From The London Quarterly Review. THE Londoners will be sorry to lose Millbank. For so many years that strange cross between a star fort and a medieval castle has seemed to belong to the river landscape. Men will miss it from their Chelsea boats; and now that the river same work, done by contract, would have cost £168,000. That is something to be proud of; and so, too, is the fact that our system has become so perfected that there, at the Scrubs, within hail of London, rascaldom is lodged almost in the open, and yet there is no attempt to run away, because rascaldom feels at last that au thority is too strong for it. boats are to be improved (as they said In the good old times convicts did not some time ago the cabs were to be), there will be more to miss it than heretofore. with them, a case of survival of the fittest multiply. It was a struggle for existence It is a peculiarity of our times that a thing very soon becomes classical. The peni-Gaols were mostly private ventures; the fittest, i.e., to stand against gaol-fever. tentiary began to be used a year after the squares and a fine - battle of Waterloo; the act (Howard's act gaoler was paid out of the fees; and he it may be called) "for the establishment paid himself by pilfering the wretched of penitentiary houses," which led to its rations that scarcely kept body and soul Ventilation? Why in those erection, is not quite a century old. Yet together. City clerks, as they pass the gloomy pile days the wisdom of our legislators had laid on a window-tax. How could a gaoler, on their way from office, always think, with a half shudder, of the French Revolution. anxious to put by every penny he could Millbank is their Bastille, their great and scrape together, be expected to find winlittle Châtelet, their Abbaye, all in one bound to give fresh air to the guilty, he dows to the cells? So far from feeling The halo of ages is round that crown of towers;" and when it is all done away till his fees were paid. The court acquitted would not even set innocent men at liberty with, and Cubitopolis has stretched down to the river's edge as it does at Grosvenor you; you were free in the eyes of the law; Pier; when streets and but back you must go unless you could new church cover the prison ground the wipe off the score that he had against you. "A merciless set of men, these gaolers neighborhood will fancy it has lost something almost as ancient as the Tower. (says Blackstone), steeled against any tender sensation." Sometimes the prisMillbank is doomed. Last year, about Wormwood Scrubs, might be noticed some oners had their revenge in a strange fashbig wooden sheds, shut in by a high ion. At the "black assize" in Oxford wooden paling. Those are the convicts' Castle, in 1577, the gaol-fever was so quarters, and the work that is going on is strong that all present died in forty hours - the lord chief baron, the sheriffthe new prison—to be built, as most work some three hundred in all. At Taunton, of the kind lately has been, by prisoners themselves. At last, "the Chelsea philosin 1730, some prisoners from Dorchester opher" has got his wish. We do not pet gaol so infected the court that Chief our Uriah Heeps now; we make them at Baron Pengelly, Serjeant Sir Jas. Sheppard, the sheriff, and some hundreds more once keep down the taxes and keep in one another. died. Again in 1750, a lord mayor, two One reads with great satisfaction the statement by Capt. Griffiths, his-judges, an alderman, and many others took torian of Millbank, that "the Devil's Bri- the distemper and perished. These were gade," ," "the Army of Rascaldom" (for its gaol-deliveries with a vengeance; Nature other titles see "Latter-Day Pamphlets "), asserting her broken laws, proving that has, within the last few years, actually saved us £75,000 in building alone; the work they have done has cost £93,000; the chief barons and sheriffs and such like are of the same flesh and blood as prisoners, and thereby hinting that it was the duty of such notables to look into these things to see, for instance, that gaolers FITHS, Governor of Millbank Penitentiary, etc., etc. should be no longer permitted to bind men and women with chains and iron col * Memorials of Millbank. By CAPT. C. G. GRIF Murray. 1875. at lars if they could not pay for dispensa- | general centre, to hold conversations with tions. It was no chief baron or official the visitors." personage, but simple John Howard who forced this abomination into public notice, and thereby did so much to remedy it. The Penitentiary Act was his work; he had seen a sort of penitentiary at Ghent, and a good deal of prisoners' labor in Holland. But we never do things in a hurry, so it was a quarter of a century from passing the act to laying the foundation stone of Millbank. From this sort of half Crystal Palace, half ear of Dionysius, the tower-girdled penitentiary sprang. People were their wits' ends what to do with prisoners; the American war had stopped one great safety-valve, "the plantations" in Virginia and elsewhere. Bentham offered to do the thing cheaply. His building was to cost only £19,000-and then he promised as grandly as Fourier or St. Meanwhile, Jeremy Bentham had come Simon could have done. The prisoners to the front with his "greatest happiness he undertook to provide with "spiritual and of the greatest number" theory, part of medical assistance; he promised them which was "to provide a spectacle such constant work when discharged, and even as persons of all classes would in the way annuities for old age. To the crown he of amusement be curious to partake of, bound himself to pay a fine for every prisand that not only on Sundays at the time oner who escaped, for all who died above of Divine Service, but on ordinary days at the ordinary rate within the bills of mormeal times or times of work." This tality, and for every one convicted of a 66 'spectacle" was the common gaol, or as felony after his discharge at a rate increashe styled it," Panopticon, or the inspec-ing according to the time that he had tion-house," ," "an iron cage glazed, with been a happy denizen of the Panopticon. glass lantern as large as Ranelagh, the Strange as it seems, Pitt, Dundas, and cells being on the outer circumference." the rest, warmly embraced Bentham's In such a building, he contracted to main-project; and, but for stubborn old George tain and employ convicts for £12 a head III., who hated radical philosophers as per annum, he receiving "the produce of much as his grandfather hated "bainters their labor," and, by admitting "the pub- and boets," the great experiment of raslic" to the central room whence they caldom versus humanitarianism would could see without being seen, he fancied | have been tried under a man of real he should be providing "a System of genius. Bentham bought fifty-three acres Superintendence universal, unchangeable, in Tothill Fields, paying Lord Salisbury and uninterrupted, the most effectual and indestructible of all securities against abuse." People would throng in for the fun of the thing, just as they do to the monkeys' cage at the Zoological Gardens; Well, perhaps it was best so; for the and yet this "curiosity and love of amuse- | diffculties of the site were enough to break ment, mixed with better and rarer motives," even a philosopher's heart. £19,000 inwas his chief security against abuse and deed; why the "additional item for the imperfection in every shape. "A promis- foundations," amounted to £42,000! Bencuous assemblage of unknown and there- tham had chosen the site, because, as he fore unpaid and incorruptible inspectors said, it was "in no neighborhood at all." would cause a sentiment of a sort of invis- A quagmire, where snipe have been shot ible omnipresence to pervade the place." by men still alive, it contained any numBut, since "the banquet offered to curios- ber of almshouses, (how "rheumatiz" must ity will be attractive in proportion to the have flourished!) Hill's, Butler's, Wicher's, variety and brilliancy of the scene," the Palmer's, and Lady Dacre's; a Bridewell; humanitarian philosopher proposed "to some pest-houses (used as almshouses light up the Panopticon at night by reflec-"so long as it shall please God to keep tion, and to enable the prisoners, by means us from the plague"); and Charles II.'s of tubes reaching from each cell to the Green Coats Hospital — verily he deserved £19,000 for them; but not a stone was laid till 1812, long after Bentham had been got rid of, of course with due compensation. his name of "merry monarch" when he | drain had somewhat dried the peat. Mr. dressed the poor boys ("yellow-hammers," Hardwicke got disgusted, and resigned; a envious gutter-children call them) in such Mr. Harvey took his place, and courses of motley. Good enough for school-children brickwork bedded in Parker's cement beand alms-people, and such like, the swamp gan to be laid regardless of expense. It was eschewed by "people of condition;" was all paid out of the taxes; and people its name came from the Abbot of West- seemed rather pleased when the saying minster's mill, to which a very old em- "There's more money put away below bankment directed a current from the ground than above at Millbank," seemed river. In Stow's time the Earl of Peter- likely to be verified. At length, in June borough had a big house thereabouts, 1816, came the first batch of prisoners "but its situation is but bleak in the win- thirty-six women from Newgate. But by ter, and not over healthful, as being so September serious cracks had opened in near the low meadows on, the south and walls and arches, and the inmates began west parts." The new supervisors, how-to fear lest some fine night they might be swallowed up in a quaking bog. Towards the end of this month the governor was called up at daybreak with the news that none of the passage gates in pentagon No. I could be unlocked. He went, and found the women going into fits, and noticed that the three angle towers had sunk a little, cracking arches and walls, and naturally preventing doors from opening. The architect was sent for, and laid the blame on the Thames, which had lately been let in to flood the drains. For fear of accidents admission of prisoners was stopped, and Rennie and Smirke called in. "The main sewer is badly built (said they), and the foundations are far too meagre." Then came more tinkering and jobbing, one engineer playing into another's hands, till the total cost had risen to nearly half a million. Wormwood Scrubs is to be finished for a fifth of the sum. ever, did not care to look out for a new site; they got a Mr. Hardwicke for architect, his payment being 2 1-2 per cent. on the estimated £260,000. The plan was imposing a six-pointed star fort, every salient being a pentagon with a small tower at each angle and a big watch-tower in the centre of its "airing-yard." The labyrinth within is so intricate that Captain Griffiths tells us an old warder, who had served for years and had risen step by step, could never find his way about; he always carried a bit of chalk with which to "blaze" his path as a man "blazes trees in the bush. It must have looked grand on paper; but the difficulty was to get it on terra firma. This was a very rare substance thereabouts. Here and there was a seam of good stiff clay; but in general it was all peat and loose sand. Plenty of plans were proposed. A mysterious Blackheath architect, Alexander, offered to contract for foundations "independent of piles, planking, and brickwork." But, as he insisted on keeping his secret, the supervisors would have nothing to do with him, and Messrs. Rennie and Cockerell were employed to dig down twelve feet to the sound gravel, and fill in with puddled walling. The outer gate, lodge, and boundary wall were to be trusted to piles," with rubble two feet deep rammed tight between them." But the rubble sadly betrayed its trust; the boundary wall bulged out and sank, and the lodge was soon found resting on nothing but the piles, the masonry between having sunk, along with the whole surface of the ground, as soon as a main And now the penitentiary was fairly launched. A governor was found (who resigned by-and-by because the committee would not let him go on practising as a solicitor outside). A lawyer's widow was made matron. The bishop of London recommended as chaplain "a clergyman of great activity and benevolence, and untainted with fanaticism" (surtout point de zèle). And turnkeys were secured who were warranted to unite firmness with gentleness. But the committee did a deal (a deal too much) of the work themselves; they were always about the place. One of them, Mr. Holford, confessed that for some time he had done everything but sleep there. Millbank was their toyhouse, which they had the privilege of keeping up at the expense of the nation. | 1823, scurvy broke out and was followed They showed it to all comers grand by a sort of slow cholera, which carried dukes, lords, princes of the blood, ladies off a good many, and set the committee who came to see the prisoners "perform taking opinions from eminent medical their religious exercises." Meanwhile men. Doctors differed, as usual. Some they tried experiments and encouraged said it was the water (likely enough; it "ports." Tale-bearing throve apace; came from the Thames, into which poured prisoners and inferior officers "referred the prison drains); others said it was the things to the committee." The governor low diet. Meat (four ounces a day) and was a nonentity; and as for the matron, she was accused, first, of setting some of the women to work at her daughter's wedding things, next of using a shilling's worth of prison thread (she replaced it as soon as she could get some of her own), lastly of giving to her daughter a Bible with which the committee had supplied her she thought as a present. On these grave charges she was dismissed. oranges were instantly supplied, and be- Thus hulks was drowned, and the prisoners One of the experiments, by the way, was giving brown instead of white bread. The prisoners would not eat it. Mr. Holford exhorted them, but they all left it outside their cell-doors. Next day was Sun-One rough day the master of one of the day, a row was evidently preparing, so the governor by way of precaution "put three braces of pistols loaded with ball inside his pew"! Who should come in but the chancellor of the exchequer with a party of friends? Such "religious exercises". file-firing by slamming down the flaps of the seats (why were they made with flaps?) varied with discharges of heavy artillery in the shape of loaves, the women raising their war-song, "Give us our daily bread." The riot got worse, and then the women began fainting and had to be removed. Then there was a lull; the chancellor made a most appropriate admonition, and the prisoners went off, to begin, next day, breaking windows and destroying their furniture. They're over-fed," said the public. "It's Mr. Holford's fattening-house," observed a jocose M. P., whereupon the committee ran into the other extreme, and at once did away with all the solid meat, giving instead ox-head soup at the rate of one head for a hundred prisoners. Then (Mr. Holford having seen potatoes carried out in the wash-tubs better than he was eating at home), potatoes were given up, and the diet was reduced to a pint of gruel for breakfast, a pint of soup at mid-day, and the same in the evening, a pound and a half of bread being distributed through the day. This seems nourishment enough; but sedentary people really need more nourishment than those who live in fresh air, and prisoners more than either. Most of them are really fretting, even though they "brave it out," and nothing uses up nerve force like fretting. So in January, Meanwhile, the penitentiary had been cleansed. Sir H. Davy had undertaken the ventilation, Faraday ("a Mr. Faraday, from the Royal Institution," he is styled) had fumigated it with chlorine. More stoves were put in, school-hours were to be lengthened, moral and religious books to be multiplied, "games and sports" to be introduced. The philanthropic régime had come in stronger than ever, and the criminals on whom it was to be tried were chosen as affording reasonable hope that they would be corrected and reclaimed. Instead of amendment there broke out an epidemic of suicide, mostly feigned prisoners would hang themselves a few seconds before the time for opening their cell1 not That door, taking care to keep something under | during the bitters of anxious suspense, that I their feet till they heard the key in the lock. set myself down for the purpose of relating to Others made false keys-one fellow, who you the candid feelings. I possess at the present remarked when found out, "You see, I've hour; and I hope, my dear, that it will find got a very nice eye," caught the pattern of you enjoying the sweets of good health, as, thank God, his cell-key, moulded it in bread, cut up from the pleasure received from our co am at present. . . . It is his pewter-can with his tailor's scissors, spondence that I venture to commit myse co and melted it with his irons and ran it into yours and your friend's generosity; but it is the mould. A comrade told of him; in- from the real expectation of being joined to deed, most of the plans failed "through one of you by the appointed precept of the information." Before long there came a Creator, to stick strong and constantly to you, grand conspiracy, started in letters written and to live an honest, industrious life, enon blank prayer-book leaves, to make such deavoring to obtain felicity in the world to a riot as should get them all sent to the come. So, my dear, if your heart be disposed hulks; "It's so much jollier at the hulks." to acknowledge a sympathy with mine, conThis riot was serious, and was met by a God, restored to liberty, and becoming a ditionally, that is to say, by the blessing of great deal of "dark-celling." But this, spectator of my person, I myself am not so even when continued for a month together, very particular about having a handsome wife, has little general effect; some people, even for many pretty girls are so sensible of their some children, don't mind it one bit. So beauty that it makes their manners rather the humane committee had nothing to do odious; but so as you are a tidy-looking girl, for it but to ask Parliament to let them use and industriously inclined, with a good disflogging. It was time; threatening notices position, and will love me and me only, began to be posted about; the infirmary suitor, I beg you give me a true answer in But if any other young man is your intended warder's cat was hanged, and he was reply to this. I hope neither you nor warned: "You see your Cat is hung And your two friends will show our notes to any you Have Been the corse of it for your one, for some women can never keep a secret; Bad Bavior, to Those arond you. Dom when friendship ceases they let all out. yor eis, you'll get pade in yor torn yet." is why I am more distant in my expressions Then a long and elaborate petition was than I should be, for I would not have this sent to the governor complaining of one known for the best ten pounds that ever was of the warders. "The governor," ," the coined. writer says, "would reason with a man on his misconduct; Mr. Pilling delights in aggravating the cause with a grin or a jeer of contempt." At last a warder or two was half killed, and then the Flogging Act was passed, and temporary quiet was the result. But prisoners must be at something, and as they were not rioting they took to love-making. The laundry woman, who had to open the men's kits, one day found a slip of paper, on which a man had written that he came from Glasgow, and hopes the women are all well. The "kitter" could not read, so she handed the slip round. "I know him well," spoke up a Scotch lassie; "it's John Davidson, a very nice young man, and if none of you'll answer, I'll just write to him myself." She wrote, was answered, sent him a lock of her hair, and a heart worked in worsted on his flannel bandage. Before long every woman had a correspondent; the washing "blue" supplied ink, and all went on merrily when the wardwoman told the matron, and the kits were all searched. Just then the following letter was picked up in chapel: From the young man that wrote first to the young woman that wrote last. My dear-It is with a pleasure produced from a mind en And so on, in the complete letter-writer style, a marvellous instance of high-polite. But the flirting was not confined to the prisoners; at this time the superior officers were married, and lived with their families inside the walls. They had their servants, of course; and, since "girls will be girls," no wonder the chaplain's maid" was always at her kitchen window making signs;" and the surgeon's servant struck up a friendship with a prisoner-cook, in whose pocket was found a lock of her hair neatly plaited. The steward's housemaid kept her love-letters in her kitchen drawer; she had two admirers, one of whom, Adamlike, excused himself by saying: "Well, she nodded to me first." Ón the whole, the women gave more trouble than the men; they assaulted the chief matron, telling one another that "if two or three well-behaved women hit her again and again, the gentlemen of the committee would say she's not respected, and is not the prisoners' friend. Then they'll send her away, and we shall be quit of her." They lamented the want of pluck of the men; went into hysterics when the patrol stopped them from rushing about, stool in hand, vowing they would have somebody's life. Then they were such clever |