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X. BARON FISCO AT HOME. By W. W. Story,. Blackwood's Magazine,

THE LOVE OF THE PAST,

A DAY,

"GIRL GRADUATES,"

From Beginning,

Vol. CLIV.

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From The Fortnightly Review.
NEWGATE: A RETROSPECT.

life. Light scarcely penetrated their dark and loathsome dungeons; no breath of IN antiquity and varied interest New- fresh air sweetened the fetid atmosphere gate prison yields to no place of durance they breathed; that they enjoyed the luxin the world. A gaol has stood on this ury of water was due to the munificence same site for almost a thousand years. of a pious ecclesiastic. As for their daily The first prison was nearly as old as the subsistence it was most precarious. Food, Tower of London, and much older than clothing, fuel were doled out in limited the Bastille. Hundreds of thousands of quantities by prosperous citizens as chari"felons and trespassers" have from first table gifts, while some bequeathed small to last been incarcerated within; and to legacies to be expended in the same artimany it must have been an abode of sor- cles of supply. These bare prison allowrow, suffering, and unspeakable woe, a ances were further eked out by the chance kind of terrestrial inferno, to enter which seizures in the markets; by bread forwas to abandon every hope. Imprison. feited as inferior or of light weight, and ment was often lightly and capriciously meat unfit to be publicly sold. All classes inflicted in days before our liberties were and categories of prisoners were herded fully won, and innumerable victims of indiscriminately together: men and womtyranny and oppression have been lodged en, tried and untried, upright but misin Newgate. Political troubles also sent guided zealots with hardened habitual their quota; the gaol was the halfwayhouse to the scaffold or the gallows for turbulent or short-sighted persons who espoused the losing side; it was the starting-place for that painful pilgrimage to the pillory or whipping-post which was too frequently the punishment for rashly uttered libels and philippics against constituted power. Newgate, again, was on the highroad to Smithfield; in times of intolerance and fierce religious dissensions numbers of devoted martyrs went thence to suffer for conscience' sake at the stake. For centuries a large section of the permanent population of Newgate, as of all gaols, consisted of offenders against commercial laws; fraudulent bankrupts were hanged, others more unfortunate than criminal were clapped into gaol to linger out their lives without the chance of earning the funds by which alone freedom could be recovered. Debtors of all degrees were equally condemned to languish for years in prison often for the most paltry sums-innocent persons also; gaoldeliveries were rare, and the boon of arraignment and fair trial was strangely and unjustly withheld, while even those acquitted in open court were often haled back to prison because they were unable to discharge the gaoler's illegal fees. The condition of the prisoners was long most deplorable. They were but scantily supplied with the commonest necessaries of

offenders. The only principle of classification was a prisoner's ability or otherwise to pay certain fees; money could purchase the squalid comfort of the master's side, but no immunity from the baleful companionship of felons equally well furnished with funds and no less anxious to escape the awful horrors of the common side of the gaol. The weight of the chains again, which innocent and guilty all alike wore, depended upon the price a prisoner could pay for " easement of irons," and it was a common practice to overload a new comer with enormous fetters and so terrify him into lavish disbursements. The gaol at all times was so hideously overcrowded that plague and pestilence perpetually ravaged it, and the deadly infection often spread into the neighboring courts of law.

The foregoing is an imperfect but by no means overcolored picture of Newgate as it existed for hundreds of years, from the twelfth century, indeed, to the nineteenth. The description is supported by historical records somewhat meagre at first perhaps, but becoming more and more ample and better substantiated as the period grows less remote. We have but scant information as to the first gatehouse gaol. Being part and parcel of the city fortifications, it was intended mainly for defence, and the prison accommodation which the gate afforded with its

garrets above, | ing duly treated Andrew to liquor unlim. most limited de-ited, he was constituted " "white son ""

to

utter ruin, and such extensive works were undertaken to re-edify it that the security of the gaol was said to be endangered, and it was thought better to pardon most of the prisoners before they set themselves free. Lupton, in his " London Carbonadoed," speaks of Newgate as "newfronted and new-faced" in 1638. Its accommodation must have been sorely tried in the troublous years which followed. It seems to have been in the time of the Commonwealth when "our churches were made into prisons," and demands for space had greatly multiplied,

dungeons beneath, and must have been of the scription. More pains were no doubt the governor and governess of Newgate, taken to keep the exterior strong and safe and was given the best room in the prison, against attack, than to render the interior with all admissible indulgences. The habitable, and we may conclude that the best room was very draughty, unquiet, moneys willed by Whittington for the re- and full of evil savors, and Underhill, edification of Newgate were principally falling into an ague, was moved into the expended on the restoration and improve- gaoler's own parlor, far from the noise of ments of the prison. "Whit's palace," the prison. But his new chamber was as rebuilt by Whittington's executors, near the kitchen, and the smell of meat lasted for a couple of centuries, and was was more than he could bear, whereupon the principal gaol for the metropolis. Mistress Andrew put him away in her Reference is constantly made to it in the store-closet, "amidst her best plate, crockhistory of the times. It was the natural ery, and clothes." receptacle for rogues, roysterers, and With occasional, but not always suffimasterless men. It is described as a hot- cient, repairs, but without structural albed of vice, a nursery of crime. Drunk- terations, Whittington's Newgate conenness, gaming, profligacy of the vilest tinued to serve down to the seventeenth sort, went forward in the prison without century. About 1629 it was in a state of let or hindrance. Contemporary petitions, preserved in the State papers, penned by inmates of Newgate pining for liberty, call their prison house a foul and noisome den. The gaoler for the time being was certain to be a brutal partisan of the party in power, especially bitter to religious or political opponents who fell into his hands. Such an one was Alexander Andrew, the keeper in Mary's reign. So violent was his hatred of Protestants, Foxe tells us, that he would go to Bonner crying, "Rid my prison, I am too much pestered with heretics." Overflowing with zeal, he brought all his powers of that Newgate was increased by the addipersuasion, fair words and promises of tion of the buildings belonging to the kind treatment, to induce his prisoners to Phoenix Inn in Newgate Street. The He had so little compassion that great fire of 1666 gutted, if not completely he forbade good old Master Rogers, the destroyed, Newgate, and its reconstrucproto-martyr of the Maryan persecutions, tion became imperative. Some say Wren to share his meals with his starving fellow- was the architect of the new prison, but prisoners. Alexander, on the other hand, the fact is not fully substantiated. Auwas lenient enough to prisoners of the thentic and detailed information has, howright way of thinking. In the narrative ever, been preserved concerning it; it is of Underhill, the Hot Gospeller, commit- figured in a familiar woodcut which may ted to Newgate in 1553, Alexander An- be seen in every modern history of Londrew and his wife, who shared his duties, don, while a full description of the inare described as feasting and carousing in terior, both plan and appropriation, has the great central hall of Newgate with been left by an anonymous writer, who prisoners who were clever enough to keep was himself an inmate of the gaol. The their religious views in the background, prison was still subordinated to the gate, and ready to pay for their gaoler's enter- which was an ornate structure, with great tainment. Underhill gives us a curious architectural pretensions. Tuscan pilas. glimpse of the inside of the prison. Hav-ters, with statues in the intervening niches

recant.

stone hold, an underground dungeon, dark and dismal, into which no daylight ever penetrated, and which was reserved for such as could not pay their entrance fees; alongside was the lower ward, also an underground den; above it was the middle ward, for felons who could just meet the simplest demands for fees. These were for males; female felons were lodged in "waterman's hall," a very dark and stinking place, and having as near neighbors the "press room," used for the infliction of peine forte et dure, the "bilbows," another refractory cell, and the women's condemned cell, a dismal, cheerless dungeon. The female felons had another ward, at the top of the prison, a foul place lighted by one small window, where the women "suffered themselves to live far worse than swine, and, to speak the truth, the Augean stable could bear no comparison to it, for they are almost poisoned by their own filth, and their conversation is nothing but one continued course of swearing, cursing, and debauchery, insomuch that it passes all description and belief."

decorated both fronts; the western had a | ed, that the place has the exact aspect of figure of Liberty with Whittington's cat hell itself." To the common felons this at her feet; on the eastern were figures of must have been their only enjoyment, for Justice, Mercy, and Truth. But as a their condition was truly awful, and the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine well side they occupied is fitly described as put it about a century ago, "The sump-"a most terrible, wicked, and dreadful tuousness of the outside but aggravated place." There were five wards in it; the the misery of the wretches within." A fair conception of the horrors of the interior will best be obtained from a brief account of its various parts. Some effort was made to classify, and the Newgate of that day contained five principal divisions or sides: there was the master's side, for debtors and felons respectively; the common side, for those same two classes of prisoners; and lastly the press yard, for prisoners of note. The master debtors' side consisted of three wards or rooms which were furnished at high rates, with flock beds, tables, and chairs; in the master felons' side were a couple of wards above and communicating with the "gigger," an interviewing chamber where felons, on payment, saw their friends, while below the gigger was an underground taproom, or drinking-vault, to which the felons on the master's side had access at all hours, and where they might drink as deep as they pleased. The right to occupy the master's side was a luxury dearly purchased, but the accommodation obtained, albeit indifferent, was palatial to that provided for the impecunious on the common side. Penniless debtors were cast into the "stone hall," close to which was the "partner's room," a species of punishment cell for the refractory; into "Tangier," a larger room, but "dark and stinking," and aptly named; or into a debtors' hall, a third room upon the top story, well provided with light but with unglazed windows, and having as its immediate neighbor "Jack Ketch's kitchen," where that "honest fellow, the hangman," boiled the quarters of those executed and dismembered for high treason. The poor debtors were not denied the indulgence of liquor, if they could only pay for it. In one corner of the stone hall above mentioned was a "tap-house," which felons on this side were secretly permitted to enter, to drink with the debtors, "by which means such wretchedness abound

The only inmates of the Newgate prison I am now describing comparatively well off, were those admitted to the press yard; a division composed of "large and spacious rooms" on all the three floors of the prison, and deemed by a legal fiction to be part of the governor's house. That functionary made these, his involuntary lodgers, pay just what he chose. His rates were proportionate to a prisoner's means, and might be anything between twenty and a hundred pounds as a premium, with a high weekly rental, and exorbitant charges for extras besides. But the gentlemen of the press yard, whether State prisoner, aristocratic or opulent criminal, could buy what was denied to their poorer fellows upon the other side: abundant light and air, decent beds, clean and sufficient bedding, and the attendance of servants.