Now he was appointed governor of a prison in England and here began the great work of his life in a frontal attack on the corruptions he discovered. The yardsmen did a secret traffic in all the goods forbidden in the prison, there were caches of tobacco, spirits and such things under the pavements, the weaker prisoners were robbed by the stronger. The women's and men's quarters were so arranged that by connivance of the jailors frequent meetings took place. On one of these occasions Captain Chesterton himself appeared:
My hands were seized with tender empressement, and I was addressed as "my love," "My darling," "my dear creature:" and all the conventional endearments of the pavé were showered upon me. I had to struggle for enlargement, and beat a hasty retreat, quite confounded by my initiation into "prison discipline." And the consternation occasioned by this discovery became perfectly electric.*
[* Revelations of Prison Life, pp. 84-85.]
Attempts to bribe him were followed by attempts to kill him, but he stood firm. Mrs. Fry invoked his aid to improve the home conditions to which the prisoners had to return. Chesterton turned to Dickens and to Dickens's friend, Miss Coutts, in defiance of a narrow-minded magistrate
who perversely insisted (as was by cynical interpretation literally too true) that Miss Coutts had no right to confer with prisoners within those walls, nor was it "to be tolerated that Mr. Charles Dickens should walk into the prison whenever he pleased."*
[* Ibid., p. 186.]
From Cold Bath Fields the reforms begun by Captain Chesterton and warmly seconded by Dickens spread to other prisons, "Although (he declares) I consented to forego pecuniary advantage, I cling the more tenaciously to the credit of my past exertions; when, beset with fraud, ferocity, and moral pollution, I achieved a triumph fraught with civilizing influences."*
[* Ibid., p. v.]
APPENDIX B
Prize Poem Written at St. Paul's