SEVEN
Several thieves and street robbers confessed in Newgate that they raised their courage at the playhouse by the songs of their hero Macheath, before they sallied forth in their desperate nocturnal exploits
(A disapproving comment on the effect on the criminal community of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, 1728)
For the last fourteen days, so salutary has the impression of this butchery been upon me, I have had the man’s face continually before my eyes; I can see Mr Ketch at this moment, with an easy air, taking his rope from his pocket
(William Makepeace Thackeray’s account of Going to
See a Man Hanged, 1840)
Everything told of life and animation but one dark cluster of objects in the centre of all – the black stage, the cross beam, the rope and all the hideous apparatus of death.
(Charles Dickens describes Oliver Twist’s departure from Newgate after visiting Fagin in the condemned cell)
Newgate has spawned its own literary heritage, a testimony to the hold that the notorious gaol exerted on the literary imagination. A century after the building was demolished the Newgate Novel still enjoyed the unusual distinction of its own entry in the Oxford Companion to English Literature.1 Much of its influence on subsequent literature may be traced back to the collection of works loosely described as The Newgate Calendar. The literary merit of these works is debatable, as is their accuracy but their influence may clearly be recognised in the works of writers and artists as distinguished and diverse as Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, John Gay and William Hogarth, as well as less well-known writers such as Harrison Ainsworth, William Godwin and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It was the source of crude morality tales as well as featuring in major works like Barnaby Rudge, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations.
THE NEWGATE CALENDAR
The original Newgate Calendar was a document compiled each month by the keeper of the gaol which recorded the names of those entering the gaol each month: in effect a gaol register. However the notoriety of Newgate was such that the title also became attached to accounts of the trials and misdeeds of the inmates, or indeed to others whose connections with Newgate itself were tenuous or non-existent. Some reference to such accounts has been made in previous pages, including the Memoirs of the Right Villainous John Hall.2 They were privately produced by enterprising publishers with an eye to profiting from sensational literature. The first account to refer to a calendar was published in about 1705 under the title The Tyburn Calendar or Malefactors Bloody Register. The others that followed over the next two centuries were given similar titles, their publishers showing no wish to understate their contents. In 1719 Captain Alexander Smith published in the Newgate series an account of the Most Notorious Highwaymen and in the years that followed the reading public was able to buy Villainy Displayed in all its Branches (1720); Plunders of the Most Noted Pirates Interspersed with Several Remarkable Trials of the most Notorious Malefactors (1734); and in 1780Accounts of Executions, Dying Speeches and other Curious Particulars Relating to the Most Notorious Violators of the Laws of their Country who have Suffered Death. Many versions of the work amounted to morality tales. A stern warning of the consequences of criminality would preface the volume and most offenders were presented as inadequate rather than heroic, though exceptions were made for celebrities such as Jack Sheppard and villains like Jonathan Wild.3 The typical subject was idle and feckless, sometimes led astray by others and guilty of stealing items or money of little value before being caught. Murders often arose from robberies which went wrong, but the criminal was always caught and almost always executed.
In the 1820s two lawyers, Andrew Knapp and William Baldwin, published four edited volumes entitled The Newgate Calendar Comprising Interesting Memoirs of the Most Notorious Characters and they sold so well that, two years later, they published six volumes of The New Newgate Calendar. Young writers who were struggling to become established took on the work of compiling these titles, one of them being George Borrow (1803–81), the son of an army recruiting officer. He was born at East Dereham, Norfolk, and spent much of his childhood sharing his father’s nomadic existence, moving from place to place as his father sought out candidates for the king’s shilling. He was educated first in Norwich and later in Edinburgh and was briefly articled to a solicitor, but the settled life did not suit him and he continued his wanderings on the Continent, visiting France, Germany, Spain, Russia and Portugal, acquiring a knowledge of many foreign languages including that of gypsies for whom his wandering life gave him an affinity. He published a dictionary of the Romany language and earned his living partly from translating works such as the Bible from English into other languages. He contributed to The New Newgate Calendar in 1825, though in his fanciful, semi-autobiographical work Lavengro, published in 1851, he gave an exaggerated account of his role in the compilation of this massive work. He described a meeting with a publisher in which the latter offered him £50 for a compilation of Newgate lives and trials, to comprise six volumes of at least 1,000 pages each. Hardly a generous offer, even for the early nineteenth century, though later in the same work he claimed to have completed the task and to have enjoyed it more than any of his other literary works.
Most of the accounts of crimes, trials and confessions included in the various versions of the calendar were very short, amounting to two or three pages of the most alarming facts. Longer accounts were reserved for criminals who were particularly infamous or who had carried out especially gruesome crimes. Thus one edition of the work, The Complete Newgate Calendar, allowed Jack Sheppard fourteen pages while the less notorious Elizabeth Brownrigg had five pages devoted to her because of the horrible cruelty she inflicted on the servant girls that had been sent to her care by the Foundling Hospital. The compiler recorded with satisfaction that Brownrigg’s corpse was sent to Surgeons’ Hall for dissection.4 Many versions of The Newgate Calendar did not feel obliged to confine their accounts to crimes which had any connection with the prison, the main criterion for inclusion being that the events described should be sensational. Thus the same edition includes the tale of Dick Turpin, who was executed at York, while another is that of the unfortunate Jonathan Bradford, who was ‘executed at Oxford for a murder he had contemplated but did not commit’. Margaret Dixon is included, having been hanged at Edinburgh in 1728 for supposedly murdering her child (a crime she firmly denied), but when the coffin lid was seen to move she was revived by those of the mourners who had not fled in terror. A few days later she remarried her husband according to the compiler of this version of the Calendar. As far as is known this lady never set foot outside Scotland. Sawney Beane, another Scot who never went near Newgate, was included because he was ‘an incredible monster who, with his wife, lived by murder and cannibalism in a cave’ and was executed in Leith in the reign of James I.
The fact that multi-volume works of this kind could sell in sufficient quantities to reward their publishers at a time when only a small proportion of the population could read invites comparison with the popular press of the twenty-first century. However, the sales of this version of The Newgate Calendar were far outstripped by those of individual trials, especially when the notoriety of the crime was followed by the confession and death of the condemned. The pre-eminent practitioner of this branch of sensational literature was the printer James Catnach (1792–1841). He was born in Alnwick, Northumberland, and inherited a printing business from his father, also called James. It was based in Monmouth Court in the notorious St Giles district of London, which was the heart of London’s criminal community and close to the route which criminals had taken on their way to execution at Tyburn. His publications were illustrated with crude woodcuts to attract the semi-literate and included a twopenny broadsheet, Life in London; Or the Sprees of Tom and Jerry, the first reference to this notable pair of names. However, his greatest sales were for accounts of sensational trials such as that of Maria Marten and the Murder in the Old Red Barn, which was itself recorded in The Newgate Calendar, though the trial and execution of the murderer, William Corder, took place close to the scene of his crime at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Some accounts suggested that in 1828 Catnach sold a million copies of his broadsheet on this notorious crime, which was soon turned into one of the most popular of Victorian melodramas.
Other writers traded on the name of Newgate simply by including it the titles of works which implied improbable claims. An example of this, written as late as 1873 when the gaol was in its final years, was How to Get Out of Newgate by One who has Done It and Can Do It Again. The writer recommends that the escaper should bribe the governor, ply the gaolers with brandy and distract them with magic lantern slides.5 Newgate, or lurid accounts of It, thus generated one of the earliest forms of really popular literature, a fact which helps to explain its influence on later more celebrated writers.
THE BEGGAR’S OPERA
One of the most famous literary works based on the affairs of Newgate was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which was revived in 1928 by the German Marxist writer Bertold Brecht as The Threepenny Opera. John Gay (1685–1732) was born in Barnstaple, Devon, and sent to London as an apprentice to a silk merchant, but was soon drawn to the world of literature. He demonstrated his familiarity with London low life in 1712 by his essay entitled An Argument Proving that the Present Mohocks and Hawkubites are the Gog and Magog of Revelation. The Mohocks and Hawkubites were street ruffians of the early eighteenth century. Gay earned a modest living as secretary to members of the aristocracy and as a writer of verses, which drew him into the circle of writers such as Richard Steele, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. It was Swift who suggested to him that a tale based upon ‘a Newgate pastoral, among the whores and thieves there’ would find a ready market, as a result of which The Beggar’s Opera was produced in 1728. The principal character, Peachum, who is both a receiver of stolen goods and an informant, is clearly based upon Jonathan Wild who had exercised both these professions and been hanged at Tyburn three years before the musical play was produced, at enormous profit to Gay and to the producer John Rich. The production was said to have made Gay rich and Rich gay. Its memorable characters included Captain Macheath, the gallant highwayman, Lucy Lockit, the Newgate gaoler’s pretty daughter, and Polly Peachum, Lucy’s rival in love for the affections of Macheath and so popular that Gay wrote a sequel for her simply called Polly. The music was based upon popular ballads whose tunes would have been familiar to the large audiences which attended it at the New Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. At the end of the play Macheath is reprieved from the condemned cell at Newgate.
The sympathetic portrayal of Macheath and his escape from execution meant that The Beggar’s Opera was not a tale of virtue rewarded, a feature which ensured that it became an object of controversy as a possible source of moral decay. Macheath was perceived as gallant and sympathetic despite his criminal activities, whereas the normal formula for Newgate tales was that criminals should be condemned and punished. One contemporary writer recorded, with dismay, that ‘several thieves and street robbers confessed in Newgate that they raised their courage at the playhouse by the songs of their hero Macheath, before they sallied forth in their desperate nocturnal exploits’ thereby suggesting that crime was actually being promoted by the entertainment.6 Further offence was caused to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, whose politics and private life were both satirised in the drama. Walpole retaliated by depriving Gay of a comfortable apartment he occupied in Whitehall as holder of the sinecure post of Commissioner of Lotteries. When Gay’s friend Henry Fielding continued the attack on Walpole the enraged Prime Minister passed the Theatrical Licensing Act, which made the Lord Chamberlain responsible for issuing licences to theatres and for licensing plays before they could be staged. The office survived until 1968 but its immediate effect was to end Fielding’s career as a playwright and to precipitate a decline in English drama, an outcome that was not foreseen by these ‘Newgate’ writers.
THE NEWGATE NOVEL
Henceforth tales about Newgate would take the form of the novel, which remained free of the ministrations of the Lord Chamberlain, and the Newgate Novel became a recognised category within the genre of historical fiction: a precursor of the crime fiction of the centuries that followed. Two of Britain’s earliest novelists based their Newgate tales upon direct experience of the gaol, though from different perspectives. Reference has already been made to the short and relatively painless period that Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) spent in Newgate as a result of his satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way with Dissenters.7 The author of Robinson Crusoe drew on his experience as a prisoner there for a novel whose full title was The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders Who was born in Newgate and during a life of continued Variety for Threescore Years was Twelve Years a Whore, five Times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, lived Honest and died a Penitent. It purported to be the autobiography of the daughter of a woman who was spared the gallows because of her pregnancy and was instead transported to Virginia shortly after Moll, the daughter’s, birth. The story, which is well summarised in its prolix title, was a morality tale of an altogether superior quality to those of The Newgate Calendar itself and shows the unlikely heroine, Moll herself, as a woman in charge of her destiny in a way that was unfamiliar to eighteenth-century readers. Defoe’s description of the gaol in Moll Flanders no doubt reflects his own experience of the place:
It was impossible to describe the terror of my mind when I was first brought in; and when I looked round upon all the horrors of that dismal place, the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing and clamour, the stench and nastiness and all the dreadful afflicting things that I saw there joined to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself and a kind of entrance to it.
Defoe also produced his own potboiler account of the activities of Jonathan Wild, one of many written by authors of widely varying abilities during the centuries that followed the execution of the notorious thief-taker. The full title of Defoe’s version, like that ofMoll Flanders, could not be described as pithy and emphasises the author’s supposedly superior credentials as a reliable reporter: The Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild, not made up of Fiction and Fable but taken from his own Mouth and collected from Papers of his own Writing.
The second of these early novelists, Henry Fielding (1707–54) was acquainted with Newgate and its practices in his capacity as a magistrate at Bow Street and his horrified view of the gaol reflects Defoe’s. Fielding’s description of Newgate as ‘a prototype of hell’ and ‘the dearest place on earth’ has already been recorded. Many of the most important episodes in his novel Amelia are set in Newgate, which is relentlessly portrayed as a place of filth, brutality and corruption, many of whose inmates are innocent victims of Trading Justices whom Fielding was endeavouring to exclude from the capital.8 The principal character, Amelia, is based upon Fielding’s much-loved wife Charlotte who, unlike Moll Flanders, is presented as an honest, loving and innocent woman who is a victim of the corrupt and powerful. Her charming, brave but rather helpless husband William is imprisoned in Newgate on a false charge, but it is also while in Newgate that Amelia is shown to have been defrauded of her inheritance by a dishonest lawyer who is duly taken to the prison for execution while Amelia, her fortune restored, retires to a prosperous life in the country far from the corrupt metropolis: another morality tale.
OPPRESSED INNOCENCE
William Godwin (1756–1836) is better remembered for his family life than for his writings, though the latter were very influential during his lifetime. He was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, the son of a Presbyterian minister and he himself followed that profession for some years with excursions into a number of unorthodox religious views, which caused anxiety to his teachers and fellow ministers. He eventually left the ministry and turned to radical politics, inspired by a belief that humans were susceptible to rational argument; that such reasoning would promote feelings of benevolence; and that as a result such persons could live harmoniously without the need for laws. In March 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft, the early advocate of women’s rights and author ofA Vindication of the Rights of Women published in 1790. Godwin appears to have married Mary because she was pregnant, her daughter being born in September 1797. The mother died shortly after the birth and the daughter went on to become Mary Shelley, wife of the poet, and author of Frankenstein.
Godwin’s Newgate Novel is Caleb Williams: Or Things as They Are, an early novel of crime and detection and a powerful satire on the oppression of the honest and weak by the vicious and strong. The text includes numerous references to The Newgate Calendar and to John Howard’s State of the Prisons in England and Wales.9 The principal character, Caleb Williams, is secretary to Squire Falkland, a man of charm and goodwill who has himself been corrupted by his tyrannical neighbour Squire Tyrrel. Having killed Tyrrel in a quarrel the previously benevolent Falkland escapes justice by falsely incriminating an innocent tenant and his son. Caleb Williams learns of Falkland’s guilt but loyalty to his master prevents him from making his suspicions known. Instead of showing gratitude the shameless Falkland persecutes Williams but is eventually driven to relent by Williams’s honesty and innocence. This happy outcome was excluded from the original, much darker version which ended with a demented Williams in gaol. The theme of oppressed innocence is thus mitigated at the end, but William Hazlitt underlined the power of the characterisation when he wrote that ‘no-one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through’.
HARRISON AINSWORTH AND EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–82) carried the Newgate Novel a step further with historical fiction explicitly based on characters and events from the prison. He was the son of a lawyer who had an interest in legal and criminal history which he imparted to his son whose first success, Rookwood, published in 1834, created the entirely fictional legend of Dick Turpin’s ride to York. He followed this with the very successful Jack Sheppard (1839) in which he narrates the exploits of three real Newgate characters: Jack Sheppard, Jonathan Wild and Sheppard’s collaborator ‘Blueskin’. To these he adds fictional characters such as the virtuous Darrell whose path deviates from that of Sheppard as Darrell chooses a life of work while Sheppard takes to crime. The reader is encouraged to harbour some feelings of sympathy for Sheppard as he is pursued by the wicked and relentless thief-taker Wild, but Sheppard’s life of crime leads to the gallows, as convention required, while justice is further served by the hanging of the more vicious and corrupt Wild.
Ainsworth’s much more famous contemporary was Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) best known for his historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and, during his lifetime, for his relentless pursuit by his troublesome wife Rosina, also a writer. She dedicated her life after their estrangement to embarrassing him by writing libellous novels and abusing him at public meetings when he was campaigning as a Member of Parliament. His Newgate Novels included Paul Clifford and Eugene Aram, the latter based on a real case of murder, both novels being characterised by criminals who engage the sympathy of the reader. Both of them were very successful in Bulwer-Lytton’s lifetime and the first, Paul Clifford, influenced a novelist of more enduring stature.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
William Thackeray (1811–63) was born in Calcutta, the son of an employee of the East India Company who died when he was three years old. Educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, he left the latter without a degree, dabbled in the law and soon drifted into the world of journalism, scratching a modest living working for The Times, the Morning Chronicle and Fraser’s Magazine. Misgivings about the penal code prompted in him deep misgivings about what he regarded as the glamorous depiction of crime by writers such as Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, both of whom he satirised in Fraser’s Magazine. It was in reaction to such works that he wrote Catherine, also serialised in Fraser’s Magazine in 1839–40 and narrated under the pseudonym ‘Ikey Solomons Junior’.
Thackeray took the story of Catherine Hayes from a particularly lurid version of The Malefactors’ Bloody Register published in the 1770s. Catherine had been burned at the stake in 1726 for the murder of her husband.10 Thackeray’s intention, in choosing such an unsympathetic subject and such a gruesome fate, was to demonstrate the grim and squalid nature of crime in contrast to the sympathetic and even heroic representations of Ainsworth and Bulwer-Lytton. This noble purpose was set out in a preface to the published book which took the form of an ‘advertisement’ and explained:
The story of Catherine which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine in 1839–40 was written by Mr Thackeray under the name of Ikey Solomons Junior to counteract the injurious influence of some popular fictions of that day, which made heroes of highwaymen and burglars and created a false sympathy for the vicious and criminal. With this purpose the author chose for the subject of his story a woman named Catherine Hayes who was burned at Tyburn in 1726, in very revolting circumstances. Mr Thackeray’s aim obviously was to describe the career of this wretched woman and her associates with such fidelity to truth as to exhibit the danger and folly of investing such persons with heroic and romantic qualities.
To strengthen his anti-Newgate arguments Thackeray drew in features of other gruesome crimes, including the activities of two grave-robbers who, unable to find suitable candidates for the dissection tables from their customary sources, created their own corpse by drugging and drowning a young Italian boy whom they had abducted from the streets of London. One of the abductors was a butcher whose special skill was gouging teeth from the gums of corpses with a bradawl and the site of the murder, Nova Scotia Gardens in Bethnal Green, was a popular place for voyeurs to visit. The crime was a cause célèbre when Thackeray wrote his novel and should have added to the feelings of revulsion among his readers.11
The novel was a great popular success, though not in the way that Thackeray had intended. The strong characterisation of the principal character, Catherine herself, and of Catherine’s seducer (a fictional character), evoked the sympathies of the readers in a way that Thackeray had not intended. The ironies of the work were lost upon the readers, to Thackeray’s annoyance, though it did succeed in stirring up the so-called ‘Newgate controversy’ in the weekly magazines. John Forster, friend, colleague and biographer of Dickens, led the arguments against the romanticising of crime in Newgate Novels and Thackeray followed up with indignant articles in Punch. The correspondence ran for weeks
The controversy surrounding Newgate Novels was sharpened when it was argued in the trial of the valet François Courvoisier that he had read Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard before murdering his master Lord William Russell. The implication was that the novel had prompted the crime, an allegation echoed in similar charges two centuries later in controversies over violent and pornographic forms of entertainment. It was in Fraser’s Magazine that Thackeray recorded his reactions to the hanging of Courvoisier under the title ‘On Going to See a Man Hanged’.12 The event made a lasting impression on Thackeray who wrote about the experience a fortnight later:
For the last fourteen days, so salutary has the impression of this butchery been upon me, I have had the man’s face continually before my eyes; I can see Mr Ketch at this moment, with an easy air, taking his rope from his pocket; I feel myself shamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity that took me to that brutal sight; and I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us, and to cleanse our land of blood.13
In the same crowd was an even more celebrated writer upon whom the events of the day made an equally strong impression.
CHARLES DICKENS AND NEWGATE NOVELS
Charles Dickens (1812–70), who named his eldest son after his friend and fellow novelist Lytton, experienced the judicial and prison systems early in life in most distressing circumstances. His father, John Dickens, an improvident clerk in the navy pay office, managed his finances in the ways later adopted by Wilkins Micawber, in David Copperfield. Consequently, in 1824 he was committed for debt to the Marshalsea prison in Southwark, a humiliation which hung upon the 12-year-old Charles for the rest of his life. The ordeal was made more bitter by the fact that his father’s incarceration coincided with Charles’s period of employment in a blacking factory owned by a friend of the family near Charing Cross. Here the boy worked twelve hours a day, lodging first in Camden Town and then in Southwark close to the Marshalsea where the rest of the family resided until John Dickens discharged his debt by means of a legacy from his mother.
Many of Dickens’s most memorable characters spend time in a debtors’ prison. One of his earliest characters, Samuel Pickwick, spends an uncomfortable time in the Fleet prison for debt as a result of the ludicrous Bardell vs Pickwick case in which the innocent Pickwick is sued for breach of promise by his landlady. Pickwick Papers was published in 1837 but twenty years later Dickens returned to the theme in Little Dorritt. The whole Dorritt family lives in the Marshalsea, as Dickens’s father had done, the patriarch of the family and the gaol’s longest-serving inmate being William Dorritt (Old Dorritt), who is the victim of a contract with the Circumlocution Office, an unflattering portrait of a government department. Amy, the ‘Little Dorritt’ of the title, is born in the Marshalsea and when her father is released after twenty-three years he is unable to adjust to the ways of the world despite inheriting a fortune.
DICKENS AND THE PENAL SYSTEM
Following the release of the family from the Marshalsea, Charles was first articled as a clerk to a solicitor and learned shorthand, using this attribute first to become a Parliamentary reporter and later to enter the profession of journalist, making contributions to theMorning Chronicle under the pseudonym Boz. His family’s experience of prison led Dickens to take an interest both in prison regimes and in the death penalty, an interest reflected in his journalism as well as his great works of fiction. One of his earliest forays as a journalist was recorded in Sketches by Boz and concerned a visit to Newgate in 1836.14 He recorded the casts of the heads of notorious prisoners and the irons allegedly worn by Jack Sheppard together with the yard set aside for ‘prisoners of the more respectable class’. He then made his way to the chapel and described:
The condemned pew; a huge black pen in which the wretched people who are singled out for death are placed on the Sunday preceding their execution, to hear prayers for their own souls, to join in the responses of their own burial service and to listen to an address urging themselves, while there is yet time to ‘turn and flee from the wrath to come’.
He observed almost thirty awaiting execution, from a grizzled old man to a boy of under 14 (though it was at this stage normal for such young offenders to have their death sentences commuted). Dickens also saw fourteen infant pickpockets ‘drawn up in line for our inspection – not one redeeming feature among them – not a glance of honesty, not a wink expressive of anything but the gallows or the hulks’.
In his American Notes written in 1842, he recorded a visit to a prison in Philadelphia.15 He took the opportunity to judge and condemn the Solitary System which he witnessed there.16 In a long account of his visit to the Eastern Penitentiary in that city he wrote:
The system here is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong … I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers.
He described the process by which each prisoner was compelled to wear a black hood to prevent any visual contact with other prisoners. Apart from an occasional glimpse of his gaolers ‘he never looks upon a human countenance or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive, to be dug out in the slow round of years and in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair’. One prisoner was allowed to keep rabbits but, despite this concession, he looked ‘as wan and unearthly as if he had been summoned from the grave’. Another, who had endured eleven years of this solitary confinement, would say nothing, but would ‘stare at his hands and pick the flesh upon his fingers’. Upon release some of the prisoners were so disorientated that they could not hold the pen steadily with which to sign the discharge book and, upon being let through the prison gate into the daylight, could only lean against the prison wall, unsure of where to go or what to do. Some of the prisoners had become deaf. He also visited prisons in Boston, Massachusetts and Maryland. It is not hard to make the connection between these disorientated prisoners and the inability of Old Dorritt to cope with life outside the Marshalsea.
Dickens’s comments caused great offence to his American hosts, but his visits to English and American gaols, combined with his own family’s experience of the Marshalsea, helped to form his ambivalent attitude towards the justice system, imprisonment, capital punishment and the criminal classes. His works of fiction are littered with references which reflect an attitude composed of indignation at injustice, compassion for its victims and loathing for the incorrigible. Bleak House (1852–3) satirises the corruption and delays of the Court of Chancery in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in which corrupt lawyers profit from the law’s delay. The long shadow of the Bastille hangs over the character of Dr Manette after his unjust incarceration in A Tale of Two Cities.
Dickens’s attitude to criminal behaviour and penal reform was ambivalent. On one occasion he was reported as having marched a young woman to a police station for swearing in public17 and he frequently emphasised the need for prisoners to undertake hard, futile labour as an antidote to crime. In Great Expectations he makes some sarcastic comments on prison conditions when Pip, the principal character of the story, visits Newgate with the good-hearted clerk Wemmick to interview clients of Wemmick’s master, Jaggers. Pip noted that:
At that time gaols were much neglected and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on all public wrongdoing was still far off. So, felons were not lodged and fed better than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers) and seldom set fire to their prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavour of their soup.18
The reference to the soup concerned an incident at Chatham prison in February, 1861, as Dickens was writing this instalment, when some prisoners had set fire to the gaol in protest against the quality of their food. Reference has already been made to public resentment at the ‘fattening house’ at Millbank gaol after the diet was improved in the 1820s and from Dickens’s reference to soldiers and paupers we may judge that he had some sympathy for the critics of the reformers.19 By the time that Dickens came to write his favourite book, the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield, he was still sufficiently interested in prison regimes to send David and his friend Tom Traddles to investigate the separate system where David comments on the prison diet:20
I wondered whether it occurred to anybody that there was a striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality and the dinners, not to say of paupers but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest working community, of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined half so well.
DICKENS AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
His attitude towards capital punishment was particularly complex. He was influenced by the arguments of a clergyman, Henry Christmas, that the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, did not support the practice, a belief that was strengthened by his attendance at the execution of Courvoisier in July 1840, the occasion also witnessed by Thackeray and described in Fraser’s Magazine as ‘Going to See a Man Hanged’.21 Five years after the Courvoisier execution he saw a beheading in Rome, following which he wrote a series of letters to the Daily News in February and March 184622 in which he argued for ‘the total abolition of the Punishment of Death, as a general principle, for the advantage of society, for the prevention of crime and without the least reference to, or tenderness for any individual malefactor whatever’. Dickens thought that public executions might actually promote crime because of their impact on the criminally inclined, arguing that:
Present this black idea of violence to a bad mind contemplating violence; hold up before a man remotely compassing the death of another person, the spectacle of his own ghastly and untimely death by man’s hands; and out of the depths of his own nature you shall assuredly raise up that which lures and tempts him on.
Three years later, in 1849, Dickens again attended a public execution, that of Frederick and Marie Manning who had murdered Marie’s lover. They were the first married couple to be executed for more than a century, a feature of the spectacle which prompted almost unprecedented interest. A grandstand was erected by some entrepreneurs and Dickens paid two guineas, a substantial sum, to be sure of a good view from a nearby roof. This prompted further letters from him, on this occasion to The Times, but Dickens was no longer advocating outright abolition. Rather, he expressed the hope that ‘the Government might be induced to give its support to a measure making the infliction of capital punishment a private solemnity within the prison walls’.23 It is not clear whether this change of heart was caused by a belief that murderers deserved to die though without promoting an unseemly public spectacle; or whether he was simply recognising, as others did, that total abolition was a lost cause and that the ending of public executions was an acceptable half measure. He later declined to attend a meeting calling for the complete abolition of capital punishment.24
DICKENS’S NEWGATE FICTION
In his fiction Dickens resolved some of his feelings about the system which Newgate represented by distinguishing between the incorruptible, the incorrigible and those who fell somewhere between these two categories. Thus in Oliver Twist (1838) Fagin attempts to teach Oliver to be a thief by encouraging Oliver to pick Fagin’s own pockets and by telling him amusing stories about Fagin’s early criminal exploits. The corruption of Oliver will deprive him of his inheritance and earn Fagin a reward, but Oliver’s character is such that Fagin completely fails to draw Oliver into a life of crime.25 Bill Sikes, on the other hand, and Fagin himself are incorrigible villains for whom no penalty is too harsh. Sikes comes to a horrible end, hanging himself by accident as he tries to escape. Fagin is tried at the Old Bailey, next to Newgate, where the spectators in the public gallery give ‘looks expressive of abhorrence’ towards Fagin as he stands in the dock and when the death sentence is pronounced by the judge he hears ‘a peal of joy from the populace outside, greeting the news that he would die on Monday’.26
Fagin’s ordeal in the condemned cell is one of Dickens’s darkest passages. Oliver visits his former tormentor within ‘those dreadful walls of Newgate’ and sees his ‘face retaining no human expression but rage and terror’. Fagin is angry and indignant rather than repentant and refuses Oliver’s plea to say a prayer with him. As he leaves the gaol, Oliver sees the world outside the gates where ‘everything told of life and animation but one dark cluster of objects in the centre of all – the black stage, the cross beam, the rope and all the hideous apparatus of death’. The bells of the neighbouring church clocks (St Sepulchre’s among them) signal Fagin’s approaching death. For Fagin there is no hope just as for Oliver there is no possibility of corruption, while some of the characters surrounding Fagin learn from their experiences and adopt honest means of earning a living – one of them becoming a police informer. The work was published in 1838 and in a preface to the third edition, in 1841, Dickens dissociated it from the earlier Newgate Novels and insisted that it did not glamorise crime.
Other prisoners are treated with more sympathy by Dickens. Thus in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) the saintly errand boy Kit Nubbles, who is devoted to Little Nell, is framed by the evil dwarf Quilp and committed to prison for a while. However, Dickens was clearly uneasy with the idea of the honest Kit suffering the same discomforts as the evil Fagin. Kit is ‘lodged, like some few others in the jail, apart from the masses of prisoners because he was not supposed to be utterly depraved and irreclaimable and had never occupied apartments in that mansion before’. Whether these reassurances were designed to comfort the reader or Dickens himself is not clear: probably both. In David Copperfield even the profoundly unsympathetic character Uriah Heep is shown to be a model prisoner following his unmasking by Micawber, though whether this is evidence of his redemptive qualities or of his well-known capacity for dissimulation is not quite clear.
BARNABY RUDGE
Of all Dickens’s novels Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty is the novel most strongly associated with Newgate. It was published both in serial form, and as a single volume, in 1841. It includes the most vivid account of the Gordon Riots of 1780, which had destroyed much of London including the recently rebuilt Newgate prison27, but the gaol itself and the punitive system it represents cast longer shadows over some of the principal characters in the narrative. Moreover, many passages reflect Dickens’s experiences of attending public executions. Barnaby Rudge himself, the simpleton after whom the book is named, is inveigled into taking part in the riots by being allowed to carry a silken flag in the ranks of the rioters. He is sent to Newgate where he is the subject of one of the most famous of Phiz’s illustrations, fettered and bewildered in a dark cell.
Barnaby is rescued from Newgate by the rioters and, recaptured, is condemned to death, but reprieved at the eleventh hour. Further references to Newgate and the penal system are made in the fate of Hugh the ostler, who is the son of one of the principal villains of the story. Hugh’s mother, a gypsy, had been hanged at Tyburn and Hugh himself is hanged outside Newgate after the riots, his demeanour as he approaches the scaffold echoing the defiance of some of those executed earlier:
Upon these human shambles I, who never raised a hand in prayer till now, call down the wrath of God! On that black tree, of which I am the ripened fruit, I do invoke the curse of all its victims past, and present and to come. The behaviour of the crowd reflects the earlier
observations that Dickens and others had recorded when attending Newgate executions themselves. Thus the crowd swells with ‘every chime of St Sepulchre’s clock’ which also brings nearer the moment of execution and the traditional cry of ‘Hats off’ greets the condemned men as they emerge from the prison. Dickens, who in the preface to the book described the riots as ‘those shameful tumults [which] reflect indelible disgrace upon the time in which they occurred’ shows sympathy for those whose executions followed except for the wretched former hangman Dennis who is presented as a craven coward begging for a reprieve. Thus he writes that ‘those who suffered as rioters were for the most part the weakest, meanest and most miserable among them’ and he adds a moving description of a grey-haired man greeting and embracing his son as the boy ascends the scaffold. Perhaps he had read the account of the father accompanying his condemned son to Tyburn.28
Phiz, whose real name was Hablot Knight Browne (1815–82), was descended from French Huguenots and apprenticed to an engraver of steel plates, but had his indentures cancelled because he spent too much of his employer’s time preparing his own illustrations. In 1836 Dickens fell out with Robert Seymour, illustrator of thePosthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, and the comparatively unknown Browne took over, adopting first the pseudonym Nemo (Latin for ‘nobody’) which he soon changed to Phiz. He subsequently illustrated ten of Dickens’s novels. One of his most important qualities appears to have been the easy tolerance with which he accommodated the needs and whims of the imperious Dickens. The relationship was ended by Dickens in about 1860 after Browne had illustrated A Tale of Two Cities. Barnaby Rudge was the fruit of one of their earlier collaborations and contains the famous illustration of the hapless Barnaby in Newgate. Browne also illustrated works by the Newgate novelists Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, as well as editions of Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Despite his falling-out with Dickens he continued to work as an illustrator until his death at the age of 67 in 1882.
FINAL DAYS
Dickens died in 1870 as Newgate entered its final phase. The prison-building programme of the first half of the nineteenth century had ensured that, from 1850, Newgate had been used to hold only those prisoners awaiting trial at the Old Bailey and those awaiting execution. Its design did not lend itself to adaptation to ‘panoptic’ or other principles embraced by the reformers and the recommendations of the Gladstone Committee, already noted,29 and the replacement of the Du Cane prison regime by a more humane one ensured that the days of Newgate as a gaol were numbered. Moreover, the Old Bailey next door needed larger premises from which to conduct its grim business and the City Corporation was actively seeking ways of extending the building. The government considered offering a site for a new sessions house on the Victoria Embankment, but this idea was abandoned and in 1898 the Newgate site was sold to the City for £40,000, the money being used to extend Brixton prison. This cleared the way for the demolition of Newgate, an event which was lamented by no one. In July 1900 The Sphere published an illustrated article to mark the forthcoming destruction of Newgate, commenting, ‘This is not to be regretted, for its history is of the most unsavoury order.’ On 6 May 1902 George Woolfe became the last of over 1,100 people to be executed at Newgate, after which the remaining male inmates were sent to Pentonville while the females went to Holloway. The scaffold also went to Pentonville, where it was soon in use.
On 15 August 1902 demolition of the old gaol began, an event recorded by the Daily Mail with the words ‘the doom of the gaol was being carried out at last’. It was also noted by the Illustrated London News, though most of the emphasis in that publication was on the architectural designs for the new sessions house, the Old Bailey, and the occasion was overshadowed by the extensive coverage of the delayed coronation of Edward VII.30 A few months later, on 4 February 1903, occurred an auction of Newgate relics which was recorded in the City Press under the heading ‘The Passing of Newgate: Historic Sale of Relics’. The auction took place ‘within the gloomy precincts of crime-stricken Newgate’.31 The newspaper commended the jovial manner of the auctioneer, but noted that the 214 lots of the auction managed to raise only the modest sum of £980. Nine plaster casts of the heads of some of the most notorious former inmates were sold for only £5 and some of the furniture fetched less than its value as firewood. The equipment from the execution shed fetched only five guineas, while the flagstaff on which the black flag had been hoisted to mark an execution was sold for eleven and a half guineas to a citizen of Cape Province, South Africa. Twelve pounds ten shillings was paid for a key cupboard which, according to the auctioneer, was the very same one (or almost the very same one) as had been mentioned in Barnaby Rudge. The highest price by far was the £100 paid by Madame Tussaud’s for the great bell of Newgate, which had tolled away the hours to executions. This event was Newgate’s last rite. None mourned its passing. It is commemorated now only in the name of the street in which it once stood and in a macabre phrase of uncertain origin, which has become a simile for blackness and filth:
As black as Newgate’s knocker.