The following recollections of Mr. Howard’s habits at this period, by the Rev. Mr. Townsend, who resided with him at Cardington for a short period, in the interval between the secession from the Old Meeting-house, and the erection of the new one, may be interesting: ‘He found him,’ he said, ‘not disposed to talk much; he sat but a short time at table, and was in motion during the whole day. He was very abstemious; lived chiefly on vegetables, ate little animal food, and drank no wine or spirits. He hated praise; and when Mr. Townsend once mentioned to him his labors of benevolence’—not those general ones for which he is now so celebrated, but his exertions for the improvement of the condition of the people in his neighborhood—‘he spoke of them slightingly, as a whim of his, and immediately changed the subject.’ ‘He was at all times,’ adds his biographer, Mr. Brown, ‘remarkably neat in his dress, but affected no singularity in it. Though he never thought it right to indulge in the luxuries of life, he did not despise its comforts. Wine or fermented liquors of any kind he himself never drank; but they were always provided, and that of the best quality, for his friends who chose to take them. He always maintained an intercourse of civility with some of the most considerable persons in the country, and was on visiting terms with the greater part of the country gentlemen around him, and with the most respectable inhabitants of the town of Bedford, churchmen and dissenters. His aversion to mix much with promiscuous assemblies was the result of his religious principles and habits, which taught him that this was no very profitable method of spending his time; yet however uncomplying he might be with the freedoms and irregularities of polite life, he was by no means negligent of its received forms; and though he might be denominated a man of scruples and singularities, no one would dispute his claim to the title of a gentleman.’
From these details our readers will be able to fancy Mr. Howard as he was in the year 1773—a widower country gentleman, of plain, upright, methodical habits, aged about forty-six; devout and exemplary in his conduct, and a dissenter by profession, but without any strong prejudices for or against any sect; temperate and economical, but the very reverse of parsimonious; fond of traveling, and exceedingly attentive to what fell under his observation; of a disposition overflowing with kindness at the aspect of a miserable object, and prompting him to go out in search of wretchedness, and to distribute over his whole neighborhood the means of comfort and happiness. Such was Mr. Howard in the year 1773; and if he had then died, his name would never have been so celebrated as it is over the world, but would only have been remembered in the particular district where his lot was cast, as the names of many benevolent landlords and good men are locally remembered all over the country. Fortunately, however, a circumstance happened which opened for this unostentatious benefactor of a village a career of world-wide philanthropy. This was his election, in the year 1773, to the important office of high-sheriff of the county of Bedford. Regarding the special circumstances which led to his election to such a post, we have no information. It may be mentioned, however, that, in accepting the office, he subjected himself to the liability of a fine of £500—the laws which disqualified dissenters from holding such offices not having been yet repealed, although they were practically set at defiance by the increasing liberality of the age. A story was indeed once current that Mr. Howard, on his nomination to the office, stated to earl Bathurst, then lord chancellor, his scruples about accepting it, arising from the fact of his not being a member of the Church of England; and that lord Bathurst, in reply, gave him an assurance of indemnification, in case any malicious person should endeavor to put the law in force against him. This story, however, does not appear to have been well-founded.
The duties of a high-sheriff in England are important and various. To him are addressed the writs commencing all actions, and he returns the juries for the trial of men’s lives, liberties, lands and goods. He executes the judgments of the courts. In his county he is the principal conservator of the peace. He presides in his own court as a judge; and he not only tries all causes of forty shillings in value, but also questions of larger amount. He presides at all elections of members of parliament and coroners. He apprehends all wrongdoers, and for that purpose, he is entitled to break open outer-doors to seize the offender. He defends the county against riot, or rebellion, or invasion. The sheriff takes precedence of all persons in the county. He is responsible for the execution of criminals. He receives and entertains the judges of assize, on whom he is constantly in attendance whilst they remain in his shire. To assist him in the performance of his duties, the sheriff employs an under-sheriff, and also a bailiff and jailers, from whom he takes security for their good conduct. Such was the office to which, fortunately for society, Mr. Howard was appointed at the annual election of sheriffs in the year 1773.
The office of high-sheriff became a different thing in the hands of such a man as Howard from what it had been before. It was no longer a mere honorable office, all the drudgery of which was performed by the under-sheriff; it was no longer the mere right of going in state twice a-year to meet the judges, and of presiding during the gayeties of an assize-week; it was a situation of real power and laborious well-doing. Already alive to the existence of numerous abuses in prison management—as well by his general information respecting the institutions of the country, as by his own experience of prison life in France seventeen years before—he had not been a month in office before all the faculties of his heart and soul were engaged in searching out and dragging into public notice the horrible corruptions and pollutions of the English prison system.
Within Mr. Howard’s own cognizance as sheriff of Bedfordshire, there were three prisons—the county jail, the county bridewell, and the town jail, all in Bedford; and, as a matter of course, it was with these that his inquiries commenced. Various abuses struck him in their management, particularly in that of the county jail, the accommodations of which, whether for the purposes of work, health, or cleanliness, he found very deficient. But what roused his sense of justice most of all, was to find that the jailer had no salary, and depended for great part of his income on the following clause in the prison regulations:—‘All persons that come to this place, either by warrant, commitment, or verbally, must pay, before being discharged, fifteen shillings and fourpence to the jailer, and two shillings to the turnkey.’ The effect which this and similar exactions from prisoners in the Bedford jail made upon him, will be best learned from his own statement prefixed to his ‘Account of the State of Prisons.’ ‘The distress of prisoners,’ he says, ‘of which there are few who have not some imperfect idea, came more immediately under my notice when I was sheriff of the county of Bedford; and the circumstance which excited me to activity in their behalf was seeing some who, by the verdict of juries, were declared not guilty—some on whom the grand jury did not find such an appearance of guilt as subjected them to trial—and some whose prosecutors did not appear against them—after having been confined for months, dragged back to jail, and locked up again till they should pay sundry fees to the jailer, the clerk of assize, etc. In order to redress this hardship,’ he continues, ‘I applied to the justices of the county for a salary to the jailer in lieu of his fees. The bench were properly affected with the grievance, and willing to grant the relief desired; but they wanted a precedent for charging the county with the expense.’
With a view to find the precedent required, Mr. Howard undertook to visit the jails of some of the neighboring counties, that he might inquire into the practice adopted there. His first visits were to the jails of Cambridge and Huntingdon; and in the course of the same month—November 1773—he prosecuted his tour through those of the following counties in addition—Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stafford, Warwick, Worcester, Gloucester, Oxford, and Buckingham. In each and all of these jails he found abuses and grievances; different, indeed, in one from what they were in another, and in some fewer and less shocking than in others, but in all disgraceful to a civilized country. In all of them, the income of the jailer was derived, as at Bedford, from fees exacted from the prisoners, and not from a regular salary; nay, in one of them the sheriff himself drew fees from the prisoners; and in another, that of Northampton, the jailer, instead of having a salary, paid the county £40 a-year for his office. To enter into the details of his investigations of the abuses of the various prisons above enumerated, as these are given in the first edition of his ‘Account of the State of Prisons,’ would be impossible; suffice it to say, that Mr. Howard’s reports on the various jails he visited are not mere general assertions that this or that jail was defective in its arrangements, but laborious and minute accounts of the statistics of each—containing in the briefest possible compass, every circumstance respecting every jail which it could possibly be useful to know. Indeed no parliamentary commission ever presented a more searching, clear, and accurate report than Howard’s account of the state of the prisons he visited.
His visits to the jails of the counties adjoining Bedford had only disclosed to him those depths of misery which he was yet to sound. ‘Looking into the prisons,’ he says, ‘I beheld scenes of calamity which I became daily more and more anxious to alleviate. In order, therefore, to gain a more perfect knowledge of the particulars and extent of it, by various and accurate observation, I visited most of the county jails in England.’ This more extensive tour was begun in December 1773, and by the 17th of that month he had inspected the jails of the counties of Hertford, Berks, Wilts, Dorset, Hants, and Sussex; occupying, therefore, it will be perceived, a much less space of time in his survey than most official commissioners, and yet probably doing the work much better. The next six weeks he appears to have spent at Cardington with his son, then about eight years of age, and at home no doubt on his Christmas vacation; but towards the end of January 1774, his philanthropic tour was resumed. The jails of Rutlandshire were first visited, then those of York: on his journey southward from York he passed through the shires of Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, visiting the prisons of each: a fortnight was then devoted to an examination of the monster prisons of London: from London he set out on a journey to the western counties, inspected the jails of Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Hereford, and Monmouth; and, after a short absence, returned to London, having, in the course of three months of expeditious and extensive, but most thorough scrutiny, acquired more knowledge of the state of English prisons than was possessed by any other man then living. Such is the effect of having a definite object in view, and attending exclusively to it. If we measure ability by mere largeness of intellect, there were undoubtedly hundreds of abler men than Howard then alive in England; but what is the lazy and languid greatness of these intellectual do-nothings compared with the solid greatness of a man like Howard, who, gifted by God with a melting love for his fellow-men, laboriously and steadily pursued one object, made himself master of one department, and dragged into daylight one class of social abuses till then unknown or unheeded?
It happened by a fortunate conjunction, that at the time Mr. Howard was pursuing his prison inquiries, a few members of the legislature were interesting themselves in the same subject. In the previous session of parliament a bill had been introduced into the House of Commons by Mr. Popham, member for Taunton, proposing the payment of jailors, not by fees from the prisoners, as heretofore, but out of the county rates. The bill had been dropped in committee on the second reading; but the subject of prison management was resumed next session, the principal movers in the inquiry being Mr. Popham, and Mr. Howard’s intimate friends, Mr. St. John and Mr. Whitbread. It would appear that it had been in consequence of consultations with Mr. Howard that these gentlemen broached the subject in parliament at so early a period in the session; at all events, we find Mr. Howard immediately after his return from his western tour, examined before a committee of the whole House regarding his knowledge of the state of English prisons. So full and valuable were the details submitted to the committee by Mr. Howard, that on the House being resumed, the chairman of the committee, Sir Thomas Clavering, reported that ‘he was directed by the committee to move the House that John Howard, Esq., be called in to the bar, and that Mr. Speaker do acquaint him that the House are very sensible of the humanity and zeal which have led him to visit the several jails of this kingdom, and to communicate to the House the interesting observations he has made upon that subject.’ The motion was adopted unanimously; and Mr. Howard had, accordingly, the honor of receiving the public thanks of the House for his philanthropic exertions. To show however, how little the spirit which animated these exertions was understood or appreciated, we may mention that it is related that during his examination before the committee, one member put the question to him, ‘At whose expense he traveled?’
Mr. Howard, however, was still only at the commencement of his labors. In the month of March 1774, only a few days after receiving the thanks of the House of Commons, he set out for the extreme north of England, to visit the jails there. In an incredibly short space of time he had traversed the counties of Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancaster, Chester, and Shropshire, visiting the jails in each; then, after revisiting those of Stafford, Derby, Nottingham, Leicester, and Northampton, he returned home to Cardington; from which, after a week’s repose he sent out for Kent. With the examination of the jails of Kent, Mr. Howard’s first survey of the jails of England may be said to have been finished. To give once for all, an idea of the minute and thorough manner in which he discharged his self-imposed duty, we may quote his remarks on the county jail at Durham. After giving a list of the officials and their salaries, he proceeds thus:—‘The high jail is the property of the bishop. By patent from his lordship, Sir Hedworth Williamson, Bart., is perpetual sheriff. The court for master’s side debtors is only 24 feet by 10: they are permitted sometimes to walk on the leads. They have beds in the upper hall, and in several other rooms. Their rooms should be ceiled, that they might be lime-whited, to prevent infectious disorders, and that great nuisance of bugs, of which the debtors complain much here and other places. Common side debtors have no court; their free wards, the low jail, are two damp, unhealthy rooms, 10 feet 4 inches square by the gateway. They are never suffered to go out of these except to chapel, which is the master’s side debtor’s hall; and not always to that: for on Sunday, when I was there, and missed them at chapel, they told me they were not permitted to go thither. No sewers. At more than one of my visits I learned that the dirt, ashes, etc., had lain there many months. There is a double-barreled pump, which raises water about 70 feet. Felons have no court; but they have a day-room, and two small rooms for an infirmary. The men are put at night into dungeons: one, 7 feet square, for three prisoners; another, the great hole, 16½ feet by 12, has only a little window. In this I saw six prisoners, most of them transports, chained to the floor. In this situation they had been for many weeks, and were very sickly; their straw on the stone floor almost worn to dust. Long confinement, and not having the king’s allowance of two shillings and sixpence a-week, had urged them to attempt an escape; after which the jailer had chained them as already mentioned. There is another dungeon for women felons, 12 feet by 8; and up stairs, a separate room or two. The common side debtors in the low jail, whom I saw eating boiled bread and water, told me that this was the only nourishment some had lived upon for near a twelvemonth. They have, from a legacy, one shilling and a sixpence a-week in winter and one shilling a-week in summer, for coals. No memorandum of it in the jail: perhaps this may in time be lost, as the jailer said two others were—namely, one of Bishop Crewe, and another of Bishop Wood, from which prisoners had received no benefit for some years past. But now the bishop has humanely filed bills in Chancery, and recovered these legacies, by which several debtors have been discharged. Half-a-crown a-week is paid to a woman for supplying the debtors with water in the two rooms on the side of the gateway. The act for preserving the health of prisoners is not hung up. Jail delivery once a-year. At several of my visits there were boys between thirteen and fifteen years of age confined with the most profligate and abandoned. There was a vacant piece of ground adjacent, of little use but for the jailor’s occasional lumber. It extends to the river, and measures about 22 yards by 16. I once and again advised the enclosing this for a court, as it might be done with little expense; and it appears that formerly here was a doorway into the prison. But when I was there afterwards in January 1776, I had the mortification to hear that the surgeon, who was uncle to the jailer, had obtained from the bishop, in October preceding, a lease of it for twenty-one years, at the rent of one shilling per annum. He had built a little stable on it.’
Having completed his survey of the English jails, Mr. Howard turned his attention next to those of Wales; and by the end of the autumn of 1774, he appears to have visited the principal jails in that principality. During these last months the field of his inquiries had been extended, so as to embrace a new department. ‘Seeing,’ he says ‘in two or three of the jails some poor creatures whose aspect was singularly deplorable, and asking the cause of it, the answer was, ‘They were lately brought from the bridewells.’ This started a fresh subject of inquiry. I resolved to inspect the bridewells; and for that purpose traveled again into the counties where I had been; and indeed into all the rest, examining houses of correction, city and town jails. I beheld in many of them, as well as in the county jails, a complication of distress.’