The grinning Carker of "Dombey and Son" is ground to death under the wheels of a locomotive at a French railway station; Quilp, of "The Old Curiosity Shop," is dramatically drowned; Bill Sykes' neck is broken by the rope meant for his escape; Bradley Headstone and his enemy go together to the bottom of the canal; while the mysterious Krook, of "Bleak House" is disposed of by spontaneous combustion.
Certainly such a gallery of horrors could not be invented purely out of an imaginative mind, and must admittedly have been the product of intimate first-hand knowledge of criminals and their ways.
Doubtless there was a tendency to improve moral conditions as things went on. Britain is not the dying nation which the calamity howlers would have us infer.
In the year 1800, there were—notwithstanding the comparative sparseness of population—eighteen prisons in London alone, whereas in 1850, when Dickens was in his prime and when population had enormously increased, that number had been reduced one-third.
In the early days the jailor in many prisons received no salary, but made his livelihood from the fees he could extort from the prisoners and their friends; and in some cases he paid for the privilege of holding office. Not only had a prisoner to pay for his food and for the straw on which he slept, but, if he failed to pay, he would be detained until he did so.
In Cold Bath Fields prison, men, women, and children were indiscriminately herded together, without employment or wholesome control; while smoking, gaming, singing, and every species of brutalizing conversation obtained.
At the Fleet Prison there was a grate or iron-barred window facing Farringdon Street, and above it was inscribed, "Pray remember the poor prisoners having no allowance," while a small box was placed on the window-sill to receive the charity of the passers-by, and a man ran to and fro, begging coins "for the poor prisoners in the Fleet."
At Newgate, the women usually numbered from a hundred to one hundred and thirty, and each had only eighteen inches breadth of sleeping-room, and all were "packed like slaves in the hold of a slave-ship."
And Marshalsea, which Dickens incorporated into "David Copperfield" and "Little Dorrit," was quite as sordid, to what extent probably none knew so well as Dickens, père et fils, for here it was that the father fretfully served out his sentence for debt.
Of all the prisons of that day it may be stated that they were hotbeds of immorality, where children herded with hoary criminals; where no sanitary laws were recognized; where vermin swarmed and disease held forth, and where robbery, tyranny, and cruelty, if not actually permitted, was at least winked at or ignored.