“Of a row of mean and not over cleanly houses, situated within ‘the rules’ of the King’s Bench Prison; . . . comprising some dozen streets in which debtors who could raise money to pay large fees—from which their creditors did not derive any benefit—were permitted to reside.”
We learn from Allen’s “History of Surrey” that these rules comprehended all St. George’s Fields, one side of Blackman Street, and part of the Borough High Street, forming an area of about three miles in circumference. They could be purchased by the prisoners at the rate of five guineas for small debts, eight guineas for the first hundred pounds of debt, and about half that sum for every subsequent hundred.
The site of the prison is now occupied by workmen’s model dwellings named “Queen’s Buildings,” divided, north and south, by Scovell’s Road.
At the opposite side (east) of Newington Causeway, which here commences, is Union Road, late Horsemonger Lane; a short distance down which, on its south side, is “The Public Playground for Children,” formerly the site of Horsemonger Lane Gaol, erected at the back of the Surrey Sessions House. Here the execution of the Mannings took place, November 13th, 1849, on which occasion Charles Dickens was present. The same day he sent a notable letter to the Times, directing general attention to the demoralising effect of such public exhibitions; thus setting on foot an agitation which shortly resulted in the adoption of our present private mode of carrying out the last penalty of the law. After giving a forcible and graphic picture of the night scenes enacted by the disorderly crowd in waiting, the letter was thus continued:—
“When the sun rose brightly—as it did—it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to shrink from himself as fashioned in the image of the devil. When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them, were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgment, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world, and there was no belief among men but that they perished like the beasts. I have seen, habitually, some of the worst sources of general contamination and corruption in this country, and I think there are not many phases of London life that could surprise me. I am solemnly convinced that nothing that ingenuity could devise to be done in this city, in the same compass of time, could work such ruin as one public execution; and I stand astounded and appalled by the wickedness it exhibits.”
Mr. Chivery resided with his family in Horsemonger Lane, in close proximity to the old prison, and kept a tobacconist’s shop for the supply of his Marshalsea customers and the general public of the neighbourhood—
“A rural establishment one storey high, which had the benefit of the air from the yards of Horsemonger Lane Jail, and the advantage of a retired walk under the wall of that pleasant establishment. The business was of too modest a character to support a life-size Highlander, but it maintained a little one on a bracket on the door-post, who looked like a fallen cherub that had found it necessary to take to a kilt.”
In the little back-yard of the premises, “Young John”—disappointed in love—was accustomed to sit and meditate; taking cold among the “tuneless groves” of the newly-washed family linen, and composing suitable epitaphs to his own memory, in melancholy anticipation of an early decease.
Proceeding along the Borough Road, we arrive in due course at St. George’s Obelisk, which stands at the meeting-point of six roads. In the twelfth chapter of “David Copperfield” we read of the Obelisk as the place near to which the “long-legged young man with a very little empty donkey-cart” was standing, whom David engaged to take his box to the Dover coach-office for sixpence. And we all remember the sad dénouement of that engagement, as previously mentioned. Near at hand, at the top of Blackfriars Road, stands The Surrey Theatre, at which Fanny Dorrit was engaged as a dancer, while her Uncle Frederick played the clarionet in the orchestra.
Crossing over to the opposite thoroughfare of Lambeth Road, the Rambler will find, at a short distance on the left, the entrance to Bethlehem Hospital, familiarly known as Bedlam. A reference to this asylum will be found in the pages of “The Uncommercial Traveller,” where our author implies the idea that the sane and insane are, at all events, equal in their dreams—