roker, 'seeing + that a few people live there pretty snug. That's the Fair, that is!' + 'My friend,' said Mr. Pickwick, 'you don't really mean to say that + human beings live down these wretched dungeons?' 'Don't?' replied Mr. + Roker, with indignant astonishment; 'why shouldn't I?' 'Live down + there?' exclaimed Mr. Pickwick. 'Live down there? Yes, and die down + there, too, wery often.'" + +Nominally, each prisoner in the Fleet on the Warden Side was entitled to +a room at the charge of 1s. 3d. a week. Actually, however, he never got +one on any floor above the level of Bartholomew Fair. Each room was made +to quarter from two to four tenants in the space designed for one, so +that it, at full seasons, actually produced at least a crown a week +rental. This system, which was excused on the plea of overcrowding of +the jail by commitments of the courts, was called "chummage," and the +system produced another curious practice of prison life. If one or more +prisoners occupied a room and another was "chummed" on them, they could +buy him off by paying him a few shillings a week, and so keep the room +to themselves. He, out of the money they paid him, paid in his turn for +inferior quarters elsewhere. Thus, a prisoner who was willing to pay +full rent for a room to the warden, and buy off anyone who might be +chummed upon him, could have a dirty box of a chamber to himself, at the +average cost of a first-class parlor and bedroom outside the walls. +Prisoners who had been a certain number of years in the jail had a +prescriptive right to a room to themselves, and most of these rented +their apartments at good rates to new comers, and took beds for +themselves in the common lodgings. + +When Mr. Pickwick entered the Fleet as a resident (vide volume II, +chapter xiv) he was chummed on "27 in the third," whose door was to be +distinguished by the likeness of a man being hung and smoking a pipe the +while, done in chalk upon the panel. Not liking his company of three +here he, as may be recalled, rented the room of a chancery prisoner, in +which he settled down. For the use of this room he paid L1 a week, and +for the furniture, which he hired from a keeper, L1 3s. more. These +figures may serve as an indication of the rates prevailing in the Fleet +fifteen years before it was demolished. The episode of Mr. Pickwick's +investigatory experiences in this connection is worth quoting, as a part +of the panorama of prison life. There was only one man in the room upon +which he was chummed, and he "was leaning out of the window as far as he +could without overbalancing himself, endeavoring, with great +perseverance, to spit upon the crown of the hat of a personal friend +upon the parade below." He expressed his disgust at having had the +newcomer chummed upon him, and summoned his two room-mates, who were a +bankrupt butcher and a drunken chaplain out of orders, the expectoratory +gentleman himself being a professional blackleg. + + "'It's an aggravating thing, just as we got the beds so snug,' said + the chaplain, looking at the dirty mattresses, each rolled up in a + blanket, which occupied one corner of the room during the day, and + formed a kind of slab on which were placed an old cracked basin, ewer + and soap-dish of common yellow earthenware with a blue flower; 'very + aggravating.' + + "Mr. Martin (the butcher) expressed the same opinion, in rather + stronger terms. + + "Mr. Simpson (the 'leg) after having let a variety of expletive + adjectives loose upon society, without any substantive to accompany + them, tucked up his sleeves and began to wash greens for dinner. + + "While this was going on Mr. Pickwick had been eyeing the room, which + was filthily dirty and smelt intolerably close. There was no vestige + of either carpet, curtain or blind. There was not even a closet in it. + Unquestionably, there were but few things to put away if there had + been one, but, however few in number, or small in individual amount, + still, remnants of loaves, and pieces of cheese, and damp towels, and + scraps of meat, and articles of wearing apparel, mutilated crockery, + and bellows without nozzles, and toasting-forks without prongs, do + present somewhat of an uncomfortable appearance when they are + scattered about the floor of a small apartment, which is the common + sitting and sleeping room of three idle men. + + "'I suppose that this can be managed somehow,' said the butcher, after + a pretty long silence. 'What will you take to go out?' + + "'I beg your pardon,' replied Mr. Pickwick, 'what did you say? I + hardly understood you.' + + "'What will you take to be paid out?' said the butcher. 'The regular + chummage is two-and-six; will you take three bob?' + + "'And a bender,' suggested the clerical gentleman. + + "'Well, I don't mind that; it's only a twopence apiece more,' said Mr. + Martin; 'What do you say now? We'll pay you out for three-and-sixpence + a week; come!' + + "'And stand a gallon of beer down,' chimed in Mr. Simpson. 'There!' + + "'And drink it on the spot,' said the chaplain; 'NOW!' + + "After this introductory preface the three chums informed Mr. + Pickwick, in a breath, that money was in the Fleet just what money was + out of it; that it would instantly procure him almost anything he + desired; and that supposing he had it, and had no objection to spend + it; if he only signified his wish to have a room to himself, he might + take possession of one, furnished and fitted to boot, in half an + hour's time. + + "With this the parties separated, very much to their mutual + satisfaction, Mr. Pickwick once more retracing his steps to the lodge, + and the three companions adjourned to the coffee-room, there to expend + the five shillings which the clerical gentleman, with admirable + prudence and foresight, had borrowed of him for the purpose. + + "'I knowed it,' said Mr. Roker with a chuckle, when Mr. Pickwick + stated the object with which he had returned. 'Lord, why didn't you + say at first that you was willing to come down handsome?'" + +Those who could afford to sleep well in the Fleet, as sleeping went in +such places, might feed well enough, too. They could be served in the +coffee-room, and if they preferred to eat in privacy, there was a +cookshop in the prison; and there were, besides, messengers who could be +sent on errands of purchase outside the walls. In every case the charges +were extortionate, for the one object of the prison was to squeeze the +debtor dry by fair means or foul. But when the law sanctions such +outrages as the Fleet itself, the minor offenses by which the greater +burden is mitigated to its victims may be condoned. There was a taproom +in the prison where beer and wine were to be had, but the traffic in +spirits was forbidden, and even the conveyance of them to the prisoners +from without prohibited under heavy penalties; "and such commodities +being highly prized by the ladies and gentlemen confined therein" +("Pickwick" volume II, chapter xvii), "it had occurred to some +speculative turnkey to connive, for certain remunerative considerations, +at two or three prisoners retailing the favorite articles of gin for +their own profit and advantage." The spirit dispensaries were known in +the jargon of the jail as "whistling-shops," and what with the strong +waters they provided, and the malt liquors of the taproom, it was safe +to assume that the bulk of such prisoners in the Fleet as were not dying +for the want of sufficient food were perishing of a superfluity of +drink. + +The poor debtors who still had the price of "a chamber-pot of coals" and +a scrag of mutton, could have it in from the market and cook it for +themselves in their rooms or, for a penny or two, at the common kitchen +in the prison-yard. In default of sufficient capital to this end they +must live off bread and cheese, or cold meat, or hope, or, as many +doubtless did, on the porter from the taproom. To secure the means of +subsistence and indulgence they begged from the visitors. The sharper +old residents borrowed from the shallower newcomers, and, as a matter of +course, theft went hand in hand with mendicancy. Of this shadowy side of +a picture, dark enough, in all conscience, in its lightest spots, +Dickens gives us a glimpse in chapter xiv of volume II, where Mr. +Pickwick encounters Mr. Alfred Jingle on the Common Side, and Mr. Jeb +Trotter, returning from pawning his master's last coat, with a scrap of +meat for his dinner. And Mr. Jingle's own summary of the prevailing +state of things at that period and place may serve as a description of +the condition and prospects of his neighbors. + + "'Lived on a pair of boots--whole fortnight. Silk umbrella--ivory + handle--week. Nothing soon--lie in bed--starve--die--inquest--little + bone-house--poor prisoner--common necessaries--hush it up--gentlemen + of jury--warden's tradesmen--keep it snug--natural death--coroner's + order--workhouse funeral--serve him right--all over--drop the + curtain.'" + +In 1749 the son of the architect, Dance, who built old Buckingham House +and Guy's Hospital, was imprisoned in the Fleet for debt. He wrote and +published a poem called "The Humors of the Fleet," which has an interest +for comparison with what the prison became later. The book had a +frontispiece showing the prison-yard, a newcomer treating the jailer and +cook and others to drink; racket-players at their game; and in one +corner of the yard a pump and a tree. When the Fleet was rebuilt after +the riots, there were two exercise grounds within the walls. One, the +smaller, was on the side toward Farringdon street, denominated and +called "The Painted Ground," from the fact of its walls having once +displayed the "semblances of various men-of-war in full sail, and other +artistical effects, produced, in bygone days, by some imprisoned +draughtsman in his leisure hours." On the other side of the prison was +the larger yard where racket was played and games of skittles bowled +beneath a shed. Here might be seen the characterless "characters" of the +place, in which every prison is sure to abound. Smokers and other idlers +loitered about the steps leading to the racket ground, draining their +pots as they watched the game. Here Mr. Smangle "made a light and +wholesome breakfast on a couple of cigars" Mr. Pickwick had paid for, +and here Mr. Weller, with a pint of beer and the day before yesterday's +paper, divided his time between dipping into the news and the noggin, +the skittle game and the affections of a young lady who was peeling +potatoes at one of the jail windows, on that memorable morning when Mr. +Stiggins called upon him and sampled the port wine in the coffee-room +snuggery. Here you might hear the roar of the great babel without; and +from the same point see one or two of its churches aspiring above the +'chevaux-de-frise' of the prison walls. There was a torrent-like fury +about the busy hum of the town in contrast with the stagnant life within +the brick walls; and, as if to keep up the mockery, they verged upon the +yard of the Belle Sauvage Inn, where travelers constantly came and went +on their journeys, free, if they chose, to roam around the world. In +chapter xvii of volume II, Dickens sketches a vivid picture of the daily +scene in the jail-yard. + + "Sauntering or sitting about, in every possible attitude of listless + idleness, were a number of debtors, the major part of whom were + waiting in prison until their day of 'going up' before the Insolvent + Court should arrive, while others had been remanded for various terms, + which they were idling away as they best could. Some were shabby, some + were smart, many dirty, a few clean; but there they all lounged, and + loitered, and slunk about, with as little spirit or purpose as the + beasts in the menagerie. Lolling from the windows which commanded a + view of this promenade were a number of persons, some in noisy + conversation with their acquaintances below, and others playing bat + all with some adventurous throwers outside, and others looking on at + the racket players, or watching the boys as they cried the game. + Dirty, slipshod women passed and repassed on their way to the cooking + house in one corner of the yard; children screamed, and fought, and + played together in another; the tumbling of the skittles and the + shouts of the players mingled perpetually with these and a hundred + other sounds, and all was noise and tumult." + +To this picture of the Fleet by day, it is worth while to add one of the +after dark, from chapter xii, of volume II. + + "It was getting dark; that is to say, a few gas jets were kindled in + this place, which was never light, by way of compliment to the evening + which had set in outside. As it was rather warm some of the tenants of + the numerous little rooms which opened into the gallery on either hand + set their doors ajar. Mr. Pickwick peeped into them, as he passed + along, with curiosity and interest. Here, four or five great hulking + fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco smoke, were engaged + in noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of beer, or + playing at all fours with a very greasy pack of cards. In the + adjourning room some solitary tenant might be seen poring, by the + light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered + papers, yellow with dust, and dropping with age, writing, for the + hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances for the + perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose + heart it would never touch. In a third a man and his wife and a whole + crowd of children might be seen making up a scanty bed on the ground, + or upon a few chairs for the younger ones to pass the night in. And in + a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh the noise, and the + beer, and the tobacco smoke, and the cards all came over again in + greater force than before. In the galleries themselves, and more + especially on the staircases, there lingered a great number of people + who came there, some because their rooms were foul and hot, and the + greater part because they were restless and uncomfortable and not + possessed with the secret of knowing exactly what to do with + themselves. There were many classes of people here, from the laboring + man and his fustian jacket to the broken-down spendthrift in his shawl + dressing-gown, most appropriately out at the elbows; but there was the + same air about them all--a sort of listless, gaol-bird, careless + swagger; a vagabondish, who's-afraid sort of bearing which is wholly + indescribable in words, but which any man can understand in a moment, + if he wish, by setting foot in the nearest debtors' prison, and + looking at the very first group of people he sees there." + +The Fleet Prison was staggering along on its last legs, like some gouty +monster whose swollen joints were rotting asunder of internal +corruption, when Dickens gave it a place in the fiction of picturesque +fact. But it had a long history behind it, a history dating from the +time when the Fleet creek, now a noisome sewer under the foundations of +the jail, was a pretty little river, winding down from a verdant and +fertile country. When the town had grown toward and around it, the Fleet +river had become silted and clogged up into a foul and sluggish stream, +and was such a nuisance that it was arched over, and a market built upon +the arches. But below the market it still remained an open stream, where +colliers' barges unloaded their cargoes at Sea-Coal lane, and what is +now Bridge street was a sluggish, polluted canal, whose reek infected +the air. The gaol took its name from the stream upon whose banks it was +built. The exact date of its foundation is unknown, but by various +records it was formerly held in conjunction with the Manor of Leveland, +in Kent, and with "the King's House at Westminster," the whole being a +part of the ancient possessions of the See of Canterbury, traceable in a +grant from the Archbishop Lanfranc, soon after the accession of William +the Conqueror. The wardenship or sergeantcy of the prison was anciently +held by several eminent personages, who also had custody of the king's +palace at Westminster. It was "a place," in the worst sense of the +phrase, for, as long ago as 1586, the persons to whom the warden had +underlet it were guilty of cruelty and extortion, crimes, however, quite +characteristic of the Court of Star Chamber, of which the Fleet was at +this time the prison. Up to this period its history is little better +than a sealed book, the burning of the prison by the followers of Wat +Tyler seeming to have been the only very noticeable event during the +above interval. In the reigns of Edward VI and of Mary, the Fleet was +tenanted by several victims of religious bigotry. One of the most +venerated of British martyrs, Bishop Hopper, was twice committed to the +Fleet, which he only quitted in 1555 for the stake and the fire, in the +chief town in his diocese, Gloucester. His captivity was truly wretched; +he slept upon "a little pad of straw" with a rotten covering; "his +chamber was vile and stinking," just as it might have been had he been a +poor debtor in 1825. + +The fees belonging to the warden of the Fleet and his officers, in the +reign of Elizabeth, were very heavy. An archbishop, duke or duchess had +to pay for a commitment fee and the first week's "dyett," L21 10s.; a +lord, spiritual or temporal, L10 5s. 10d.; a knight, L5; an esquire, L3 +6s. 8d.; and even a poor man in the wards, "that hath a part at the box, +to pay for his fee, having no dyett, 7s. 4d." The warden's charge for +lawful license "to go abroad" was 20d. per diem. Thus, as may be seen, +the fleecing and flayings, the inhumanities and the injustices which +characterized the later years of the prison were hereditary to it. + +From the reign of Elizabeth to the sixteenth year of King Charles I, +1641, the Star Chamber Court was in full activity, and several bishops +and other persons of distinction were imprisoned in the Fleet for their +religious opinions. Thither, too, were consigned political victims of +the Star Chamber, two of the most interesting cases of this period being +those of Prynne and Lilburne. Prynne was taken out of the prison, and, +after suffering pillory, branding, and mutilation of the nose and ears, +was remanded to the Fleet. Lilburne--"Freeborn John"--and his printer +were committed to the Fleet for libel and sedition; and the former was +"smartly whipped" at the cart's tail, from the prison to the pillory +place between Westminster Hall and the Star Chamber; and he was +subsequently "doubled ironed" in the prison wards. Another tenant of the +Fleet at this period was James Howel, the author of the "Familiar +Letters," several of which are dated from the prison. From a letter "To +the Earl of B----," from the Fleet, Nov. 20, 1643, we gather that Howel +was arrested "one morning betimes" by five men armed with "swords, +pistols and bils," and some days after committed to the Fleet; and he +says, "as far as I see, I must lie at anchor in this Fleet a long time, +unless some gentle gale blow thence to make me launch out." Then we find +him consoling himself in the reflection that the English "people" are in +effect but prisoners, as all other islanders are. There are other +letters by Howel, dated from the Fleet in 1645-1646 and 1647. + +The prison was burnt on September 4, 1666, during the Great Fire, when +the prisoners were removed to Carom or Caroon House, in South Lambeth, +until the Fleet was rebuilt on the original site. After the abolition of +the Star Chamber, in 1641, the Fleet had become a prison for debtors +only, and for contempt of the Court of Chancery, Common Pleas and +Exchequer. It appears that the prison had been used for the confinement +of debtors from the 13th century, at least, a petition from John +Trauncy, a debtor in the Fleet, A. D. 1290, being still preserved. When +the Star Chamber was abolished, the warden's power of exacting enormous +fees by putting in irons does not appear to have ceased also, for the +wardens continued to exercise their tyranny, "not only in extorting +exorbitant fees, but in oppressing prisoners for debt, by loading them +with irons, worse than if the Star Chamber were still existing." In 1696 +the cruelties and the extortions of the wardens were made public, but it +was not until 1727 that the enormity of the system of mismanagement came +fully before the public, and indescribable was the excitement and horror +it caused. A Parliamentary committee was then appointed, and the result +of their labors was the committal of Wardens Bambridge and Huggins, and +some of their servants, to Newgate. They were tried for different +murders, yet all escaped by the verdict of "Not Guilty." Hogarth has, +however, made them immortal in their infamy, in his picture of Bambridge +under examination, whilst a prisoner is explaining how he has been +tortured. Twenty years after, it is said, Bambridge cut his throat. In +consequence of these proceedings the Court of Common Pleas, January 17, +1729, established a new list of fees to be taken, and modified the rules +and orders for the government of the Fleet. The rents, perquisites, and +profits of the office at the above period were L4,632 18s. 8d. per +annum. James Gambier succeeded Bambridge in the wardenship, was +succeeded by John Garth, and to him followed John Eyles, and in 1758 +Eyles's son succeeded him in the office, which he held for sixty-two +years. He was succeeded in 1821 by his deputy, Nixon, who died in 1822. +The next appointed was W. R. H. Brown, he being the last of the wardens +of the prison. + +In the riots of 1780 the Fleet was destroyed by fire, and the prisoners +liberated by the mob; consequently a great part of the papers and prison +records were lost, though there remain scattered books and documents of +several centuries back. Although he does not deal specifically with the +attack on the prison at this period, Dickens in "Barnaby Rudge" (volume +II, chapter ii) gives a brief but picturesque description of the +surroundings of the gaol as they were at the time of the Gordon riots. + + "Fleet Market at that time was a long, irregular row of wooden sheds + and pent houses occupying the centre of what is now called Farringdon + street. They were jumbled together in a most unsightly fashion in the + middle of the road to the great obstruction of the thoroughfare and + the annoyance of passengers who were fain to make their way as best + they could among the carts, barrows, baskets, trucks, casks, hulks, + and benches, and to jostle with porters, hucksters, wagoners and a + motley crowd of buyers, sellers, pickpockets, vagrants and idlers. The + air was perfumed with the stench of rotten leaves and faded fruit, the + refuse of the butchers' stalls, and offal and garbage of a hundred + kinds. It was indispensable to most public conveniences in those days + that they should be public nuisances likewise, and Fleet Market + maintained the principle to admiration." + +Further on, in chapter ix of the same work, he summarizes a peculiar +episode in the history of the gaol at the same period. + + "The gates of the King's Bench and the Fleet Prison, being opened at + the usual hour, were found to have notices affixed to them announcing + that the rioters would come that night to burn them down. The wardens, + too well knowing the likelihood there was of this promise being + fulfilled, were fain to set their prisoners at liberty, and gave them + leave to move their goods; so all day such of them as had any + furniture were occupied in conveying it, some to this place, some to + that, and not a few to the brokers' shops, where they gladly sold it + for any wretched price those gentry chose to give. There were some + broken men among these debtors who had been in gaol so long, and were + so miserable and destitute of friends, so dead to the world, and + utterly forgotten and uncared for, that they implored their gaolers + not to set them free, and to send them, if need were to some other + place of custody. But they refusing to comply, lest they should incur + the anger of the mob, turned them into the streets where they wandered + up and down, hardly remembering the ways untrodden by their feet so + long, and crying--such abject things those rotten-hearted gaols had + made them--as they slunk off in their rags and dragged their slipshod + feet along the pavement." + +In spite of the concession of the Warden, the mob, as has been stated, +burned the Fleet down, and it was in the successor to the den which had +risen on the ruins left by the great fire of 1666 that Mr. Pickwick +prosecuted his studies of prison life and character. + +Among the curiosities of the London Archives are over a ton of books +registering the Fleet Marriages between 1686 and 1754, which are in the +Registry Office of the Bishop of London, where they were deposited by +the Government, which purchased them in 1821. These Fleet Marriages were +the scandal and disgrace of their time. While they lasted the debtor's +gaol was the Gretna Green of London. There were no end of hard-living +parsons flung into the Fleet for debt, and as these men were always +paupers in purse, they were put to strange shifts to keep themselves in +meat and drink--especially the latter. The idea to convert clandestine +marriages into a source of gain, once originated, with men who had +neither money, character or liberty to lose, was not long in spreading. +At first the ceremony was performed within the prison chapel. Then they +became too numerous and the business too extensive for the confines of +the gaol, and every tavern around the prison had its marriage mill, and +a parson who in the rules of the prison was permitted to go at large +within certain limits, to grind the mill for anyone who listed. These +clerical vagabonds employed touts, who roved about the market and the +adjacent streets drumming up custom for the parson, who sat swigging +while he waited for trade, very much as the slop-shop salesman of to-day +seeks for custom passing on the sidewalk. Tennant relates that in +walking the street in his youth, on the side next to this prison: "I +have often been tempted by the question, 'Sir, will you be pleased to +walk in and be married.'" Along this most lawless space was frequently +hung up the sign of a male and female hand conjoined, with "Marriages +Performed Within" written beneath. A dirty fellow invited you in. The +parson was seen walking before his shop, a squalid, profligate figure, +clad in a tattered plaid night-gown, with a fiery face, and ready to +couple you for a dram of gin or roll of tobacco. "The Grub Street +Journal," in January, 1735, says: "There are a set of drunken, swearing +parsons, with their myrmidons, who wear black coats and pretend to be +clerks and registers of the Fleet, and who ply about Ludgate Hill, +pulling or forcing people to some peddling ale-house or brandy shop to +be married; even on a Sunday stopping them as they go to church and +almost tearing the clothes off their backs." + +Competition in the business was fierce. While the Fleet parsons sent +their pullers-in forth to scour the streets, they hung their signs out +in the windows under the shadow of the prison wall. Thus at one corner +might be seen a window, "Weddings performed here cheap." The business +was advertised in the newspapers. The marriage taverns lined Fleet Lane +and Fleet Ditch. Two of them--the Bull and Garter and the King's +Head--were kept by warders of the prison. The parson and the landlord +divided the fee between them, after deducting a shilling for the tout +who brought the customers in. If a marriage was desired to be secret it +was not entered on the register of the house. Otherwise it was, for a +small fee, written down in a book which each tavern kept. Thus a +profligate man could victimize a confiding girl with impunity. Men and +women might commit bigamy at will, since any name they chose to give, +along with their fee, satisfied the parson, and they could have the +"ceremony" kept unregistered, or dated back as they chose. The law held +a married woman free of the responsibility of her debts, while a single +woman could be arrested and locked up for them. All a woman of free life +had to do to defraud her creditors was to get some man to marry her at +the Fleet. Then she could not be prosecuted. As for the man, the +creditors had to find him before they could proceed against him. + +Women of quality who had led extravagant lives did not hesitate at the +same shift. There were parsons who kept husbands in hire at five +shillings each. There is record of one fellow having been "married" to +four women in one day. There is also a record of women, dressed as men, +being hired out as mock husbands for the occasion. All classes were fish +for the Fleet parson's net. Drunken sailors and soldiers were united to +the gin-perfumed fairies of the market; roues fetched their silly, +girlish victims in coaches to the altar reeking of stale beer and +brandy; and great men of the realm utilized the functions of the +clerical mountebanks to a similar result. In five months--from October, +1704, to February, 1705--2,954 marriages were recorded at the Fleet. How +many went unrecorded can only be surmised. The church strove in vain to +eradicate the scandal, and it required an Act of Parliament to put an +end to it in 1754. + +The Fleet marriages provided Dickens with no material, although other +and less distinguished romancers have found use for them, with more or +less effect. In fact, Dickens rarely wrote without a distinct object, +and in "Pickwick," desultory and irregular as the thread of the +narrative is, he had such a purpose when he took the Fleet in hand. At +the time he wrote of it (1836) the monstrosity was at its worst. The +prevalent system of imprisonment for debt rendered the hideous gaol a +tool at the hands of a vengeful enemy, and in those of a rapacious and +dishonest man. The outrages to which it lent itself, at the call of +swindling lawyers and commercial extortioners, had commenced to attract +public attention. That the chapters on the Fleet in "Pickwick" bore a +share in arousing the general indignation which forced the Government +into action cannot be questioned. They shaped the popular sentiment and +gave it a war-cry. But the good work was not to be done in a day. It +required an Act of Parliament, debated on and contested with the usual +ponderous procrastinativeness, to rid the earth of the Fleet. The Act +was at last passed in 1842, and by it the prison was abolished, and its +inmates were drafted into the Queen's Prison. The Fleet was later sold +to the Corporation of the City of London, and in the spring of 1846 it +was razed to the ground. Its site to-day is marked by business +buildings, whose ceaseless industry makes a strange monument for the +stagnant and idle life of which the spot was once the scene. + + + + +CHAPTER IV. +THE MARSHALSEA. + + +It was a good seven years--or an evil seven--for many a poor debtor, +after the Fleet was legislated out of existence, before its younger +brother on the other side of the river followed it. The Marshalsea was +not officially abolished until 1849, and even then it escaped the doom +of extinction meted out to the Fleet, and prolonged its material +existence into our own day. What had been a frowsy jail became a frowsy +shelter for a community scarcely poorer than that which had once +inhabited it; albeit this newer community enjoyed the advantage of being +miserable in freedom from the restrain of barred windows and +spike-topped walls. + +Of the prison, Dickens sketches a good description in Chapter 6 of the +first volume of "Little Dorrit." "Thirty years ago," he says, "there +stood, a few doors short of the church of St. George, in the borough of +Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way going southward, the +Marshalsea Prison. It was an oblong pile of barrack buildings, +partitioned into squalid rooms standing back to back, so that there were +no back rooms; environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed by high walls +duly spiked on the top. Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, +it contained within it a much closer and more confined gaol for +smugglers. Offenders against the revenue laws, and defaulters to the +excise or customs, who had incurred fines which they were unable to pay, +were supposed to be incarcerated behind an iron-plated door, closing up +a second prison, consisting of a strong cell or two, and a blind alley +some yard and a half wide, which formed the mysterious termination of +the very limited skittle ground in which the Marshalsea debtors bowled +down their troubles. Supposed to be incarcerated there, because the time +had rather outgrown the strong cells and the blind alley. In practice +they come to be considered a little too bad, though in theory they were +quite as good as ever; which may be observed to be the case at the +present day with other cells that are not at all strong, and with other +blind alleys that are stone blind. Hence the smugglers habitually +consorted with the debtors (who received them with open arms) except at +certain constitutional moments when somebody came from some office, to +go through the form of overlooking something, which neither he nor +anybody else knew anything about. On these truly British occasions, the +smugglers, if any, made a feint of walking into the strong cells and the +blind alley, while this somebody pretended to do his something, and made +a reality of walking out again as soon as he hadn't done it--nearly +epitomising the administration of the most of the public affairs in our +own right, tight little island." + +The Marshalsea had several notable neighbors in its own line of trade. +One of these was Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the county jail for Surrey. It +was a sturdy, thick-set prison, with a massive-looking lodge and +powerful walls. Executions took place on the roof of the lodge, the +gallows being set up there, and the drop cut in the roof itself. These +hangings were a popular show in their day, and the tenants of the houses +across the way from the jail used to reap a harvest by letting their +front windows to sightseers. It is said that they would commonly make a +year's rent, and often more, out of the morbid curiosity of the town on +one of these occasions. What the occasions were like, Dickens has left +us an idea in his famous letter to the "Times," on the occasion of the +execution of the Mannings, husband and wife, on November 13, 1849. +Dickens and John Foster attended this ghastly raree-show. Here is a +description of it: + + "I was a witness to the execution of the Mannings in Horsemonger Lane. + I went there with the intention of observing the crowd gathered to + behold it, and I had excellent opportunities of doing so; at intervals + all through the night, and continuously from daybreak until the + spectacle was over. I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as + the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that + execution could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no + heathen land under the sun. The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime + which brought these wretched murderers to it, faded in my mind before + the atrocious bearing, looks and language of the assembled spectators. + When I came upon the scene, at midnight, the shrillness of the cries + and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came + from a concourse of boys and girls already assembled in the best + places, made my blood run cold. As the night went on, screeching and + laughing and yelling, in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, + with substitutions of 'Mrs. Manning' for 'Susannah,' and the like, + were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, + ruffians and vagabonds of every kind flocked on to the ground, with + every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, + whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous + demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged + out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a + new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly, as + it did, it gilded the thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so + inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man + had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from + himself, as fashioned in the image of the devil. When the two + miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them + were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more + pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgment, no + more restraint in any of the previous obscenities than if the name of + Christ had never been heard in the world, and there was no belief + among men but that they perished like beasts. I have seen, habitually, + some of the sources of general contamination and corruption, and I + think there are not many phases of London life that could surprise me. + I am solemnly convinced that nothing that ingenuity could devise to be + done in this city, in the same compass of time, could work such ruin + as one public execution, and I stand astounded and appalled by the + wickedness it exhibits. I do not believe that any community can + prosper where such a scene of horror and demoralization as was enacted + this morning outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol is presented at the very + doors of the good citizens, and is passed by unknown or forgotten." + +This letter created a tremendous sensation, and started a whole flood of +literature, condemnatory and demanding the abolishment of public +hangings; but they were not finally done away with until nearly twenty +years later. Apropos of Horsemonger Lane, readers of "Little Dorrit" may +recall that it was here that John Chivery resided, assisting his mother +"in the conduct of a snug tobacco business, which could usually command +a neat connection within the college walls"--the college being a polite +title for the Marshalsea, whose inmates were, by natural association, +technically known among themselves as collegians. + + "The tobacco business around the corner of Horsemonger Lane was + carried on in a rural establishment one story high, which had the + benefit of the air from the yards of the Horsemonger Lane Gaol, and + the advantage of a retired walk under the wall of that pleasant + establishment. The business was of too modest a character to support a + life-sized Highlander, but it maintained a little one on the bracket + on the door post, who looked like a fallen cherub that had found it + necessary to take to a kilt." + +It was from the stock of this establishment that John Chivery produced +the cigars of which he made a Sunday offering on the altar of the Father +of the Marshalsea, who not only "took the cigars and was glad to get +them," but "sometimes even condescended to walk up and down the yard +with the donor, and benignantly smoke one in his society." It was also +from this establishment that he issued forth on the memorable Sunday, +"neatly attired in a plum-colored coat, with as large a collar of black +velvet as his figure could carry; a silken waistcoat, bedecked with +golden sprigs, a chaste neckerchief much in vogue in that day, +representing a preserve of lilac pheasants on a buff ground; pantaloons, +so highly decorated with side stripes that each leg was a three-stringed +lute; and a hat of state, very high and hard," not to mention a pair of +white kid gloves, and a cane like a little finger post, surmounted by an +ivory hand, to propose to Little Dorrit on the Iron Bridge. + +Another of the famous Southwark gaols was the King's Bench, but in +justice to Mr. Micawber, it demands a chapter to itself. To return to +the Marshalsea, it may be remarked that Dickens knew it by such early +experience that he was qualified to write about it, even more +exhaustively than he did in "Little Dorrit." While he was still a boy, +in 1822, his father endured a period of compulsory retirement behind its +lock, and the future chronicler of the jail lodged in a cheap garret +near by, an episode of his life which he has introduced in "David +Copperfield," in connection with the Micawbers and the King's Bench. +Every morning, as soon as the gates were opened, the boy went to the +Marshalsea, where his mother had joined his father, to breakfast. In the +evening he would go to the jail from the blacking factory, where he was +employed, to get his supper. The family got along quite gayly while the +elder Dickens's affairs were in the courts. He had an income on which +they lived and kept a servant, a workhouse girl, from whom the novelist +is said to have drawn his character of The Marchioness in "Old Curiosity +Shop." The girl and the boy had to leave the prison before ten, when the +gate was locked for the night, and they became great friends. On +holidays he would go to the seminary on Tenterden street, where his +sister Fanny was at school, and fetch her to spend the day in the family +circle, escorting her back in the evening. How freely he used his +Marshalsea experiences in "David Copperfield," and transferred to Mr. +Micawber the actualities of his own family life, may be appreciated from +the passage, written by himself and quoted by Foster, relating to his +first visit to his father in the jail: + + "My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room + (on the top story but one) and cried very much, and he told me, I + remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if + any man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen + shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent + the other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before + now, with two bricks in the rusted grate, one on each side to prevent + its burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room with + him, who came in by-and-by; and, as the dinner was a joint-stock + repast, I was sent up to Captain Porter in the room overhead, with Mr. + Dickens's compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., + lend me a knife and fork. Captain P. lent me a knife and fork, with + his compliments in return. There was a very dirty lady in his room, + and two wan girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought + I should not have liked to borrow Captain Porter's comb. The Captain + himself was in the last extremities of shabbiness, and if I could draw + at all, I would draw an accurate portrait of the old, old brown + great-coat he wore, with no other coat below it. His whiskers were + large. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner, and what plates and dishes + and pots he had on a shelf; and I knew (God knows how) that the two + girls with the shock heads were Captain Porter's natural children, and + that the dirty lady was not married to Captain P. My timid, wondering + station on his threshold was not occupied more than a couple of + minutes, I daresay; but I came down into the room below with all this + as surely in my knowledge as the knife and fork were in my hand." + +It was into this familiar scene that Dickens introduced Mr. William +Dorrit, a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged gentleman, who was +"going out again directly. Necessarily he was going out again directly, +because the Marshalsea lock never turned upon a debtor who was not. He +brought in a portmanteau with him, which he doubted it worth while to +unpack, he was so perfectly clear--like all the rest of them, the +turnkey on the lock said--that he was going out again directly. He was a +shy, retiring man, well-looking, though in an effeminate style; with a +mild voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands--rings upon the fingers +those days, not one of which was left" upon them a little while +after--when the drunken doctor, fetched in haste, ushered Little Dorrit +into the world, with the assistance of Mrs. Bangham and the brandy +bottle. The doctor was a type of one class of tenants to be found in +every debtors' prison. He lived in a wretched, ill-smelling room under +the roof, with a puffy, red-faced chum, who helped to pass the time +playing all fours, with pipe and brandy trimmings. "The doctor's friend +was in the positive stage of hoarseness, puffiness, all fours, tobacco, +dirt and brandy; the doctor in the comparative--hoarser, puffier, more +red-faced, more all foury, tobaccoer, dirtier and brandier. The doctor +was amazingly shabby in a torn, darned, rough weather sea jacket, out at +the elbows, and eminently short of buttons (he had been in his time the +experienced surgeon carried by a passenger ship), the dirtiest white +trowsers conceivable by mortal man, carpet slippers and no visible +linen. 'Childbed?' said the doctor (to Mr. Dorrit, who had come to +summon him) 'I'm the boy!' With that the doctor took a comb from the +chimneypiece, and stuck his hair upright--which appeared to be his way +of washing himself--produced a professional case or chest, of the most +abject appearance, from the cupboard where his cup and saucer and coals +were, settled his chin in a frowsy wrapper round his neck, and became a +ghastly medical scarecrow." + +To enter the public establishment of which he was destined to become the +patriarch, Mr. William Dorrit had passed through an open outer gate on +High street in the Borough, to give Southwark its more familiar name; +had crossed a little court-yard, ascended a couple of stone steps, +traversed a narrow entry, and been admitted by a string of locked doors +into the prison lodge. Here he had waited, as the form and practice of +the proceeding required, until his arrival was registered, and the +tipstaff, who had kindly guided and guarded his feet to this harbor of +refuge from the cares of the world which works for a living, had +received a receipt for his safe delivery. Through another door at the +rear of the lodge, which was built in the wall of the jail itself, he +was conducted to what was to be his home for half the lifetime allotted +to mortal man. Before him was the jail court, the aristocratic court, +where the pump was; and facing the lofty wall which divided it from the +street, the barrack, on the next to the top floor of which he found the +shabby room in which the child of the Marshalsea was to be born. Debtors +were playing at racket and skittles in the court, and grouped around the +entrance to the snuggery or tap-room at the further end of the barrack. +There were "the collegian in the dressing gown, who had no coat, the +stout greengrocer collegian in the corduroy kneebreeches, who had no +cares, the collegian in the seaside slippers, who had no shoes, and the +lean clerk collegian in buttonless black, who had no hopes; the man with +many children and many burdens, whose failure astonished everybody; the +man of no children and large resources, whose failure astonished nobody; +the people who were always going out to-morrow, and always putting it +off; the slatternly women at the windows, gossiping shrilly, the smudgy +children playing noisily; all those people in fine who belong to such a +place, not forgetting the nondescript messengers, go-betweens and errand +runners, who formed a class by themselves." + +Every debtors' prison had its corps of such attendants, who came and +went in the service of the inmates whose liberty ended at the lodge +door. "The shabbiness of these attendants upon shabbiness, the poverty +of the insolvent waiters on insolvency, was a sight to see. Such +threadbare coats and trowsers, such fusty gowns and shawls, such +squashed hats and bonnets, such boots and shoes, such umbrellas and +walking sticks, never were seen in Rag Fair. All of them wore the +cast-off clothes of other men and women; were made up of patches and +pieces of other peoples' individuality, and had no sartorial existence +of their own proper. Their walk was the walk of a race apart. They had a +peculiar way of doggedly slinking around the corner, as if they were +eternally going to the pawnbroker's. When they coughed, they coughed +like people accustomed to be forgotten on the doorsteps and draughty +passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink, which gave the +recipients of those manuscripts great mental disturbance and no +satisfaction. As they eyed the stranger in passing, they eyed him with +borrowing eyes--hungry, sharp, speculative as to his softness if they +were accredited to him, and the likelihood of his standing something +handsome. Mendicity on commission stooped in their high shoulders, +shambled in their unsteady legs, buttoned and pinned and darned and +dragged their clothes, frayed their button-holes, leaked out of their +figures in dirty ends of tape, and issued from their mouths in alcoholic +breathings." + +In spite of occasional touches such as this, the comparative brightness +of Dickens's picture of the Marshalsea, as contrasted with the gloom and +horror of his delineation of the Fleet, has been frequently commented +upon, but there was a reason for this in fact. Squalid and miserable +enough the Marshalsea was, but it was still more merciful and humane a +house of confinement than the other. Extortions were common to all such +places, but they were carried to their worst extent at the Fleet. The +Marshalsea, moreover, was a smaller prison, its population came and went +at shorter intervals than that of the Fleet, and it did not include so +heavy a percentage of the baser elements of society as festered in the +social cesspool opposite the Fleet Market. Very few debtors remained in +the gaol for an extended period. The average generation of a Marshalsea +prisoner was, as Dickens himself says, three months. The case of the +Father of Marshalsea--which, by the way, was based on that of a real +prisoner in the last century--was unique. "The affairs of this debtor +were perplexed by a partnership of which he knew no more than that he +had invested money in it, by legal matters of assignment and settlement, +conveyance here and conveyance there, suspicion of unlawful preference +of creditors in this direction, and of mysterious spiriting away of +property in that." In short, Mr. William Dorrit's affairs were so +tangled up that even the lawyers could not untwist them, and finally +they gave him up, and in the inextricable entanglement he remained +fettered to the Marshalsea as if he had never been a part of any world +beyond its confining wall. "Crushed at first by his imprisonment" (vide +Chapter 6, Volume I, "Little Dorrit"), "he had soon found a dull relief +in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that kept him in +kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with strength of +purpose to face these troubles and fight them, he might have broken the +net that held him, or broken his heart; but, being what he was, he +languidly slipped into this smooth descent and never took one step +upward. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder children +played regularly about the yard, and everyone knew the baby and claimed +a kind of proprietorship in her." The title conferred upon him by a +turnkey he came to hear with pride, and under it he levied the tribute +of selfish and ungrateful beggary upon the goodnatured subjects over +whom he presumed to rule. + +There was a certain snugness about the Marshalsea which was not to be +found in the Fleet. There the company was too numerous and heterogeneous +to form any social combination. In the smaller prison a specie of club +system was kept up. The tap-room, or snuggery, was a public room where +meat and drink might be procured, and where a fire was maintained for +the use of the prisoners who did not wish to cook in their rooms. The +furnace was kept fed by assessment of those who used it. At the club, +which met nightly, each man paid his own scot. The requisite for +membership was the possession of the price of the potations served to +the member. The club was of indefinite proportions and individuality. +Its members came with the tipstaves and went with the orders of release +issued by the courts. The general form of its management was that which +used to be known as the "free and easy." If any person present was a +mimic, a singer, a musician, or otherwise gifted with a pleasing or +popular accomplishment, he might be called upon to display it for the +general good. Poor debtors, who could do something to amuse, might have +their beer free at the charge of the more solvent collegians whom they +consented to divert. There is a legend of a comedian, broken down by +drink, who was sent to the Marshalsea and who lived off the fat of the +jail for several years, until he died of it, all through the discreet +application of his mimetic and comic powers in the snuggery club. Once +in a while the club would perform a piece of serious business. Sometimes +it would draft a memorial against imprisonment for debt to the Throne or +Judges, which neither Throne nor Judges saw or read, of course. +Sometimes it would issue patriotic manifestoes to Parliament, of which +Parliament remained equally ignorant. When a popular member secured his +release the club would present him with a memorial, properly engrossed +and framed, of its esteem. Mr. Dorrit received such a memorial when he +came into his fortune and resigned his paternal supremacy over the +college; and in return he treated the whole jail to a refection in the +Pump Yard, as you may read in the last chapter of the first volume of +the record of his prison patriarchy. But one drop of bitterness flavored +the cup of the Marshalsea Club. Its festivities were limited by the +public hours of the prison. The clangor of the jail bell announced the +closing of the gates at ten o'clock at night, and warned all visitors to +retire or be locked in until morning. Such experience befell Mr. Arthur +Clennam when he made his first visit to the Dorrits' at home. + + "The stoppage of the bell, and the quiet in the prison, were a warning + to depart. But he had remained too late. The inner gate was locked and + the lodge closed. This brought them to the tavern establishment at the + upper end of the prison, where the collegians had just vacated their + social evening club. The apartment on the ground floor in which it was + held was the Snuggery: the presidential tribune of the chairman, the + pewter pots, glasses, pipes, tobacco ashes and general flavor of + members were still as that convivial institution had left them on its + adjournment. The Snuggery had two of the qualities popularly held to + be essential for grog for ladies, in respect that it was hot and + strong; but in the third point of analogy, requiring plenty of it, the + Snuggery was defective; being but a cooped-up apartment. + + "The unaccustomed visitor from the outside naturally assumed everybody + to be prisoners--landlord, waiter, barmaid, potboy and all. Whether + they were or not did not appear; but they all had a weedy look. The + keeper of the chandler's shop in the front parlor, who took in + gentlemen boarders, lent his assistance in making the bed. He had been + a tailor in his time, and had kept a phaeton, he said. It was evident, + from the general tone of the whole party, that they had come to regard + insolvency as the normal state of mankind, and the payment of debts a + disease that occasionally broke out. In this strange scene, and with + these strange spectres flitting about him, Arthur Clennam looked on + the preparations as if they were a part of a dream. Pending the while + the long initiated Tip, with an awful enjoyment of the Snuggery's + resources, pointed out the common kitchen fire maintained by + subscription of the collegians, the boiler for hot water, supported in + the same manner, and other premises generally tending to the deduction + that the way to be healthy, wealthy and wise was to come to the + Marshalsea. + + "The two tables put together in a corner were, at length, converted + into a very fair bed; and the stranger was left to the Windsor chairs, + the presidential tribune, the beery atmosphere, sawdust, pipelights, + spittoons and repose. But the last item was long, long, long in + linking itself to the rest. The novelty of the place, the coming upon + it without preparation, the sense of being locked up, kept him waking + and unhappy. Speculations, too, bearing on the strangest relations + towards the prison, but always concerning the prison, ran like + nightmares through his mind while he lay awake. Whether coffins were + kept ready for people who might die there, where they were kept, how + they were kept, where people who died in prison were buried, how they + were taken out, what forms were observed, whether an implacable + creditor could arrest the dead? As to escaping, what chances were + there of escape? Whether a prisoner could scale the walls with a cord + and grapple? How he would descend on the other side; whether he could + alight on a housetop, steal down a staircase, let himself out at a + door, and get lost in the crowd? As to fire in the prison, if one were + to break out while he lay there? + + "The morning light was in no hurry to climb the prison wall and look + in at the Snuggery windows; and when it did come, it would have been + more welcome if it had come alone, instead of bringing a rush of rain + with it. But the equinoctial gales were blowing out at sea, and the + impartial southwest wind, in its flight, would not neglect even the + narrow Marshalsea. While it roared through the steeple of St. George's + church, and twirled all the cowls in the neighborhood, it made a swoop + to beat the Southwark smoke into the gaol; and, plunging down the + chimneys of the few collegians who were yet lighting their fires, half + suffocated them. + + "Heartily glad to see the morning through little rested by the night, + he turned out as soon as he could distinguish objects about him, and + paced the yard for two heavy hours before the gaol was opened. The + walls were so near to one another, and the wild clouds hurried over + them so fast, that it gave him a sensation like the beginning of + seasickness to look up at the gusty sky. The rain, carried aslant by + flaws of wind, blackened that side of the central building which he + had visited last night, but left a narrow dry trough under the lee of + the wall, where he walked up and down among the waifs of straw and + dust and paper, the waste droppings of the pumps and the stray leaves + of yesterday's greens. It was as haggard a view of life as a man need + look upon." + +By the arrangement of the walls, all that the prisoners in the +Marshalsea could see out of doors was the sky. The view from the barred +windows of the uppermost rooms was cut off by the higher line of the +wall topped with its chevaux-de-frise. But Little Dorrit's own room, +being in the Warden's house, had a somewhat freer prospect. "A garret +and a Marshalsea garret without compromise was Little Dorrit's room," +but "the housetops and the distant country hills were discernible over +the walls in the clear morning." Since the prison has been put to +ordinary uses, such of the wall as is left has been lowered so that the +view except from the lower windows is not obstructed. The sharp and +cruel spikes that reddened in the sunrise like the bloody fangs of a +savage beast, are gone. Poverty looks out of the old windows without +having to peep between iron bars, and in the prison where the smugglers +did not abide a factory is busy. The place, when I saw it, had changed +but little since Dickens himself visited it in 1857, and wrote: + + "I found the outer front court-yard, often mentioned here, + metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every + brick of the gaol for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain + adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,' I came to 'Marshalsea + Place,' the houses in which I recognized; not only the great block of + the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind's + eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer. A little further on, I + found the older and smaller wall, which used to inclose the pent-up + inner prison, where nobody was put except for ceremony. But whosoever + goes into Marshalsea Place, turned out of Angel Court, leading to + Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving stones of the + extinct Marshalsea Gaol; will see its narrow yard to the right and to + the left, very little altered, if at all, except that the walls were + lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the + debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of many + years." + +The Marshalsea has a history nearly as ancient as the Fleet. Stow tells +us that it was so called as "pertaining to the Marshalls of England." In +it were confined all manners of marauders, with a special tendency +towards persons who had been guilty of piracy and other offenses on the +high seas. Some authorities place its foundation as far back as the +Twelfth Century. It was a prison of considerable extent in 1377, when a +mob of sailors broke into it and murdered a gentleman who had been +incarcerated there for killing one of their comrades in a pot-house +brawl. Three years later, Wat Tyler, in the course of his rebellion, +seized and hanged the Marshal of the Marshalsea. The official title of +the Warden of the prison was, by the way, Marshal. When Bishop Bonner +was deprived of his see of London for his adherence to the Church of +Rome, he was sent to the Marshalsea. He lived there ten years, and there +dying, in 1569, he was buried at midnight in St. George's Church hard +by. This ancient prison occupied another site on the same street as the +later structure. Under Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth, it was the +second prison in importance in London, being inferior only to the Tower. +Here Christopher Brooke, the poet, was confined for being concerned in +the wedding of Dr. Donne, and here George Wither was a prisoner for one +of his satires against the Government aggressions and the abuse of the +royal prerogative. The Nonconformist confessors were divided up among +the Southwark prisons, and the Marshalsea received its share of them. +John Udall, the Puritan martyr, fell a victim to its gaol fever. Its +blight extended through many generations, and the shadow of its walls +darkened many useful lives for no crime worse than the accident of +failure that may come to any man. A false system ground its abject +shabbiness, its haggard anxiety, and hopeless stupor of energies, into +natures that might, but for it, have triumphed over care, and converted +the defeat of to-day into the victory of to-morrow. "Changeless and +barren, looking ignorantly at all seasons with its fixed, pinched face +of poverty and care, the prison had not a touch of any of these beauties +in it. Blossom what would, its bricks and bars bore uniformly the same +dead crop." + +Long before "Little Dorrit" was projected, Dickens introduced the +Marshalsea to his readers; even before he introduced the Fleet, indeed. +The ceremony was performed in Volume I chapter 21 of the "Pickwick +Papers," in the sketch called "The Old Man's Tale about the Queer +Client." Here is the passage: + + "In the Borough High street, near St. George's Church, and on the same + side of the way, stands, as most people know, the smallest of our + debtors' prisons--the Marshalsea. Although in later times it has been + a very different place from the sink of filth and dirt it once was, + even its improved condition holds out but little temptation to the + extravagant or consolation to the improvident. The condemned felon has + as good a yard for air and exercise in Newgate as the insolvent debtor + in the Marshalsea Prison. + + "It may be my fancy, or it may be that I cannot separate the place + from the old recollections associated with it, but this part of London + I cannot bear. The street is broad, the shops are spacious, the noise + of the passing vehicles, the footsteps of a perpetual stream of + people--all the busy sounds of traffic resound in it from morn to + midnight, but the streets around are mean and close; poverty and + debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune + are penned up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and dreariness + seems, in my eyes at least, to hang about the scene, and to impart to + it a squalid and sickly hue. + + "Many eyes that have long since closed in the grave, have looked + around upon that scene lightly enough, when entering the gate of the + old Marshalsea Prison for the first time; for despair seldom comes + with the first severe shock of misfortune. A man has confidence in + untried friends, he remembers the many offers of assistance so freely + made by his boon companions when he wanted them not, he has hope--the + hope of happy inexperience--and however he may bend beneath the first + shock, it springs up in his bosom, and flourishes there for a brief + space, until it droops beneath the blight of disappointment and + neglect. How soon have those same eyes, deeply sunken in the head, + glared from faces wasted with famine, and sallow from confinement, in + days when it was no figure of speech to say that the debtors rotted in + prison, with no hope of release, and no prospect of liberty. The + atrocity in its full extent no longer exists, but there is enough of + it left to give rise to occurrences that make the heart bleed." + + + + +CHAPTER V. +THE KING'S BENCH. + + +In the "Pickwick Papers" the Fleet Prison was made to serve as an +important feature of the story. In "Little Dorrit," the story as far as +its human interest, humor and pathos are concerned, centres in the +Marshalsea. The introduction of the King's Bench into "David +Copperfield" is entirely episodic, but it makes one of the most +brilliant chapters in the book, and, from its personal connection with +the author's own life, one of the most important. That Dickens drew +largely on his own experience for the material in "David Copperfield" +has been abundantly shown by many commentators. Without being an +autobiography, the book gives one many glimpses into the real life of +its author. He transfers scenes and changes names a trifle, as he was +fond of doing, but the private memoranda furnished by him of his early +toil and trials afford a key to much that one reads in "Copperfield" in +the flimsy disguise of fiction. Thus, he adapts the knowledge of the +Marshalsea, which he acquired while his father was a prisoner there, to +the fictitious figure and fortunes of old Dorrit; and he bestows on Mr. +Micawber, in the King's Bench, the traits displayed by his father in the +Marshalsea. A recent compiler of odds and ends of Dickens personalia, +sapiently undertakes to show that the elder Dickens must have been +incarcerated in the King's Bench and not in the Marshalsea, because Mr. +Micawber was locked up there. Unfortunately for this arrangement, +Dickens himself had distinctly disproved it in advance. Some years +before he wrote "Copperfield"--probably before he even thought of +writing it--he jotted down a number of personal facts, many of which +were used in Forster's biography. These notes demonstrate positively +that in it, as in "Dorrit," he pursued his favorite plan of +interchanging occurrences, scenes and characters, without, however, +departing from the main facts, which he had grafted in this fashion on +the inventions of his fantasy. At the very commencement of the King's +Bench interlude in "David Copperfield" this becomes apparent. + + "At last Mr. Micawber's difficulties came to a crisis, and he was + arrested one morning and carried over to the King's Bench Prison in + the Borough. He told me, as he went out of the house, that the God of + day had now gone down upon him--and I really thought his heart was + broken, and mine too. But I heard, afterwards, that he was seen to + play a lively game of skittles before noon. + + "On the first Sunday after he was taken there I was to go and see him + and have dinner with him. I was to ask my way to such a place, and + just short of that place I should see such another place, and just + short of that I should see a yard, which I was to cross, and keep + straight on until I saw a turnkey. All this I did, and when at last I + did see a turnkey (poor little fellow that I was), and thought how, + when Roderick Random was in a debtor's prison, there was a man there + with nothing on but an old rug, the turnkey swam before my dimmed eyes + and my beating heart. + + "Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to + his room (top story but one) and cried very much. He solemnly conjured + me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to observe that if a + man had twenty pounds a year for his income, and spent nineteen + pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that + if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable. After which he + borrowed a shilling from me for porter, gave me a written order on + Mrs. Micawber for the amount and put away his pocket handkerchief and + cheered up. + + "We sat before a little fire, with two bricks put within the rusted + grate, one on each side, to prevent its burning too many coals until + another debtor, who shared the room with Mr. Micawber, came in from + the bakehouse with a loin of mutton, which was our joint stock repast. + Then I was sent up to 'Captain Hopkins,' in the room overhead, with + Mr. Micawber's compliments, and I was his young friend, and would + Captain Hopkins lend me a knife and fork. + + "Captain Hopkins lent me a knife and fork with his compliments to Mr. + Micawber. There was a very dirty little lady in his little room, and + two wan girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought it + was better to borrow Captain Hopkins's knife and fork than Captain + Hopkins's comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremity of + shabbiness, with large whiskers, and an old, old brown great coat, + with no other coat below it. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner; and + what plates and dishes and pots he had, on a shelf; and I divined (God + only knows how) that though the two girls with the shock heads of hair + were Captain Hopkins's children, the dirty little lady was not married + to Captain Hopkins. My timid station on the threshold was not occupied + more than a couple of minutes at most; but I came down again with all + this in my knowledge as surely as the knife and fork were in my hand." + +Compare this with Dickens's description of his actual visit to his +father in the Marshalsea. The difference is only that of a slight +rounding off or modifying of a sentence in the "Copperfield" version. In +the case of Captain Hopkins, whose real name was Captain Porter, one may +note how the actual suggested the fictitious title. The association +between porter and hops is evident and direct. The real experiences of +the Dickens's, at this period, in and out of jail, parallel those +credited to the Micawbers. Mrs. Dickens and the family camped in Gower +street just as Mrs. Micawber and the children camped in Windsor Terrace. +The Dickenses even had a workhouse girl for servant, like the Micawbers, +and little Charles made journeys to the pawnshop and the old book-stall +in real life, just as David did in the story. Throughout this portion of +biography and book the entries go side by side. For example: + + CHARLES DICKENS. + + "At last my mother and her encampment in Gower street north, broke up + and went to live in the Marshalsea. The key of the house was sent back + to the landlord, who was very glad to get it; and I (small Cain that I + was, except that I had never done harm to anyone) was handed over as a + lodger to a reduced old lady, long known to our family, in Little + College street, Camden town. I felt keenly living so cut off from my + parents, my brothers and sisters. One Sunday night I remonstrated with + my father on this head, so pathetically and with so many tears, that + his kind nature gave away. A back attic was found for me at the house + of an insolvent court-agent, who lived in Lant street, in the Borough, + where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards. A bed and bedding were + sent over for me and made up on the floor. The little window had a + pleasant prospect of a timber yard; and when I took possession of my + new abode I thought it was a paradise." + + DAVID COPPERFIELD. + + "At last Mrs. Micawber resolved to move into the prison, where Mr. + Micawber had now secured a room to himself. So I took the key of the + house to the landlord, who was very glad to get it; and the beds were + sent over to the King's Bench, except mine, for which a little room + was hired outside the walls in the neighborhood of that institution, + very much to my satisfaction, since the Micawbers and I had become too + used to one another in our troubles to part. The Orfling was likewise + accommodated with an inexpensive lodging in the same neighborhood. + Mine was a quiet back garret, with a sloping roof, commanding a + pleasant prospect of a timber yard; and when I took possession of it, + with the reflection that Mr. Micawber's troubles had come to a crisis + at last, I thought it quite a paradise." + +As Dickens told Forster, his family had no want of bodily comforts in +the Marshalsea. His father's income, still going on, was amply +sufficient for that; and in every respect, indeed, but elbow room, they +lived more comfortably in prison than they had done for a long time +while out of it. As he told the public in "David Copperfield": "I was +now relieved of much of the weight of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber's cares; for +some relatives or friends had engaged to help them at their present +pass, and they lived more comfortably in the prison than they had lived +for a long time out of it." As Forster tells us, directly from Dickens's +own statements to him: "They were waited on still by the +maid-of-all-work from Bayham street, the orphan girl of the Chatham +workhouse, from whose sharp little worldly and also kindly ways he took +his first impression of the Marchioness in the 'Old Curiosity Shop.' She +also had a lodging in the neighborhood that she might be early on the +scene of her duties; and when Charles met her, as he would do +occasionally, in his lounging place by London bridge, he would occupy +the time before the gates opened by telling her quite astonishing +fictions about the wharves and the Tower." As David Copperfield tells +us: + + "I used to breakfast with them, now, in virtue of some arrangement, of + which I have forgotten the details. I forget, too, at what hour the + gates were opened in the morning, admitting of my going in, but I know + that I was often up at six o'clock, and that my favorite lounging + place in the interval was the old London Bridge, where I was wont to + sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people go by, or to + look over the balustrades at the sun shining in the water, and + lighting up the golden flame on the top of the Monument. The Orfling + met me here sometimes, to be told some astonishing fictions respecting + the wharves and the Tower; of which, I can say no more than I hope I + believed them myself. In the evening I used to go back to the prison, + and walk up and down the parade with Mr. Micawber; or play casino with + Mrs. Micawber and hear reminiscences of her mamma and her papa." + +Charles Dickens's father's "attempts to avoid going through the courts +having failed, all needful ceremonies had to be undertaken to obtain the +benefit of the Insolvent Debtors' Act." Mrs. Micawber informed David +that "her family had decided that Mr. Micawber should apply for his +release under the Insolvent Debtors' Act, which would set him free, she +expected, in about six weeks." The elder Dickens, while awaiting his +discharge from the Marshalsea, had drawn up a petition to the throne for +the appropriation of a sum of money to enable the prisoners to drink His +Majesty's health on His Majesty's forthcoming birthday. "I mention the +circumstance," writes Dickens in his autobiographical jottings, "because +it illustrates to me my early interest in observing people. When I went +to the Marshalsea of a night, I was always delighted to hear from my +mother what she knew about the histories of the different debtors in the +prison; and when I heard of this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious +to see them all come in, one after another (though I knew the greater +part of them already, to speak to, and they me), that I got leave of +absence on purpose, and established myself in the corner near the +petition. It was stretched out, I recollect, on a great ironing board, +under the window, which in another part of the room made a bedstead at +night. The internal regulations of the place, for cleanliness and order, +and for the government of a common room in the ale-house, where hot +water and some means of cooking, and a good fire, were provided for all +who paid a very small subscription, were excellently administered by a +governing committee of debtors, of which my father was chairman for the +time being. As many of the principal officers of this body as could be +got into the small room without filling it up supported him, in front of +the petition; and my old friend, Captain Porter (who had washed himself +to do honor to the solemn occasion), stationed himself close to it, to +read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The door was +then thrown open, and they began to come in, in long file, several +waiting on the landing outside, while one entered, affixed his +signature, and went out. To everybody in succession Captain Porter said: +'Would you like to hear it read?' If he weakly showed the least +disposition to hear it, Captain Porter, in a loud, sonorous voice, gave +him every word of it. I remember a certain luscious roll he gave to such +words as Majesty--gracious Majesty--your gracious Majesty's unfortunate +subjects--your Majesty's well-known munificence--as if the words were +something real in his mouth, and delicious to taste; my poor father +meanwhile listening with a little of an author's vanity, and +contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the opposite wall. Whatever +was comical in this scene, and whatever was pathetic, I sincerely +believe I perceived in my corner, whether I demonstrated it or not, +quite as well as I should perceive it now. I made out my own little +character and story for every man who put his name to the sheet of +paper. I might be able to do that now, more truly; not more earnestly or +with closer interest. Their different peculiarities of dress, of face, +of gait, of manner, were written indelibly upon my memory. I would +rather have seen it than the best play ever played; and I thought about +it afterwards over the pots of paste-blacking, often and often. When I +looked, with my mind's eye, into the Fleet prison during Mr. Pickwick's +incarceration, I wonder whether half-a-dozen men were wanting from the +Marshalsea crowd that came filing in again to the sound of Captain +Porter's voice." Here is the same scene, transferred to the King's +Bench. + + "By way of going in for anything that might be on the cards, I call to + mind that Mr. Micawber, about this time, composed a petition to the + House of Commons, praying for an alteration of the law of imprisonment + for debt. I set down this remembrance here, because it is an instance + to myself of the manner in which I fitted my old books to my altered + life, and made stories for myself out of the streets, and out of men + and women; and how some main points in the character I shall + unconsciously develop, I suppose, in writing my life, were gradually + forming all the time. + + "There was a club in the prison, in which Mr. Micawber, as a + gentleman, was a great authority. Mr. Micawber had stated his idea of + this petition to the club, and the club had strongly approved the + same. Wherefore Mr. Micawber (who was a thoroughly good-natured man, + and as active a creature about anything but his own affairs as ever + existed, and never so happy as when he was busy about something that + could never be any profit to him) set to work at the petition, + invented it, engrossed it on an immense sheet of paper, spread it out + on the table, and appointed a time for all the club, and all within + the wall if they chose, to come up to his room and sign it. + + "When I heard of this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious to see + them all come in, one after another, though I knew the greater part of + them already, and they me, that I got an hour's leave of absence from + Murdstone and Grinby's, and established myself in a corner for that + purpose. As many of the principal members of the club as could be got + into the small room without filling it supported Mr. Micawber in front + of the petition, while my old friend Captain Hopkins (who had washed + himself to do honor to the solemn occasion) stationed himself close to + it, to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The + door was then thrown open, and the general population began to come + in, in a long file; several waiting outside, while one entered, + affixed his signature, and went out. To everybody in succession + Captain Hopkins said: 'Have you read it?' 'No.' 'Would you like to + hear it read?' If he weakly showed the least disposition to hear it, + Captain Hopkins, in a loud, sonorous voice, gave him every word of it. + The Captain would have read it 20,000 times if 20,000 people would + have heard him, one by one. I remember a certain luscious roll he gave + to such phrases as; 'the peoples' representatives in Parliament + assembled,' 'your petitioners therefore approach your honorable + house,' 'His Gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects,' as if the words + were something real in his mouth and delicious to taste, Mr. Micawber, + meanwhile, listening with a little of an author's vanity and + contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the opposite wall. + + "As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and Blackfriars, and + lounged about at meal times in obscure streets, the stones of which + may, for anything I know, be worn at this moment by my childish feet, + I wondered how many of these people were wanting in the crowd that + used to come filing before me in review again, to the echo of Captain + Hopkins's voice. When my thoughts go back now to that slow agony of my + youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people + hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered facts. When I tread + the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on + before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out + of such strange experiences and sordid things." + +The fortunate acquisition of a legacy of considerable amount released +the elder Dickens from the Marshalsea. "In due time Mr. Micawber's +petition was ripe for hearing, and that gentleman was ordered to be +discharged under the Act. Mr. Micawber returned to the King's Bench when +his case was over, as some fees were to be settled, and some formalities +observed, before he could be actually released. The club received him +with transport, and held a harmonic meeting that evening in his honor; +while Mrs. Micawber and I had a lamb's fry in private, surrounded by the +sleeping family." But you may read all there is to be read of the +Micawbers and the King's Bench in the first volume of "David +Copperfield," Chapters 11 and 12, and compare it, if you choose, with +the early passages of "The Life of Charles Dickens," by John Forster, +Volume I. + +Dickens's presentations of the Fleet and the Marshalsea had, it will be +noted, the interest of description as well as of personal association +with the characters of the stories for which they provided a part of the +scenario. The King's Bench is an entirely personal episode. The figure +of Mr. Micawber obscures all view of the prison. It poses on the merest +suggestion of a background of barred windows and spiked walls. For this +there are two reasons to be found. In the first place, all of the +debtors' prisons of London were alike in their general features. They +differed only in degrees and details of misery. In the Fleet and in the +Marshalsea Dickens had exposed all that fell within his vocation to +expose. Moreover, the necessity for invoking public obloquy upon the +dens had passed away with the revision of the laws for debt. To have +elaborated the material details of the life in the King's Bench would +have been to repeat a twice-told tale. Apart from this, Dickens had made +no special study of the King's Bench Prison. His memories of the +Marshalsea were indelibly imprinted on his mind. It had been a part of +his own life. He had explored the Fleet with the purpose of lending what +aid he could toward its abolishment. His boyish wanderings had made him +familiar enough with the external aspect of the King's Bench, and he had +visited it on at least one occasion when an acquaintance was +incarcerated there. But, after the Fleet and Marshalsea, its familiar +features made no appeal to him. What could he say or write of it that +had not been said or written by him already? + +The King's Bench Prison of Micawber's time stood in the Borough Road. It +was much more roomy and endurable than the Marshalsea, and much less +wretched than the Fleet. It was enclosed by a wall thirty-five feet +high, garnished with the usual chevaux-de-frise, and was entered through +a stone lodge three stories in height. The jail buildings themselves +carried four stories, and were broken up into nearly 250 rooms, with a +chapel, and out-buildings for officials and for cookery and other +necessities. The courtyard was comparatively spacious, and was +especially famous for its racket games. Some champion scores of the day +were scored by the collegians at the King's Bench, who certainly had +time enough for practice to perfect themselves in the sport. Like the +Fleet and the Marshalsea, the King's Bench had its tap-room and its +coffee-room, its poor side and its pay side, and its club, which +nightly, over a pipe and pot, forgot for a few hours that the jail yard +was not all out-of-doors. The prison derived its title from the fact +that it was the gaol of the High Court of Justice, over which royalty +was supposed to sit as supreme judge. So it became the Queen's Bench +when England was ruled by a queen, and under the Commonwealth, when +royalty was not recognized, bore the name of the Upper Bench Prison. + +The original King's Bench Prison was situated in Southwark as early as +the reign of Richard II. It was broken into and sacked by the Kentish +rebels under Wat Tyler, who, on this occasion, performed a similar +service to the old Marshalsea close at hand. It was to the King's Bench +that Chief Justice Gascoigne so intrepidly committed the Prince of +Wales, afterward Henry V; and down to the time of Oldys the room in +which the wild young crony of Sir John Falstaff spent his term in gaol, +was known as the Prince of Wales's Chamber. The old King's Bench seems +to have been a decidedly easy-going jail. In 1579 we learn from the +chronicles that the prisoners used to eat in a little low parlor next +the street, and that they always had an audience staring at them through +the barred windows, such as nowadays honors the repasts of the wild +beasts in the zoo. During this year the prisoners petitioned for an +enlargement of the prison and for a chapel, both of which requests seem +to have been granted. Defoe, who sampled the King's Bench as well as +Newgate and the Fleet, describes it as "not near so good" as the latter +little prison, and complained that "to a man who had money the Bench was +only the name of a prison." Indeed, the license of the seventeenth and +the eighteenth centuries in the King's Bench would be hardly credible to +persons accustomed only to the rigid discipline of modern jail +management. In all the debtors' gaols of this period, the gambler and +the swindler, the pickpocket, and even the footpads, who robbed by +violence, plied their trades. Drunkenness was universal, and the +commitment of loose women and the freedom of entry from without made +worse debaucheries than those of the bottle easy of indulgence. At +certain periods of their history the prisons seem to have been nothing +less than vast bagnio-taverns, only the restriction upon the egress of +the debtors distinguishing them from the common resorts of the town. The +authorities of the jail were not supersensitive in their morality, +provided their purses were kept filled. Wealth might riot, if it paid +the piper, as readily and freely as poverty might rot for the +wherewithal to buy a crust of bread. Roderick Random's naked debtor +shivering in a scrap of worn-out carpet was no fiction of the King's +Bench, nor Captain Blazer's banquets to his fair friends from over the +river a romance. + +Smollet knew the Bench well enough. He had spent a term of probation +behind its walls, and wrote "Sir Launcelot Greaves" within its rules. +John Wilkes lay by the heels for one of his libels under its smoky roof, +and hither came the mob to release him in 1768. The mob assembled in St. +George's Field for the purpose, and thus in 1780 the Gordon Rioters +gathered, who, a few days later, burst the prison gates and turned 700 +prisoners loose before they put the rotten and reeking old jail to the +torch. Combe was a prisoner under the rules of the King's Bench when he +wrote "Dr. Syntax," and Haydon drew his idea of "The Mock Election" from +a burlesque enacted among the prisoners while he was locked up in the +jail for debt. A volume could be filled with the curious and +characteristic events and personal episodes of the prison from the days +of Wat Tyler down to 1862, when the last debtor passed out at the lodge +gate, and the brief career of the King's Bench as a military prison +began. Its history covered really that of two prisons, for after the +attack of 1780 by the rioters, the old site was abandoned and another +chosen for the rebuilding of the jail. In one of Dickens's last strolls +in Southwark, he noticed the fact that no vestige of the King's Bench +remained, but that a huge structure devoted to model homes for +workingmen redeemed its unlamented grave from the uselessness which had +made it a blight during many centuries. In Chapter 14 of Volume 2 of +"Nicholas Nickleby," by the way, Dickens adverts to a feature of the law +of which the King's Bench was one of the outgrowths, in connection with +the first visit of Nicholas to Madeline Bray. + + "The place to which Mr. Cheeryble had directed him was a row of mean + and not over cleanly houses, situated within the 'Rules' of the King's + Bench Prison, and not many hundred paces distant from the obelisk in + St. George's Fields. The Rules are a certain liberty adjoining the + prison, and comprising some dozen streets in which debtors who can + raise money to pay large fees, from which their creditors do not + derive any benefit, are permitted to reside by the wise provisions of + the same enlightened laws which leave the debtor who can raise no + money to starve in gaol, without food, clothing, lodging, or warmth, + which are provided for felons convicted of the most atrocious crimes + that can disgrace humanity. There are many pleasant fictions of the + law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or + practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal + value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally + obtainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture + of their pockets. + + "To the row of houses indicated to him by Mr. Charles Cheeryble, + Nicholas directed his steps without much troubling his head about such + matters as these; and at this row of houses--after traversing a very + dirty and dusty suburb of which minor theatricals, shell-fish, + ginger-beer, spring vans, green grocery and brokers' shops appeared to + compose the main and most prominent features--he at length arrived + with a palpitating heart. There were small gardens in the front which, + being wholly neglected in all other respects, served as little pens + for the dust to collect in, until the wind came around the corner and + blew it down the road. Opening the rickety gate which, dangling on its + broken hinges, before one of these, half admitted and half repulsed + the visitor, Nicholas knocked at the street door with a faltering + hand. + + "It was, in truth, a shabby house outside, with very dim parlor + windows and very small show of blinds, and very dirty muslin curtain + dangling across the lower panes on very loose and limp strings. + Neither, when the door was opened, did the inside appear to belie the + outward promise, as there was a faded carpeting on the stairs and + faded oil-cloth in the passage; in addition to which discomforts a + gentleman Ruler was smoking hard in the front parlor (though it was + not yet noon), while the lady of the house was busily engaged in + turpentining the disjointed fragments of a tent-bedstead at the door + of the back parlor, as if in preparation for the reception of some new + lodger who had been fortunate enough to engage it." + +The Fleet had its rules like the King's Bench, but there was no such +legalized stretching of the bounds of confinement tolerated at the +Marshalsea. There the prisoner was supposed to remain a close prisoner +within the walls until the courts ordained his release. In fact, +however, if he had money he might buy sly periods of liberty under the +eye of the keeper, and this abuse of his office brought the Marshal and +his subordinates many a sovereign above their legitimate emoluments. One +young gentleman of sporting proclivities, who was committed to the +Marshalsea while his lawyer was settling up the wreck of his handsome +patrimonial estate, afterwards published an account of his experiences +as a detained debtor. From this it appears that during the entire term +of his detention he was a regular spectator at the cock fights, dog +fights and prize fights, of the day, and that he kept his wherry on the +Thames, and went out for a row whenever he felt the need of air and +exercise. The keeper who accompanied him on these excursions, and who +was of a sporting turn himself, left the prison to enter his employ, and +was his faithful henchman at the time he printed his book, in the most +genteel and elegant style, for circulation among his friends. + +It is curious to note that even to our own day, and in our own country, +this system of prison favoritism is not entirely unknown. If a man is +arrested on a judgment for debt, he can, if he knows the way, save +himself from being locked up for a night at least by paying the +sheriff's deputy for it. To be sure the deputy will have to be in his +company until he is duly handed over at Ludlow street Jail, and properly +receipted for, but there are such things as double bedded rooms in New +York hotels. In the same way, it is shrewdly suspected, prisoners in +Ludlow street who can pay for it can enjoy a night out once in a while. +It used to be so at least; and by the evidence brought out by +investigations in the past it was not even an unusual occurrence. It is +popularly believed, by the way, that there is no such thing in New York +state as imprisonment for debt. Some native realist in the line of +fiction ought to take a turn over to the east side of the commercial +metropolis of the United States, and weave his experiences of the Ludlow +street cage into some such shape as Dickens did his of the Fleet, the +Marshalsea, and the King's Bench. + + + + +CHAPTER VI. +THE NEW YORK TOMBS. + + +Dickens may fairly be said to have begun his sight-seeing in America by +going to jail. He commenced with those in Boston, and wherever else he +found a prison he had a look at it. The interest he took in penal +reform, which rendered him familiar with nearly every gaol in England, +did not desert him when he made his first voyage across the Atlantic. In +the "American Notes," among a number of minor and comparatively +unimportant observations, most of which are, in fact, long out of date, +and lost in the changed conditions of jail construction, discipline and +government, there are two descriptions, which retain their interest. The +first in order of occurrence in the book, relates to a prison as famous +throughout America as Newgate is in Great Britain, and which, indeed, is +the closest approach we have to the gloomy criminal cage of London. You +may find it in a description of a walk about New York in Chapter 6: + + "What is this dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an + enchanter's palace in a melodrama? A famous prison called the Tombs. + Shall we go in? + + "So. A long, narrow and lofty building, stove-heated as usual, with + four galleries, one above the other, going round it, and communicating + by stairs. Between the two sides of each gallery, and in its center, a + bridge for the greater convenience of crossing. On each of these + bridges sits a man, dozing or reading, or talking to an idle + companion. On each tier are two opposite rows of small iron doors. + They look like furnace doors, but are cold and black, as though the + fires within had all gone out. Some two or three are open, and women + with drooping heads bent down are talking to the inmates. The whole is + lighted by a skylight, but it is fast closed; and from the roof there + dangle, limp and drooping, two useless windsails. + + "A man with keys appears to show us round. A good-looking fellow, and + in his way civil and obliging. + + "'Are those black doors the cells?' + + "'Yes' + + "'Are they all full?' + + "'Well, they're pretty nigh full, and that's a fact and no two ways + about it.' + + "'Those at the bottom are unwholesome, surely.' + + "'Why, we do only put colored people in 'em. That's the truth.' + + "'When do the prisoners take exercise?' + + "'Well, they do without it pretty much.' + + "'Do they never walk in the yard?' + + "'Considerable seldom.' + + "'Sometimes, I suppose?' + + "'Well, it's rare they do. They keep pretty bright without it.' + + "'But suppose a man were here for a twelve-month? I know this is only + a prison for criminals who are charged with some grave offenses, while + they are awaiting trial, or are under remand, but the law affords + criminals many means of delay. What with motions for new trials, + arrest of judgment and what not, a prisoner might be here for twelve + months, I take it, might he not?' + + "'Well, I guess he might.' + + "'Do you mean to say that in all that time he would never come out at + that little iron door for exercise?' + + "'He might walk some, perhaps--not much.' + + "'Will you open one of the doors?' + + "'All, if you like.' + + "The fastenings jar and rattle, and one of the doors turns slowly on + its hinges. Let us look in. A small, bare cell, into which the light + enters through a high chink in the wall. There is a rude means of + washing, a table, and a bedstead. Upon the latter sits a man of sixty, + reading. He looks up for a moment, gives an impatient, dogged shake, + and fixes his eyes upon his book again. As we withdraw our heads the + door closes on him, and is fastened as before. This man has murdered + his wife and will probably be hanged. + + "'How long has he been here?' + + "'A month.' + + "'When will he be tried?' + + "'Next term.' + + "'When is that?' + + "'Next month.' + + "'In England, if a man is under sentence of death even, he has air and + exercise at certain periods of the day.' + + "'Possible?' + + "With what stupendous and untranslatable coolness he says this, and + how loungingly he leads on to the woman's side, making, as he goes, a + kind of castanet of the key on the stair rail. + + "Each cell-door on this side has a square aperture in it. Some of the + women peep anxiously through it at the sound of footsteps; others + shrink away in shame. For what offense can that lonely child, of ten + or twelve years old, be shut up here? Oh, that boy? He is the son of a + prisoner we saw just now; is a witness against his father, and is + detained here for safe keeping until the trial, that's all. + + "But it is a dreadful place for the child to pass the long days and + nights in. This is rather hard treatment for a young witness, is it + not? What says our conductor? + + "'Well, it ain't a very rowdy life, and that's a fact.' + + "Again he clinks his metal castanet and leads us leisurely away. I + have a question to ask him as we go. + + "'Pray, why do they call this place the Tombs?' + + "'Well, it's the cant name.' + + "'I know it is. Why?' + + "'Some suicides happened here when it was first built. I expect it + came about from that.'" + +It did not "come about from that" by any means. The Tombs was a +comparatively new prison when Dickens saw it first. It was erected under +an authorization of the Common Council of the city of New York, issued +in 1833. At that time, Mr. John L. Stevens, of the Hoboken family who +still keep up seigneurial state on the bank of the Hudson, having +recently returned from an extended tour through Asia and the Holy Land, +issued an account of his travels, with many illustrations of the rare +and curious things he had seen. Among these was a representation of an +ancient Egyptian tomb, accompanied by a full and accurate description. +The majestic proportions and sombre beauty of this mortuary structure so +impressed the committee of the Common Council who had the selection of +plans for the new jail that they adopted it as their model, and the +general appearance and construction of the building was made to conform +as closely as the necessities of its use permitted to Stevens's design. +As it stands it is probably the finest specimen of Egyptian architecture +of its order to be found outside of Egypt itself, and the filth, squalor +and grimy ugliness that hem it in only serve to accentuate its +architectural beauty. Its official title is the City Prison, but the one +by which it is best known was derived from the character of the edifice +in "Stevens's Travels," after which it was planned. + +From an artistic point of view the selection of a site for the Tombs was +singularly unfortunate. At the date of its erection its location was +upon the upper outskirts of the city. Now the town has grown beyond it +miles upon miles. For years it stood in the heart of the lowest and most +dangerous criminal district. Even now its surroundings of +tenement-houses, workshops, dirty streets harboring dirty shops of the +basest order, are anything but inviting to the sightseer. Through +Leonard and Franklin streets, which bound its lower and upper ends, one +catches eastward glimpses of Baxter street festooned with the sidewalk +displays of the old clo' shops, and westward sees the passing life of +Broadway. Elm street in the rear and Centre street in front of it abound +in sour-savored groggeries and the shabby hang-dog offices of the lower +order of criminal lawyers who practice at the bar of the Tombs court. +The streets swarm with the children of the tenements, which line them +with towering piles of unclean brick and mortar; and the pedestrians who +navigate them, and who hang about the outside of the prison, as if held +there by a spell and only awaiting their turn to pass within its walls, +are for the most part of that skulking, evil class which knows the +interior of the jail quite as well as its outer barriers, and the ways +which lead to its frowning gate. For many years the passenger traffic of +the New York Central Railroad was embarked at a depot occupying the +block above the Tombs. Travelers were here taken on board cars which +were dragged by mules or horses up to Fourth avenue and Twenty-sixth +street, where the locomotive replaced the teams as a motor. As the town +grew the railroad removed its station to the site of the present Madison +Square Garden building, and converted the old depot into a +freight-house, in and out of which lines of cars drawn by long tandems +of mules clanked day and night the year round. Now the freight depot is +gone, and an enormous granite structure, which accommodates the various +criminal courts, rises on its site. Between this building and the Tombs +an enclosed bridge for the passage of prisoners to and from court spans +the street. + +The Tombs itself was built in the basin of a little lake which was once +one of the romantic spots of Manhattan Island, and a favorite resort of +the angler and the pleasure seeker. The lake was known as the Collect +Pond, a corruption of the Dutch title "Kalckhoek," or Shell Point, from +a beach of shells which existed on its margin. The Collect was a +fresh-water pond, fed by natural springs, and having an outlet by small +streams into both the North and East rivers. Thus the pond and its +creeks actually cut Manhattan Island in half and made two islands of it. +There were pleasure houses on the hillocks around the Collect, and on an +island, in its centre, the city powder house was erected. The course of +time worked the usual changes upon it for the worse. Tanners set up +their tan pits near it, the city garbage was dumped into it, and among +the marshes to the eastward the criminal colony, since infamous as the +Five Points, commenced to form itself. There was still water enough in +it in 1796 for John Fitch to experiment in navigating the first +steamboat America ever saw, but a few years later, to give employment to +clamorous and starving labor, at a period of industrial and commercial +stagnation, the city ordered the hills around it to be leveled and the +pond filled up with the earth removed from them. In spite of the +reduction of the ground to the westward, the site remained much lower +than the grade of Broadway, and the Tombs roof is scarcely above the +line of that thoroughfare. To support the ponderous mass of Maine +granite, which constituted the prison, a forest of piles was sunk deep +in the sodden soil. The work of construction occupied five years, so +that the prison had been in use scarcely four years when Dickens made +his visit to it--and, while its outer walls remain substantially the +same, its internal construction has been vastly augmented and improved. +When he saw it the city watch-house occupied part of the building; and +he makes a record of a night visit to "those black sties" where "men and +women, against whom no crime is proved, lie all night in perfect +darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapors which encircle that flagging +lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and offensive stench." +The watch-house was on the Franklin street side of the jail, and was +long kept up as a police station. Now it is used as a common room for +the confinement of vagrants and drunkards picked up on the streets, +pending their confinement to the penal institutions. + +Of another old and hideous institution which one cannot disassociate +with the Tombs, in spite of the abolition of it which has been decreed +by law, Dickens wrote: + + "The prison yard, in which he pauses now, has been the scene of + terrible performances. Into this narrow, grave-like place men are + brought out to die. The wretched creature stands beneath the gibbet on + the ground; the rope is about his neck; and when the sign is given a + weight at its other end comes running down and swings him up into the + air--a corpse. The law requires that there be present at this dismal + spectacle the judge, the jury, and citizens to the amount of + twenty-five. From the community it is hidden. To the dissolute and bad + the thing remains a frightful mystery. Between the criminal and them + the prison wall is interposed as a thick and gloomy veil. It is the + curtain to his bed of death, his winding sheet and grave. From him it + shuts out life and all the motives to unrepenting hardihood in that + last hour, which its mere sight and presence is often all sufficient + to sustain. There are no bold eyes to make him bold; no ruffians to + uphold a ruffian's name before. All beyond the pitiless stone wall is + unknown space." + +At the time of Dickens's visit (1842) London was still the scene of +public hangings, and the privacy with which the executions in the Tombs +were conducted furnished him with a text for one of his protests against +the existing state of things at home. The Tombs hangings were private, +as he stated, but they were not unattended by morbid interest on the +part of the mob. On the morning of an execution, the obscene streets all +about would swarm with obscene life. From their festering dens in the +Five Points, and from the remoter haunts of vice and crime which had +grown up with the growth of the town, the social banditti came in a +scowling, ribald and revolting legion. They camped on doorsteps before +dawn, and all the groggeries drove a roaring trade. They beguiled the +time with gloating reminiscences of their criminal lives, and watched +the jail roof for a signal that the ghastly work within was done. +Curiously enough, nature had provided them with a sign as certain as the +running up of the black flag upon the wall of Newgate. A great number of +pigeons had found lodgment in the Tombs yard, nesting in cotes which had +been put up for them along the inner jail walls and in the eaves of the +buildings themselves. Long immunity from human aggressions had rendered +them fearless, and when the audience gathered for an execution, under +the gray shadow of the jail walls, the pigeons were equally certain to +assemble, cooing and pluming themselves in the sunlight above. When, at +the fatal moment, the heavy thud of the executioner's axe denoted the +severing of the cord which supported the counterweights and sent the +victim whirling to his death, the birds, startled by the sound, would +rise upward in flurried flight, circle about a couple of times and +settle at their perches again. It was by this confused and frightened +movement of the pigeons above the walls that the waiting rabble knew the +unseen tragedy of the law was done. + +A moment later the race of reporters and messenger boys from the prison +gate to the newspaper offices close by would begin, and in half an hour +all the ghastly details of the event, described with such +circumstantiality and such sensational exaggeration as the horror-hungry +public was expected to crave for, would be hawked at every street corner +and carried by swift runners and overdriven wagons to the most distant +quarters of the town. To such extreme was this practice stretched that, +on the occasions of later executions in the Tombs, reporters would +actually be sent to spend the night in prison, and to record the last +hours of a worthless brute whose just doom should have been a swift +death and complete oblivion. Evil as the influence of a public hanging +may have been, it may be doubted if it was any worse than the practice +of the press in investing the attendant circumstances of a vile and +dangerous wretch's end with the mock heroism of cheap bravado and the +clap-trap sentiment of literary fustian. The law providing for the +execution of criminals by electricity, and in secret, has performed one +public service, at least, in doing away with these outdoor gatherings at +the Tombs on hanging day. + + + + +CHAPTER VII. +PHILADELPHIA'S BASTILE. + + +In Philadelphia Dickens made a special request for permission to visit +the great prison of the State, remarking that it and the Falls of +Niagara were the two objects he most wished to see in America. +Exceptional facilities were afforded him to gratify his desire, and make +his investigation as thorough as he chose. Nothing was concealed from +him, and his account and opinion of the Eastern State Penitentiary +("American Notes," Chapter 7) created a vast deal of comment in their +day. He put himself on record as a violent opponent of the solitary +system, and while he intended to make this chapter the strongest, it was +really one of the weakest in the book. He had assailed the outrages of +the debtors' prisons of London manfully. Over the Philadelphia system he +became almost hysterical. In the former he had actual evils and wrongs +and outrages to combat. In the latter his grievance was largely founded +on sentimentality and purely personal feeling. He describes his visit: + + "In the outskirts stands a great prison called the Eastern + Penitentiary, conducted on a plan peculiar to the State of + Pennsylvania. The system here is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary + confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong. + + "I was accompanied to this prison by two gentlemen officially + connected with its management, and passed the day in going from cell + to cell and talking with the inmates. Every facility was afforded me + that the utmost courtesy could suggest. Nothing was concealed or + hidden from my view, and every piece of information that I sought was + openly and frankly given. The perfect order of the building cannot be + praised too highly, and of the excellent motives of all who are + immediately concerned in the administration of the system there can be + no kind of question. + + "Between the body of the prison and the outer wall there is a spacious + garden. Entering it by a wicket in the massive gate, we pursued the + path before us to its other termination, and passed into a large + chamber, from which seven long passages radiate. On either side of + each is a long, long row of low cell-doors with a certain number over + every one. Above a gallery of cells like those below, except that they + have no narrow yard attached (as those in the ground tier have), and + are somewhat smaller. The possession of two of these is supposed to + compensate for the absence of so much air and exercise as can be had + in the dull strip attached to each of the others, in an hour's time + every day; and, therefore, every prisoner in this upper story has two + cells, adjoining and communicating with each other. + + "Standing at the central point and looking down these dreary passages, + the dull repose and quiet that prevails is awful. Occasionally there + is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver's shuttle or shoemaker's last, + but it is stilled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon door, and only + serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and + face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house a black + hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain + dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from + which he never again comes forth until his whole term of imprisonment + has expired. He never hears of wife or children, home or friends; the + life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison officers, + but, with that exception, he never looks upon a human countenance, or + hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive, to be dug out in the + slow rounds of years, and, in the meantime, dead to everything but + torturing anxieties and horrible despair. + + "His name, and crime, and term of suffering are unknown, even to the + officer who delivers him his daily food. There is a number over his + cell-door, and in a book, of which the governor of the prison has one + copy and the moral instructor another, this is the index to his + history. Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence; + and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no + means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the + building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether + in the long winter nights there are living people near, or he is in + some lonely corner of the great gaol, with walls and passages, and + iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors. + + "Every cell has double doors--the outer one of sturdy oak, the other + of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his food is + handed. He has a bible and a slate and pencil, and, under certain + restrictions, has sometimes other books, provided for the purpose, and + pen and ink and paper. His razor, plate and can, and basin hang upon + the wall, or shine upon the little shelf. Fresh water is laid on in + every cell, and he can draw it at his pleasure. During the day his + bedstead turns up against the wall and leaves more space for him to + work in. His loom, or bench, or wheel is there, and there he labors, + sleeps and wakes and counts the seasons as they change, and grows + old." + +Over the inmates of this Philadelphia gaol Dickens exuded a great deal +of sympathy and sentiment. He invested each man he wrote about with a +pathos that made good reading at any rate, and no doubt sincerely +believed all that he wrote. To a man of a convivial and companionable +nature like himself the idea of a life of solitude was naturally +horrible. To a man fond of long walks among other men the enforced +absence of exercise as well as of companionship was naturally dreadful. +To Charles Dickens, in short, a term of imprisonment in the Eastern +Penitentiary would unquestionably have been the cruelest torture. He +would, in all likelihood, have worn his life out speedily here, like a +wild bird in a cage, or have laid violent hands upon himself, or have +become a madman. To the felons whom he visited, men for the most part of +blunt sensibilities and brutal natures, he credited the same qualities +as belonged to his own refined and sensitive composition, and he put +himself in their place and spoke for them from his own standpoint. How +far he was led astray by this was shown by the case of the character +long known as "Dickens's Dutchman." Of this fellow he wrote: + + "In another cell there was a German, sentenced to five years' + imprisonment for larceny, two of which had just expired. With colors + procured in the same manner (extracted from dyed yarn given him to + weave) he had painted every inch of the walls and ceiling quite + beautifully. He had laid out the few feet of ground behind him with + exquisite neatness, and had made a little bed in the centre, that + looked, by the bye, like a grave. The taste and ingenuity he had + displayed in everything was most extraordinary, and yet a more + dejected, heartbroken, wretched creature it would be difficult to + imagine. I never saw such a picture of forlorn affliction and distress + of mind. My heart bled for him, and when the tears ran down his + cheeks, and he took one of the visitors aside to ask, with his + trembling hands nervously clutching at his coat to detain him, whether + there was no hope of his dismal sentence being commuted, the spectacle + was really too painful to witness. I never saw or heard any kind of + misery that impressed me more than the wretchedness of this man." + +This was the Dickensesque of it, and it gave its unfortunate subject an +international notoriety. Now mark the plain, unvarnished facts. + +The name of "Dickens's Dutchman" was Charles Langheimer. He was +sentenced to the Eastern Penitentiary for the first time on May 15, +1840, and it was while he was serving this term that Dickens saw him. On +June 25, 1852, he came back on a year's sentence, and on Feb. 24, 1855, +he was a third time convicted, for two years on this occasion. On April +4, 1861, he came again for a year, on March 12, 1872, he was returned +for two years, on Sept. 9, 1875, and on April 4, 1877, he began two +terms of a year each. On Sept. 10, 1879, he received a three years' +term, and he was no sooner through with this than he was once more +convicted and sent up for a year, in 1882. In the intervals of the +sixteen years he spent in this one prison, since his first conviction, +he had served five terms in other prisons, three in the County Jail, of +Philadelphia, one in the Baltimore Penitentiary, and one in New York. In +plain English, the man was a confirmed pauper and thief. He lived by +mendicancy, and from time to time he would commit some larceny, for +which offense all his sentences were imposed on him, merely in order to +be sent to jail to be cared for--just as he might have gone on a +vacation from his regular and miserable life upon the chance of charity. + +In view of Dickens's positive and unqualified expression of sentiment in +regard to him, the most curious fact of his life remains to be noted. +This is that, fourteen years after Dickens's own death, he returned +voluntarily to the penitentiary, where he had ended a year's term only a +few months before, and begged to be taken in. This place, so dreadful to +the impressionable novelist, was the only approach to home the poor +wretch knew. He was in a deplorable condition, was nearly eighty years +of age, and had a horror of the almshouse. The inspectors consented that +he should have his wish, and he was cared for for a month, until his +death, which occurred on March 14, 1884. It is interesting to know that +Dickens died at the age of fifty-eight years. This "picture of forlorn +affliction and distress of mind," this "dejected, heartbroken, wretched +creature," who was born eight years before Dickens, survived him nearly +twice that period, and outlived him, in the mere number of his years, by +twenty-two. It may be remembered, in connection with the Fleet Prison +episode of "Pickwick," that Sam Weller adverts to the almost identical +case of an old prisoner, to whom the jail had become such a home that +the fear of being locked out of it eventually deterred him from taking +the sly tastes of liberty which the turnkeys were willing to allow him. + +The Eastern State Penitentiary is, in this day, admitted to be one of +the model penal institutions of the world. When built it was in the +northern suburb, but it is now in the heart of Philadelphia. It occupies +an entire block, comprising ten or twelve acres, and its site was +originally known as Cherry Hill, a name which is often locally applied +to the jail itself. The ground is elevated, and from the gateway tower a +fine panorama of the vast city, spreading about for miles, may be +obtained. All that is visible externally is a massive granite wall, some +thirty-five feet high, slightly relieved or buttressed with towers at +the angles and on the front. The enclosure is square, and the entrance, +in the centre of the front wall, is by a lofty portal, defended by a +heavy outer gate, in which there is a wicket, and an inner gate, and +dominated by a tower taller than the others. Within the walls the ranges +of cells radiate from an octagonal central building, which is crowned +with an observatory. To simplify the description it may be said that +this central building forms the hub from which branch branch forth the +spokes of this enormous wheel. A system of lighting the entire grounds +by night is provided in a lantern of special ingenious construction, in +the tower below the observatory or lookout. There are some detached +buildings on the grounds, used for mechanical and culinary purposes. The +living apartments of the warden and his family, offices, etc., are in +the front building. The outer and inner gates of the prison are never +opened at the same time. Even a visitor or an official becomes in a +manner a prisoner when he leaves the street. + +Dickens's general description of the prison is good enough, but some of +his statements are more picturesque than precise. Prisoners are not shut +off from intercourse by letter, or even personally, with their families. +They do see various persons connected with the prison, although they +cannot see other prisoners. Even this, which Dickens thought so cruel, +and the concealment of their faces when they are brought in to the jail, +is a precaution born of benevolence and mercy. The idea is that after a +man has served a term at Cherry Hill and been discharged he may go where +he will, and if he wishes to live an honest life no man can point him +out as an ex-convict. Except in the private record of the prison, known +only and accessible only to a few responsible persons, John Jimpson +never existed in the Eastern State Penitentiary. The keepers, the +doctor, the jail attendants only knew him as No. 99. The librarian never +issued books to John Jimpson, but to No. 99. The nurses in the infirmary +never attended him when he was sick, but cared for No. 99. No one but +the warden knew whether the letters sent to him by his wife or family or +friends were meant for No. 99 or No. 199. As far as the stigma of his +crime and its punishment can be effaced it is effaced. He loses his +social identity when he enters the prison, and puts it on when he comes +out, like a new suit of clothes. + +It is a rule of the prison that each convict, when he enters, shall be +taught a useful trade, if he has not one already. He then has a daily +task set, and all that he can or cares to produce above this task is +credited to him, and the money is paid to him when he departs. The +illiterate convicts are taught to read and write. Those who display +intelligence are encouraged to cultivate it. Convicts of superior +education--such, for instance, as can produce literary work or paint +pictures--are permitted the means to do so. The entire system of the +prison is reformatory as well as punitive; the idea is not merely to +cage a social beast, but to tame him and train him, so that he may be of +use to the world when he has served his term of isolation. + +The idea of separate confinement--the Philadelphia Idea, as it has been +called--originated nearly a century ago. In an admirable sketch of the +origin and history of the Eastern District Penitentiary, compiled by Mr. +Richard Vaux, president of the board of Inspectors, the history of +Pennsylvania's system of prison discipline and management is given in +brief but interesting style. In 1776 the common jail of Philadelphia was +as horrible a den as the worst of London jails at its worst. An attempt +was made by Richard Wistar, one of the famous family of that name, to +reform it, but in 1777 the British army occupied the city and the good +work was, perforce, suspended. In 1787 it was taken up again, and the +Philadelphia Prison Society was formed. The first president of the +society was Bishop William White, the first Protestant Episcopal +Archbishop of Pennsylvania, and he held the office for forty years. The +society's first work was to have the chain gangs, employed at cleaning +the streets and repairing the roads, abolished. The next was to secure a +separation of the sexes in the common jail. Then the separation of +actual criminals and of persons merely accused but not yet found guilty +of crime demanded attention. So, by degrees, the idea of separate +confinement took shape. In 1790 a law was passed by which this principle +was put to the test, and finally, in 1821, the Legislature authorized +the construction of the State Penitentiary for the Eastern district of +Pennsylvania. + +At this date the site of the present Penitentiary was a farm, remarkable +for its grove of fine cherry trees. It belonged to the Warner family. +The farm-house was a cheery old colonial mansion, and it is worth noting +that when the Warners sold the land they reserved the right to remove +the mantels and fireplaces from the house. The place was purchased in +1821. The plans of several competing architects were submitted to the +board appointed by the Legislature, and that of John Haviland was +selected. The cornerstone of the Penitentiary was laid in 1823, and it +was opened for the reception of convicts in 1829. Up to that time about +$340,000 had been expended on it, but since then the necessary +enlargements and improvements have brought its cost up to probably +$1,000,000 or more. If Dickens could revisit it in the flesh to-day he +would find it a much more extensive establishment than the one he +criticised so severely and unjustly; and his confidence in himself would +perhaps be shaken when he read the record of his woebegone "Dutchman." + + + THE END. + + + + +TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE + +List of changes from the printed edition (in parentheses the original +text): + +p. 5: removed stray period (when George III. was king) + +p. 7: "others" for "other" (while others erected) + +p. 8: "workmen's" for "workmens'" (with the workmens' voices) + +p. 11: "street" for "stret" (marched into the stret) + +p. 17: "landau" for "landeau" (in his own landeau and six) + +p. 21: "ladders" for "ladlers" (long ladlers for scaling) + +p. 23: "besieged" for "beseiged" (others beseiged the house) + +p. 26: "buckets full" for "bucketsfull" (of which bucketsfull were +passed) + +p. 33: "Sergeant" for "Sargeant" (Recorder and Common Sargeant) + +p. 41: "indescribable" for "indiscribable" (with an indiscribable +feeling) + +p. 44: inserted space (forming a part of NewgateMarket) + +p. 52: added final closing quote mark (as much trouble as possible.) + +p. 54: added period (Werry good That's a case) + +p. 54: added final closing quote mark (I should like to see 'em.) + +p. 55: removed final closing quote mark (the prisoner before him.") + +p. 57: added final period (I suppose mine did) + +p. 59: "pew" for "pen" (the 'condemned pen') + +p. 59: "huge" for "hugh" (A hugh black pen) + +p. 64: removed duplicate "desperate" (helpless, desperate, desperate +state) + +p. 65: added period (linen cloth His red) + +p. 67: changed opening double quote to single quote ("Here's somebody) + +p. 76: "divagations" for "divigations" (in his pleasant divigations) + +p. 77: "preferred" for "prefered" (debtors who prefered to preserve) + +p. 80: added period (the charge of 1s. 3d a week) + +p. 84: "gallon" for "galllon" (And stand a galllon) + +p. 84: "Wat" for "Watt" (followers of Watt Tyler) + +p. 94: added period (L3 6s 8d.) + +p. 94: added period (7s 4d.) + +p. 95: "Westminster" for "Westminister" (between Westminister Hall) + +p. 95: guessed "are" as missing word (There other letters by Howel) + +p. 102: removed duplicate "of" (the shadow of of the prison) + +p. 125: "made" for "maade" (when he maade his first visit) + +p. 126: "Clennam" for "Clenham" (Arthur Clenham looked) + +p. 129: added missing opening quote (I came to Marshalsea Place,') + +p. 137: added missing comma after "porter" (for porter gave me) + +p. 137: "handkerchief" for "handerchief" (his pocket handerchief) + +p. 139: removed duplicate "to" (a room to to himself) + +p. 142: apostrophe for comma (Insolvent Debtors, Act) + +p. 147: added missing opening quote ('No.' Would you like) + +p. 171: "Hopkins's" for "Hopkin's" (of Captain Hopkin's voice) + +p. 153: "rotten" for "rotton" (the rotton and reeking) + +p. 154: "huge" for "hugh" (but that a hugh structure) + +p. 171: "Dickens's" for "Dicken's" (At the time of Dicken's visit) + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's In Jail with Charles Dickens, by Alfred Trumble + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN JAIL WITH CHARLES DICKENS *** + +***** This file should be named 34112.txt or 34112.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/3/4/1/1/34112/ + +Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed +Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was +produced from scanned images of public domain material +from the Google Print project.) + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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