by Daniel Pool
To encourage citizens to point the finger, especially when they themselves were not the victims, the law even provided incentives such as a share in any fines collected from an offender if the prosecutor were successful in his endeavors. The slimy Noah Claypole, we learn at the end of Oliver Twist, knowing the penalty for taverns illegally open on Sunday, “went into business as an Informer, in which calling he realizes a genteel subsistence. His plan is, to walk out once a week during church time attended by Charlotte in respectable attire. The lady faints away at the doors of charitable publicans, and the gentleman being accommodated with threepennyworth of brandy to restore her, lays an information next day, and pockets half the penalty.”
This does not mean that the police had to wait for a private individual to conduct an investigation and bring charges, but it did mean that the fiction was maintained that when the police acted to bring charges they were doing so only in their individual capacities as private citizens just like everyone else. And when it came time to conduct the prosecution’s case in a courtroom, lawyers in private practice had to be hired on an ad hoc basis. “Who is conducting the prosecution?” asks Mr. Toogood in The Last Chronicle of Barset. “Walker, Walker, Walker? oh—yes; Walker and Winthrop, isn’t it?,” while in The Eustace Diamonds the fact that Lizzie Eustace will not come to testify at the great trial ensures that “the attorneys engaged for the prosecution were almost beside themselves.” “ ‘That won’t do at all,’ said an old gentleman at the head of the firm. ‘She has been very leniently treated and she must come.’ ”
When a supposed malefactor was actually brought to court, if the offense were relatively trivial the justice of the peace or his London equivalent, the police magistrate, would hear the charges and mete out punishment on the spot with no jury trial. If the matter were more serious, the criminal would be tried at the quarter sessions when all the justices in the county met together or, if graver still, by the assize judges (the Common Pleas, King’s Bench, and Exchequer court judges riding circuit from London). In London, the quarter sessions and assizes were combined and held at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey. It is where the trial of Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Smiler takes place in The Eustace Diamonds. Fagin is tried here, too; the Old Bailey was right next to Newgate Prison, which made it convenient both for purposes of incarceration and execution.
Whatever our notions of the great Anglo-Saxon heritage of impartial justice, we should not imagine that nineteenth-century England went out of its way to protect the rights of accused criminals. Until 1848, for example, the police magistrate was not charged with evenhandedly weighing the evidence brought before him in a prosecution. On the contrary, the law presumed that a crime had been committed and that it was the magistrate’s job to ferret out the evidence that would prove it—a fact that accounts in part for the adversarial stance Mr. Fang so rapidly assumes when Oliver Twist is brought in on suspicion of trying to steal from an old gentleman at a bookstall. Until 1898 the accused was not permitted to testify at all, even on his own behalf. A lawyer for the accused in felony cases was permitted no chance to question or cross-examine witnesses nor could he make any speeches to the jury in most cases until 1837, nor could you see the “written record of evidence” against you before trial until 1839.
You were not even guaranteed a prompt trial. In London things might happen fairly rapidly, but since in the country serious crimes had to go before an assize judge there could be a substantial delay between the time of commitment to jail and the time of trial. In the six counties in the north of England, for example, the assize judges showed up only once a year, in the summer, until well into the 1800s—which meant that if you got hauled in just after their annual trip you could stay in jail eleven months just awaiting trial.
Trials, however, were undeniably swift. In fact, the first English criminal trial ever to run for more than a day did not take place until 1794. Moreover, executions by law were to take place within two days of sentencing, in order to drive home to people that the Crown was serious about law and order. In Oliver Twist, Fagin is found guilty on Friday; he is then imprisoned in Newgate Prison and hanged the following Monday. This was not atypical. In 1812 a man named Bellingham shot Prime Minister Perceval on May 11, was tried and convicted on May 15, and was executed on May 18.
If the accused were found guilty and the sentence were death, London executions occurred on a scaffold erected outside Newgate, and enormous crowds would attend. We catch glimpses of them in Oliver Twist, waiting for the chance to witness Fagin’s end in the dawn before he is to be hanged. A husband and wife team of murderers were executed together in 1849 before a crowd of 30,000. A railroad rented excursion trains for the execution of a mass murderer during the same period, and a man from Madame Tussaud’s showed up to try to get the criminal’s clothes. Public executions were not confined to the city; as a boy, Thomas Hardy witnessed the execution of a woman at the Dorchester jail through a telescope that perhaps influenced his depiction of the death of Tess Durbeyfield. Public executions were not halted until 1868.
For many years, the Crown’s pursuit of felons did not end with their death. Treason until 1870 was punishable by the loss of one’s land, and any other felony by the loss of everything else the guilty party owned. “Lay hold of his personal property,” Wemmick warns Pip when Magwitch—illegally—returns to England in Great Expectations. “You don’t know what may happen to him. Don’t let anything happen to the portable property.” Pip is not mindful of this practical advice, and when Magwitch is seized, the convict himself is not aware that his capture has now ensured Pip’s financial ruin. “I’ve seen my boy,” the injured convict says, “and he can be a gentleman without me.” “No. I had thought about that,” Pip tells the reader. “No. Apart from any inclinations of my own, I understood Wemmick’s hint now. I foresaw that, being convicted, his possessions would be forfeited to the Crown.”
Trials did not always end in death, of course. The real innovation in the correctional system during this period was undoubtedly transportation. That is, if one were found guilty of something—send him to another continent. Originally this led to dumping convicts in the American colonies—a custom which grew more difficult with the outbreak of the American Revolution. Temporary holding pens consisting of old prison ships—the “hulks” described at the beginning of Great Expectations—were accordingly pressed into service beginning in 1776, the convicts being sentenced to hard labor gathering ballast for shipping on the Thames.
Then someone got the bright idea of shipping all the criminals to Australia. This should have put an end to the hulks, but it did not, since they continued until 1858. In the meantime, however, transportation proved quite popular—between 1810 and 1852 some 140,000 convicts were sent “down under.” Eventually, however, the Australians began complaining about being a dumping ground for criminals, too, and so it became necessary to imprison people in England again.
There were several varieties of English prisons. Dickens shows us the grimness of Newgate, but we also catch a glimpse in Little Dorrit of the rather cheap-hotellike Debtor’s Prison in the Marshalsea. But the Marshalsea and Newgate were characteristic of a cruder, more haphazard approach to punishment that sought only to confine and not to “correct” or “reform.” It was left to the reformers of the early 1800s to take steps toward the more systematic persecution of the criminal element.
“The Treadmill and the Poorhouse,” says Scrooge when benevolent philanthropists visit him for a Christmas donation on behalf of the poor, “are in full vigour then?” Of course—his visitors reply—and indeed they were. Invented in 1818, the treadmill was a nasty device typical of the new “reform” era that consisted of a great metal cylinder with steps built on it so far apart that one had to step way up to catch the next one before the cylinder revolved around from under one’s feet. Convicts were required to walk on the treadmill six hours at a time, a practice that certainly did nothing for the health of the weak or sickly and merely drew the
convicts’ attention to how boring, pointless, and repetitive their lot was. “Lucy is Threatened with the Treadmill” Trollope called one of his chapters in The Eustace Diamonds. The device was finally abolished in 1898.
A prisoner too young or ill for the treadmill would in all likelihood be set to picking oakum, the rope which when unwound by hand through long and tedious work was made to yield strands that could be used for caulking ships. Or so the theory ran. Prisoners were kept at the work even after ships no longer used oakum, and in some of the new model prisons the work was required to be carried out in absolute silence. Indeed, the so-called silent system forbade any conversation with guards, visitors, and other inmates on the logically unassailable principle of penological reform that bad associations bred bad (criminal) people—cut out any chance for association and you eventually cut out the criminal behavior. The idea was a hit for some time in criminological circles; its logical analogue—that prisoners should be kept isolated from one another in individual cells rather than sojourn in large communal areas as in the sprawling prisons of the 1700s—is with us to this day. Cells and hard labor became the hallmark of the new nineteenth-century prisons that replaced the old, ramshackle confinement of places like the Marshalsea or the King’s Bench.
THE HORSE
Before the railroad, the horse was the way you got somewhere if you weren’t going on foot, whether you went on its back or by “waggon” or coach. After the railroad, though, the horse was just as important until cars came along. In the country, there were plenty of places railroads didn’t go, so the horse had to instead. Even in the city, it still supplied the motive power for cabs and buses, and there were hansoms in London up through 1900.
Horses were specialized in what they could do. The hack was the ordinary everyday horse you used for just clip-clopping along. In addition, there was the sleek, nervous racehorse. Also the hunter—a horse bred specifically for fox hunting, who was not even used in its chosen sport until several years old. You used the hack to get to a “meet,” and the hunter you would use to hunt with once you got there was brought along separately. For fat people, there were cobs—short, sturdy draft horses suitable for carrying or pulling heavy loads. For riding, stallions were usually too frisky, geldings best, and mares were in between, but women and children favored ponies; small children rode along beside their parents on horseback in Hyde Park on their little ponies, and at the end of Great Expectations the “sad” ending Dickens originally wrote finds Pip meeting Estella driving a pony carriage in Piccadilly. As well she might—ponies were smaller and easier to handle than horses, and, if women did drive horses, they usually drove a one-horse carriage. Only men would venture to try controlling the three additional horses required in a “four-in-hand.” On horseback, ladies rode side saddle, alternating sides each day so as not to develop an overly enhanced buttock on one side. Riding astride seems to have been looked on as risque, if Hardy’s description of Bathsheba Everdene when “she had no sidesaddle” is anything to go by. “Satisfying herself that nobody was in sight, she seated herself in the manner demanded by the saddle, but hardly expected of the woman.”
Except for a racehorse, an animal generally hit his prime around six. This is not to say that some horses didn’t wear out sooner than others. A horse pulling a fast carriage would typically have a “working life” of only four years. Its top speeds under these circumstances, judging from the prodigious accomplishments of the mail coaches, was an average eleven miles an hour. Generally, a horse could go twenty-five to fifty miles a day, but not for any long period. On a dirt road pulling a load a team could generally haul about a ton; a major factor in the building of canals was that they enabled a horse to pull fifty tons instead.
Horses were expensive both to buy and maintain, so it is not surprising that in 1848 out of a population in excess of 18 million only 100,000 had their own carriage or riding horses. In the 1820s, a good carriage horse or hunter could run £100 and even an ordinary hack could cost £25 to £40. Plus horses, unlike cars, had to be fed, sheltered, and cared for daily, which meant that if you got a horse you were also entering into a subsidy of the horse transportation business. You were buying the services of a corn dealer (fast horses ate 72 pounds of straw, 56 pounds of hay, 2 bushels of oats, and 2 bushels of chaff a week), a blacksmith, a saddler, a coach maker (if you had a carriage), a harness maker, and—if you were fancy—a coachman and a groom as well. Some people simply opted out and went to livery stables, where you could rent horses. In addition, the rich and the nobility in England by the latter part of the century, at least in London, almost invariably went to a “jobber” or rent-a-horse man for their horses, presumably leaving their own good ones back at the country estate where they could rest up for the summer and fall during the London season. This “jobbing” cost about £85 a year in the 1880s but freed one from all the worry about the lameness, illness, and death of the horses.
The poor couldn’t afford horses, and, if, like the costermongers, they needed a beast of burden, they resorted to donkeys. They were cheap; at mid-century you could get one in London for five shillings and a deluxe donkey was only three pounds. They were easily managed little beasts who had the additional merit of being willing to eat almost anything. Some of them were almost like pets to the “costers” whose carts they pulled, but they were, sadly, more likely to succumb to the cold than their sturdier equine cousins.
Horses died, too, of course, and when they did, it was off to the “knacker”—the slaughteryard. Here, in death as in life, the horse served mankind. He was sliced, diced, and chopped into an amazing variety of products—his hair for horsehair sofas and mattresses (and the ghastly crinolines, crin being French for “horsehair”), his hooves for glue, his skin for tanning, his bones for manure, his bone fat for harness and cartwheel grease, and his approximately 350 remaining pounds of horseflesh for dog food and cat food.
PLEASE, JAMES, THE COACH
The oldest form of wheeled transportation in nineteenth-century Britain was the waggon, a long, heavy vehicle like the American covered wagon, except bigger and clumsier, pulled by up to ten horses with drovers plodding patiently alongside. When David Copperfield is deemed to have overeaten along the coach route he is taking, he is “the subject of jokes between the coachman and guard as to the coach drawing heavy behind, on account of my sitting there, and as to the greater expediency of my travelling by waggon.” The waggon made its way through the English countryside carrying heavy goods and people who didn’t have the money to travel fast or were not pressed for time, averaging three to four miles an hour. For moderately faster and/or shorter-distance travel there was the van, a smaller vehicle which servants might use to get themselves back and forth between London and their master’s country estate and which really served as the local bus in the countryside. To get to her ersatz cousins, the “d’Urbervilles,” Tess “walked to the hill-town called Shaston, and there took advantage of a van which twice in the week ran from Shaston eastward to Chaseborough.”
Next up the scale in speed and prestige came the coaches—stage or mail. Coaches were enclosed, four-wheel vehicles that were not terribly fast until the roads were improved in the late 1700s. The invention of springs in the latter part of the 1700s and early 1800s made it possible to suspend the body of the coach instead of fastening it onto a stiff “perch”—which also made for a more comfortable ride, notwithstanding that a mail coach measured only forty inches from seat cushion to roof.
In nineteenth-century England carriages carried people, while waggons carried goods. (Stagecoaches and humble vehicles like pony chaises might carry people, too, but they did not incarnate the grandness and gentility that a vehicle graced by the name carriage did. To call a pony chaise a carriage smacked of absurd social pretensions.) Barouches, landaus, victorias, curricles, and broughams were all carriages—they varied in their body shape, the number of horses that pulled them, the number of passengers they took, and the number of wheels they had, but they all
embodied a certain social dignity. Carts, drays, vans, and waggons, on the other hand, were generally used for carrying goods. They could also be used to carry people as well, but, if so, they were generally people of the lower orders.
As a rule, coaches were used for long-distance travel. For shorter distances in the country, there were two sorts of vehicle—the gig and the curricle in the two-wheel department and the waggonette and the cart in the four-wheel. The gig was the basic two-wheel, all-purpose, everyday work-pleasure vehicle, especially in the country, the vehicle that Farmer Boldwood uses in Far from the Madding Crowd and the one people often drive in Jane Austen when they are not trying to impress anyone or are not carrying a large group. It was a one-horse, two-person vehicle, of which the stanhope and the tilbury were two varieties. The curricle, popular in the first half of the century, was the same idea, except—alone of the two-wheel vehicles—it was built for two horses, which made it more of a rich man’s toy, especially given the difficulty of finding a well-matched, high-quality pair. Catherine Morland finds in Northanger Abbey “that a curricle was the prettiest equipage in the world” and, by comparison, “the chaise and four wheeled off with some grandeur, to be sure, but it was a heavy and troublesome business.” The curricle is very fast on her journey: “so nimbly were the light horses disposed to move, that, had not the general chosen to have his own carriage lead the way, they would have passed it with ease in half a minute.” It was probably really a young man’s carriage, like a sports car; it was one of the first things the young Dickens bought when he made money with his writing.