In Jail with Charles Dickens Part 2

"Boy: Yes, my Lord; fifteen gen'lm'n is a vaten outside, and vos avaten all day yesterday, vich they told me the night afore my trial vos a coming on.

"Court: Inquire for these witnesses.

"Here a stout beadle runs out, and vociferates for the witness at the very top of his voice; for you hear his cry grow fainter and fainter as he descends the steps into the courtyard below. After an absence of five minutes he returns, very warm and hoa.r.s.e, and informs the Court of what he knew perfectly well before--namely, that there are no such witnesses in attendance. Hereupon the boy sets up a most awful howling, screws the lower part of the palms of his hands into the corners of his eyes, and endeavors to look the picture of injured innocence. The jury at once find him 'guilty,' and his endeavors to squeeze out a tear are redoubled. The governor of the gaol then states, in reply to an inquiry from the bench, that the prisoner has been under his care twice before. This the urchin resolutely denies in some such terms as: 'S'elp me, gen'lm'n, I never vos in trouble afore--indeed, my Lord, I never vos. It's all a howen to my having a twin brother, vich has wrongfully got into trouble, and vich is so exactly like me, that no one ever knows the difference atween us.'

"This representation, like the defence, fails in producing the desired effect, and the boy is sentenced, perhaps, to seven years'

transportation. Finding it impossible to excite compa.s.sion, he gives vent to his feelings in an imprecation bearing reference to the eyes of 'old big vig,' and as he declines to take the trouble of walking from the dock, is forthwith carried out, congratulating himself on having succeeded in giving everybody as much trouble as possible."

In a similar vein, when the Artful Dodger falls into the toils ("Oliver Twist," Chapter 43) he a.s.serts himself.

"It was indeed Mr. Dawkins, who, shuffling into the office with the big coat sleeves tucked up as usual, his left hand in his pocket, and his hat in his right hand, preceded the gaoler, with a rolling gait altogether indescribable, and taking his place in the dock, requested in an audible voice to know what he was placed in 'that 'ere disgraceful situation for.'

"'Hold your tongue, will you?' said the gaoler.

"'I'm an Englishman, ain't I?' rejoined the Dodger. 'Where are my privileges?'

"'You'll get your privileges soon enough,' retorted the gaoler, 'and pepper with 'em.'

"'We'll see what the Secretary of State for the Home Affairs has got to say to the beaks, if I don't,' replied Mr. Dawkins.

"'Now then. Wot is this here business? I shall thank the madg'strates to dispose of this little affair, and not to keep me while they read the paper, for I've got an appointment with a gentleman in the city, and as I'm a man of my word and very punctual in business matters, he'll go away if I ain't there to my time, and then p'raps there won't be an action for damages against them as kept me away. Oh, no, certainly not.'

"At this point the Dodger, with a show of being very particular with a view to the proceedings to be had thereafter, desired the gaoler to communicate 'the names of them two files as was on the bench,' which so tickled the spectators, that they laughed almost as heartily as Master Bates could have done if he had heard the request.

"'Silence there,' cried the gaoler.

"'What is this?' inquired one of the magistrates.

"'A pocket-picketing case, your worship.'

"'Has the boy ever been here before?'

"'He ought to have been, a many times,' replied the gaoler. 'He has been pretty well everywhere else. I know him well, your worship.'

"'Oh, you know me, do you?' cried the Artful, making a note of the statement. 'Werry good. That's a case of deformation of character, any way.'

"Here there was another laugh, and another cry for silence.

"'Now then, where are the witnesses?' said the clerk.

"'Ah, that's right,' added the Dodger. 'Where are they? I should like to see 'em.'

"This wish was immediately gratified, for a policeman stepped forward who had seen the prisoner attempt the pocket of an unknown gentleman in the crowd, and indeed take a handkerchief therefrom, which, being a very old one, he deliberately put back again, after trying it on his own countenance. For this reason he took the Dodger into custody as soon as he could get near him, and the said Dodger being searched, had upon his person a silver snuff-box, with the owner's name engraved upon the lid. This gentleman had been discovered upon reference to the Court Guide, and being then and there present, swore that the snuff-box was his, and that he had missed it on the previous day, the moment he had disengaged himself from the crowd before referred to. He had also remarked a young gentleman in the throng, particularly active in making his way about, and that the young gentleman was the prisoner before him.

"'Have you anything to ask this witness, boy?' said the magistrate.

"'I wouldn't abase myself by descending to hold no conversation with him,' replied the Dodger.

"'Have you anything to say at all?'

"'Do you hear his worship ask if you've anything to say?' inquired the gaoler, nudging the silent Dodger with his elbow.

"'I beg your pardon,' said the Dodger, looking up with an air of abstraction.

"'Did you mean to say anything, you young shaver?'

"'No,' replied the Dodger, 'not here, for this ain't the shop for justice; besides which, my attorney is a breakfasting this morning with the Wice-President of the House of Commons; but I shall have something to say elsewhere, and so will he, and so will a wery numerous and 'spectable circle of acquaintances as'll make them beaks wish they'd never been born, or that they'd got their footman to hang 'em up to their own hat-pegs afore they let 'em come out this morning to try it upon me. I'll----'

"'There. He's fully committed,' interposed the clerk. 'Take him away.'

"'Oh, ah. I'll come on,' replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the palm of his hand. 'Ah (to the bench) it's no use your looking frightened; I won't show you no mercy, not a ha'porth of it. You'll pay for this, my fine fellers. I wouldn't be you for something; I wouldn't go free now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask me. Here, carry me off to prison. Take me away.'

"With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by the collar, threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a parliamentary business of it, and then grinning in the officer's face with glee and self approval."

To such scholars as these, all the schools that could be crowded into Newgate would be of no avail. Their biographies are summed up by Magwitch, in "Great Expectations," who, blandly admitting to have been brought up to be "a warmint," says:

"'In gaol and out of gaol, in gaol and out of gaol, in gaol and out of gaol. That's my life. I've been done everything to, pretty well--except hanged. I've been locked up as much as a silver tea-kettle. I've been carted here and carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town. I've no more notion where I was born than you have, if so much. I first became aware of myself down in Ess.e.x, a-thieving turnips for a living. Summun had run away from me--a man, a tinker--and he'd took the fire with him and left me very cold.

"'I knowed my name to be Magwitch, christened Abel. How did I know it?

Much as I knowed the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought that it was all lies together, only, as the birds' names come out true, I suppose mine did.

"'So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but what caught fright at him, and either drove him off or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg'larly growed up took up.'"

One of the most curious episodes of Newgate is connected with the hanging of the Rev. W. Dodd, for forgery, on Friday, June 6, 1777. The clerical malefactor preached his own funeral sermon in the chapel of the prison before he was led out to die, the text being from Acts XV, 23.

The theatre of this remarkable valedictory went up in the smoke of the Gordon Riots, but there is a chapel in the reconstructed jail: "situated," says Boz, "at the back of the governor's house; the latter having no windows looking into the interior of the prison. Whether the a.s.sociations connected with the place--the knowledge that here a portion of the burial is, on some dreadful occasions, performed over the quick and not over the dead--cast over it a still more gloomy and sombre air than art has imparted to it, we know not, but its appearance is very striking. The meanness of its appointments--the bare scanty pulpit, with the paltry painted pillars on either side--the women's gallery with its great heavy curtains--the men's with its unpainted benches and dingy front--the tottering little table at the altar, with the commandments on the wall above it, scarcely legible through lack of paint, and dust and damp--so unlike the velvet and gilding, the marble and the wood of a modern church--are strange and striking. There is one object, too, which rivets the attention and fascinates the gaze, and from which we may turn horror-stricken in vain, for the recollection of it will haunt us waking and sleeping for a long time afterward. Immediately below the reading desk, on the floor of the chapel, and forming the most conspicuous object in the little area, is the 'condemned pew': A huge black pen in which the wretched people, who are singled out for death, are placed on the last Sunday preceding their execution, in sight of all their fellow prisoners, from many of whom they may have been separated but a week before, to hear prayers for their own souls, to join in the responses of their own burial service, and to listen to an address warning their recent companions to take example by their own fate and urging themselves, while there is yet time--nearly four-and-twenty hours--to 'turn and flee from the wrath to come.' At one time--and at no distant period either--the coffins of the men about to be executed, were placed in that pew, upon the seat by their side, during the whole service." The chapel has been rearranged since the time in which Boz wrote, and the ghastliest part of its show done away with.

In the condemned ward Boz found "five-and-twenty or thirty prisoners, all under sentence of death, awaiting the result of the recorder's report--men of all ages and appearances, from a hardened old offender with swarthy face and grizzly beard of three days' growth, to a handsome boy not fourteen years old, and of singularly youthful appearance even for that age, who had been condemned for burglary." It must be remembered that they hanged men for all sorts of offenses in England then, which made the population of the condemned ward abundant around sessions time, when the trials were on. The death penalty was as common then as it is now rare in its infliction. "The room was large, airy and clean. One or two decently dressed men were brooding with a dejected air over the fire; several little groups of two or three had been engaged in conversation at the upper end of the room, or in the windows; and the remainder were crowded around a young man seated at a table, who appeared to be engaged in teaching the younger ones to write. On the table lay a Testament, but there were no tokens of its having been in recent use. In the press-room below were the men, the nature of whose offense rendered it necessary to separate them, even from their companions in guilt. It is a long sombre room, with two windows sunk in the stone wall, and here the wretched men are pinioned on the mornings of their execution, before moving toward the scaffold."

"A few paces up the yard," he goes on, "and forming a continuation of the building, lie the condemned cells. The entrance is by a narrow and obscure staircase, leading to a dark pa.s.sage, in which a charcoal stove casts a lurid light over the objects in its immediate vicinity, and diffuses something like a warmth around. Prior to the recorder's report being made, all the prisoners under the sentence of death are removed from the day room at five o'clock in the afternoon, and locked up in these cells, where they are allowed a candle until ten o'clock; and here they remain until seven the next morning. When the warrant for the prisoner's execution arrives, he is removed to the cells, and confined in one of them until he leaves it for the scaffold. He is at liberty to walk in the yard; but both in the walks and in his cell, he is constantly attended by a turnkey, who never leaves him on any pretence."

The cell was "a stone dungeon eight feet long by six feet wide, with a bench at the upper end, under which were a common rug, a Bible and a prayer-book. An iron candle-stick was fixed into the wall at the side; and a small high window at the back admitted as much air and light as could struggle in between a double row of heavy, crossed iron bars." It was in one of these dens ("Oliver Twist," Chapter 52) that f.a.gin 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 n.o.body there to speak to him; but, as he pa.s.sed, the prisoners fell back to render him more visible to the people who were clinging to the bars; and they a.s.sailed 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 pa.s.sage 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 antic.i.p.ating the law; this ceremony performed, they led him to one of the condemned cells, and left him there--alone.

"He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which served for a seat and bedstead; and casting his bloodshot eyes upon the ground, tried to collect his thoughts. After a while, he began to remember a few disjointed fragments of what the judge had said; though it seemed to him, at the time, that he could not hear a word. These gradually fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more; so that in a little time he had the whole almost as it was delivered. To be hanged by the neck, till he was dead--that was the end. To be hanged by the neck till he was dead.

"As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had known who had died upon the scaffold; some of them through his means.

They rose up, in such quick succession, that he could hardly count them. He had seen some of them die--and had joked, too, because they died with prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop went down; and how suddenly they changed from strong and vigorous men to dangling heaps of clothes.

"Some of them might have inhabited that very cell--sat upon that very spot. It was very dark; why didn't they bring a light? The cell had been built for many years. Scores of men must have pa.s.sed their last hours there. It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead bodies--the cap, the noose, the pinioned arms, the faces that he knew, even beneath that hideous veil. Light--Light.

"At length, when his hands were raw with beating against the heavy door and walls, two men appeared: one bearing a candle, which he thrust into an iron candle-stick fixed against the wall; the other dragging a mattress on which to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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.