In Jail with Charles Dickens Part 3

"Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sed, 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 cl.u.s.ters 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.

"'f.a.gin,' said the gaoler.

"'That's me,' cried the Jew, falling, instantly into the att.i.tude of listening he a.s.sumed 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. f.a.gin, f.a.gin, 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 d.i.c.kens'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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sed. 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 a.s.surance 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 ent.i.tled 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 pa.s.s out and draw in a wooden box, in which the charitably inclined might drop an obolus as they pa.s.sed 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 d.i.c.kens, 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 cla.s.s 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 ent.i.tled to a share of some small quant.i.ties 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 dest.i.tute condition of these unhappy persons remains the same. We no longer suffer them to appeal at the prison gates to the charity and compa.s.sion of the pa.s.sers-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 st.u.r.dy 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 pa.s.ses 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 munic.i.p.al 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 pa.s.sengers 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 sc.u.m, 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 gla.s.s, 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 a.s.sembled 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 pa.s.sed 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 s.p.a.ce as to cram within it the greatest possible number of persons.

To this end, each floor was traversed by a single hallway or pa.s.sage, "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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sage.

As to Bartholomew Fair, let d.i.c.kens 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 quant.i.ties 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 ent.i.tled 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+llings 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-cla.s.s 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 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.'

"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 sc.r.a.ps of meat, and articles of wearing apparel, mutilated crockery, and bellows without nozzles, and toasting-forks without p.r.o.ngs, 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.