2
i
MOST EDUCATED PEOPLE have felt twinges of nostalgia for Georgian England.
We are tied to the Georgian past through artifacts that we would still like to use, given the chance. The town houses, squares, villas, gardens, paintings, silver and side tables seem to represent an “essence” of the eighteenth century, transcending “mere” politics. Since they present an uncommonly coherent image of elegance, common sense and clarity, we are apt to suppose that English society did too. But argument from design to society, like the syllogism that ascends from the particular to the general, usually goes awry. “We shall learn,” wrote one typical English exponent of this approach, “from the architecture and furniture and all other things . . . that nearly everybody in the eighteenth century looked forward to a continuation and an agreeable expansion of gracious fashions.”1
“Nearly everybody”—that, until quite recently, was the conventional picture. A passing reference to violence, dirt and gin; a nod in the direction of the scaffold; a highwayman or two, a drunken judge, and some whores for local color; but the rest is all curricles and fanlights. Modern squalor is squalid but Georgian squalor is “Hogarthian,” an art form in itself.
Yet most Englishmen and Englishwomen did not live under such roofs, sit on such chairs or eat with such forks. They did not read Johnson or Pope, for most of them could not read. Antiques say little about the English poor, that vast and as yet unorganized social mass—Samuel Johnson’s “rabble,” Edmund Burke’s “swinish multitude”—from whose discontents in the nineteenth century the English working class would shape itself. The Georgian London a modern visitor imagines was not their city. There were two such Londons, their separation symbolized by the cleavage that took place as the rich moved their residences westward from Covent Garden between 1700 and 1750, as the speculators ran up their noble squares and crescents—an absolute gulf between the new West End and the old, rotting East End of the city.
West London had grown rationally. Its streets and squares were planned; property was secured by long leases and enforced standards of building. East London had not. It was a warren of shacks, decaying tenements, and brand-new hovels run up on short leases by jerry-builders restrained by no local ordinances. Georgian residential solidity stopped at the lower fringe of the middle class. The “rookeries” of the poor formed a labyrinth speckled with picturesque names: Turnmill Street, Cow Cross, Chick Lane, Black Boy Alley, Saffron Hill, the Spittle. West of the old City of London, the worst slum areas in the mid-eighteenth century lay around Covent Garden, St. Giles, Holborn and the older parts of Westminster. To the east, they spread through Blackfriars and beyond the Tower, by the Lower Pool and Limehouse Reach: Wapping, Shadwell, Limehouse, Ratcliffe Highway, the Jewish ghettos of Stepney and White-chapel on the north side of the Thames, the brick canyons of Southwark with its seven prisons on the south bank. Their courts and alleys were dark, tangled, narrow and choked with offal. Because men had to live near their work, tenements stood cheek by jowl with slaughterhouses and tanneries. London was judged the greatest city in the world, but also the worst smelling. Sewers still ran into open drains; the largest of these, until it was finally covered in 1765, was the Fleet Ditch. Armies of rats rose from the tenement cellars to go foraging in daylight.
The living were so crowded that there was scarcely room to bury the dead. Around St. Martin’s, St. James’s and St. Giles-in-the-Fields, there were large open pits filled with the rotting cadavers of paupers whose friends could get them no better burial; they were called “Poor’s Holes” and remained a London commonplace until the 1790s.
Within the rookeries, distinctions of class were seen. Their cellars were rented at 9d. or is a week* to the most miserable tenants—ragpickers, bonegatherers or the swelling crowd of Irish casual laborers driven across St. George’s Channel by famine, rural collapse and the lure of the Big City. Thirty people might be found in a cellar. Before 1800 an artisan might expect to find a “cheap” furnished room in London for 2s. 6d. a week, and most London workers lived in such places with no rights of tenancy.
To speak of an eighteenth-century “working class” as though it were a homogeneous entity, united by class-consciousness and solidarity, is both anachronistic and abstract. It is a projection of the twentieth century onto the eighteenth.
Loyalties ran between workers in the same trade but rarely between workers as such. The variety of trades and work underwrote the complexity of this other London. It contained a huge range of occupations, and a passion for close divisions of social standing held for workers as well as for gentry. They too had their pecking orders and were bound by them. At the upper end of income and comfort, just below the independent shopkeepers, were the skilled artisans in luxury trades, regularly employed: upholsterers and joiners, watch-finishers, coach-painters or lens-grinders. At the lower end were occupations now not only lost but barely recorded: that of the “Pure-finders,” for instance, old women who collected dog-turds which they sold to tanneries for a few pence a bucket (the excrement was used as a siccative in dressing fine bookbinding leather). In between lay hundreds of occupations, seasonal or regular. None of them enjoyed any protection, since trade unions and “combinations” were instantly suppressed. There were no wage guarantees, and sweated labor was usual.
Occupational diseases ran rampant. Sawyers went blind young, their conjunctival membranes destroyed by showers of sawdust—hence the difference of status between the “top-notcher,” or man on top of the log in the sawpit, and his partner pulling down the saw below. Metalfounders who cast the slugs for Baskerville’s elegant type died paralyzed with lead poisoning, and glassblowers’ lungs collapsed from silicosis. Hairdressers were prone to lung disease through inhaling the mineral powder used to whiten wigs. The fate of tailors, unchanged until the invention of electric light, was described by one to Henry Mayhew:
It is not the black clothes that are trying to the sight—black is the steadiest of all colours to work at; white and all bright colours makes the eyes water after looking at ‘em for any long time; but of all colours scarlet, such as is used for regimentals, is the most blinding, it seems to burn the eyeballs, and makes them ache dreadful . . . everything seems all of a twitter, and to keep changing its tint. There’s more military tailors blind than any others.2
Children went to work after their sixth birthday. The Industrial Revolution did not invent child labor, but it did expand and systematize the exploitation of the very young. The reign of George III saw a rising trade in orphans and pauper children, collected from the parish workhouses of London and Birmingham, who were shipped off in thousands to the new industrial centers of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire. One London child-slave, Robert Blincoe, who was placed in the St. Pancras Workhouse in 1796 at the age of four and sent off with eighty other abandoned children to the Lambert cotton mill outside Nottingham, gave testimony to a Parliamentary committee on child labor some forty years later:
Doctors tended to side with their class allies, the factory-owners, and went on record again and again with their considered opinions that cotton lint, coal dust and phosphorus were harmless to the human lung, that fifteen hours at a machine in a room temperature of 85 degrees did not cause fatigue, that ten-year-olds could work a full night shift without risk of harm. Employers, naturally, resisted the very thought of reform. Some of them were cultivated men like Josiah Wedgwood, uncle to Charles Darwin and heir to his father’s great pottery in Staffordshire, who employed 387 people—13 under ten years old, 103 between ten and eighteen—in such work as dipping ware in a glaze partly composed of lead oxide, a deadly poison which, as he admitted, made them “very subject to disease,” though no more so than plumbers or painters. Yet “I have a strong opinion,” Wedgwood told the Peel Committee in 1816, “that, from all I know at present of manufactories in general, and certainly from all I know of my own, we had better be left alone.”4
Of all the testimony offered to the Royal Commissions on factory labor, there is perhaps none more chilling than the evidence of Joseph Badder, a children’s overseer in a Leicester mill, to the Factory Commission of 1833. It has a prophetic ring: Here, the factory-induced dystopic visions of man as automaton that would run from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) are made pitiably concrete:
I used to beat them. . . . I told them I was very sorry after I had done it, but I was forced to it. The masters expected me to do my work, and I could not do mine unless the children did theirs. Then I used to joke with them to keep up their spirits.
I have seen them fall asleep, and they have been performing their work with their hands until they were asleep, after the billy had stopped, when their work was over. I have stopped and looked at them for two minutes, going through the motions of piecening fast asleep, when there was really no work to do, and when they were really doing nothing.5
Such flat and distant voices confirm the rhetoric of William Blake: “Grace” is underwritten by constant, speechless suffering, and “culture” begins in the callused hands of exhausted children, weaving robotically in sleep, “going through the motions . . . when they were really doing nothing.” For the first time in human history, the machine dictates the term of organic existence to its servants; the body becomes an inferior machine. If respectability was to be judged by people’s endurance of such work, there is no surprise in the growth of crime. In a sense, the children of the mills were inoculated against the dread of punishment; “they appeared as complete prisoners as they would be in gaol,” remarked one observer to the Peel Committee.6
But mill labor, at least, was regular and gave fairly steady employment. Not all workers in London had such a prospect. Home industries like weaving were prostrated by industrial competition. To be whipsawed between long work-hours and patches of unemployment was deeply demoralizing. As Francis Place found, it bred the familiar torpor of the laid-off:
I know not how to describe the sickening aversion which at times steals over the working man, and utterly disables him for a longer or shorter time from following his usual occupation, and compels him to idleness. I have felt it. I have been obliged to submit and run away from my work. This is the case with every workman I have known; and in such proportion as a man’s case is hopeless will such fits occur and be of longer duration.7
A common solace was gin. After 1720 this white grain spirit flavored with crushed juniper berries became England’s national stupefacient, the heroin of the eighteenth century (but worse, because its use was far wider). Brandy, port, claret and Madeira, the rich man’s four tipples, were taxed on import and no workingman could afford them. But gin was made in England and cost next to nothing: “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence” meant what it said. Its consumption was eagerly promoted by the landed gentry, because England nearly always had a surplus of corn, which gin-distilling used up. Consequently there were no restrictions of any kind on making or selling the liquor until the Gin Act of 1751, by which time London was said to have one gin-shop for every 120 citizens. By 1743 the laboring poor of England were consuming 8 million gallons of gin a year, and they presented a most squalid appearance: “Lazy, sotted and brutish by nature,” a French visitor called them in 1777.8 The contrast between the new, degraded “mob,” sodden with gin, and the honest peasantry, merry with ale, was by now a commonplace with every moralist up to and including William Hogarth, who gave it memorable form in his engravings Gin Lane and Beer Street.
The “mob,” as the urban proletariat was called, had become an object of terror and contempt, but little was known about it. It was seen as a malign fluid, a sort of magma that would burst through any crack in law and custom, quick to riot and easily inflamed to crime by rabble-rousers. This moral prejudice affected most efforts to find out about English crime and English poverty.
Thus Patrick Colquhoun, in his Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (1797), made one of the first attempts to gauge the number of criminals in George Ill’s London. He claimed that there were 115,000 people living off crime in the city—about one Londoner in eight, which constituted a “criminal class” in itself. But who were they, and what did they do? Colquhoun lumped thieves, muggers and forgers, who clearly were criminals, together with scavengers, bear-baiters and gypsies, who were not, or at least not clearly so. He estimated that there were 50,000 “harlots” in London—about 6 percent of its population—but, as Edward P. Thompson pointed out, “[Colquhoun’s] prostitutes turn out, on closer inspection, to be ‘lewd and immoral women’, including ‘the prodigious number among the lower classes who cohabit together without marriage’ (and this at a time when divorce for women was an absolute impossibility).”9 If the same criteria of whoredom were applied to London today, how many “harlots” would a modern Colquhoun find?
The fact that their superiors thought that such people were prostitutes is no guide: In social matters, Georgian Englishmen far preferred generalization to reportage, and there was no eighteenth-century Mayhew. A Spitalfields weaver, an Irish casual laborer and a Scottish ditch digger might not even understand one another’s speech, let alone share any aspirations; but seen from above they all belonged to the “mobbish class of persons.” The “mob” was Georgian society’s id—the sump of forbidden thoughts and proscribed actions, the locus of the raging will to survive. Amid the general fear of Jacobinism that swept England after the French Revolution, it would seem an even greater menace. Then, the issues of crime and of revolution became conflated, and so the rising crime-rate—or rather, the belief that it was rising—became a potent issue. Accordingly, the Georgian legislators fought back against a threat which they believed came from a whole class. The criminal became the dreaded sans-culotte’s cousin. Georgian fear of the “mob” led to Victorian belief in a “criminal class.” Against both, the approved weapon was a form of legal terrorism.
ii
THE BELIEF in a swelling wave of crime was one of the great social facts of Georgian England. It shaped the laws, and the colonization of Australia was its partial result.
Sending criminals to the far Antipodes was like sending them from one disagreeably fabled land to another. The slum areas of London seemed a foreign country of crime, and in 1751 Henry Fielding reflected that
had they been intended for the very purpose of concealment, they could hardly have been better contrived. Upon such a view, [London] appears as a fast wood or forest, in which a Thief may harbour with as great security, as wild beasts do in the deserts of Africa or Arabia.10
Crime was up in the countryside, too; “Our people have become what they never were before, cruel and inhuman.”11 The reasons, Fielding thought, were gin, gambling and the love of “luxury” that had caused men and women to reject their traditional stations, even among “the very dregs of the people.” The helpless begged, while those “of more art and courage” stole. The innocent lived in a state of siege.
A quarter of a century later, things seemed no better. In 1775 Jonas Hanway indignantly exclaimed that
I sup with my friend; I cannot return to my home, not even in my chariot, without danger of a pistol being clapt to my breast. I build an elegant villa, ten or twenty miles distant from the capital: I am obliged to provide an armed force to convey me thither, lest I should be attacked on the road with fire and ball.12
Two centuries later one can see broader reasons for this growth of crime. English society was violently changing, under the stresses of industrialization, the growth of towns, and a soaring birthrate. From 1700 to 1740, the population of England and Wales remained almost constant at about 6 million people. Then it started rising fast—so fast that between 1750 and 1770 the population of London doubled—and by 1851 it stood at 18 million. This meant that the median age of Englishmen kept dropping and the labor market was saturated with the young. No mechanisms existed for the effective relief of mass unemployment; it was not a problem England had ever before had to contend with on this scale. The Poor Laws had been written for a different England. Parish relief and the workhouse were the primitive devices of a pre-industrial society; now they were overwhelmed. But crime is, was and always will be a young man’s trade, and English youth, rootless and urban, took to it with a will.
They found easy pickings, especially since Georgian England had none of the tools for catching criminals that the twentieth century takes for granted. Official crime records and registers of criminals were primitive, and there would be no fingerprinting until 1885. Artists made sketches, for popular consumption, of famous offenders like Dick Turpin or Jack Sheppard, but one could no more recognize a felon from such semi-devotional effigies than pick St. Paul from a crowd by consulting a Byzantine icon. Identification of wanted men had to be made from verbal descriptions in the police gazettes, circulated to mayors and magistrates after the early 1770s: “Benjamin Bird, a tall thin man, pale complexion, black hair tied, thick lips, the nail of the forefinger of his right hand is remarkably clumsy, comes from Coventry, and is charged with several forgeries, the last at Liverpool . . .” Sketchy as they were, such descriptions did produce some arrests, mainly in villages where people noticed strangers. Some officers of the law had long memories. Henry Fielding’s sightless half-brother John, a magistrate known at Bow Street as the “Blind Beak,” was said to be able to identify 3,000 different malefactors by their voices alone. But on the whole, it was easier for criminals to escape scot-free in the 1780s than it would ever be again.
There was one main reason for this: England had no effective, centralized police force and would not form one until Peel’s Police Act of June 1829. Law and order on the street was left to the parishes and wards; hence those enfeebled butts of every street urchin, the “Charlies” or parish watchmen. There were about 2,000 of them in London in the late eighteenth century, “poor old decrepit people” as Fielding bluntly put it, charity cases who had cast themselves on the mercy of the parish because they no longer had the strength to do other work. From the parish, each Charley got a greatcoat with three capes, like a coachman’s; a lantern, to light his tottering progress through the alleys; a wooden rattle to summon help; and a staff to defend himself. He would bang its butt rhythmically against the cobbles as he walked, to give thieves plenty of warning. Thus the embarrassment of a meeting between Law and Crime could be averted. He was easily bribed, with sixpence or a quart of gin. Charley’s deterrent power was therefore slight.
In practice, the magistrates preferred an older way of catching suspects: a graduated scale of rewards for information. This reward system was the eighteenth century’s chief way of detecting crime. It pressed private enterprise into service against its Other, the criminal.
The pickings were large enough to support a whole subclass of informers, police narks and thief-takers. Suspects could bribe the informer not to lay information against them. Thus there was hardly a petty trade conducted in the London alleys whose members did not sell gin on the side, and few of them bothered to pay—or could afford—the price of a liquor license. Instead, they paid the nark £10 or so not to denounce them. If paid by the courts, informers could squeeze sap from every twig of the huge, ramifying tree of English criminal law. Nineteen separate offenses relating to the use of hackney coaches in London carried a reward of 50 shillings for informants; from there to the exalted levels of murder and grand larceny, each crime carried its reward.
One could grow prosperous by informing, but not rich. The larger profits went to a more daring and astute kind of professional, the thief-takers. In theory, the thief-taker was no mere informer. He tracked down criminals and, at his own risk, intrepidly brought them to court. He was the eighteenth-century ancestor of the private eye, a detective with no official standing and, of course, no police protection. No niceties about laws of evidence or suspects’ rights governed the thief-takers’ forays into the “alsatias” (criminal purlieus) of London. They had a vested interest in fostering crime, for it kept up the flow of rewards. By playing both ends against the middle, they invented a new pattern of English felonry, thus presenting the good Georgian citizenry with a new and extraordinarily threatening spectacle: organized crime. The archetype of the thief-taker had been Jonathan Wild (1683–1725).13
The perception of organized crime would not go away, and in time it became more and more frightening to property-owners. A single criminal could be singly met. The householder, armed with blunderbuss and paired horse-pistols, defended by locks, grilles, bells, man-traps and loyal servants, could drive him away. But a collective of thugs and thieves, a united “criminal class” working together in gangs—that was quite another matter. It was a largely fantastical notion, exaggerated and nourished by deep-rooted territorial instincts. Gangs certainly existed in Georgian England, but they were only responsible for a fraction of the deeds that the law defined as criminal. Crime was still a cottage industry, a jumble of individual acts of desperation. The failure of language—the tyranny of moral generalization over social inspection—fed the ruling class’s belief that it was endangered from below.
iii
YET THE PEOPLE who had most to gain from a police force opposed its founding, tooth and nail. Despite the unrest that smoldered in England throughout the eighteenth century—the mobs at Tyburn, the Penlez riots of 1749, the Wilkite riots of the 1760s and the Gordon riots of 1780—there was no concerted Parliamentary move to set up a police force until the nineteenth century was a quarter gone. Georgian authorities preferred to rely on thief-takers for dealing with individuals, the Riot Act and the militia for dealing with groups. This was a source of wonder to foreigners, especially the French. “From sunset to dawn,” wrote one such visitor in 1784, “the environs of London become the patrimony of brigands for twenty miles around,” but the government did not improve the police because it was hampered by “clashes of interest” between people and King.14When the Duc de Levis asked his friends in 1814 why they had no maréchaussée—the rural police, the powers of arbitrary pursuit and arrest, that had all but stamped out brigandage in the French provinces—he was firmly told that “such an institution is not compatible with liberty.”
There lay the nub. The English refused to create a regular police force because they had seen what lay across the Channel, where no Frenchman’s home was his castle. “I had rather half-a-dozen peoples’ throats be cut in the Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years,” wrote one returned traveller, “than be subject to the domiciliary visits, spies and the rest of Fouche’s contrivances.”15
There were limits, of course, to this bluff libertarian attitude, and they showed up wherever the issue of class was involved. Those who opposed a police force did so from concern for the rights of property, not those of suspects. Modern precedents governing arrest and search, such as the Miranda decision, would have struck them as insanely favorable to the criminal. There was distress at the “tenderness” of the English legal system. “The regard shown to offenders falls little short of respect,” complained Sir John Hawkins, a Middlesex magistrate of the 1760s.16 Georgian justice may look fierce to us, but seen from Europe then it was lenient. The suspect had basic rights not recognized in France, Italy or Germany: He could not be tortured until he confessed; he could not be held indefinitely without bail or trial; and he was innocent until proven guilty. The liberalism of the English Common Law, compared to their own systems based on Roman and Canon Law, astonished European visitors. They noticed that, although it reduced the likelihood of an innocent man’s conviction, it also made it easier for the guilty to escape.
The English knew this, too; hence the draconic laws they created to avenge their sense of a disturbed social order. Against the relative fairness of British trials, one must set the most striking aspect of Georgian law—the sheer scope of its capital statutes. If detection and arrest were feeble and trials tenderly fair, what punishment could keep men from crime? Only the extreme one: hanging without benefit of clergy. During the reigns of the first three Georges, law enacted death upon what seemed a limitless variety of human deeds, from infanticide to “impersonating an Egyptian” (posing as a gypsy). Between the enthronement of Charles II in 1660 and the middle of George IV’s reign in 1819, 187 new capital statutes became law—nearly six times as many as had been enacted in the previous three hundred years. Nearly all were drafted to protect property, rather than human life; attempted murder was classed only as a “misdemeanor” until 1803. These grapeshot laws scattered death impartially. Why must forgers hang? Because the increase of paper transactions in eighteenth-century banking and business—checks, notes, bonds, shares, as distinct from concrete transfer of bags of gold—had made property of all sorts more vulnerable to forgery. Why was it death to “steal an heiress”? Because, like a queen bee swollen with jelly, an heiress was property incarnate; her abductor went to the gallows not for rape but for his theft of a family’s accumulated goods and rights.
Some capital statutes were very broad. The most notorious of them was 9 Geo. I, c. 22, otherwise known as the Waltham Black Act. It had been drafted ostensibly to repress some minor agrarian uprisings in 1722–23 near Waltham Chase in Hampshire, where rural laborers, moving at night with blacked faces, had taken to poaching game and fish, burning hayricks and posting threatening letters on their landlords’ gates. The act, passed by the Commons without a murmur of dissent, prescribed the gallows for over two hundred possible offenses in various permutations. One could be hanged for burning a house or a hut, a standing rick of corn, or an insignificant pile of straw; for poaching a rabbit, for breaking down “the head or mound” of a fishpond, or even cutting down an ornamental shrub; or for appearing on a high-road with a sooty face. As Sir Leon Radzinowicz remarked, “The Act constituted in itself a complete and extremely severe criminal code which indiscriminately punished with death a great many different offences, without taking into account either the personality of the offender or the particular circumstances of each offence.”17
Such legislation was part of a general tendency in eighteenth-century England: the growth of the Rule of Law (as distinct from any particular statute) into a supreme ideology, a form of religion which, it has since been argued, began to replace the waning moral power of the Church of England.18
Like the Church, Law had its own diction and rituals and its own priests—bewigged men in scarlet and ermine. At the assizes, the judge’s rolling sermons on vice and virtue, his reprobations, didactic asides and calls to repentance, were the secular equivalent of that pulpit eloquence which, in the seventeenth century, had shaken and fascinated those who thronged to hear the great preachers like John Donne or George Cokayne. Well into the nineteenth century, hanging verdicts continued to produce extremes of emotion, on both sides of the bench, that would be hard to match today. When two agricultural protestors named Peter Withers and James Lush were sentenced to death at the Salisbury assizes in 1831, a reporter from the Dorset County Chronicle described how
there were . . . no dry eyes in the crowded court. The tears of pity, of compassion, of regret, at the necessity of such severity were to be seen flowing and chasing one another down the cheeks not merely of the spectators, but of those who had long been accustomed to hear the last dreadful sentence which a human being has the power of passing on a fellow-creature in this world. [The judges] were frequently obliged to rest their faces on their extended hands, and even then the large drops were to be seen falling in quick succession. . . . Every one [of the prisoners] was in a state of dreadful agitation—some sobbing aloud and others with a pallid cheek . . . [After the death sentence] their mothers, their sisters, and their children clasped them in their arms with an agonizing grasp—the convicts . . . gave way, they wept like children . . . Nature had begun to play with every force, and the heart was broken.19
Why did the judges weep with the accused? Because both were bound—though not, of course, in equality of pain—to the law. This drama of immutable rules lay at the heart of the tremendous power that Law held over the English imagination. The judge simply surrendered to the imperative of the statutes, a course of action that absolved him of judicial murder, and that caused him to weep. His tears humbled him not before the men in the dock, which would have been unthinkable, but before the idea of Law itself. When the Royal Mercy intervened as it commonly did, transmuting the death penalty into exile on the other side of the world, the accused and their relatives could bless the intervening power of patronage while leaving the superior operations of Law unquestioned. The law was a disembodied entity, beyond class interest: the god in the codex. The judge was invested with its numen, as a priest was touched by sacerdotal power. But he could no more change the law than a clergyman could rewrite the Bible. All men were equal before the law, and none might evade its reach. It might demand the death of a poor ten-year-old boy, but noblemen could and did hang as well. The famous one was Lord Ferrers, who in a fit of paranoid suspicion blew his steward’s brains out in 1760. Convicted and sentenced to hang, the peer made his journey to Tyburn in a landau drawn by six horses, wearing a white wedding-suit sumptuously encrusted with silver embroidery; thousands of people cheered him over the drop. This, as upholders of the Law’s impartiality were given to stress, was equality indeed.
iv
NOTHING IN English criminal law seems more disgusting than public hanging. We are apt to think of it as the very saturnalia of death: a man or woman carted through the screaming mob that lined the road from Newgate to Tyburn, and then killed by a civil servant while more pockets were picked around the scaffold than the victim had picked in his life.20
Yet the official view of hanging was the very opposite. The Georgian lawmakers believed that public execution would reform those who saw it. A writer in 1772 recounted how parents would bring their children to a hanging and flog them afterward “that they might remember the example they had seen.”21 The scaffold was the altar of a ritual whose aim was to fill society with moral awe. This expiatory theater, solemn and fatal, deserved the widest audience.
To a well-anticipated hanging, if the victims were famous—a Jack Sheppard, a Lord Ferrers—twenty-five thousand people might come. Thirty thousand are said to have attended the execution of the twin brothers Perreau (for forgery) in 1776, and in 1767, eighty thousand people—or about one Londoner in ten—flocked to a hanging in Moorefields.22 Against this may be set the extreme unreliability of Georgian statistics. Nevertheless, hanging was clearly the most popular mass spectacle in England; nothing could match the drawing-power of the gallows or its grip as a secular image.
Hence the importance of the ritual. On the eve of Tyburn Fair (one of the colloquial names for execution-day at Tyburn gallows), it began with a prayer intoned by the sexton of the parish church of Newgate prison, St. Sepulchre’s, addressed to the occupants of its condemned hold, the Stone Room:
You prisoners that lie within, who for wickedness and sin, after many mercies shown you, are now appointed to die tomorrow in the forenoon, give ear and understand that tomorrow morning the greatest bell of St. Sepulchre’s shall toll for you in form and measure of a passing bell, as used to be tolled for those at the point of death, to the end that all godly people, hearing that bell and knowing that it is for your going and your deaths, may be stirred up heartily to pray to God . . .23
With the morning came the minatory prayers, the hoarse clanging bells and the procession westward along the busiest streets of London, from Newgate to Tyburn, the present site of Marble Arch. Each condemned man sat in the cart facing the rising sun, with a noose bound to his chest. At the gallow’s foot, phrase by halting phrase, he had to recite Psalm 51, the “Hanging Psalm”:
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
and in sin did my mother conceive me.
Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being,
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Fill me with joy and gladness;
let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice.
Hide thy face from my sins . . .
Sometimes he would append a conventional speech of repentance, known as the “dismal ditty.” Then came the donning of the white shroud, an undignified and spectral garment like a coarse nightgown; the climb up the ladder; the choking drop.
But what did the lower classes think of this spectacle staged for their benefit? There is much to suggest that the panoply of Tyburn was not taken in a proper spirit by the “mobbish class of Persons.” Hanging had two languages. The official one was elevated and abstract: A hanged man “paid the supreme penalty,” “suffered the ultimate exaction of the Law,” or was “launch’d into Eternity.” But there was also a vast gallows argot, for, next to those hardy perennials sex, money and crime, nothing on the social horizon of the English poor produced more slang and cant than hanging. Not a word of it reflects the official solemnities. Terse in its irony, bitter in its defiant concreteness, it rejected the values of the Law and its makers.
A condemned man “died with cotton in his ears” because Cotton was the name of the praying sexton at Newgate. The hangman was Jack Ketch, the nubbing-cove, the crap merchant, the crapping cull, the switcher, the cramper, the sheriff’s journeyman, the gaggler, the toppingcove, the roper or the scragger. Tyburn being in the parish of Paddington, execution-day was also known as Paddington Fair, the hood drawn over one’s head on the scaffold was the Paddington spectacles, and in dying one danced the Paddington frisk.
Some hangmen bequeathed their names to the rite. In the 1770s a man would be “dempstered,” and around 1785 the gallows briefly became the Gregorian tree, after a London hangman named Gregory Brandon. But its other names were legion. Being a construction of three posts linked by cross-bars, the gallows was the three-legged mare, and to ascend it was to “climb three trees with a ladder”; being made of oak, it was the wooden mare, and to die on it was to “ride a horse foaled by an acorn.” It was the morning drop, the trining-cheat, the nubbing-cheat, the scragging-post, or, in a laconic parody of the pastoral mode, “the deadly Nevergreen that bears the fruit all the year round.” The noose was a horse’s nightcap, a Tyburn tippet, a hempen casement or an anodyne necklace. Before the invention of the hinged trapdoor through which the victim dropped, he or she was “turned off” or “twisted” by the hangman who pulled the ladder away. To ascend it was “to go up the ladder to bed,” “to take a leap in the dark.” Some names for this death were bald: to stretch, to squeeze, to be jammed or frummagemed or haltered. Others referred to epidemic disease: “to die of a hempen quinsey or a hempen fever.” “To be in a deadly suspense” predicts the nudging humor of the music hall, as does another elaborate Cockney locution for hanging: “to have a hearty choke [artichoke] and caper sauce for breakfast.” The most chilling are the phrases that evoke the solitude and sterility of public death: “dance upon nothing,” “take the earth bath,” “shake a cloth in the wind,” “go off at the fall of a leaf.” Or, because of the noises and grimaces a strangling person makes: “to cry cockles,” “to piss when you can’t whistle,” “to loll your tongue out at the company.”24
This is not the language of the penitent thief. Its brusque, canting defiance reminds one that hanging meant one thing to the judges but another to the poor and the “mob.” Samuel Johnson objected to the “fury of innovation” in the movement to abolish public hanging. “Executions are intended to draw spectators,” the Rambler grumbled. “If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer to their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it.”25
The idea that condemned men could draw solace and support from the crowd at their hanging offends our deepest sense of propriety about death. It seems unspeakably grotesque. Nevertheless, they did. There are many accounts of young men setting forth in the Tyburn coach dressed like bridegrooms in new white suits emblematic of innocence, ribbons fluttering from their hats, posies in their white-gloved hands, cockily saluting a crowd that showered them, not with dead rats and cabbages, but with fruit and flowers in tribute to their passing. This was a common enough sight for Swift to take for granted:
As clever Tom Clinch, while the Rabble was bawling,
Rode stately through Holbourn to die in his Calling;
He stopt at the George for a bottle of Sack,
And Promis’d to pay for it when he came back.
His Waiscoat and Stockings, and Breeches were white,
His cap had a new Cherry Ribbon tied to it.
The Maids to the Doors and the Balconies ran,
And said, lack-a-day! he’s a proper young Man.
But, as from the windows the Ladies he spied,
Like a Beau in a Box, he bow’d low on each Side.26
As early as 1701 a pamphleteer was complaining that the condemned rode to Tyburn in bright clothes “like Men that triumph,” as though the journey of shame were the parade of a Caesar.27 A man’s bearing on the cart and at Tyburn was discussed like the form of a boxer at a prizefight. The phlegm of English malefactors was renowned in Europe, whose criminals tended to beg and blubber or become reduced to bovine passivity when confronted by their executioners. One admiring Italian felt that the English faced the gallows come se andasse a Nozze . . . colla più soave indifferenza nel Mondo, “as if going to be married, with the calmest indifference in the world.”28 The crowd wanted to see this and supported those who showed it. A “Tyburn blossom” must be an exemplary dandy, trim, gay and uncaring.
Hanging crowds were unruly. Hogarth’s engraving The Idle Prentice Executed at Tyburn gives a powerful sense of them: the crush of jostling voyeurs, a trampled child, squabbling fruit-sellers, pamphleteers hawking the just-printed “Last Dying Speech and Confession”—a turgid mass of drunks, whores, cripples, gospellers, pikemen and building-workers from the new West End squares nearby, parting to make way for the fatal cart. Beside the scaffold rises a grandstand that belonged to a famous scalper, the Widow Proctor, who made £500 in one day selling seats for Lord Ferrers’s hanging.
People also went to Tyburn to mourn, to reclaim the body of their friend or relative, to give the corpse its due dignity. They waited below the gallows to retrieve it in order to give it a proper burial and did not hesitate to fight the sheriff’s officers for it. The law did not recognize the relatives’ rights to a hanged corpse. It gave the body to the Royal College of Physicians for dissection, which heaped further ignominy on the dead. Thus there was a continuous record of brawls and riots at Tyburn and other English places of execution, as the “mob” battled with the surgeons’ corpse-takers for possession of bodies. And, as Peter Linebaugh remarked,
When brickmakers came out to defend the bodies of two felons with several years’ good standing in the trade against the surgeons, when bargemen came down from Reading to guard one of their own at a hanging, when the hackney coachmen rallied to keep the body of a fellow coachman “from being carried off with Violence,” or when the small cottagers and market people of Shoreditch surrounded the tumbril of Thomas Pinks their neighbour in the village, “declaring that they had no other Intention, but to take care of the Body for Christian burial,” the evidence . . . shows the depth of the mutuality of the poor, their solidarity in the face of personal disaster.29
This solidarity, as Dr. Johnson perceived, gave support to the condemned. Public execution, meant to terrify the populace, enabled the “mob” to show its defiance of authority. How mulish, the scientific onlooker might say, to deny the science of medicine its rights of progress by way of the bodies of the poor! What anatomical Luddism! What counted, however, was that the laboring poor of England gave the rituals their own meaning, quite at odds with its official one.
At this distance, one cannot say whether public hanging did terrify people away from crime. Nor can anyone do so, until we can count crimes that were never committed. Probably some people in the Tyburn crowds did fear hanging more for having seen it. Despite (or, from another point of view, because of) the intimidating ferocity of the statutes, there were more than twice as many capital convictions in the London and Middlesex courts in the 1780s as there had been in the 1750s. This does not prove, however, that capital punishment failed to deter anyone. Population had grown, poverty was worse, and there might have been even more crime if some people were not frightened by the gallows.
But one fact is certain. As the eighteenth century went on, fewer people were actually hanged for capital crimes that they had been convicted of. In ten-year periods, the figures for London and Middlesex (the area of highest crime) are:30
|
DECADE |
CAPITAL CONVICTIONS |
EXECUTIONS |
PERCENTAGE |
|
1749–58 |
527 |
365 |
69.3 |
|
1759–68 |
372 |
206 |
55.4 |
|
1769–78 |
787 |
357 |
45.4 |
|
1779–88 |
1152 |
531 |
46.1 |
|
1789–98 |
770 |
191 |
24.8 |
|
1799–1808 |
804 |
126 |
15.7 |
Why did the English write their fatal laws and then not use them to the full? One answer is squeamishness: Judges and juries simply frustrated the hanging statutes out of decency. A judge would commute the death sentence on a suitably penitent felon, while juries (and sometimes even prosecutors) cheated the gallows by deliberately undervaluing stolen goods. Thus, hundreds of convictions were handed down every year for thefts of goods that juries valued at 39 shillings, not because that was their actual value, but because the law said that anyone who stole above 40 shillings in a house or on a highway must hang. However, there would not have been so many remissions if they had not been encouraged by an active intent to exercise mercy.31
George III took the exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy (the King’s power to override his courts and remit a sentence at will) very seriously. The Royal Mercy showed his subjects that their monarch cared about them. One besought it by letter, through the home secretary, enclosing whatever references and sub-petitions could be raised from clergymen and other respectable people, and it was quite often given. The laws were the stick, mercy the carrot. There was subtlety in maintaining the hanging laws but not automatically using them. If they had merely been repealed, the effect would not have been the same. For mercy to evoke gratitude, the ruler must be seen to choose mercy, so that each reprieve is a special case, to be paid for in gratitude and obedience, never taken as a right.32
Moreover, the Royal Mercy and judicial commutation of sentences kept the crossroads of England from being decorated with scores and scores of corpses—a sight that could have provoked general riots. But what could the courts do with the convicts? The less rope was used, the more jails were needed. Yet eighteenth-century England was short of jails.
v
THE ONES it had were old. They had changed little since the Middle Ages. Their archetype in London was Newgate, which began its career in the twelfth century as a city gatehouse strengthened to hold prisoners and ended after almost eight hundred years of service and four rebuildings, with demolition in 1903. Newgate’s walls were of a Piranesian thickness, and there was virtually no way past its labyrinth of dark cells, subterranean corridors and iron bars as thick as a navvy’s wrist. To escape from this accursed place—especially from its condemned cell, the Stone Room—was to achieve immediate celebrity in the London underworld. Newgate was called the “whit” or “wit,” and all flash lads drank to its destruction. “The Wit be burnt,” ran a common criminal toast, “the Flogging Cull [flogger] be damned, the Nubbing Chit [gallows] be curs’d.” The debtor’s section of Newgate was called “Tangier,” because of the miseries suffered by English prisoners of Arab pirates on the Barbary Coast; its inmates, some abandoned by the outside world for ten years over a matter of a few shillings, were “tangerines.”
Inside Newgate one simply rotted away, staring through the bars (or, as the phrase went, “polishing the King’s iron with your eyebrows”). No work was done there. The central idea of the Victorian penitentiary, as proposed by Bentham and his Panopticon and first tried in Philadelphia—that prison should be a place of isolation, discipline and systematically graded punishment alleviated by precise injections of hope—was quite new and untried in the reign of George III. It affected neither the way judges thought about sentences, nor the manner in which prisons were run. The project of creating a captive society within the state, populated by convicts fed and housed at public expense and repaying an offended world (however nominally) with forced labor—in short, the idea of the penitentiary as it developed after 1820—would have struck the rules of Georgian England as utterly chimerical. Jails were simply lockups, and no one was “improved” by a spell in one. They were holes in which prisoners could be forgotten for a while. Their purpose was not reform, but terror and sublimation. But they were also meant to turn a profit.
About half the jails of England were privately owned and run. Chesterfield Jail belonged to the Duke of Portland, who sublet it to a keeper for 18 guineas a year. The Bishop of Ely owned a prison, the Bishop of Durham had the Durham County Jail, and Halifax Jail belonged to the Duke of Leeds. Their jailers were not State employees but small businessmen—malignant landlords—who made their profits by extorting money from prisoners. On entering the Bishop of Ely’s lockup, a prisoner was chained down to the floor with a spiked collar riveted round his neck until he disgorged a fee for “easement of irons.” Any jailer could load any prisoner with as many fetters as he pleased and charge for their removal one at a time. The “trade of chains” though often denounced as a national disgrace, survived well into the 1790s.
One paid for food, for drink—the prison tap room, dispensing gin, was a prime source of income for jailers—for bedding, water and even air. A well-off prisoner could live in some ease (although nothing could buy him immunity from typhus, the endemic disease of eighteenth-century prisons). For poorer men, the system was crushing. The entrance fee at Newgate was 3s., the weekly “rent” 2s. 6d., the charge for sharing a straw mattress with another prisoner is 6d a week. These sums sound small, but they often represented the full amount for which a debtor or thief had been clapped in prison, and there was little or no hope of earning them inside. “The prisoners have neither tools nor materials of any kind,” wrote John Howard, the pioneer of penal reform, in the 1770s,
but spend their time in sloth, profaneness and debauchery . . . Some keepers of these houses, who have represented to magistrates the wants of their prisoners, and desired for them necessary food, have been silenced with the inconsiderate words, Let them work or starve. When these gentlemen know the former is impossible, do they not by that sentence inevitably doom poor creatures to the latter?33
Howard travelled all over collecting material for his monumental report, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777). He drew a detailed picture of this hidden world, of which the respectable and literate knew nothing—its crowding, darkness and scant rations, the cruel indifference of the Bench and the venal favoritism of wardens, the garnish and chummage and easement fees, the cell floors awash with sewage, the utter lack of medical care, the fatal epidemics. Even the air was unbreathable. Howard discovered that
my cloaths were in my first journeys so offensive, that in a post-chaise I could not bear the windows drawn up: and was therefore obliged to travel on horseback. The leaves of my memorandum-book were often so tainted, that I could not use it till after spreading it an hour or two before the fire: and even my antidote, a vial of vinegar, has after using it in a few prisons, become intolerably disagreeable.34
The idea that prisons could not reform criminals but were incubators of crime was the merest commonplace in the 1780s; everyone, magistrates included, took it for granted. There was no attempt to classify or segregate prisoners by age, sex or gravity of crime. Women were thrown in the same common ward as men, first offenders with hardened recidivists, inoffensive civil debtors with muggers, clerkly forgers with murderers, ten-year-old boys with homosexual rapists. All prisoners, authority thought, were united by the common fact of their malignant otherness. They had crime in common, and that was enough. There was no need for fine distinctions in the black hole.
The common simile for the prison was a monastery or seminary, a closed order of people who studied vice, not holiness—an appealing figure in its perfect inversion. To Henry Fielding in 1751, prisons were “no other than . . . seminaries of idleness, and common sewers of nastiness and disease.”35 Howard, echoing him, saw them as “seats and seminaries (as they have very properly been called) of idleness and every vice.”36 The line continued to Australia in the 1820s, where one finds Governor Thomas Brisbane complaining that “The Convict-Barracks of New South Wales remind me of the Monasteries of Spain. They contain a population of consumers who produce nothing.”37
However, it was Dr. Johnson who most pithily set forth the vision of Georgian jails as anti-monasteries:
The misery of gaols is not half their evil . . . In a prison the awe of publick eye is lost, and the power of the law is spent; there are few fears, there are no blushes. The lewd inflame the lewd, the audacious harden the audacious. Everyone fortifies himself as he can against his own sensibility, endeavours to practice on others the arts which are practised on himself, and gains the kindness of his associates by similitude of manners. Thus some sink amidst their misery, and others survive only to propagate villainy.38
Such passages indicate how far apart modern and Georgian penal ideas are. In practice, high-security prisons are still human zoos. But the liberal view is that a jail is a sad but necessary expedient, harsh but susceptible of reform, which, if decently run, can keep a criminal out of social circulation without making him or her much worse. No such opinions were held two hundred years ago. Then it was clear that prisons, before they are institutions, are concentrations of criminals: Their institutional definition began with the fact of criminality, not the hope of reform, and their essential nature was to degrade all their occupants by the relentless moral pressure of the group. The prison pickled the felon in evil, hardened him, perfused him with the hard salt of sin. Hence the loathing in which English jails were held by those who would never see the inside of one. They were the republics of a sublimated criminal class; they belonged to the antipodes of crime, not to the bright world of authority, which they represented only in a nominal way. In due course, this train of thought would provide the underlying logic of transportation to Australia. For transportation made sublimation literal: It conveyed evil to another world.
Howard’s The State of the Prisons had an immediate effect on thought and the drafting of law. But practical reforms were slow in coming. The English authorities talked incessantly about the need for new jails, legislated for their urgent construction, but did not actually build them. Within two years of the publication of Howard’s report, an act of 1779 called for two large prisons in London, designed along the lines Howard advocated, with provision for work, segregation of the sexes, and confinement in single cells rather than common wards. They were not even started. In 1786 the prime minister, William Pitt, wrote to William Wilberforce, the great liberal abolitionist who was pressing him for prison reform, that “the multitude of things depending, has made the Penitentiary House long in deciding upon. But I still think,” he added vaguely, “a beginning will be made on it before the season for building is over.” Again, no beginning was made, but in the summer of 1788 Pitt reassured Wilberforce that penitentiaries “shall not be forgotten.”39 Forgotten they were, because by then the Government could only see one remedy for the increase of crime and the apparent ineffectiveness of prisons: transportation “beyond the seas.”
Transportation—forced exile, in plain English—had undeniable merits. It preserved the Royal Prerogative of Mercy, as the felon was left alive. At the same time he was removed from the realm as completely, if not as permanently, as any hanged man. Transportation got rid of the prison as well as the prisoners. It supplied Britain with a large labor force, consisting entirely of people who, having forfeited their rights, could be sent to distant colonies of a growing Empire to work at jobs that no free settler would do. Free-born Englishmen had always disliked the idea of laboring bands of convicts engaged on public works at home. A bill of 1752 introducing public chain-gang labor as punishment for criminals was rejected by the Lords partly because security was too great a problem but mainly because the sight of chain gangs in public places was felt to be degrading. How could onlookers distinguish such a punishment from outright slavery? In the New World, there would be no such problem.
The germ of the transportation system lay in a law of 1597, 39 Eliz. c. 4, “An Acte for Punyshment of Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars.” In essence, it declared that obdurate idlers “shall . . . be banished out of this Realm . . . and shall be conveyed to such parts beyond the seas as shall be . . . assigned by the Privy Council.” If a “Rogue so banished” returned to England without permission, he would be hanged.
It was through this act that in the seventeenth century, convicts under commuted death sentences were sent across the Atlantic to labor on the plantations of the Virginia Company. Sir Thomas Dale, Marshal of Virginia, took three hundred “disorderly persons” with him in 1611, but they turned out so “profane and mutinous, . . . diseased and crazed that not sixty of them may be employed.”40 Still, bad labor was better than none in the New World; the Indians could not be enslaved, while the English gentlemen of the Virginia Company had an extreme distaste for manual work. Soon Dale was asking for two thousand more convicts. “All offenders out of the common gaols condemned to die should be sent for three years to the Colony; so do the Spaniards people the Indies.”41And from 1618 onward, a steady infusion of felons came to England’s embryo settlements in the New World, to Puritan Massachusetts as well as to the tidewater settlements of the South. Most of them were common criminals. Some were Scots and English prisoners-of-war taken by Cromwell at the battles of Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651); others—mostly shipped to the sugar plantations of Jamaica and Barbados in the 1650s—were Irishmen who had been so unwise as to resist the invasion of the Lord Protector.
After 1717, transportation was stepped up and rendered fully official by a new act, 4 Geo. I, c. 11, which provided that minor offenders could be transported for seven years to America instead of being flogged and branded, while men on commuted capital sentences (recipients of the King’s Mercy) might be sent for fourteen. English jailers did excellent business by selling these luckless colonists to shipping contractors, who in turn sold them (or, to be legally precise, the rights to their labor during their seven or fourteen years) to plantation-owners in the Caribbean and America. For the next sixty years, about 40,000 people suffered this thinly disguised form of slavery: 30,000 men and women from Great Britain, 10,000 from Ireland. This steady drainage of felons, averaging fewer than 700 people a year, kept the crowded jails of England from crisis.
But after 1775, the crisis could no longer be postponed. The American colonies rebelled. One result of the revolution was that the British could no longer send its convicts there. The American air filled with nobly turned resolutions against accepting criminals from England, for a new republic must not be polluted with the Crown’s offal. This was cant, since the American economy was already heavily dependent on slavery. The real point was that the trade in black slaves had turned white convict labor into an economic irrelevance. On the eve of the American Revolution, 47,000 African slaves were arriving in America every year—more than English jails had sent across the Atlantic in the preceding half-century. Beside this labor force, the work of white indentured convicts was inconsequential; the Republic did not need it.
As soon as the American outlet was stopped up, English prisons began to overflow. At first, the Crown did nothing about this. The Americans would surrender sooner or later, and then the convict transports could ply the Atlantic again. In July 1783, only a month before Britain was forced to recognize the United States at Versailles, George III wrote to Lord North: “Undoubtedly the Americans cannot expect nor ever will receive any favour from Me, but the permitting them to obtain Men unworthy to remain in this Island I shall certainly consent to.”42
So the English did not enlarge their prisons and in 1776 they found a compromise. The idea of forced convict labor on public works no longer seemed so tainted with slavery. It was dusted off and Lord North drew it up as 16 Geo. III, c. 43, known as the Hulks Act, a stopgap meant to last only until the American insurgents were crushed.
The Thames and the southern naval ports of England were dotted with hulks—old troop transports and men-o’-war, their masts and rigging gone, rotting at anchor, but still afloat and theoretically habitable. Convicts sentenced to be transported would now be kept on them until the government decided where to send them; this would relieve the bursting land prisons. Tactfully, the Hulks Act did not mention the revolt of the American colonists. It made a virtue of necessity by noting that transportation had deprived England of people “whose labour might be useful to the Community.” These men would now be set “to Hard Labour . . . cleansing the River Thames.” Thus the felons “might be reclaimed.”
But the convicts jammed on the hulks were no more reclaimed than the Thames was cleansed. By 1790 their number was rising by about one thousand a year. Not only had the problem of security become acute, but typhus was by then endemic and the prospect of general infection terrified free citizens outside. The authorities would have done almost anything to get rid of the criminals their laws had created. Clearly, transportation must begin again—but to where? They chose the least imaginable spot on earth, which had been visited only once by white men. It was Australia, their new, vast, lonely possession, a useless continent at the rim of the world, whose eastern coast had been mapped by Captain Cook in 1770. From there, the convicts would never return. The names of Newgate and Tyburn, arch-symbols of the vengeance of property, were now joined by a third: Botany Bay.