In the year 1728, an opinion was entertained that much cruelty and
rapacity were exercised by the keepers of the great prisons in London.
It was known that they had almost unlimited power in their hands, that
they were not subject to regular inspection, and that it was scarcely
possible to bring them to justice for their treatment of those
committed to their charge. It was argued, that it is impossible to
depend upon the lenity of men who have such powers over their
fellow-creatures, and that these officers must be supposed more than
human if they did not occasionally abuse their authority. Of their
having actually done so, many rumours had from time to time reached
parliament. But in making out a case for inquiry, its strongest
supporters had but a very slight forecast of the horrors it was to
divulge. It may here be remarked, that before the proper arrangements
for official responsibility and regular systematic management in such
matters as prison discipline or the custody of the insane were
devised, our free parliament did incalculable service by its inquiries
and exposures. In that august assembly, every tale of formidable
injustice or oppression was sure to receive a ready auditory; and its
power was so transcendent, that every door flew open at its command,
and no influence could protect the wrong-doer from its sweeping
vengeance. With such a body in existence, even the worst governments
which Britain has known could not keep up those mysterious agents of
tyranny, secret state-prisons, which continue to be the curse of every
despotic country. Yet it will be seen, that for want of some more
immediate and direct responsibility, the abuses in the prisons even of
this country had risen to a very dreadful height.
The member who headed the inquiry was Colonel Oglethorpe. He was a man
of literary talent--a dashing and intrepid soldier, but still more
renowned for his wide and active benevolence. It is to him that Pope
alludes in the lines:
One driven by strong benevolence of soul,
Shall fly like Oglethorpe from pole to pole.
A committee obtained by his influence, did not conduct its inquiry in
easy state in St Stephen's, but appalled the guilty parties by
immediately repairing to the prisons, and diving to the furthest
recesses of their dungeons. In the Marshalsea, it found that even
those who paid excessive fees for their lodgings, were laid in lairs
above each other on boards set on tressels, where they were packed so
close together, that many were believed to have died from mere
deficiency of air. There was no doubt that many others, debtors, had
come to a miserable end by starvation. Some were found in the last
stage of attenuation. Those who could not provide for themselves, had
nothing to feed on but a scanty charity-allowance from the benevolence
of individuals, which, when distributed among the whole, furnished
each with sometimes only a few peas in the day; and at intervals of
several days, an ounce and a half of meat. 'When the miserable
wretch,' say the committee in their report, 'hath worn out the charity
of his friends, and consumed the money which he hath raised upon his
clothes and bedding, and hath ate his last allowance of provisions,
he usually in a few days grows weak for want of food, with the
symptoms of a hectic fever; and when he is no longer able to stand, if
he can raise 3d. a day to pay the fee of the common nurse of the
prison, he obtains the liberty of being carried into the sick-ward,
and lingers on for about a month or two, by the assistance of the
above-mentioned prison portion of provision, and then dies.' The
committee made more lifelike this horrible description of the state of
the prison by describing the results of their efforts to relieve the
sufferers. They said: 'On the giving food to these poor
wretches--though it was done with the utmost caution, they being only
allowed the smallest quantities, and that of liquid nourishment--one
died; the vessels of his stomach were so disordered and contracted for
want of use, that they were totally incapable of performing their
office, and the unhappy creature perished about the time of
digestion.' These prisoners were debtors, not criminals. We make our
extracts from the reports, just after having heard in a scientific
society an examination of the dietary of a large district of prisons.
The difficulty appeared to be, to find the medium that would preserve
health without making the criminal's living in some measure luxurious;
and it appeared that, by almost every dietary in actual use in the
district, the prisoners fattened; in fact, they profited so much in
constitution by sobriety, good air, and regular food, however simple,
that it was found a difficult matter to give them what might be
considered a bare sufficiency, without raising their physical
condition, and sending them out of prison with improved constitutions.
So different is imprisonment for crime in the present age, from
imprisonment for debt a hundred and twenty years ago.
The condition of many of the prisoners for debt in England, though few
knew the actual extent of its horrors, was well known to be wretched,
and several humane persons had made charitable bequests for their
support. Colonel Oglethorpe's Committee made inquiry as to the
employment of these charities, and disclosed incidents of singular
villainy. It appeared, for instance, that in the Marshalsea there were
several charities; and that the prisoners might be sure of benefiting
by them, it was arranged that they should elect six constables, and
that these constables should choose a steward, who was to receive and
disburse the charities. Like a corporation, the steward had a seal
which he appended to the receipts for the money received for the
charities. The officers of the prison had carried on a systematic
perversion of these charities, either through connivance of the
steward elected by the constables, or by imposing on him. In the year
1722, however, it happened that a man named Matthew Pugh, an active,
clever exponent of abuses, was chosen steward. He discovered several
charities, the knowledge of which had been entirely suppressed, the
proceeds being drawn by the officers of the prison. He found, that to
facilitate their fraud, they had got a counterpart of the common seal,
with which they certified the receipts. Pugh got a new seal made; and
to prevent a new system of fraud being carried out, he got a
safety-chest fixed to the prison wall, with six locks, requiring for
opening it six separate keys, which were put into the hands of the six
constables. The committee, in describing how audaciously these
precautions were defeated, shew distinctly how slight were the checks
on the conduct of prison-officers in the reign of George II. They say:
'But this public and just manner of receiving and disbursing the
charities was disliked by the keeper and his servants; and they
complained to the judge of the Palace Court, and gave information that
the said Pugh was a very turbulent fellow, and procured a rule by
which it was ordered, that Matthew Pugh should no longer be permitted
to have access to the said prison or court; and the prisoners are
allowed to choose another steward; and accordingly, John Grace, then
clerk to the keeper, was chosen steward by those in the keeper's
interest; but the constables, in behalf of the prisoners, refused to
deliver up the keys of the chest, where their seal was, insisting that
all receipts should be sealed as usual in a public manner, that they
might know what money was received; and thereupon the said chest was
broke down, and carried away by the said William Acton (the keeper)
and John Grace.'--_Parliamentary History_, viii. 736. Hence the deaths
from starvation reported by Colonel Oglethorpe's Committee.
The reports of the committee were varied by statements of atrocious
cruelties committed on the prisoners, by their committal, whenever the
prison-officers thought fit, to damp and loathsome dungeons full of
filth, by heavy irons being forced on them, and even by the
application of the thumbkins, and other such tortures as were applied
in the previous century to the Covenanters. Thus, after narrating an
attempt made to escape, and the severities used on those who had
participated in it, the committee say: 'One of them was seen to go in
(to the keeper's lodge) perfectly well, and when he came out again, he
was in the greatest disorder; his thumbs were much swollen, and very
sore; and he declared that the occasion of his being in that condition
was, that the keeper, in order to extort from him a confession of the
names of those who had assisted him and others in their attempt to
escape, had screwed certain instruments of iron upon his thumbs, so
close, that they had forced the blood out of them with exquisite pain.
After this, he was carried into the strong room, where, besides the
other irons which he had on, they fixed on his neck and hands an iron
instrument called a collar, like a pair of tongs; and he being a large
lusty man, when they screwed the said instrument close, his eyes were
ready to start out of his head, the blood gushed out of his ears and
nose, he foamed at the mouth, and he made several motions to speak,
but could not: after these tortures, he was confined in the strong
room for many days with a heavy pair of irons called sheers on his
legs.'
It is not to be denied that some of the charges made by the committee
were not ultimately confirmed. It is natural for humane men, becoming
for the first time acquainted with extensive cruelties, to tinge their
narrative with the indignation they feel, and thus give it a
prejudiced and exaggerated tone. Even committees of the House of
Commons are not entirely exempt from such failings. But for our
purpose, which is that of noticing the progress of civilisation and
humanity in the period that has elapsed since the inquiry, it is
sufficient to know, that there must have been an extensive foundation
in facts for the horrors detailed by the committee. If it could not be
distinctly proved that an individual officer had murdered any prisoner
by the use of a particular torture, yet the instruments of torture
described in the above extract were in the prisons--they were seen and
handled by the committee, who were not to suppose that they were kept
for no use. They state, that it had become the practice for the
keepers 'unlawfully to assume to themselves a pretended authority as
magistrates, and not only to judge and decree punishments arbitrarily,
but also to execute the same unmercifully.'
In the exercise of this authority, the keepers seem to have imitated
the cruelties of the classical tyrant Mezentius, commemorated by
Virgil as chaining the living to the dead, for the committee say: 'The
various tortures and cruelties before mentioned not contenting these
wicked keepers in their said pretended magistracy over the prisoners,
they found a way of making within the prison a confinement more
dreadful than the strong room itself, by coupling the living with the
dead; and have made a practice of locking up debtors who displeased
them in the yard with human carcasses. One particular instance of
this sort of inhumanity, was of a person whom the keepers confined in
that part of the lower yard which was then separated from the rest,
whilst two dead bodies had lain there four days; yet was he kept there
with them six days longer; in which time the vermin devoured the flesh
from the faces, ate the eyes out of the heads of the carcasses, which
were bloated, putrid, and turned green during the poor debtor's dismal
confinement with them.'
Some of the accounts given by the committee are as grotesque, without
being so horrible. A certain Captain John M'Phaedris had been a person
of considerable fortune, and, like many of his contemporaries, had
been a victim to the South-sea speculation, which appears to have made
all the debtors' prisons more than usually full between the years 1720
and 1725. He refused to pay the exorbitant fees demanded by the keeper
for accommodation, and maintained that they were illegal. To silence
so troublesome a person, he was turned, unsheltered, into the yard,
where he had to remain exposed to the weather day and night. 'He sat
quietly,' said the committee, 'under his wrongs, and, getting some
poor materials, built a little hut to protect himself as well as he
could from the injuries of the weather.' The keeper, seeing this
ingenious abode, exclaimed with an oath that the fellow made himself
easy, and ordered the hut to be pulled down. 'The poor prisoner,' we
are told, 'being in an ill state of health, and the night rainy, was
put to great distress.'
In another instance, a prisoner had been committed to a cell so damp,
as the witnesses described it, that they could sweep the water from
the wall like dew from the grass. A feather-bed happened by some odd
accident to be in the place, and the prisoner tore it up, and, for
warmth, buried himself in the contents. Being covered with cutaneous
sores, the feathers stuck to him, as if he had been subject to the
operation of tarring and feathering. One Sunday, the door of the cell
being left open, he rushed out, and entered the prison chapel during
divine service--a horribly ludicrous figure. The committee, on the
conclusion of the incident, say, 'he was immediately seized and
carried back into the sad dungeon; where, through the cold, and the
restraint, and for want of food, he lost his senses, languished, and
perished.'
Such were the features of the system of mistreatment pursued in the
London prisons, thirty years after the general liberties of the
subject had been secured by the Revolution. We may in a subsequent
paper advert to some of the particular cases which came under the
attention of courts of justice.