From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop

by Stephen Halliday

  CHARLES DICKENS AND VICTORIAN PRISONS

  Thackeray, like his contemporary Charles Dickens, had formed his view of Newgate as a reporter before he wrote of it. In July 1840 both writers had, co-incidentally, attended the execution of a man called Francois Courvoisier who had murdered his master, Lord Russell. The execution took place on a scaffold erected outside Newgate to which executions had been transferred from Tyburn in 1783. The transfer was made to avoid the infamous ‘Tyburn Processions’ in which criminals were conveyed from Newgate to Tyburn amidst much riotous and drunken behaviour. This did not, however, do much to reduce the size or conduct of the crowds who were drawn to the executions. Thackeray wrote of the experience in an account called ‘On Going to See a Man hanged’, which expressed his revulsion at the experience, while Dickens was sufficiently moved by the occasion to argue that executions should take place within the prison, in private, a move that took place in 1868.

  Dickens sends several of his characters to prison, drawing not only on his experience of seeing executions but on his family’s own experience of the penal system. At the age of 12, Dickens’s father John had been committed to the Marshalsea Prison in Southwark for debt, a fate to which Dickens condemned Samuel Pickwick (though in the Fleet Prison) in his first major work The Pickwick Papers in 1837. Twenty years later, in Little Dorrit, Dickens sent the whole Dorrit family to the Marshalsea following its dispute with a government department, the Circumlocution Office.

  Little Dorrit was published in 1857 and draws heavily on the author’s memories of the Dickens family’s incarceration in the Marshalsea Prison for four months in 1824. Old William Dorrit has been imprisoned for so long in the Marshalsea that he finds it hard to imagine life outside the prison. He is comforted by the devoted care of his small daughter, Amy (‘Little Dorrit’) who loves, and is finally loved by, Arthur Clennam who is himself reduced to penury and joins them in the Marshalsea. William Dorrit unexpectedly inherits a large fortune which is duly lost through unwise investment with the swindling financier Merdle. William Dorrit dies and at the end of the novel Amy and Arthur, by now modestly prosperous, marry and set out on a new life together.

  Dickens’s criticism of the delays and obstructions of the legal system in Little Dorrit is second only to that shown in Bleak House, the ‘Circumlocution Office’ being the special object of his bitter satire:

  The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office.

  However, Dickens’s most memorable prison scenes were set in Newgate itself, which he had visited many times as a journalist before witnessing Courvoisier’s execution. Newgate makes many appearances in Oliver Twist. Oliver is led past Newgate by Sikes and Nancy, with the experience made more sinister by the heavy mist and rain in which Dickens sets the episode. In the light of a gas lamp from a shop window Oliver notices Nancy’s pale face, lined with fear of Sikes. One of Dickens’s darkest passages of the book describes Fagin in his death cell at Newgate. In this early work the contrasts are particularly marked between the virtuous and incorruptible Oliver and his evil tormentors, Fagin and Sikes. Fagin’s trial at the Old Bailey, next to Newgate, is attended by spectators whose ‘looks expressive of abhorrence’ are directed towards Fagin in the dock, and when the judge pronounces the death sentence for his numerous crimes Fagin hears ‘a peal of joy from the populace outside, greeting the news that he would die on Monday’. Oliver visits Fagin in the condemned cell and sees his face ‘retaining no human expression but rage and terror’ and showing indignation at his plight rather than regret for his misdeeds. The cell door and other Newgate relics may now be seen in the Museum of London. As he leaves Newgate, Oliver sees the world outside where ‘everything told of life and animation but one dark cluster of objects in the centre of all – the black stage, the cross beam, the rope and all the hideous apparatus of death’. The bells of St Sepulchre, whose tolling signalled to the condemned the approach of the hour of execution, are heard by Oliver as he leaves Newgate.

  St Sepulchre, the City of London’s largest parish church, is celebrated in the rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’ as the Bells of Old Bailey (‘When will you pay me? Say the Bells of Old Bailey’) and its ‘execution bell’ is on view in a glass case in the south aisle of the church. Bill Sikes is saved from execution only because, while fleeing after killing Nancy, he falls and is hanged at Jacob’s Island, a notorious rookery in Bermondsey on the present site of Jacob Street, SE1, situated on the appropriately named Dickens Estate. When Winston Smith in 1984 recalls the rhyme, he can ‘hear the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten’.

  Dickens also writes of the Old Bailey in Great Expectations, where Pip’s benefactor Magwitch, having returned from deportation to Australia, is caught and, for that crime, condemned to death. Magwitch stands in the dock at the Old Bailey, Pip leaning over the rail to hold his hand, as Magwitch, with other convicts, watches the judge don the black cap and pronounce sentence. Pip tells the reader:

  Penned in the dock, as I stood outside it at the corner with his hand in mine, were the two-and-thirty men and women: some defiant, some stricken with terror, some sobbing and weeping, some covering their faces, some staring gloomily about. There had been shrieks from among the women convicts but they had been stilled and a hush had succeeded.

  Magwitch tells the judge: ‘My Lord, I have received my sentence of death from the Almighty but I bow to yours,’ though he escapes execution when he dies of injuries sustained in a murderous final struggle with his nemesis and former partner in crime.

  ANOTHER NEWGATE NOVEL

  The most famous Newgate novel is probably that of Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), better known as the author of Robinson Crusoe, who spent a short time in Newgate because of a satirical pamphlet he wrote about the established Church. His Newgate novel bore the full title The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders who was Born in Newgate and During a Life of Continued Variety for Threescore Years was Twelve Years a Whore, Five Times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a Transported Felon in Virginia, at Last Grew Rich, Lived Honest and Died a Penitent. Having read the title one hardly needs to read the book. In the novel, better known simply as Moll Flanders, Defoe makes use of his (and Moll’s) intimate knowledge of London’s streets to show how Moll plied her trade as seducer and thief to avoid detection. Thus, having stolen ‘a gold watch, a silk purse of gold, his sword and fine snuff box’ from a client, she leaps from the carriage in which they are travelling and escapes into ‘the narrow streets beyond Temple Bar’.

  TEMPLE BAR AND ST PAUL’S

  At that time Temple Bar stood in the Strand, which marked the boundary between the City of London and Westminster. It was surrounded by dark alleys into which Moll could escape and was known to Defoe because he had spent time in the pillory there for his satirical pamphlet, though a supportive crowd meant he was only pelted with flowers. Temple Bar was dismantled in 1878 to improve the Strand as a thoroughfare and in 2004 it was re-erected as the entrance to Paternoster Square, adjacent to the north-west end of St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Since Tudor times Paternoster Row, at the top of Ludgate Hill, has been associated with the sale of stationery and books. After the Great Fire of 1666 other traders like mercers moved out and it became almost exclusively devoted to bookselling and publishing, Robinson Crusoe being published from there in 1719. The area was devastated by bombing in the Second World War, when 6 million books were destroyed. It was rebuilt and reopened as Paternoster Square, the Temple Bar being retrieved from an ignoble site near Cheshunt in Hertfordshire and re-erected as an entrance
to the square in 2004.

  The present St Paul’s, the work of Christopher Wren, is the fifth cathedral on the site and was completed in 1710 following the destruction of the medieval cathedral in the Great Fire of 1666. By the time of the fire, the earlier building was in a poor state. It had long been in need of refurbishment and its condition had not been improved by its use for quartering Parliamentary troops during the civil war of the 1640s. In his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis: the Year of Wonders 1666’ Dryden referred to the destruction of the cathedral as a providential act following its use for such a purpose:

  The daring flames peeped in and saw from far

  The awful beauties of the sacred quire:

  But since it was prophaned by Civil War

  Heaven thought it fit to have it purged by fire.

  Charlotte Brontë is most often associated with Haworth, Yorkshire, but she visited her publisher in London and presumably also visited St Paul’s Cathedral since she sends her heroine Villette there:

  Finding myself before St Paul’s, I went in; I mounted the dome whence I saw London, with its river, and its bridges, and its churches; I saw antique Westminster and the green Temple Gardens, with sun upon them, and a glad blue sky of early spring above.

  COLDBATH FIELDS

  Newgate was not the only London prison which was celebrated in literature. Another was Coldbath Fields, London’s largest prison, which accommodated 1,200 inmates. It had existed since the sixteenth century and was extensively rebuilt and enlarged in the nineteenth century as part of the Victorian prison reform programme. Unlike Newgate it adopted the ‘silent and solitary’ regime whereby prisoners were denied all contact with other inmates in the belief that this would prevent one prisoner from ‘infecting’ another with his own bad habits and also that a solitary existence would oblige prisoners to reflect upon their errors and mend their ways. Many became deranged as a result of the experience and such was the reputation of the prison that Coleridge wrote in his poem ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’, describing the devil’s feelings as he passed the prison:

  As he went through Coldbath Fields he saw

  A solitary cell,

  And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint

  For improving his prisons in Hell.

  The prison was demolished in 1889 to make way for the Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant sorting office and is remembered by the adjacent Cold Bath Square, EC1.

  Dickens treats some other prisoners better than he treats Fagin. In The Old Curiosity Shop the innocent errand boy Kit Nubbles, who is devoted to Little Nell, is framed by the evil dwarf Quilp and briefly imprisoned, but Dickens reassures his readers that Kit is ‘lodged like some few others in the gaol, apart from the masses of prisoners because he was not supposed to be utterly depraved and irreclaimable’. Even Uriah Heep in David Copperfield becomes a model prisoner following his unmasking by Wilkins Micawber. However, the work in which Newgate figures most prominently is undoubtedly Barnaby Rudge.

  Barnaby Rudge, or, to give its full title, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ’Eighty was published in 1841 and of all Dickens’s works it is the one most firmly based on historical events. The Gordon Riots were led by a renegade and highly disturbed aristocrat called Lord George Gordon, third son of the Duke of Gordon, in protest at the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 which enabled Roman Catholics to join the army and own and inherit property. These reasonable enough measures outraged Gordon, whose speeches in Parliament prompted one fellow Parliamentarian to comment that ‘the noble lord has got a twist in his head, a certain whirligig which runs away with him if anything relative to religion is mentioned’. In June 1780 a crowd of Gordon’s supporters, numbering in excess of 20,000, assembled in Lambeth and proceeded to Westminster carrying banners bearing the message ‘No Popery’. The headquarters of the rioters was the Boot Tavern in Cromer Street, Bloomsbury, which still exists – though the original building has been replaced by the present one. The mob briefly invaded the Palace of Westminster, before being repulsed, and proceeded to attack Catholic chapels of foreign embassies, followed by the home of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, at 29 Bloomsbury Square. The riots continued for four days and culminated in an attack on Newgate, where some of their number had earlier been incarcerated. Dickens’s story follows the disturbances quite closely with the fictional and villainous Sir John Chester helping to foment the riots; the simpleton Barnaby Rudge being innocently drawn into them and narrowly escaping execution; and the fate of Ned Dennis, the treacherous Tyburn hangman, reflecting Dickens’s own ambivalent feelings about capital punishment.

  The attack on Newgate was witnessed by the poet George Crabbe, who paid a householder sixpence to watch the spectacle from his roof, commenting: ‘Here I saw a new species of gaol delivery. The captives marched out with all the honours of war, accompanied by a musical band of rattling fetters.’ William Blake also watched the rioters from his new printing shop in Broad Street. The mob was eventually dispelled by troops and twenty-one rioters were hanged, Lord George Gordon escaping a charge of treason on the grounds that his intentions were peaceful and he couldn’t be held responsible for the excesses of misguided supporters. After a spell in the Tower of London, Gordon ended his days in Newgate having been convicted of libelling the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. In Newgate he converted to the Jewish faith.

  Dickens was born in 1812, thirty-two years after the riots, but he must have had contact with people who remembered them, so vivid and authentic is his account. The principal character of Dickens’s tale, Barnaby Rudge, is drawn into the riots by being encouraged to carry one of their colourful flags and he is sent to Newgate where, fettered in his dark cell, he was depicted by Dickens’s illustrator Phiz in one of his most famous illustrations.

  Phiz, whose real name was Hablot Knight Browne (1815–82), was of French Huguenot descent and became Dickens’s illustrator in 1836 when the notoriously irascible writer fell out with Robert Seymour, who had illustrated The Pickwick Papers. Browne illustrated ten of Dickens’s novels and his easy temperament enabled him to accommodate the novelist’s uneven temper, the collaboration lasting almost a quarter of a century to 1860. He also illustrated works by other Newgate novelists, including Harrison Ainsworth and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He is commemorated by a Blue Plaque at his former home, 239 Ladbroke Grove.

  Barnaby was released from Newgate by the rioters, recaptured and condemned to death, but reprieved at the eleventh hour. Hugh the Ostler, another character in the novel, is hanged as his gypsy mother had been before him and his behaviour as he approaches the scaffold outside Newgate is defiant as he cries:

  Upon these human shambles I, who never raised a hand in prayer till now, call down the wrath of God! On that black tree of which I am the ripened fruit I do invoke the curse of all its victims past, and present and to come.

  As eight o’clock approaches, the hour of execution, the crowd swells ‘with every chime of St Sepulchre’s clock’ and as the condemned are brought from the gaol the cry of ‘Hats off’ is heard, as Dickens himself had heard it at Courvoisier’s execution in 1840, the year before Barnaby Rudge was written. Dickens shows sympathy for all the executed except the hangman Dennis, who is portrayed as a coward cravenly begging for a reprieve. Dickens concludes that ‘those who suffered as rioters were for the most part the weakest, meanest and most miserable amongst them’ and adds a moving account of a weeping, grey-haired man approaching the scaffold and embracing his son as the boy goes to his death.

  SMITHFIELD

  Smithfield is frequently mentioned in the works of Dickens. It takes its name from the ‘Smooth Field’ which was located just outside the City wall. In Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, an account of an imaginary ideal society, the killing of animals takes place outside the City walls, reflecting practices at Smithfield. From the twelfth century, sales of live animals took place here alongside Bartholomew Fair, which was mostly concerned with the sale of cloth and occurred during August each year following St Bartholomew�
��s Day, the patron of the nearby hospital of that name. It is remembered in the name of the neighbouring street, Cloth Fair. Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair, written in 1614, described some of the fair’s attractions: ‘The wonder of nature, a girl about sixteen years of age, born in Cheshire and not above eighteen inches long’ and ‘a Man with one head and two distinct bodies.’

  Wordsworth also described Bartholomew Fair in Book VII of his autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’ entitled ‘Residence in London’:

  The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel,

  Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls, and boys,

  Blue-breeched, pink-vested, and with towering plumes.—

  All moveables of wonder, from all parts,

  Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,

  The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,

  The Stone-eater, the Man that swallows fire,

  Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,

  The Bust that speaks, and moves its goggling eyes,

  The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft

  Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,

  All out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,