The seven curses of London

by James Greenwood

Whipping while in prison—scroby or claws for breakfast.

Long-fingered thieves expert in emptying ladies’ pockets—fine wirers.

The condemned cell—the salt box.

The prison chaplain—Lady Green.

A boy thief, lithe and thin and daring, such a one as housebreakers hire for the purpose of entering a small window at the rear of a dwelling house—a little snakesman.

So pertinaciously do the inhabitants of criminal colonies stick to their “latin,” that a well-known writer suggests that special religious tracts, suiting their condition, should be printed in the language, as an almost certain method of securing their attention.

There can be no question that that of the professional thief is a bitterly severe and laborious occupation, beset with privations that moral people have no conception of, and involves an amount of mental anxiety and torment that few human beings can withstand through a long lifetime. Some years ago a clergyman with a thorough acquaintance with the subject he was handling, wrote on “Thieves and Thieving,” in the “Cornhill Magazine,” and apropos of this benumbing atmosphere of dread, that constantly encompasses even the old “professional,” he says:—

“But if an acquaintance with the thieves’ quarters revealed to me the amazing subtlety and cleverness of the pilfering fraternity, it also taught me the guilty fear, the wretchedness, the moral guilt, and the fearful hardships that fall to the lot of the professional thief. They are never safe for a moment, and this unceasing jeopardy produces a constant nervousness and fear. Sometimes when visiting the sick, I have gently laid my hand on the shoulder of one of them, who happened to be standing in the street. The man would ‘start like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons,’ and it would take him two or three minutes to recover his self-possession sufficiently to ask me ‘How are you to-day, sir?’ I never saw the adage, ‘Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind,’ so painfully illustrated as in the thieves’ quarter, by the faces of grey-haired criminals, whose hearts had been worn into hardness by the dishonouring chains of transportation. When, in the dusk of the evening, I have spoken to one of them as he stood idly on the public-house steps, I have spoken in a low and altered tone, so that he might not at first recognise me: again the guilty start as the man bent forward, anxiously peering into my face.”

He is never at rest, the wretched professional thief. He goes about with the tools of war perpetually in his hands, and with enemies in the front and the rear, and to the right and the left of him. “Anybody, to hear ’em talk,” a thief once remarked to me (he was a thief at present in possession of liberty; not an incarcerated rogue plying “gammon” as the incarcerated rogue loves to ply it), “anybody would think, to hear ’em talk, that it was all sugar with us while we were free, and that our sufferings did not begin until we were caught, and ‘put away.’ Them that think so know nothing about it. Take a case, now, of a man who is in for getting his living ‘on the cross,’ and who has got a ‘kid’ or two, and their mother, at home. I don’t say that it is my case, but you can take it so if you like. She isn’t a thief. Ask her what she knows about me, and she’ll tell you that, wuss luck, I’ve got in co. with some bad uns, and she wishes that I hadn’t. She wishes that I hadn’t, p’raps—not out of any sort of Goody-two-shoes feeling, but because she loves me. That’s the name of it; we haint got any other word for the feelin’; and she can’t bear to think that I may, any hour, be dragged off for six mouths, or a year, p’raps. And them’s my feelings, too, and no mistake, day after day, and Sundays as well as week-days. She isn’t fonder of me than I am of her, I’ll go bail for that; and as for the kids, the girl especially, why I’d skid a waggon wheel with my body rather than her precious skin should be grazed. Well, take my word for it, I never go out in the morning, and the young ’un sez ‘good bye,’ but what I think ‘good bye—yes! p’raps it’s good bye for a longer spell than you’re dreaming about, you poor little shaver.’ And when I get out into the street, how long am I safe? Why, only for the straight length of that street, as far as I can see the coast clear. I may find a stopper at any turning, or at any corner. And when you do feel the hand on your collar! I’ve often wondered what must be a chap’s feelings when the white cap is pulled over his peepers, and old Calcraft is pawing about his throat, to get the rope right. It must be a sight worse than the other feeling, you’ll say. Well, if it is, I wonder how long the chap manages to hold up till he’s let go!”

I am the more anxious to remark on these lingering relics of humanity, and, I may almost say virtue, that, if properly sought, may be discovered in the most hardened criminals, because, of late, there appears to be a growing inclination to treat the habitual criminal as though he had ceased to be human, and had degenerated into the condition of the meanest and most irreclaimable of predatory animals, fit only to be turned over to the tender mercies of a great body of huntsmen who wear blue coats instead of scarlet, and carry staves and handcuffs in place of whips and horns, and to be pursued to death. I have already taken occasion in the public newspapers, and I have much pleasure in returning to the charge here, to exclaim against the barbarous suggestions of a gentleman holding high position in the police force, Colonel Fraser, Commissioner of the City Police.