On "off" days they have soup and thick gruel for breakfast, and sixteen ounces of bread per day. They never get beer, butter, milk, cheese, cabbage, tea, coffee, or eggs.
HOTEL REGULATIONS.
So, after I had seen all this "bee bread," the hunks of meat duly weighed out, the potatoes and lumps of bread packed in their panniers and delivered out from door to door—the chief warder and I began to ascend a very Mont Blanc of iron staircases, and visited, one after the other, the cells of the wicked hive; in which, God knows, there was no honey making, but only wax, bitter as the book which the Apostle swallowed.
The original "comb," many stories high, had been built in one of the former yards of the gaol. The space between the different tiers of cells was quite sufficient for ventilation; but the architects had of necessity trusted more to height than to breadth, and this increased the hive-like appearance of the place. But when I came down again, the remembrance of what I had seen fresh upon me, all these iron staircases and galleries, all these shining locks, bars, numbers, plates, and "inspection holes," all these recrossing and crossing pillars, trusses, and girders, made me think that I had just left some great, bad exhibition of products of the devil's industry. One cell was, in all save its occupant, twin brother to its neighbor on either side; and so on, tier above tier, until the whole nest had been explored. I forgot to ask how many feet broad, by how many feet long, was each dungeon.
But here is one—the type of all the rest. It is as large say, as a cabinet particulier, to hold four, at Vachett's or the Moulin Rouge; but it is given up to the occupancy of one man. It is a hundred times cleaner than ever was cabinet in Paris restaurant; and here the lodger eats, reads, and sleeps. His bedding lies on a shelf on the right corner as you enter the cell. It is a pile of rugs, matting, mattress, or some other kind of bedding, packed and folded up with mathematical accuracy, with an assortment of straps and hooks disposed in corresponding order. These hooks will, by and bye, at eight o'clock, be inserted in rings in the whitewashed cell, when the prisoner will make his bed and sleep athwart his cell.
There are his gas-pipe, his basin, and mug; there is a little desk-formed table, which he can prop up with a wooden support, to eat his meals upon; there are his tin panikin and wooden spoon, his Bible, prayer-book, and hymn-book, his comb, his salt-cellar, with a neat cover of blue paper. Everything shines, glistens, sparkles, almost as bravely as the gew-gaws in Mr. Benson's shop outside. The floor is of shining asphalte. The covered ceiling is without a flaw. The walls are unsmirched. A neat copy of the regulations enforced in this "hotel"—the code of discipline framed by the Sheriffs—are hung up for the prisoner's guidance. He has a ventilator, by means of which he can regulate the temperature of his cell; and I noticed that the chief warder had to tell almost every prisoner that he was keeping his cell too warm.
Among the many afflicting scenes that have taken place in the vicinity of Newgate, was that of February 23, 1807, when two men, named Haggerty and Holloway, were hanged for the murder of Mr. Steele, on Hounslow Heath. The greatest interest had been excited by the trial of these two men, and an immense crowd assembled to witness their execution.
By five o'clock in the morning every avenue was blocked up; every window that communicated a view of the place was crammed, and wagons, arranged in rows, groaned under the weight of the eager multitude. The pressure of the assemblage was tremendous; and when the criminals had been turned off—when they had given their last death struggle—the mass of the people began to move. But there was no room for them to move in.
Immediately rose the shrieks of affrighted women in the crowd, which but increased the alarm, and made each individual struggle to get out of the multitude. Hundreds were trodden under foot, and the furious and frightened crowd passed over them.
At last the confusion ceased a little, and the ground became comparatively clear.