Transcriber’s Note
Words in italics are marked with _underscores_.
Words in small capitals are shown in UPPER CASE.
Words marked with =equals signs= were originally printed in bold,
italics and were underlined.
The names under the photographs were originally handwritten.
Footnotes have been moved to the end of paragraphs.
The photograph of Jane Warton has been moved, the page number in the
list of illustrations refers to its original position in the book.
Variant spelling, misspelt names and inconsistent hyphenation are
retained, a few palpable printing errors have been corrected.
The ⁂ character was originally printed as an inverted asterism.
PRISONS AND PRISONERS
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| MY FATHER |
| |
| PERSONAL AND SPIRITUAL REMINISCENCES |
| |
| By ESTELLE W. STEAD |
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| Demy 8vo. Price 10/- net |
| |
| LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN |
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[Illustration:
_Holman & Paget, photographers_
_Emery Walker Ph. Sc._
Constance Lytton]
PRISONS & PRISONERS
SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
By CONSTANCE LYTTON AND
JANE WARTON, SPINSTER
WITH PORTRAITS
[Illustration: W H (Publisher’s logo)]
LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN
_Copyright_, 1914.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
DEDICATION.
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. MY CONVERSION 9
III. A DEPUTATION TO THE PRIME MINISTER 31
IV. POLICE COURT TRIAL 54
V. HOLLOWAY PRISON: MY FIRST IMPRISONMENT 68
VI. THE HOSPITAL 92
VII. SOME TYPES OF PRISONERS 114
VIII. “A TRACK TO THE WATER’S EDGE” 138
IX. FROM THE CELLS 173
X. NEWCASTLE: POLICE STATION CELL 201
XI. NEWCASTLE PRISON: MY SECOND IMPRISONMENT 222
XII. JANE WARTON 234
XIII. WALTON GAOL, LIVERPOOL: MY THIRD IMPRISONMENT 259
XIV. THE HOME OFFICE 296
XV. THE CONCILIATION BILL 311
XVI. HOLLOWAY PRISON REVISITED: MY FOURTH IMPRISONMENT 320
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
_The Publisher hopes that fault will not be found if he disclaims
agreement with some of Lady Constance Lytton’s views expressed in
this volume, notwithstanding the fact that he is glad to offer it to
the public. He feels that personal disagreement over details should
not hinder him from publishing this splendid story of heroism and
unselfishness._
DEDICATION TO PRISONERS
When, for a short while, I shared your lot, I asked myself through all
my waking hours if there were any friendly thought which could act
beneficently for all prisoners, no matter how various the training
of their previous lives, no matter whether distress of circumstance,
drunkenness, selfish action, cruelty, or madness had been the cause
which brought them into prison.
And there seemed this one thing. It is a single idea, but needs many
words to give it shape.
Lay hold of your inward self and keep tight hold. Reverence yourself.
Be just, kind and forgiving to yourself. For the inner you of yourself
is surely the only means of communication for you with any good
influence you may once have enjoyed or hope some day to find, the only
window through which you can look upon a happier and more lovable
life, the only door through which some day you will be able to escape,
unbarring it to your own release from all that is helpless, selfish,
and unkind in your present self.
Public opinion, which sent you to prison, and your gaolers, who have to
keep you there, are mostly concerned with your failings. Every hour of
prison existence will remind you of these afresh. Unless you are able
to keep alight within yourself the remembrance of acts and thoughts
which were good, a belief in your own power to exist freely when you
are once more out of prison, how can any other human being help you? If
not the inward power, how can any external power avail?
But if you have this comforter within you, hourly keeping up
communication with all that you have known and loved of good in your
life, with all the possibilities for good that you know of--in your
hands, your mind, your heart--then when you are released from prison,
however lonely you may be, or poor, or despised by your neighbours, you
will have a friend who can really help you.
There will be people who visit you in prison, and who watch over you
at first when you come out. They will try to help you, but unless they
truly understand your lot, understanding your goodness as well as
your badness, and sympathising with your badness as well as with your
goodness, they will seem far off from you. Who knows, though, but what
you may help them? In my ignorance and impudence I went into prison
hoping to help prisoners. So far as I know, I was unable to do anything
for them. But the prisoners helped me. They seemed at times the direct
channels between me and God Himself, imbued with the most friendly and
powerful goodness that I have ever met.
Prisoners, I wish I could give to you, for your joy, something of the
help you gave to me, and that in many ways I could follow your example.
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF LADY CONSTANCE LYTTON _Frontispiece_.
PORTRAIT OF JANE WARTON, SPINSTER _to face p. 114_.
THE MEDALLION ON COVER BY MISS SYLVIA PANKHURST WITH GRATEFUL THANKS.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Some of the experiences which I have to record are of so unusual a
character that I think it will help to a better understanding on the
part of my readers if I briefly outline the drift of my existence
before I became aware of the women’s movement, and in touch with that
section of it known as the “Militant Suffragettes.”
My father had been dead fifteen years and I was thirty-nine years
old in 1906, when my narrative begins. I lived with my mother in the
country. Two sisters and two brothers had left the home when they
were young--the sisters to marry, the brothers to train for and enter
their professions. I assumed, as did all my friends and relations,
that, being past the age when marriage was likely, I should always
remain at home. In my early girlhood I had a yearning to take up
music professionally; again, after father’s death, when unexpected
financial misfortunes caused my mother great anxiety, I had longed to
try my hand at journalism; and once more, a few years later, I had
the same ambition. But these wishes, finding no favour, had in each
case eventually to be repressed, and in 1906 I had neither equipment,
training nor inclination for an independent life.
I had been more or less of a chronic invalid through the greater part
of my youth. An overmastering laziness and a fatalistic submission
to events as they befell were guiding factors in my existence. I was
passionately fond of animals and of children, music was a great delight
to me; otherwise I was not given to intellectual pursuits. So far as
I know, I was an average ordinary human being, except perhaps for an
exaggerated dislike of society and of publicity in any form. I had many
intimate friends, both men and women, and also children. Such mental
training as I have known was chiefly due to intercourse with them. I
owed to them, as well as to my mother and many members of my family, a
happy life, in spite of considerable physical suffering.
In 1896 and successive years I had given secretarial help to my aunt,
Mrs. C. W. Earle, in the writing of her wonderfully delightful books,
beginning with “Pot Pourri from a Surrey Garden.” She insisted that,
in return for my small and mostly mechanical services, we should share
the profits of the sale. The book ran into many editions, and she held
to her bargain, but I never felt as if I had a right to the money. Her
widely sympathetic and stimulating companionship had a great influence
on my mind. Thanks to her investigations in theories of diet, I became
a strict vegetarian. My health gained in all directions and I gradually
freed myself from the so-called “constitutional” rheumatism from which
I had suffered since my infancy. I realised, too, that all these years
I had caused untold suffering that I might be fed, and determined that
in future the unnatural death of an animal should not be necessary to
make up my bill of fare. My vitality increased, but the notion of a
vocation apart from my family and home remained as foreign to my ideas
as it was then to the average British spinster of my class.
In the year 1906 my godmother, Lady Bloomfield, died. She had shown me
much kindness and I had never found an opportunity to serve her in any
way, the generosity had been all on her side; yet, at her death, she
left me some money, without any conditions as to how I should spend
it. It gave me a strange new feeling of power and exhilaration. I look
back upon this event as being spiritually the starting point in my
new life, of which this book will tell, although, from the practical
point of view, it seems only by a series of coincidences that my after
experiences were evolved from it.
I looked about me with a view to spending the money. I had a fancy
to put it to some public use. The commonly accepted channels of
philanthropy did not appeal to me. I shifted my inquiries in other
directions. I remember that at this time I was chiefly occupied
with the idea that reformers were for the most part town dwellers,
their philosophy and schemes attuned to those surroundings. There
seemed to me need for a counteracting influence to attempt reform and
regeneration on behalf of country dwellers. The noiseless revolution
which had been worked in a few decades by the system of compulsory
education seemed to me tainted throughout by the ideals of townsfolk.
The influence of teachers and clergy, of public authorities in general,
sets before the nation’s children and their parents ideals which mould
them into townsfolk. Country craft and country lore grow less, and
are less honoured in every decade. There is no room for them in the
national curriculum. This tendency, nevertheless, seems unnatural,
imposed by a species of force on a reluctant though inarticulate
people. Some temperaments cannot acclimatise themselves to town
dwelling. The life of cities will always appear to them artificial,
repellent from the physical conditions it imposes and the mental
outlook resulting from these. Rain, earth and air are better scavengers
than any municipal corporation. The ceaseless cleansing, yet never
making clean, of town existence has from my childhood fretted my
imagination and produced a sense of incarceration. In towns, the earth
is laid over with tombstones, metalled roads or floors of wood. Avenues
of bricks and mortar shut out a great part of the sky, limiting into
a mere ceiling the heavens which should be our surrounding. A town
had always seemed to me a “deterrent” workhouse at best, and often a
punitive prison besides.
The monster of industrialism, which followed in the wake of
the discovery of steam and the dethroning of handicraft by
artificially-propelled machinery, may one day be bridled and controlled
so as to be a servant of humanity, a fellow worker in the day-to-day
glory of creation; but for the present it is still a wild beast, a
dragon at large, dealing pestilence and death with its fiery breath,
combated in panic, its evils evaded rather than faced, its power a
nightmare breeding fear and subjection. Instead of harnessing this
new force to every branch of our existence, ordering it to serve us
at our command, we have cringed before it, left our normal lives and
drained our energies to congregate in its grimy temples and worship at
its shrine. Poor, blind force that it is, we are determined to make
it an idol, and for sake of the return in money which its mechanical
rotations produce, we have been willing to sacrifice the interests both
of the human beings which should control it and of the soil, the land,
which alone can produce the raw material for its task.
How to transform this Moloch from a tyrannous master to a helpful,
submissive friend, that was the problem which seemed to cry out for
solution above all others. I looked around to see how the needs of
country folk were able to express themselves, and everywhere there was
presented to my inquiries a complicated machinery of administration
both national and local--voting rights for election of parliamentary,
municipal, county, district and parish councils. But this machinery was
apparently born and bred of urban conditions, super-imposed upon the
rural districts, in no way native to them, not of spontaneous growth.
This succession of councils, instituted with the apparent purpose of
watching one another, and, if necessary, bringing pressure to bear
upon one another, were for the most part lifeless formalities, having
no organic life, no breath of reality to set them in motion. The only
function which gives them any tangible vitality is their power of
imposing taxation and levying rates. You find in the country districts
that members of these different bodies are the same individuals. The
parish councillor who is expected to bring pressure to bear on the
district councillor, who again must appeal, if need be, to the county
councillor, is one and the same person who, as likely as not, is also
the representative of the district on the board of guardians, and he is
sure to be selected again to work the administrative machinery of every
new device that comes along for the amelioration of social evils. In
other words, the elective principle is a farce in rural districts. The
electorate are dead both to their powers and their duties. They live,
in fact, under a system which is anything but representative. They live
rather, under the devitalised husk of the feudal system, the poorer
members of the community dependent, in the worst sense, upon those
who are their social superiors, but no longer receiving from them any
security of well-being, and neither class extending to the other, with
rare exceptions, either the loyalty or devotion which seem to have been
bound up with the feudal traditions of our forefathers. Was it possible
to wake up this inert mass, so that they should co-operate with one
another, and thus be strong enough to grasp the present machinery of
national Government, and either utilise it or alter it to one better
suited to their needs?
Each of my inquiries in turn led me back to the individuals concerned,
to the human beings themselves. What were their homes, their ambitions,
thoughts, beliefs? What guidance do they give to those who wish to
serve them? I groped my way blindly and acquired knowledge only in a
negative sense by a series of failures. I gleaned two general precepts
from my investigations. They were these: It is useless to try and help
the lives of a community without consulting the individuals whom you
hope to benefit, and that to benefit the life conditions of men does
not necessarily benefit the life conditions of women, although their
interests may be apparently identical as to social grade, locality,
religious and other beliefs.
After a series of barren experiments, I stumbled by chance on a piece
of social radium, a regenerative agency that bore good fruit and that
contained an element of spontaneous joy most refreshing compared to the
oppressive straight-jackets of national or private philanthropists.
I heard of the revival of folk songs and dances. I went to see and
hear them. The first performance opened the door for me into a new
paradise. The Esperance Club of working girls had been the means of
bringing to life researches of antiquarian musical students. This
club had evidently been for many years an unusually successful social
enterprise, but the discovery of a lost treasure in the shape of
traditional songs and dances gave it a new inspiration. Both words and
tunes of the songs have come, generation after generation, from the
heart of the English folk. Each generation, each individual who has
sung them, has added or omitted some little touch, so that in these
songs, which have been mostly collected from old men and women over
eighty years of age, is expressed the very soul of English national
sentiment. The same with the dances. They were traditional in families
or localities, they had been handed down from father to son, and were
as truly folk dances as the songs were folk songs. Songs and dances
alike are full of life on the land and love of the land, of flowers,
animals and crops, of the daily lives of men, women and children.
Dramatic, tragic and comic incidents find spontaneous expression, and
every one of them tells of a vigorous and mainly joyous existence. The
girls of this club learnt the Morris dance first from two Oxfordshire
countrymen. Both the dances and songs were acquired easily “by a sort
of spiritual sixth sense,” as if the rhythm and meaning of them were
latent in their being and were easily re-awakened. The girls not
only learnt quickly, but were inspired to teach others, young girls
of seventeen and eighteen showing an amazing facility and power of
organisation in this matter. One of these came, at my eager request, to
teach in our village, and, after one week, men, women and children were
alive with these friendly, joy-giving, native arts. The following year
a girl teacher came to us again with renewed success.
In the autumn, 1908, I was invited by the secretary of the club, Miss
Mary Neal, herself a wonderful organiser, to share a seaside holiday
with her girls. In those days I never left home save for family
reasons, or for some very exceptional matter. I, therefore, refused
the invitation. I happened to mention the proposal the next day to
my mother. She said: “Why don’t you go?” I immediately went, little
realising that this visit would lead to a most unexpected series of
experiences.