A man must be made of brass or wrought-iron who can enter the gloomy portals of Newgate as a prisoner without a trembling of the limbs and a sinking of the heart. Not even consciousness of innocence is sufficient to sustain a prisoner, for alas! even the innocent are sometimes found guilty. Once within the first doors I was fain to lay hold upon the nearest turnkey or I should have fallen into a swoon; a thing which, they tell me, happens with many, for the first entrance into prison is worse to the imagination even than the standing up in the dock to take one's trial in open court. There is, in the external aspect of the prison: in the gloom which hangs over the prison: in the mixture of despair and misery and drunkenness and madness and remorse which fills the prison, an air which strikes terror to the very soul. They took me into a large vaulted ante-room, lit by windows high up, with the turnkey's private room opening out of it, and doors leading into the interior parts of the Prison. The room was filled with people waiting their turn to visit the prisoners; they carried baskets and packages and bottles; their provisions, in a word, for the Prison allows the prisoners no more than one small loaf of bread every day. Some of the visitors were quiet, sober people: some were women on whose cheeks lay tears: some were noisy, reckless young men, who laughed over the coming fate of their friends; spoke of Tyburn Fair; of kicking off the shoes at the gallows; of dying game; of Newgate music—meaning the clatter of the irons; of whining and snivelling; and so forth. They took in wine, or perhaps rum under the name of wine. There were also girls whose appearance and manner certainly did not seem as if sorrow and sympathy with the unfortunate had alone brought them to this place. Some of the girls also carried bottles of wine with them in baskets.

I was then brought before the Governor who, I thought, would perhaps hear me if I declared the truth. But I was wrong. He barely looked at me; he entered my name and occupation, and the nature of the crime with which I was charged. Then he coldly ordered me to be taken in and ironed.

The turnkey led me into a room hung with irons. 'What side?' he asked.

I told him I knew nothing about any sides.

'Why,' he said, 'I thought all the world knew so much. There's the State side. If you go there you will pay for admission three guineas; for garnish and a pair of light irons, one guinea; for rent of a bed half a guinea a week; and for another guinea you can have coals and candles, plates and a knife. Will that suit you?' He looked disdainfully at the dirt and blood with which I was covered, as if he thought the State side was not for the likes of me.

'Alas!' I replied, 'I cannot go to the State side.'

'I thought not, by the look of you. Well, there's the master's side next; the fee for admission is only thirteen and sixpence: irons, half a guinea: the rent of a bed or part of a bed half a crown, and as for your food, what you like to order and pay for. No credit at this tavern, which is the sign of the Clinking Iron. Will that suit you?'

'No, I can pay nothing.'

'Then why waste time asking questions? There's the common side; you've got to go into that, and very grateful you ought to be that there is a common side at all for such a filthy Beast as you.'

My choice must needs be the last because I had no money at all: not a single solitary shilling—my obliging friends when they put their purse into my pocket as a proof of the alleged robbery, abstracted my own—which no doubt the worthy Professor of Sacred Theology had in his pocket while he was explaining the nature of the attack to the Constable.