“Alas! I am convicted, there’s no one to blame—
I suppose you all know Leopold Redpath is my name;
I have one consolation, perhaps I’ve more,
All the days of my life I ne’er injured the poor.“I procured for the widow and orphan their bread,
The naked I clothed, and the hungry I fed;
But still I am sentenced, you must understand,
Because I had broken the laws of the land.“A last fond adieu to my heart-broken wife—
Leopold Redpath, your husband, ’s transported for life;
Providence will protect you, love, do not deplore,
Since your husband never hurted or injured the poor.* * * * *
“In London and Weybridge I in splendour did dwell,
By the rich and the poor was respected right well;
But now I’m going—oh! where shall I say—
A convict from England, oh! far, far away.* * * * *
“I might have lived happy with my virtuous wife,
Kept away from temptation, from tumult and strife,
I’d enough to support me in happiness to live,
But I wanted something more poor people for to give.”
The street singers of the metropolis seized upon the Waterloo Bridge Tragedy as a fit subject for the exercise of their dismal strains. The following is printed verbatim, from an illustrated broadsheet vended “at the charge of one halfpenny:”—
“Oh such a year for dreadful murders
As this before was never seen;
In England, Ireland, Britain over,
Such horrid crimes has never been.
But this which now has been discovered
Very far exceeds the whole,
The very thought makes men to shudder,
How horrible for to unfold.“See and read in every paper
This dreadful crime, this mystery,
Worse, far worse, than James Greenacre’s
Is the London mystery.“His body it was cut to pieces—
Oh how dreadful was his fate!
Then placed in brine and hid in secret—
Horrible for to relate.
The head and limbs had been divided—
Where parts was taken no one knows;
In a carpet bag they packed the body,
Over Waterloo bridge they did it throw.“It is supposed that a female monster
Her victim’s body onward dragged,
With no companion to assist her,
All packed within a carpet bag.
Justice determined is to take her,
When without doubt she’ll punished be,
The atrocious female Greenacre
Of the Waterloo Bridge Tragedy.”
The reader will see from these specimens how alien the costermonger race is in sympathy and life from the respectable and the well-to-do. Their songs are not ours, nor their aims nor conventional observances. What wonder is it that they leave their wretched cellars all dirt and darkness, and crowd round the public-house; or that at the costermongers’ house of call—in the midst of an atmosphere of gin and tobacco-smoke, and under the influence of songs of very questionable merit—the poor lads receive the education which is to stamp their character and to teach them to grow up Ishmaelites, with their hands against every one, and every one’s hand against them. Society will not educate its poor; wonder not then that they educate themselves, and that after a fashion not very desirable in the eyes of the friends of morality, of order, and of law.
THE POLICE-COURT
Is an attractive lounge to the seedy, the disreputable, the unwashed. Evidently it is a grand and refreshing and popular sight to see justice doled out in small parcels—to see the righteous flourish, and the wicked put to shame. I fear, however, it is a feeling of a more personal nature that is the chief attraction, after all. Jones goes to see what a mess Davis gets into; Smithes to see if Scroggins keeps “mum” like a brick; the many, to retail a little scandal at the expense of their neighbours,—if at the expense of a friend, of course so much the better. A little before ten a crowd is ranged round the police-office, waiting to see the prisoners, who have been locked up all night, marched into the court, which generally commences its operations at ten. The court itself offers very little accommodation to the most thinking public. At one end of the room is the presiding magistrate; below him is the clerk; on the right of the magistrate is the
box for complainant and witnesses. Opposite him is the dock in which the defendant is placed; behind some boards, over which only tall people can see, is the public; and on the magistrate’s right are the reporters—or, rather, the penny-a-liners—who write on “flimsy,” and leave “copy” on spec. at all the daily paper offices. Let me say a word about these exceedingly seedy-looking individuals connected with the fourth estate. That they are not better dressed is, I take it, their own fault, and arises from that daring defiance of conventionalism which is so great a characteristic of the lower orders of gentlemen connected with the press. Let me say, en passant, the public owe these men much. It is they who labour with a perseverance worthy of a better cause, and that deserves to be successful, to describe the cases heard in the police-courts in the most racy and tempting terms. In their peculiar phraseology, every bachelor who gets into a scrape is a gay Lothario, and every young woman that appeals to justice is lady-like in manners and interesting in appearance. The poor wretch that crawls along the street, all rouged and decked out in finery not her own, is “a dashing Cyprian.”
Every Irishman is described as “a native of the Green Isle;” every man in a red coat, “a brave son of Mars;” every sailor, “a jolly tar;” and a man with a little hair on his chin, or under it, is invariably “bearded like the pard;” and if anything causing a smile occurs,—and sometimes on the gravest occasions justice will even grin,—the court is—so they always put it—convulsed with laughter. Knights of the pen, a police-case loving-to-read public should be grateful to you! By the side of the reporters often sit some three or four of those mischief-makers, pettifogging attorneys; men who, in their own opinion, only require a clear stage and no favour, and the mere formality of a call to the bar, to rival, if not surpass, the fame of a Scarlett, or a Brougham, or a Lyndhurst, or an Erskine, or even of a Coke himself; and truly if to bully, to suppress what is true, and insinuate what is false—if to gloss over the injustice done by a client, and to proclaim aloud that of the opposite party—if to speak in an emphatic manner and at a most unmerciful length—if to browbeat witnesses, mislead the court, and astonish the weak nerves of their hearers, constitute a fitness for legal greatness, these gentlemen
have only to enter their names at any of the Inns of Court, and eat the requisite number of dinners, to win at once undying reputation. At the dock appears the trembling culprit, guarded sedulously by the police, who quietly assume his or her guilt, and do all they can in endeavouring to make out a case,—occasionally going so far in their zeal as to state things not exactly true, the esprit de corps of course leading them to aid each other whenever they have a chance.
In a low neighbourhood the principal cases heard are those arising from intoxication. On this particular morning we will suppose the court opens with what is very common, an assault case between two Irish families who were hereditary foes, and who, emigrating, or rather, like Eneas, “driven by fate,” from the mother country at the same time, locate, unfortunately for themselves, in the same neighbourhood,—and who, in accordance with the well-known remark of Horace, continue in St Giles’s the amicable quarrels of Tipperary, to the amusement of a congenial neighbourhood, which likes a good fight rather than not, but to the intense terror and annoyance of all such of her Majesty’s lieges as