Alfred Trumble

“ The streets swarm with the children of the tenements, which line them with towering piles of unclean brick and mortar; and the pedestrians who navigate them, and who hang about the outside of the prison, as if held there by a spell and only awaiting their turn to pass within its walls, are for the most part of that skulking, evil class which knows the interior of the jail quite as well as its outer barriers, and the ways which lead to its frowning gate. For many years the passenger traffic of the New York Central Railroad was embarked at a depot occupying the block above the Tombs. ”

“ There is no march to the gibbet through a throng of spectators as in most of our own jails. The doomed man gets his last glimpse of the sky through a stone funnel down which no ray of sunlight ever finds its way. As far as I remember, from my London days, the only sign the outer world has of the work going on within the prison walls is the hoisting of a black flag over the lodge, and I know not if even this ceremonial is still observed. From the gallows to the grave in Newgate used to be but a step. ”

“ Occasionally there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle or shoemaker’s last, but it is stilled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife or children, home or friends ”

“ Curiously enough, nature had provided them with a sign as certain as the running up of the black flag upon the wall of Newgate. A great number of pigeons had found lodgment in the Tombs yard, nesting in cotes which had been put up for them along the inner jail walls and in the eaves of the buildings themselves. Long immunity from human aggressions had rendered them fearless, and when the audience gathered for an execution, under the gray shadow of the jail walls, the pigeons were equally certain to assemble, cooing and pluming themselves in the sunlight above. ”

“ And now the strokes begin to fall like hail upon the gate and on the strong building; for those who could not reach the door spent their fierce rage on any thing, even on the great blocks of stone, which shivered their weapons into fragments, and made their hands and arms tingle as if the walls were active in their resistance and dealt them back their blows. ”

“ The Nonconformist confessors were divided up among the Southwark prisons, and the Marshalsea received its share of them. John Udall, the Puritan martyr, fell a victim to its gaol fever. Its blight extended through many generations, and the shadow of its walls darkened many useful lives for no crime worse than the accident of failure that may come to any man. A false system ground its abject shabbiness, its haggard anxiety, and hopeless stupor of energies, into natures that might, but for it, have triumphed over care, and converted the defeat of to-day into the victory of to-morrow. ”

“ Under the arched top of the framework, between it and the grating, a stone slab or panel bore the carved inscription: “Please Remember Poor Debtors, Having No Allowance.” Through the grating one might look into a squalid, dark room, with a rough wooden bench fastened to one wall, and during the hours of daylight some miserable human creature, like a caged and starved beast, always glared from behind the bars upon the street, repeating, in the voice of wheedling mendicancy, the appeal cut in the stone above his head. ”

“ Every window was 14 now choked up with heads; the housetops teemed with people clinging to chimneys, peering over gable-ends, and holding on where the sudden loosening of any brick or stone would dash them down into the street. The church-tower, the church-roof, the churchyard, the prison-leads, the very waterspouts and lampposts, every inch of room swarmed with human life. ”

“ In the matter of cleanliness a change for the better had been made in Dickens’s time; but one great evil of the jail was the herding together of the prisoners in the wards. Here the possibly innocent learned evil lessons from the guilty; the depraved could deprave those not yet wholly debased; the gaol became, in short, not so much a place of punishment for crime as a powerful breeder of it, and many a man and boy, and woman and girl, who went into Newgate for a trivial offense, emerged from it a full-fledged and incorrigible lawbreaker. ”

“ Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence; and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the long winter nights there are living people near, or he is in some lonely corner of the great gaol, with walls and passages, and iron doors between him and the nearest sharer in its solitary horrors. ”

“ How soon have those same eyes, deeply sunken in the head, glared from faces wasted with famine, and sallow from confinement, in days when it was no figure of speech to say that the debtors rotted in prison, with no hope of release, and no prospect of liberty. ”

“ I am solemnly convinced that nothing that ingenuity could devise to be done in this city, in the same compass of time, could work such ruin as one public execution, and I stand astounded and appalled by the wickedness it exhibits. I do not believe that any community can prosper where such a scene of horror and demoralization as was enacted this morning outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol is presented at the very doors of the good citizens, and is passed by unknown or forgotten. ”

“ As the warmth of the cheerful day began to shed itself upon the scanty crowd the murmur of tongues was heard, shutters were thrown open, the blinds drawn up, and those who had slept in rooms over against the prison, where places to see the execution were let at high prices, rose hastily from their beds. In some of the houses people were busy taking out the window-sashes for the better accommodation of the spectators; in others, the spectators were already seated, and beguiling the time with cards, or drink, or jokes among themselves. ”

“ There were many classes of people here, from the laboring man and his fustian jacket to the broken-down spendthrift in his shawl dressing-gown, most appropriately out at the elbows; but there was the same air about them all—a sort of listless, gaol-bird, careless swagger; a vagabondish, who’s-afraid sort of bearing which is wholly indescribable in words, but which any man can understand in a moment, if he wish, by setting foot in the 92 nearest debtors’ prison, and looking at the very first group of people he sees there. ”

“ Pile up the fire!
“It burnt fiercely. The door was red hot and the gap wider. They vainly tried to shield their faces with their hands, and standing, as if in readiness for a spring, watched the place. Dark figures, some crawling on their hands and knees, some carried in the arms of others, were seen to pass along the roof. It was plain that the gaol could hold out no longer. The keeper and his officers and their wives and children were escaping. Pile up the fire! ”

“ Each cell-door on this side has a square aperture in it. Some of the women peep anxiously through it at the sound of footsteps; others shrink away in shame. For what offense can that lonely child, of ten or twelve years old, be shut up here? Oh, that boy? He is the son of a prisoner we saw just now; is a witness against his father, and is detained here for safe keeping until the trial, that’s all. ”

“ William Dorrit had passed through an open outer gate on High street in the Borough, to 118 give Southwark its more familiar name; had crossed a little court-yard, ascended a couple of stone steps, traversed a narrow entry, and been admitted by a string of locked doors into the prison lodge. Here he had waited, as the form and practice of the proceeding required, until his arrival was registered, and the tipstaff, who had kindly guided and guarded his feet to this harbor of refuge from the cares of the world which works for a living, had received a receipt for his safe delivery. ”

“ The condemned felon has as good a yard for air and exercise in Newgate as the insolvent debtor in the Marshalsea Prison.
“It may be my fancy, or it may be that I cannot separate the place from the old recollections associated with it, but this part of London I cannot bear. The street is broad, the shops are spacious, the noise of the passing vehicles, the footsteps of a perpetual stream of people—all the busy sounds of traffic resound 133 in it from morn to midnight, but the streets around are mean and close; poverty and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys ”

“ Into this narrow, grave-like place men are brought out to die. The wretched creature stands beneath the gibbet on the ground; the rope is about his neck; and when the sign is given a 171 weight at its other end comes running down and swings him up into the air—a corpse. The law requires that there be present at this dismal spectacle the judge, the jury, and citizens to the amount of twenty-five. From the community it is hidden. To the dissolute and bad the thing remains a frightful mystery. Between the criminal and them the prison wall is interposed as a thick and gloomy veil. ”

“ The Fleet in those days consisted principally of one long brick pile, which ran parallel with the Fleet Market, now Farringdon street, with an open court around it, bounded by a lofty wall, over which, here and there, one could see the sooty chimney-tops and the smoky sky. The buildings were four stories in height above the ground, with a story half under ground among the foundations. No architectural art had been wasted on the exterior of the structure, and no sanitary ingenuity or sentimental seeking after the comfort of the inmates had been expended upon the interior. ”

“ I thought it was better to borrow Captain Hopkins’s knife and fork than Captain Hopkins’s comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness, with large whiskers, and an old, old brown great coat, with no other coat below it. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner; and what plates and dishes and pots he had, on a shelf; and I divined (God only knows how) that though the two girls with the shock heads of hair were Captain Hopkins’s children, the dirty little lady was not married to Captain Hopkins. ”

“ In the adjourning room some solitary tenant might be seen poring, by the 91 light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers, yellow with dust, and dropping with age, writing, for the hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances for the perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose heart it would never touch. ”

“ Many eyes that have long since closed in the grave, have looked around upon that scene lightly enough, when entering the gate of the old Marshalsea Prison for the first time; for despair seldom comes with the first severe shock of misfortune. ”

“ What is this dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama? A famous prison called the Tombs. Shall we go in?
“So. A long, narrow and lofty building, stove-heated as usual, with four galleries, one above the other, going round it, and communicating by stairs. Between the two sides of each gallery, and in its center, a bridge for the greater convenience of crossing. On each of these bridges sits a man, dozing or reading, or talking to an idle companion. On each tier are two opposite rows of small iron doors. ”

“ Defoe, who sampled the King’s Bench as well as Newgate and the Fleet, describes it as “not near so good” as the latter little prison, and complained that “to a man who had money the Bench was only the name of a prison.” Indeed, the license of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries in the King’s Bench would be hardly credible to persons accustomed only to the rigid discipline of modern jail management. In all the debtors’ gaols of this period, the gambler and the swindler, the pickpocket, and even the footpads, who robbed by violence, plied their trades. ”

“ The cell had been built for many years. Scores of men must have passed their last hours there. It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead bodies—the cap, the noose, the pinioned arms, the faces that he knew, even beneath that hideous veil. ”

“ To such extreme was this practice stretched that, on the occasions of later executions in the Tombs, reporters would actually be sent to spend the night in prison, and to record the last hours of a worthless brute whose just doom should have been a swift death and complete oblivion. Evil as the influence of a public hanging may have been, it may be doubted if it was any worse than the practice of the press in investing the attendant circumstances of a vile and dangerous 174 wretch’s end with the mock heroism of cheap bravado and the clap-trap sentiment of literary fustian. ”

“ He sees the prison officers, but, with that exception, he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive, to be dug out in the slow rounds of years, and, in the meantime, dead to everything 180 but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.
“His name, and crime, and term of suffering are unknown, even to the officer who delivers him his daily food. There is a number over his cell-door, and in a book, of which the governor of the prison has one copy and the moral instructor another, this is the index to his history. ”