Newgate Prison

“ Although she had made several visits to Newgate prison as early as February 1813, it was not until nearly four years afterwards that the great public work of her life may be said to have begun. The association for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate was formed in April 1817. ”

“ Much has been said about the horrors of the British prison-ships in New York harbour and elsewhere (see Greene’s Historical View, p. 351) ; but the horrors of the old Newgate prison near Granby, in my native state of Connecticut, were even worse (see Phelps’s History of the Newgate Prison) , and the prisons of Massachusetts were not much better. Honest men unable to pay their debts were thrown into these frightful dungeons and treated as brutally as ever the British treated their prisoners of war. ”

“ Newgate,” he continues, “considered as a prison is a structure of more cost and beauty than was necessary, because the sumptuousness of the outside but aggravates the misery of the wretches within; but as a gate to such a city as London, it might have received considerable additions both of design and execution, and abundantly answered the cost in the reputation of the building. The gate of a city, erected rather for ornament than use, ought to be in the style of the triumphal arches.... If Newgate be considered as a prison, it is indeed a very dismal one. ”

“ To be sure, the prisoners in Newgate have more liberty during the day, for they can, I believe, walk about the prison-yard and look out of their grated windows. From sunrise to sunset we are shut up, and the glare is too great to look out; our cells are more spacious, and we never stole, or murdered ”

“ Unlimited drinking was allowed within the walls; the prison tap, with the profits on sales of ale and spirits, was a part of the Governor’s perquisites. All this time there was unrestrained intercommunication between the prisoners; the most depraved were free to contaminate and demoralize their more innocent fellows. Newgate was then, and long continued, a school and nursery for crime. It was established beyond doubt that burglaries and robberies were frequently planned in the gaol, while forged notes and false money were often fabricated within the walls and passed out into the town. ”

“ The prison is so constantly over-crowded that the prisoners have “an infectious malignant fever which sends many to their long home. The magistrates who think them unfit to breathe their native air when living bury them as brethren when dead.” All kinds of robbery and oppression were practised within the precincts of the gaol. Inside, apart from personal discomfort, the inmates do much as they please. “There are seditious preachings by fifth monarchy men at Newgate,” say the records, “and prayers for all righteous blood.” ”

“ The old buildings were entirely disused, and the whole of the inmates of Newgate were kept constantly in separate confinement.
With the last re-edification of Newgate, a work executed some seven centuries after the first stone of the old gaol was laid, the architectural records of the prison end. Nothing much was done at Newgate in the way of building, outside or in, after 1862. The Act for private executions led to the erection of the gallows shed in the exercising yard, and at the flank of the passage from the condemned cells. ”

“ It is to be feared that long after the opening of White Cross Street prison, Newgate continued to be a reproach to those responsible for its management.
I pass now to the criminal side of Newgate, which consisted of the six quarters or yards already enumerated and described. [39] The inmates of this part, as distinguished from the debtors, were comprised in four classes:— (1) those awaiting trial; (2) persons under sentence of imprisonment for a fixed period, or until they shall have paid certain fines ”

“ The captives were packed in these dens like slaves in the hold of their prison-ship. Mrs. Frye describes the women as “swearing, gaming, fighting, singing, dancing, drinking, and dressing up in men’s clothes,” and as late as 1838 gambling with cards, dice and draughts was common among the male prisoners. Jail distempers now and then purged this sink of vileness of a portion of its inmates, till at last, in 1858, the reconstruction of its cellular system was completed. Even with that, however, Newgate is anything but a perfect jail. ”

“ Archbishop Laud concluded with whipping, and that the chief keeper should be sent for to the Council Board.
The ordinary methods of attempting escape were common enough in Newgate. Quarrying into the walls, breaking up floors, sawing through bars, and picking locks were frequent devices to gain release. In 1679 several prisoners picked out the stones of the prison walls, and seven who had been committed to Newgate for burglary escaped. No part of the prison was safe from attack, provided only the prisoners had leisure and were unobserved, both of which were almost a matter of course. ”

“ Again the following year the inspectors repeat their charge. “The prominent evils of this prison (Newgate) —evils which the alterations made within the last four{228} years have failed to remove—are the association of prisoners, and the unusual contamination to which such association gives rise. For nearly twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four the prisoners are locked up, during which time no officer is stationed in the ward with them.” They go on to say—“Newgate is only less extensively injurious than formerly because it is less crowded. ”

“ Three years after the advent of the prison commissioners, it{503} was decided that Newgate was an excessively costly and redundant establishment. It was only filled at the periods when the sessions of the Central Criminal Court were in progress; at others an expensive staff was maintained with little or nothing to do. At a short distance stood another prison of detention, that of Clerkenwell, with spare accommodation sufficient to receive all prisoners who were then committed to Newgate. ”

“ As late as 1818 the most capricious rules prevailed as to ironing in various prisons in the country. Thus at Newgate all felons were ironed; it was the same at Chelmsford; but at Bury and Norwich all felons were without irons. Again at Coldbath Fields, only the untried and those sent for re-examination were ironed; at other places the untried were not ironed, and so on. Dr. Dodd, in his ‘Thoughts in Prison,’ refers to the horror he experienced in Newgate from the constant rattling of chains. It seems the most hardened prisoners often clanked their irons for an amusement. ”

“ No doubt wiser counsels prevailed with Lord John Russell, and on a more mature consideration he realized that the limited area of the existing Newgate site, and the costliness of enlarging it, forbade all idea of entirely reconstructing the gaol so as to constitute it a model prison. It would be far better to begin at the beginning, to select a sufficiently spacious piece of ground, and erect a prison which from foundations{490} to roofs should be in conformity with the newest ideas. ”

“ He is doomed to be landed on a foreign shore, with the ensign of crime carried before him, where his deprivation of liberty will consist, not, as in England, of simple confinement within prison walls, or of the exaction of labour, but in having the eye of supervision everlastingly over him, in being assigned to a master whose interest it is to watch him incessantly, and to deprive him of the smallest chance of indulging in his favourite propensities. No, the prisoners of Newgate fear nothing so much as transportation. ”

“ The common side of Newgate is generally accounted, as it really is, the worst part of that prison; not so much from the place as the people, it being usually stocked with the veriest rogues and meanest sort of felons and pickpockets, who not being able to pay chamber-rent on the master’s side, are thrust in there. And if they come in bad, to be sure they do no go out better ”

“ Transportation had now been adopted as a secondary punishment, and numbers who escaped the halter were congregated in Newgate waiting removal beyond the seas. The population of the prison had amounted to nearly six hundred at one time in 1785. According to a presentment made by the Grand Jury in 1813, in the debtors’ side, built for one hundred, no less than three hundred and forty were lodged; in the female felons’ ward there were one hundred and twenty in space intended for only sixty. These females were destitute and in rags, without bedding, many without shoes. ”

“ We have had considerable satisfaction in observing, not only the improved state of the women in the prison, but we understand from the governor and clergyman at the penitentiary, that those who have been under our care are very different from those who come from other prisons. We also may state that when they left Newgate to go to Botany Bay, such a thing was never known in the prison before as the quietness and order with which they left it ”

“ D. away from the Great Fire with a promise of prison cells and relics of Newgate, [153] and I must admit to a sensation myself when face to face with the door of the condemned cell of Newgate Prison. This particular corner of the Museum makes a bid for popularity with those with a taste for horrors. The prison cells from Neptune Street, in which debtors were confined for indefinite periods for small debts, are an example of old London's cruelty to those of its unfortunate citizens who couldn't pay their way. ”

“ Public attention was daily more and more called to prison management. Yet through it all Newgate remained almost unchanged. It was less crowded, perhaps, since having been relieved by the opening of the Giltspur Street Compter, and that was all that could be said. In 1836, when the newly-appointed Government inspectors made their first report, the internal arrangements of Newgate were as bad as ever. These inspectors were earnest men, who had made prisons and prison management a study. One was the Rev. Whitworth Russell, for many years chaplain of Millbank ”

“ At this date there were forty-nine persons lying in Newgate under sentence of death, one hundred and eighty under sentence of transportation, and prisoners of other categories, making the total prison population up to nearly six hundred souls. ”

“ Next morning I met Martin and Williams, who had also been arrested, and with them Kevin O'Doherty, a young medical student whom I saw for the first time, and I learned that he was the registered proprietor of a new journal called the Tribune. We got the best accommodation the Governor had to give, the prison being under municipal control, and the best, sooth to say, was odious, Newgate Prison having been long condemned as insanitary. We agreed to mess together at the outset, our meals being supplied from a neighbouring hotel. ”

“ On the other hand, at the great convict establishments, such is the moral restraint of a systematic discipline, that numbers of men, “lifers,” and others with ten, fourteen, or twenty years to do, can be trusted to work out of doors without bolts and bars at a distance from the prison.{409}
The last escape from Newgate was only three years ago, and occurred just before the final closing of the prison. ”

“ They lacked aptitude, moreover, or perhaps opportunity, to weave their stories into thrilling narratives, such as have been preserved from the pens of more scholarly prisoners. Hence the chronicle of Newgate is somewhat bald and uninteresting as regards escapes. It rings the changes upon conventional stratagems and schemes. All more or less bear testimony to the cunning and adroitness of the prisoners, but all equally prove the keepers' carelessness or cupidity. An escape from prison argues always a want of precaution. ”

“ The good it tried to do took active shape in the establishment of temporary refuges—at Hoxton for males, and in the Hackney Road for females—for the reception of deserving cases discharged from prison. The governor of Newgate and other metropolitan prisons had orders of admission to this refuge, which he could bestow on prisoners on release, and so save the better-disposed or the completely destitute from lapsing at once into{169} crime. ”

“ So, persistent and desperate offenders were assigned to one ward and those less confirmed in crime to another, while boys and youths were separated from the older prisoners, whose influence on them could not be but for evil. Under the more humane management of the present century Newgate was even provided with a school. “A portion of the prison,” says Boz, in his “Visit,” “is set apart for boys under fourteen years of age.” ”

“ UNDER the conditions referred to in the previous chapter, with criminals and misdemeanants of all{67} shades crowding perpetually into its narrow limits, the latter state of Newgate was worse than the first. The new gaol fell as far short of the demands made on it as did the old. The prison population fluctuated a great deal, but it was almost always in excess of the accommodation available, and there were times when the place was full to overflowing. Neild [22] gives some figures which well illustrate this. On the 14th June, 1800, there were 199 debtors and 289 felons in the prison. ”

“ In Newgate until the building of the new (and last) gaol, the felons’ side and the common debtors’ side were so dark that it was necessary to use links and burners all day long; indeed, artificial light was generally necessary all over the prison, except in the press-yard.
The place of durance was sometimes underground, a dungeon, or subterranean cellar, into which the prisoners were lowered, to fight with rats for the meagre pittance of food thrown to them through a trap-door. ”