“It was indeed Mr. Dawkins, who, shuffling into the office with the big coat sleeves tucked up as usual, his left hand in his pocket, and his hat in his right hand, preceded the gaoler, with a rolling gait altogether indescribable, and taking 53 his place in the dock, requested in an audible voice to know what he was placed in ‘that ’ere disgraceful situation for.’
“‘Hold your tongue, will you?’ said the gaoler.
“‘I’m an Englishman, ain’t I?’ rejoined the Dodger. ‘Where are my privileges?’
“‘You’ll get your privileges soon enough,’ retorted the gaoler, ‘and pepper with ’em.’
“‘We’ll see what the Secretary of State for the Home Affairs has got to say to the beaks, if I don’t,’ replied Mr. Dawkins.
“‘Now then. Wot is this here business? I shall thank the madg’strates to dispose of this little affair, and not to keep me while they read the paper, for I’ve got an appointment with a gentleman in the city, and as I’m a man of my word and very punctual in business matters, he’ll go away if I ain’t there to my time, and then p’raps there won’t be an action for damages against them as kept me away. Oh, no, certainly not.’
“At this point the Dodger, with a show of being very particular with a view to the proceedings to be had thereafter, desired the gaoler to communicate ‘the names of them two files as was on the bench,’ which so tickled the spectators, that they laughed almost as heartily as Master Bates could have done if he had heard the request.
“‘Silence there,’ cried the gaoler.
54“‘What is this?’ inquired one of the magistrates.
“‘A pocket-picketing case, your worship.’
“‘Has the boy ever been here before?’
“‘He ought to have been, a many times,’ replied the gaoler. ‘He has been pretty well everywhere else. I know him well, your worship.’
“‘Oh, you know me, do you?’ cried the Artful, making a note of the statement. ‘Werry good. That’s a case of deformation of character, any way.’
“Here there was another laugh, and another cry for silence.
“‘Now then, where are the witnesses?’ said the clerk.
“‘Ah, that’s right,’ added the Dodger. ‘Where are they? I should like to see ’em.’
“This wish was immediately gratified, for a policeman stepped forward who had seen the prisoner attempt the pocket of an unknown gentleman in the crowd, and indeed take a handkerchief therefrom, which, being a very old one, he deliberately put back again, after trying it on his own countenance. For this reason he took the Dodger into custody as soon as he could get near him, and the said Dodger being searched, had upon his person a silver snuff-box, with the owner’s name engraved upon the lid. This gentleman had been discovered upon reference to the Court Guide, and being 55 then and there present, swore that the snuff-box was his, and that he had missed it on the previous day, the moment he had disengaged himself from the crowd before referred to. He had also remarked a young gentleman in the throng, particularly active in making his way about, and that the young gentleman was the prisoner before him.
“‘Have you anything to ask this witness, boy?’ said the magistrate.
“‘I wouldn’t abase myself by descending to hold no conversation with him,’ replied the Dodger.
“‘Have you anything to say at all?’
“‘Do you hear his worship ask if you’ve anything to say?’ inquired the gaoler, nudging the silent Dodger with his elbow.
“‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Dodger, looking up with an air of abstraction.
“‘Did you mean to say anything, you young shaver?’
“‘No,’ replied the Dodger, ‘not here, for this ain’t the shop for justice; besides which, my attorney is a breakfasting this morning with the Wice-President of the House of Commons; but I shall have something to say elsewhere, and so will he, and so will a wery numerous and ’spectable circle of acquaintances as’ll make them beaks wish they’d never been born, or that they’d got their footman to hang ’em up to their 56 own hat-pegs afore they let ’em come out this morning to try it upon me. I’ll——’
“‘There. He’s fully committed,’ interposed the clerk. ‘Take him away.’
“‘Oh, ah. I’ll come on,’ replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the palm of his hand. ‘Ah (to the bench) it’s no use your looking frightened; I won’t show you no mercy, not a ha’porth of it. You’ll pay for this, my fine fellers. I wouldn’t be you for something; I wouldn’t go free now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask me. Here, carry me off to prison. Take me away.’
“With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by the collar, threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a parliamentary business of it, and then grinning in the officer’s face with glee and self approval.”
To such scholars as these, all the schools that could be crowded into Newgate would be of no avail. Their biographies are summed up by Magwitch, in “Great Expectations,” who, blandly admitting to have been brought up to be “a warmint,” says:
“‘In gaol and out of gaol, in gaol and out of gaol, in gaol and out of gaol. That’s my life. I’ve been done everything to, pretty well—except hanged. I’ve been locked up as much as a silver tea-kettle. I’ve been carted here 57 and carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that town. I’ve no more notion where I was born than you have, if so much. I first became aware of myself down in Essex, a-thieving turnips for a living. Summun had run away from me—a man, a tinker—and he’d took the fire with him and left me very cold.
“‘I knowed my name to be Magwitch, christened Abel. How did I know it? Much as I knowed the birds’ names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought that it was all lies together, only, as the birds’ names come out true, I suppose mine did.
“‘So fur as I could find, there warn’t a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but what caught fright at him, and either drove him off or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg’larly growed up took up.’”
One of the most curious episodes of Newgate is connected with the hanging of the Rev. W. Dodd, for forgery, on Friday, June 6, 1777. The clerical malefactor preached his own funeral sermon in the chapel of the prison before he was led out to die, the text being from Acts XV, 23. The theatre of this remarkable valedictory went up in the smoke of the Gordon Riots, but there is a chapel in the reconstructed jail: “situated,” 58 says Boz, “at the back of the governor’s house; the latter having no windows looking into the interior of the prison. Whether the associations connected with the place—the knowledge that here a portion of the burial is, on some dreadful occasions, performed over the quick and not over the dead—cast over it a still more gloomy and sombre air than art has imparted to it, we know not, but its appearance is very striking. The meanness of its appointments—the bare scanty pulpit, with the paltry painted pillars on either side—the women’s gallery with its great heavy curtains—the men’s with its unpainted benches and dingy front—the tottering little table at the altar, with the commandments on the wall above it, scarcely legible through lack of paint, and dust and damp—so unlike the velvet and gilding, the marble and the wood of a modern church—are strange and striking. There is one object, too, which rivets the attention and fascinates the gaze, and from which we may turn horror-stricken in vain, for the recollection of it will haunt us waking and sleeping for a long time afterward. Immediately below the reading desk, on the floor of the chapel, and forming 59 the most conspicuous object in the little area, is the ‘condemned pew’: A huge black pen in which the wretched people, who are singled out for death, are placed on the last Sunday preceding their execution, in sight of all their fellow prisoners, from many of whom they may have been separated but a week before, to hear prayers for their own souls, to join in the responses of their own burial service, and to listen to an address warning their recent companions to take example by their own fate and urging themselves, while there is yet time—nearly four-and-twenty hours—to ‘turn and flee from the wrath to come.’ At one time—and at no distant period either—the coffins of the men about to be executed, were placed in that pew, upon the seat by their side, during the whole service.” The chapel has been rearranged since the time in which Boz wrote, and the ghastliest part of its show done away with.
In the condemned ward Boz found “five-and-twenty or thirty prisoners, all under sentence of death, awaiting the result of the recorder’s report—men of all ages and appearances, from a hardened old offender with swarthy face and grizzly beard of three days’ 60 growth, to a handsome boy not fourteen years old, and of singularly youthful appearance even for that age, who had been condemned for burglary.” It must be remembered that they hanged men for all sorts of offenses in England then, which made the population of the condemned ward abundant around sessions time, when the trials were on. The death penalty was as common then as it is now rare in its infliction. “The room was large, airy and clean. One or two decently dressed men were brooding with a dejected air over the fire; several little groups of two or three had been engaged in conversation at the upper end of the room, or in the windows; and the remainder were crowded around a young man seated at a table, who appeared to be engaged in teaching the younger ones to write. On the table lay a Testament, but there were no tokens of its having been in recent use. In the press-room below were the men, the nature of whose offense rendered it necessary to separate them, even from their companions in guilt. It is a long sombre room, with two windows sunk in the stone wall, and here the wretched men are pinioned on the mornings of their execution, before moving toward the scaffold.”
“A few paces up the yard,” he goes on, “and forming a continuation of the building, lie the condemned cells. The entrance is by a narrow and obscure staircase, leading to a dark passage, in which a charcoal stove casts a lurid light over the objects in its immediate vicinity, and diffuses something like a warmth around. Prior to the recorder’s report being made, all the prisoners under the sentence of death are removed from the day room at five o’clock in the afternoon, and locked up in these cells, where they are allowed a candle until ten o’clock; and here they remain until seven the next morning. When the warrant for the prisoner’s execution arrives, he is removed to the cells, and confined in one of them until he leaves it for the scaffold. He is at liberty to walk in the yard; but both in the walks and in his cell, he is constantly attended by a turnkey, who never leaves him on any pretence.” The cell was “a stone dungeon eight feet long by six feet wide, with a bench at the upper end, under which were a common rug, a Bible and a prayer-book. An iron candle-stick was fixed into the wall at the side; and a small high window at the back admitted as much air and 62 light as could struggle in between a double row of heavy, crossed iron bars.” It was in one of these dens (“Oliver Twist,” Chapter 52) that Fagin spent his last hours.
“They led him through a paved room under the court, where some prisoners were waiting till their turns came, and others were talking to their friends, who crowded around a gate which looked into the open yard. There was nobody there to speak to him; but, as he passed, the prisoners fell back to render him more visible to the people who were clinging to the bars; and they assailed him with opprobrious names, and screeched and hissed. He shook his fist, and would have spat upon them; but his conductors hurried him on, through a gloomy passage lighted by a few dim lamps, into the interior of the prison.
“Here he was searched, that he might not have about him the means of anticipating the law; this ceremony performed, they led him to one of the condemned cells, and left him there—alone.
“He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which served for a seat and bedstead; and casting his bloodshot eyes upon the ground, tried to collect his thoughts. After a while, he began to remember a few disjointed fragments of what the judge had said; though it seemed to him, at the time, that he could not hear a 63 word. These gradually fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more; so that in a little time he had the whole almost as it was delivered. To be hanged by the neck, till he was dead—that was the end. To be hanged by the neck till he was dead.
“As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had known who had died upon the scaffold; some of them through his means. They rose up, in such quick succession, that he could hardly count them. He had seen some of them die—and had joked, too, because they died with prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop went down; and how suddenly they changed from strong and vigorous men to dangling heaps of clothes.
“Some of them might have inhabited that very cell—sat upon that very spot. It was very dark; why didn’t they bring a light? 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. Light—Light.
“At length, when his hands were raw with beating against the heavy door and walls, two men appeared: one bearing a candle, which he thrust into an iron candle-stick fixed against the wall; the other dragging a mattress on 64 which to pass the night; for the prisoner was to be left alone no more.
“Then came night—dark, dismal, silent night. Other watchers are glad to hear the clocks strike, for they tell of life and coming day. To the Jew they brought despair. The boom of every iron bell came laden with one deep, hollow sound—Death. What availed the noise and bustle of cheerful morning, which penetrated even there, to him? It was another form of knell, with mockery added to its warning.
“The day passed off—day. There was no day; it was gone as soon as come—and night came on again; night so long, and yet so short, long in its dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours. At one time he raved and blasphemed; and at another howled and tore his hair. Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable efforts, and he beat them off.
“Saturday night. He had only one more night to live, and as he thought of this, the day broke—Sunday.
“It was not until the night of this last awful day, that a withering sense of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon his blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive hope of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more 65 than dim probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either of the two men, who relieved each other in attendance upon him; and they, for their parts, made no efforts to arouse his attention. He sat there, awake, but dreaming. Now he started up, every minute, and with gasping mouth and burning skin, hurried to and fro in such a paroxysm of fear and wrath that even they—used to such sights—recoiled from him with horror. He grew so terrible, at last, in all the tortures of his evil conscience that one man could not bear to sit there, eyeing him alone; and so the two kept watch together.
“He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth. His red hair hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn and twisted into knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Eight—nine—ten. If it was not a trick to frighten him, and those were the real hours treading on each other’s heels, where would he be, when they came around again? Eleven! Another struck, before the voice of the previous hour had ceased to vibrate. At eight, he would be the only mourner in his own funeral train; at eleven——
“Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which had 66 hidden so much misery and unspeakable anguish, not only from the eyes, but, too often and too long, from the thoughts, of men, never held so dreaded a spectre as that. The few who lingered as they passed, and wondered what the man was doing, who was to be hung to-morrow, would have slept but ill that night if they could have but seen him.
“From early in the evening until nearly midnight, little groups of two and three presented themselves at the lodge-gate, and inquired, with anxious faces, whether any reprieve had been received. These being answered in the negative, communicated the welcome intelligence to the clusters in the street, who pointed out to one another the door from which he must come out, and showed where the scaffold would be built, and, walking with unwilling steps away, turned back to conjure up the scene. By degrees they fell off, one by one; and for an hour in the dead of the night, the street was left to solitude and darkness.”
When Mr. Brownlow and Oliver appeared at the wicket, and presented an order of admission to the prisoner, signed by one of the Sheriffs, they were immediately admitted to the lodge.
“The condemned criminal was seated on his bed, rocking himself from side to side, with a countenance more like that of a snared beast 67 than the face of a man. His mind was evidently wandering to his old life, for he continued to mutter, without appearing conscious of their presence otherwise than as a part of his vision.
“‘Fagin,’ said the gaoler.
“‘That’s me,’ cried the Jew, falling, instantly into the attitude of listening he assumed upon his trial. ‘An old man, my Lord; a very old man.’
“‘Here,’ said the turnkey, laying his hand upon his breast to keep him down. ‘Here’s somebody wants to see you, to ask you some questions, I suppose. Fagin, Fagin, are you a man?’
“‘I shan’t be one long,’ replied the Jew, looking up with a face retaining no human expression but rage and terror. ‘Strike them all dead! What right have they to butcher me?’”
Since hanging by wholesale went out in England, Newgate has had no use for condemned wards, nor for its great number of condemned cells. The former are now broken up into cells, or used as exercise rooms or offices. Most of the latter are now punishment cells, in which refractory prisoners are confined. The demoralizing system of confinement in gangs has been done away with also, the cells in which the prisoners froze in cold weather have been made comfortable, and the standard of the management 68 of the jail raised in every way. Such prisoners as may be condemned to death—there are only a few a year now, where in Dickens’s boyhood there were several every week—are kept apart from their fellows and from each other. They are confined in an ordinary cell until they are convicted. Then they are transferred to a strong cell in the old condemned cell ward, and thence they travel to the scaffold.