At the period of the Gordon Riots, Newgate was in the course of reconstruction. The present prison was designed by George Dance, R. A., the architect of the Mansion House and other public buildings. The famous Lord Mayor Beckford, father of the author of “Vathek,” laid the foundation stone on May 23, 1770, this being his last public act. Work seems to have progressed slowly on it, for the newer portion was only in part completed when the Gordon mob stormed the older sections. This event served as a warning, however. Within two years Newgate was in stronger shape than ever; and substantially in the shape which, 32 after the passage of more than a century, it still presents to the world.
Newgate serves to London the purpose of a reception prison for offenders awaiting trial and for those condemned to death, and the executions of the great city are performed within its walls. The Old Bailey Court, which is an adjunct to it, is practically a part of the mountain of masonry which sends its bleak shadow over Newgate street and the Old Bailey. It is separated from it only by a yard, across which prisoners are led to be tried. The court-house, known colloquially, in London, as the Old Bailey, and politely as the Central Criminal Court, was built in 1773, was destroyed with Newgate in the Gordon Riots, but rebuilt and enlarged in 1809 by the taking in of Surgeons’ Hall. The Court is a square hall, with a gallery for visitors. At one side is the chief seat for the judge, with a canopy overhead surmounted by the royal arms, and a gilded sheathed sword on the crimson wall. Opposite is the prisoners’ dock, with the stairs descending into the covered passageway, which gives access by the way of the Press Yard to Newgate. To the left of the dock is the witness-stand, and further to 33 the left the jury box. The counsel occupy the body of the court below. The Old Bailey Court formerly sat at seven in the morning, but now sittings do not commence until ten. It tries crimes of every kind, from treason to petty larceny and offenses on the high seas, but only the heaviest ones are brought to judgment before this branch of the Sessions. What is called the New Court, adjoining the old one, sits upon the lighter misdemeanors. The Judges at the Old Bailey are nominally the Lord Mayor, who is, in fact, only a gorgeous dummy to open the court with true dignity, the Sheriff, the Lord Chancellor, and a long list of Judges, Aldermen, Recorders and so on. Of these the real Judges are the Recorder and Common Sergeant, and the Judge of the Sheriff’s Court. The law Judges take part when knotty legal questions come in dispute, or when the trial is for a capital offense which may cost the prisoner his life. A curious old custom at the Bailey is that one Alderman must be present at every sitting of the Court.
Above the Old Court is a stately dining-room where, during the Old Bailey sittings, the Sheriffs used to give Judges and Court officials, and 34 a few privileged visitors, dinners of rump steak and marrow puddings, according to a bill of fare provided by custom. The custom, I believe, is kept up still. There are two dinners, at 3 and 5 o’clock respectively, and a historic court chaplain is told of who for ten years ate both of these meals each day.
There is a reverse to this pleasant picture of the Old Bailey. For many years it was a most unhealthy place to hold court in. The jail fevers which decimated Newgate’s population always found their way into the court room. In 1750 the fever caused the death of several judges and Lord Mayor Pennant himself, and whenever there was an epidemic there are records of its effect among the potentates of the Old Bailey. In Chapter 7 of “A Tale of Two Cities,” in connection with the trial of Charles Darnay, Dickens writes of the Old Bailey Court: “They hanged at Tyburn in those days, so the street outside of Newgate had not obtained the infamous notoriety that has since attached to it. But the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practiced, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into the Court with the prisoners, and 35 sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened that the judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as certainly as the prisoner’s, and even died before him.” In the course of the same chapter he describes the accused as standing quiet and attentive, with his hands resting on the slab of wood forming the shelf of the prisoner’s dock, “so composedly that they had not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which it was strewn. The Court was all bestrewn with herbs, and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever.” In 1770, Mr. Ackerman, one of the keepers, testified before the House of Commons, which had the question of rebuilding the prison before it, that in the spring of 1750, the jail distemper had spread to the Sessions House, now the Old Bailey, and had caused the death, in addition to two Judges, and the Lord Mayor already alluded to, of several of the jury and others to the number of over sixty persons.
The surroundings of Newgate are full of historical memories. Just off Giltspur street, but a step away, is Cock lane, where the ghost walked. 36 Along Newgate street, going from the Old Bailey to Cheapside, was the noble old charity of Christ’s Hospital, otherwise famous as the Blue-Coat School, rich in works of art and richer in the recollections of such scholars within its cloisters as Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Richardson, who wrote “Clarissa Harlowe,” and many more. Along the same street opens Queen’s Head Passage, in which Dolly’s chop-house, which is a part of the commercial history of England, stands, and Ivy Lane, where Dr. Johnson established his club of that name. Newgate Market, between Newgate street and Paternoster Row, is the great meat market of London. It is what is known as the carcass market, and for many years was the chief source of slaughtered meat supply to the retail butchers of London. At a certain hour of the morning Newgate street was a veritable butchers’ exchange. Newgate market was originally a meat market, but its convenient proximity to Smithfield, which lies on the other side of Newgate, only a few streets off, led to its conversion to its later uses. Smithfield was the historic cattle market of London. Here in the past were slaughtered beasts for food, and men and 37 women for their opinions. The beasts had the better part of the bargain. They were killed before they were cooked. The human victims of Smithfield Shambles were roasted and boiled alive. In chapter 21 of “Oliver Twist” we find a description of Smithfield when Sykes is carrying Oliver off to assist in the burglary at Chertsey.
“It was market morning. The ground was covered nearly ankle deep with filth and mire, and a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary ones as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a dense mass; the whistling of the drovers, the barking of the dogs, the bellowing and the plunging of the oxen, the bleating of the sheep, the grunting and the squeaking of the pigs, the cries of the hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarreling on all sides, the ringing of bells and roar of voices that issued from every public house, the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, 38 whooping, yelling, the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market, and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng, rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene which quite confounded the senses.”
It may be remembered too, vide “Great Expectations,” chapter 20, that when Pip came up to London to find his guardian, Mr. Jaggers, he beguiled that time while awaiting his return to his office by wandering about the neighborhood, and so “came into Smithfield, and the shameful place being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where I saw the great black dome of St. Paul’s bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate prison.” Whenever he writes of the jail, he does so in the same spirit. His earliest impressions of it struck the keynote for his whole life’s view of it. What those early impressions were one may discover in that paper of the “Sketches by Boz” which, in their collected shape, bears the number 24, and has for title, “Criminal Courts.”
“We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect with which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy days. How dreadful its rough, heavy walls, and how massive the doors appeared to us—the latter looking as if they were made for the express purpose of letting people in and never letting them out again. Then the fetters over the debtor’s door, which we used to think were a bona fide set of irons just hung up there for convenience sake, ready to be taken down at a moment’s notice and rivetted on the limbs of some refractory felon. We were never tired wondering how the hackney coachman on the opposite stand could cut jokes in the presence of such horrors, and drink pots of half-and-half so near the last drop.
“Often have we strayed here in session’s time to catch a glimpse of the whipping place or that dark building on one side of the yard in which is kept the gibbet with all of its dreadful apparatus, and on the door of which we half expected to see a brass plate with the inscription, ‘Mr. Ketch,’ for we never imagined that the distinguished functionary could by possibility live anywhere else. The days of those childish dreams have passed away, and with them many other boyish ideas of gayer nature. But we shall retain so much of our original feeling that to this hour we never pass the building without something like a shudder.”
CHAPTER II.
NEWGATE WITHIN.
