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 57 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,” 58 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 59 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’ 60 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.”
61“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 62 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 63 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 64 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 65 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 66 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 67 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 68 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 69 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 70 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 71 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 72 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.
73CHAPTER 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 74 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 75 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. 76 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 77 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 78 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. 79 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 80 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 81 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 82 paid £1 a week, and for the furniture, which he hired from a keeper, £1 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.’
83“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?’
84“‘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 85 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 86 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 87 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 88 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 89 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 90 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 91 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 92 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 93 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 94 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,” £21 10s.; a lord, spiritual or temporal, £10 5s. 10d.; a knight, £5; an esquire, £3 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 95 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.
96The 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 97 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 £4,632 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 98 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.
99“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.
100“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 101 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, 102 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 103 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; roués fetched their silly, girlish victims in coaches to the altar reeking of stale 104 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 105 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.
106CHAPTER 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, 107 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 108 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 109 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 110 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 111 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, 112 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 113 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 114 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 115 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 116 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 117 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 118 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 119 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.”