CHAPTER VII.
PHILADELPHIA’S BASTILE.
In Philadelphia Dickens made a special request for permission to visit the great prison of the State, remarking that it and the Falls of Niagara were the two objects he most wished to see in America. Exceptional facilities were afforded him to gratify his desire, and make his investigation as thorough as he chose. Nothing was concealed from him, and his account and opinion of the Eastern State Penitentiary (“American Notes,” Chapter 7) created a vast deal of comment in their day. He put himself on record as a violent opponent of the solitary system, and while he intended to make this chapter the strongest, it was really one of the weakest in the book. He had assailed the outrages of the debtors’ prisons of London manfully. Over the Philadelphia system he became almost hysterical. In the former he had actual evils and wrongs and outrages to combat. In the latter his grievance 178 was largely founded on sentimentality and purely personal feeling. He describes his visit:
“In the outskirts stands a great prison called the Eastern Penitentiary, conducted on a plan peculiar to the State of Pennsylvania. The system here is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.
“I was accompanied to this prison by two gentlemen officially connected with its management, and passed the day in going from cell to cell and talking with the inmates. Every facility was afforded me that the utmost courtesy could suggest. Nothing was concealed or hidden from my view, and every piece of information that I sought was openly and frankly given. The perfect order of the building cannot be praised too highly, and of the excellent motives of all who are immediately concerned in the administration of the system there can be no kind of question.
“Between the body of the prison and the outer wall there is a spacious garden. Entering it by a wicket in the massive gate, we pursued the path before us to its other termination, and passed into a large chamber, from which seven long passages radiate. On either side of each is a long, long row of low cell-doors with a certain number over every one. Above 179 a gallery of cells like those below, except that they have no narrow yard attached (as those in the ground tier have), and are somewhat smaller. The possession of two of these is supposed to compensate for the absence of so much air and exercise as can be had in the dull strip attached to each of the others, in an hour’s time every day; and, therefore, every prisoner in this upper story has two cells, adjoining and communicating with each other.
“Standing at the central point and looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails is awful. 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; the life or death of any single creature. 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. 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.
“Every cell has double doors—the outer one of sturdy oak, the other of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his food is handed. He has a bible and a slate and pencil, and, under certain restrictions, has sometimes other books, provided for the purpose, and pen and ink and paper. His razor, plate and can, and basin hang upon the wall, or shine upon the little shelf. Fresh water is laid on in every cell, and he can draw it at his pleasure. During the day his bedstead turns up against the wall and leaves more space for him to work in. His 181 loom, or bench, or wheel is there, and there he labors, sleeps and wakes and counts the seasons as they change, and grows old.”
Over the inmates of this Philadelphia gaol Dickens exuded a great deal of sympathy and sentiment. He invested each man he wrote about with a pathos that made good reading at any rate, and no doubt sincerely believed all that he wrote. To a man of a convivial and companionable nature like himself the idea of a life of solitude was naturally horrible. To a man fond of long walks among other men the enforced absence of exercise as well as of companionship was naturally dreadful. To Charles Dickens, in short, a term of imprisonment in the Eastern Penitentiary would unquestionably have been the cruelest torture. He would, in all likelihood, have worn his life out speedily here, like a wild bird in a cage, or have laid violent hands upon himself, or have become a madman. To the felons whom he visited, men for the most part of blunt sensibilities and brutal natures, he credited the same qualities as belonged to his own refined and sensitive composition, and he put himself in their place and spoke for them from his own standpoint. How 182 far he was led astray by this was shown by the case of the character long known as “Dickens’s Dutchman.” Of this fellow he wrote:
“In another cell there was a German, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for larceny, two of which had just expired. With colors procured in the same manner (extracted from dyed yarn given him to weave) he had painted every inch of the walls and ceiling quite beautifully. He had laid out the few feet of ground behind him with exquisite neatness, and had made a little bed in the centre, that looked, by the bye, like a grave. The taste and ingenuity he had displayed in everything was most extraordinary, and yet a more dejected, heartbroken, wretched creature it would be difficult to imagine. I never saw such a picture of forlorn affliction and distress of mind. My heart bled for him, and when the tears ran down his cheeks, and he took one of the visitors aside to ask, with his trembling hands nervously clutching at his coat to detain him, whether there was no hope of his dismal sentence being commuted, the spectacle was really too painful to witness. I never saw or heard any kind of misery that impressed me more than the wretchedness of this man.”
This was the Dickensesque of it, and it gave its unfortunate subject an international notoriety. Now mark the plain, unvarnished facts.
The name of “Dickens’s Dutchman” was Charles Langheimer. He was sentenced to the Eastern Penitentiary for the first time on May 15, 1840, and it was while he was serving this term that Dickens saw him. On June 25, 1852, he came back on a year’s sentence, and on Feb. 24, 1855, he was a third time convicted, for two years on this occasion. On April 4, 1861, he came again for a year, on March 12, 1872, he was returned for two years, on Sept. 9, 1875, and on April 4, 1877, he began two terms of a year each. On Sept. 10, 1879, he received a three years’ term, and he was no sooner through with this than he was once more convicted and sent up for a year, in 1882. In the intervals of the sixteen years he spent in this one prison, since his first conviction, he had served five terms in other prisons, three in the County Jail, of Philadelphia, one in the Baltimore Penitentiary, and one in New York. In plain English, the man was a confirmed pauper and thief. He lived by mendicancy, and from time to time he would commit some larceny, for which offense all his sentences were imposed on him, merely in order to be sent to jail to be cared for—just as he might have gone on 184 a vacation from his regular and miserable life upon the chance of charity.
In view of Dickens’s positive and unqualified expression of sentiment in regard to him, the most curious fact of his life remains to be noted. This is that, fourteen years after Dickens’s own death, he returned voluntarily to the penitentiary, where he had ended a year’s term only a few months before, and begged to be taken in. This place, so dreadful to the impressionable novelist, was the only approach to home the poor wretch knew. He was in a deplorable condition, was nearly eighty years of age, and had a horror of the almshouse. The inspectors consented that he should have his wish, and he was cared for for a month, until his death, which occurred on March 14, 1884. It is interesting to know that Dickens died at the age of fifty-eight years. This “picture of forlorn affliction and distress of mind,” this “dejected, heartbroken, wretched creature,” who was born eight years before Dickens, survived him nearly twice that period, and outlived him, in the mere number of his years, by twenty-two. It may be remembered, in connection with the Fleet Prison episode of “Pickwick,” 185 that Sam Weller adverts to the almost identical case of an old prisoner, to whom the jail had become such a home that the fear of being locked out of it eventually deterred him from taking the sly tastes of liberty which the turnkeys were willing to allow him.
The Eastern State Penitentiary is, in this day, admitted to be one of the model penal institutions of the world. When built it was in the northern suburb, but it is now in the heart of Philadelphia. It occupies an entire block, comprising ten or twelve acres, and its site was originally known as Cherry Hill, a name which is often locally applied to the jail itself. The ground is elevated, and from the gateway tower a fine panorama of the vast city, spreading about for miles, may be obtained. All that is visible externally is a massive granite wall, some thirty-five feet high, slightly relieved or buttressed with towers at the angles and on the front. The enclosure is square, and the entrance, in the centre of the front wall, is by a lofty portal, defended by a heavy outer gate, in which there is a wicket, and an inner gate, and dominated by a tower taller than the others. Within the walls the ranges of cells radiate 186 from an octagonal central building, which is crowned with an observatory. To simplify the description it may be said that this central building forms the hub from which branch branch forth the spokes of this enormous wheel. A system of lighting the entire grounds by night is provided in a lantern of special ingenious construction, in the tower below the observatory or lookout. There are some detached buildings on the grounds, used for mechanical and culinary purposes. The living apartments of the warden and his family, offices, etc., are in the front building. The outer and inner gates of the prison are never opened at the same time. Even a visitor or an official becomes in a manner a prisoner when he leaves the street.