their sympathizers and supporters came to “comfort them” by sharing their potations. Even a notorious highwayman like Maclane, according to Horace Walpole, entertained great guests, and it was the “mode” for half the world to drive to Newgate and gaze on him in the “condemned hold.”
In sharp contrast with the privations and terrible discomforts of the poorer sort was the wild revelry of these aristocratic prisoners of the press yard. They had every luxury to be bought with money, freedom alone excepted, and that was often to be compassed by bribing dishonest officials to suffer them to escape. They kept late hours, collecting in one another’s rooms to roar out seditious songs over innumerable bowls of punch. At times they exhibited much turbulence, and refused to be locked up in the separate chambers allotted to them. No attempt was made to coerce them, or oblige them to observe due decorum and submit to the discipline of the prison. Yet while they thus experienced ill-placed and unjust leniency, others far less culpable were ground down till they were “slowly murdered there by the intolerable horrors of the place.”
As a general rule the movement of offenders through Newgate was pretty rapid. The period of imprisonment for debtors might be often indefinitely prolonged, and there was the well-known case of Major Bernardi and his companions, who were detained for forty years in Newgate without trial or the chance of it. Some, too, languished awaiting transfer to the West Indian or American plantations by the contractors to whom they were legally sold. But for the bulk of the criminal prisoners there was one speedy and effectual system of removal, that of capital punishment. Executions were wholesale in those times. The code was sanguinary in the extreme. The gallows tree was always heavily laden. There was every element of callous brutality in the manner of inflicting the extreme penalty of the law. From the time of sentence to the last dread moment the convict was exhibited as a show, or held up to public contempt and execration. Heartless creatures flocked to the gaol chapel to curiously examine the aspect of condemned malefactors. Men who had but a short time to live mingled freely with their fellow-prisoners, recklessly carousing, and often making a boast that they laughed to scorn and rejected the well-meant ministrations of the ordinary.
The actual ceremony was to the last degree cold-blooded and wanting in all the solemn attributes fitting the awful scene. The doomed was carried in an open cart to Tyburn or other appointed place; the halter already encircled his neck, his coffin was at his feet, by his side the chaplain or some devoted amateur philanthropist and preacher striving earnestly to improve the occasion. For the mob it was a high day and holiday; they lined the route taken by the ghastly procession, encouraging or flouting the convict according as he happened to be a popular hero or unknown to criminal fame. In the first case they cheered him to the echo, offered him bouquets of flowers, or pressed him to drink deep from St. Giles’s Bowl; in the latter they pelted him with filth and overwhelmed him with abuse. The most scandalous scenes occurred on the gallows. The hangman often quarrelled with his victim over the garments, which the former looked upon as a lawful perquisite, and which the latter was disposed to distribute among his friends; now and again the rope broke, or the drop was insufficient, and Jack Ketch had to add his weight to the hanging body to assist strangulation. Occasionally there was a personal conflict, and the hangman was obliged to do his office by sheer force. The convicts were permitted to make dying speeches, and these orations were elaborated and discussed in Newgate weeks before the great day; while down in the yelling crowd beneath the gallows spurious versions were hawked about and rapidly sold. It was a distinct gain to the decency and good order of the metropolis when Tyburn and other distant points ceased to be the places of execution, and hangings were exclusively carried out in front of Newgate, just over the debtors’ door. But some of the worst features of the old system survived. There was still the melodramatic sermon, in the chapel hung with black, before a large congregation collected simply to stare at the convicts squeezed into one pew, who in their turn stared with mixed feelings at the coffin on the table just before their eyes. There was still the same tumultuous gathering to view the last act in tragedy, the same bloodthirsty mob swaying to and fro before the gates, the same blue-blooded spectators, George Selwyn or my Lord Tom Noddy, who breakfasted in state with the gaoler, and so got a box seat or rented window opposite at an exorbitant rate. The populace were like degenerate Romans in the amphitheatre waiting for the butchery to begin. They fought and struggled desperately for front places: people fell and were trampled to death, hoarse roars came from thousands of brazen throats, which swelled into a terrible chorus as the black figures of the performers on the gallows stood out against the sky. “Hats off!” “Down in front!” these cries echoed and re-echoed in increasing volume, and all at once abruptly came to an end—the bolt had been drawn, the drop had fallen, and the miserable wretch had gone to his long home.
The policy which had brought about the substitution of Newgate for Tyburn no doubt halted halfway, but it was enlightened, and a considerable move towards the private executions of our own times. It was dictated by the more humane principles which were gradually making head in regard to criminals and crime. Many more years were to elapse, however, before the eloquence of Romilly was to bear fruit in the softening of our sanguinary penal code. But already John Howard had commenced his labours, and his revelations were letting in a flood of light upon the black recesses of prison life. It is to the credit of the authorities of the City of London that they recognized the necessity for rebuilding Newgate on a larger and more improved plan before the publication of Howard’s reports. The great philanthropist made his first journey of inspection towards the end of 1773; in the following year he laid the information he had obtained before the House of Commons, and in 1777 published the first edition of his celebrated ‘State of Prisons.’ As early as 1755 the Common Council had condemned Newgate in no measured terms; declared it to be habitually overcrowded with “victims of public justice, under the complicated distresses of poverty, nastiness, and disease,” who had neither water, nor air, nor light in sufficient quantities; the buildings were old and ruinous, and incapable of any “improvement or tolerable repairs.” It was plainly admitted that the gaol ought to be at once pulled down. But as usual the difficulty of providing funds cropped up, and the work, though urgent, was postponed for some years. The inadequacy of the prison was so obvious, however, that the matter was presently brought before a committee of the House of Commons, and the necessity for rebuilding clearly proved. A committee of the Corporation next met in 1767 to consider ways and means, and they were fortified in their decision to rebuild by convincing evidence of the horrible condition of the existing prison. A letter addressed to the committee by Sir Stephen Jansen stigmatizes it as “an abominable sink of beastliness and corruption.” He spoke from full knowledge, having been sheriff when the prison was decimated by gaol fever. In the same year Parliamentary powers were obtained to raise money to rebuild the place, and the new Newgate was actually commenced in 1770, when Lord Mayor Beckford, father of “Vathek” Beckford, laid the first stone. Its architect was George Dance, and the prison building, which still stands to speak for itself, has been counted one of his finest works. Howard, who gives this historic prison the first place in his list, must have visited it while the new buildings were in progress. The plan did not find favour with him, but he enters into no particulars, and limits his criticisms to remarking, “that without more than ordinary care the prisoners in it will be in great danger of gaol fever.” According to modern notions the plan was no doubt faulty in the extreme. Safe custody, a leading principle in all prison construction, was compassed at the expense of most others. The prison façade is a marvel of strength and solidity, but until reappropriated in recent years its interior was a limited confined space, still darkened, and deprived of ventilation, by being parcelled out into courts, upon which looked the narrow windows of the various wards.
The erection of the “new and commodious gaol,” as it is described in an Act of the period, proceeded rapidly, but three or four years after Howard’s visit it was still uncompleted. This Act recites what had been done, referring to the valuable, extensive areas, which had been taken in for the construction of this great prison, and provides additional funds. In 1780, however, an unexpected catastrophe happened, and the new buildings were set on fire by the Lord George Gordon rioters, and so much damaged that the most comprehensive repairs were indispensable. These were executed in 1782. Many years were to elapse before any further alterations or improvements were made.
It was soon evident that Dance’s Newgate, imposing and appropriate as were its outlines and façade, by no means satisfied all needs. The