---- JAIL is still a grim and castellated mountain of masonry, but a
human heart beats and a human brain throbs inside it now.
Enter without fear of seeing children kill themselves, and bearded men
faint like women, or weep like children--horrible sights.
The prisoners no longer crouch and cower past the officers, nor the
officers look at them and speak to them as if they were dogs, as they do
in most of these places, and used to here.
Open this cell. A woman rises with a smile! why a smile? Because for
months an open door has generally let in what is always a great boon
to a separate prisoner--a human creature with a civil word. We remember
when an open door meant “way for a ruffian and a fool to trample upon
the solitary and sorrowful!”
What is this smiling personage doing? as I live she is watchmaking! A
woman watchmaking, with neat and taper fingers, and a glass at her eye
sometimes, but not always, for in vision as well as in sense of touch
and patience nature has been bounteous to her. She is one of four.
Eight, besides these four, were tried and found incapable of excellence
in this difficult craft. They were put to other things; for permanent
failures are not permitted in ---- Jail. The theory is that every home
can turn some sort of labor to profit.
Difficulties occur often. Impossibilities will bar the way now and then;
but there are so few real impossibilities. When a difficulty arises,
the three hundred industrious arts and crafts are freely ransacked for
a prisoner; ay!--ransacked as few rich men would be bothered to sift the
seven or eight liberal professions in order to fit a beloved son.
Here, as in the world, the average of talent is low. The majority can
only learn easy things, and vulgar things, and some can do higher
things and a few can do beautiful things, and one or two have developed
first-rate gifts and powers.
There are 25 shoemakers (male); 12 tailors, of whom 6 female; 24
weavers, of whom 10 female; 4 watchmakers, all female; 6 printers and
composers, 5 female; 4 engrainers of wood, 2 female. (In this art we
have the first artist in Britain, our old acquaintance, Thomas Robinson.
He has passed all his competitors by a simple process. Beautiful
specimens of all the woods have been placed and kept before him, and for
a month he has been forced to imitate nature with his eye never off
her. His competitors in the world imitate nature from memory, from
convention, or from tradition. By such processes truth and beauty are
lost at each step down the ladder of routine. Mr. Eden gave clever Tom
at first starting the right end of the stick, instead of letting him
take the wrong.) Nine joiners and carpenters, 3 female; 3 who color
prints downright well, 1 female; 2 painters, 1 female; 3 pupils
shorthand writing, 1 female.
[Fancy these attending the Old Bailey and taking it all down solemn as
judges.]
Workers in gutta-percha, modelers in clay, washers and getters-up of
linen, hoe-makers, spade-makers, rake-makers, woodcarvers, stonecutters,
bakers, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. Come to the hard-labor yard.
Do you see those fifteen stables? there lurk in vain the rusty cranks;
condemned first as liars they fell soon after into disrepute as weapons
of half-science to degrade minds and bodies. They lurk there grim as
the used-up giants in “Pilgrim's Progress,” and like them can't catch a
soul.
Hark to the music of the shuttle and the useful loom. We weave linen,
cotton, woolen, linsey-woolsey, and, not to be behind the rogues
outside, cottonsey-woolsey and cottonsey-silksey; damask we weave, and a
little silk and poplin, and Mary Baker velvet itself for a treat now and
then. We of the loom relieve the county of all expense in keeping us,
and enrich a fund for taking care of discharged industrious prisoners
until such time as they can soften prejudices and obtain lucrative
employment. The old plan was to kick a prisoner out and say:
“There, dog! go without a rap among those who will look on you as a dog
and make you starve or steal. We have taught you no labor but crank, and
as there are no cranks in the outside world, the world not being such
an idiot as we are, you must fill your belly by means of the only other
thing you have ever been taught--theft.”
Now the officers take leave of a discharged prisoner in English.
Farewell; good-by!--a contraction for God be wi' ye--etc. It used to be
in French, Sans adieu! au revoir! and the like.
Having passed the merry, useful looms open this cell. A she-thief looks
up with an eye six times as mellow as when we were here last. She is
busy gilding. See with what an adroit and delicate touch the jade slips
the long square knife under the gossamer gold-leaf which she has blown
gently out of the book--and turns it over; and now she breathes gently
and vertically on the exact center of it, and the fragile yet rebellious
leaf that has rolled itself up like a hedgehog is flattened by that
human zephyr on the little leathern easel. Now she cuts it in three with
vertical blade; now she takes her long flat brush and applies it to her
own hair once or twice; strange to say the camel-hair takes from this
contact a soupcon of some very slight and delicate animal oil, which
enables the brush to take up the gold-leaf, and the artist lays a square
of gold in its place on the plaster bull she is gilding. Said bull was
cast in the prison by another female prisoner who at this moment is
preparing a green artificial meadow for the animal to stand in. These
two girls had failed at the watchmaking. They had sight and the fine
sensation of touch required, but they lacked the caution, patience
and judgment so severe an art demanded; so their talents were directed
elsewhere. This one is a first-rate gilder, she mistressed it entirely
in three days.
The last thing they did in this way was an elephant. Cost of casting
him, reckoning labor and the percentage he ought to pay to the mold, was
1s. 4d. Plaster, chrome, water-size and oil-size, 3d.; goldleaf, 3s.;
1 foot of German velvet, 4d.; thread, needles and wear of tools, 1d.;
total, 5s.
Said gold elephant standing on a purple cushion was subjected to a
severe test of his value. He was sent to a low auction room in London.
There he fell to the trade at 18s. This was a “knock-out” transaction;
twelve buyers had agreed not to bid against one another in the auction
room, a conspiracy illegal but customary. The same afternoon these
twelve held one of their little private unlawful auctions over him; here
the bidding was like drops of blood oozing from flints, but at least
it was bona-fide, and he rose to 25s. The seven shillings premium was
divided among the eleven sharpers. Sharper No. 12 carried him home and
sold him the very next day for 37s. to a lady who lived in Belgravia,
but shopped in filthy alleys, misled perhaps by the phrase “dirt cheap.”
Mr. Eden conceived him, two detected ones made him at a cost of 5s.,
twelve undetected ones caught him first for 18s., and now he stands in
Belgravia, and the fair ejaculate over him, “What a duck!”
The aggregate of labor to make and gild this elephant was not quite one
woman's work (12 hours). Taking 18s. as the true value of the work, for
in this world the workman has commonly to sell his production under
the above disadvantages, forced sale and the conspiracies of the
unimprisoned--we have still 13s. for a day's work by a woman.
From the bull greater things are expected. The cast is from the bull of
the Vatican, a bull true to Nature, and Nature adorned the very meadows
when she produced the bull. What a magnificent animal is a bull! what
a dewlap! what a front! what clean pasterns! what fearless eyes! what a
deep diapason is his voice! of which beholding this his true and massive
effigy in ---- Jail we are reminded. When he stands muscular, majestic,
sonorous, gold, in his meadow pied with daisies, it shall not be “sweet”
and “love” and “duck”--words of beauty but no earthly signification; it
shall be, “There, I forgive Europa.”
And need I say there were more aimed at in all this than pecuniary
profit. Mr. Eden held that the love of production is the natural
specific antidote to the love of stealing. He kindled in his prisoners
the love of producing, of what some by an abuse of language call
“creating.” And the producers rose in the scale of human beings. Their
faces showed it--the untamed look melted away--the white of the eye
showed less, and the pupil and iris more, and better quality.
Gold-leaf when first laid on adheres in visible squares with uncouth
edges, a ragged affair; then the gilder takes a camelhair brush and
under its light and rapid touch the work changes as under a diviner's
rod, so rapidly and majestically come beauty and finish over it. Perhaps
no other art has so delicious a one minute as this is to the gilder. The
first work our prisoner gilded she screamed with delight several times
at this crisis. She begged to have the work left in her cell one day at
least. “It lights up the cell and lights up my heart.”
“Of course it does,” said Mr. Eden. “Aha! what, there are greater
pleasures in the world than sinning, are there?”
“That there are. I never was so pleased in my life. May I have it a few
minutes?”
“My child, you shall have it till its place is taken by others like
it. Keep it before your eyes, feed on it, and ask yourself which is
the best, to work and add something useful or beautiful to the world's
material wealth, or to steal; to be a little benefactor to your kind and
yourself, or a little vermin preying on the industrious. Which is best?”
“I'll never take while I can make.”
This is, of course, but a single specimen out of scores. To follow Mr.
Eden from cell to cell, from mind to mind, from sex to sex, would take
volumes and volumes. I only profess to reveal fragments of such a man.
He never hoped from the mere separate cell the wonders that dreamers
hope. It was essential to the reform of prisoners that moral contagion
should be checkmated, and the cell was the mode adopted, because it is
the laziest, cheapest, selfishest and cruelest way of doing this. That
no discretion was allowed him to let the converted or the well-disposed
mix and sympathize, and compare notes, and confirm each other in good
under a watchful officer's eye; this he thought a frightful blunder of
the system.
Generally he held the good effect of separate confinement to be merely
negative; he laughed to scorn the chimera that solitude is an active
agent, capable of converting a rogue. Shut a rogue from rogues and let
honest men in upon him--the honest men get a good chance to convert
him, but if they do succeed it was not solitude that converted him but
healing contact. The moments that most good comes to him are the moments
his solitude is broken.
He used to say solitude will cow a rogue and suspend his overt acts
of theft by force, and so make him to a non-reflector seem no longer
a thief; but the notion of the cell effecting permanent cures might
honestly be worded thus: “I am a lazy self-deceiver, and want to do by
machinery and without personal fatigue what St. Paul could only do by
working with all his heart, with all his time, with all his wit, with
all his soul, with all his strength and with all himself.” Or thus:
“Confine the leopards in separate cages, Jock; _the cages_ will take
their spots out while ye're sleeping.”
Generally this was Mr. Eden's theory of the cell--a check to further
contamination, but no more. He even saw in the cell much positive ill
which he set himself to qualify.
“Separate confinement breeds monstrous egotism,” said he, “and egotism
hardens the heart. You can't make any man good if you never let him say
a kind word or do an unselfish action to a fellow-creature. Man is an
acting animal. His real moral character all lies in his actions, and
none of it in his dreams or cogitations. Moral stagnation or cessation
of all bad acts and of all good acts is a state on the borders of every
vice and a million miles from virtue.”
His reverence attacked the petrifaction and egotism of the separate
cell as far as the shallow system of this prison let him. First, he
encouraged prisoners to write their lives for the use of the prison;
these were weeded, if necessary (the editor was strong-minded and did
not weed out the re-poppies); printed and circulated in the jail. The
writer's number was printed at the foot if he pleased, but never his
name. Biography begot a world of sympathy in the prison. Second, he
talked to one prisoner acquainted with another prisoner's character,
talked about No. 80 to No. 60, and would sometimes say: “Now could you
give No. 60 any good advice on this point?”
Then if 80's advice was good he would carry it to 60, and 60 would think
all the more of it that it came from one of his fellows.
Then in matters of art he would carry the difficulties of a beginner
or a bungler to a proficient, and the latter would help the former. The
pleasure of being kind on one side, a touch of gratitude on the other,
seeds of interest and sympathy in both. Then such as had produced pretty
things were encouraged to lend them to other cells to adorn them and
stimulate the occupants.
For instance, No. 140, who gilded the bull, was reminded that No. 120,
who had cast him, had never had the pleasure of setting him on her table
in her gloomy cell and so raising its look from dungeon to workshop.
Then No. 140 said, “Poor No. 120! that is not fair; she shall have him
half the day or more if you like, sir.”
Thus a grain of self-denial, justice and charity was often drawn into
the heart of a cell through the very keyhole.
No. 19, Robinson, did many a little friendly office for other figures,
received their thanks, and, above all, obliging these figures warmed and
softened his own heart.
You might hear such dialogues as this:
No. 24. “And how is poor old No. 50 to-day (Strutt)?”
Mr. Eden. “Much the same.”
No. 24. “Do you think you will bring him round, sir?”
Mr. Eden. “I have great hopes; he is much improved since he had the
garden and the violin.”
No. 24. “Will you give him my compliments, sir? No. 24's compliments and
tell him I bid him 'never say die'?”
Mr. Eden. “Well, ----, how are you this morning?”
“I am a little better, sir. This room (the infirmary) is so sweet and
airy, and they give me precious nice things to eat and drink.”
“Are the nurses kind to you?”
“That, they are, sir, kinder than I deserve.”
“I have a message for you from No. -- on your corridor.”
“No! have you, sir?”
“He sends his best wishes for your recovery.”
“Now that is very good of him.”
“And he would be very glad to hear from yourself how you feel.”
“Well, sir, you tell him I am a trifle better, and God bless him for
troubling his head about me.”
In short, his reverence reversed the Hawes system. Under that a prisoner
was divested of humanity and became a number and when he fell sick the
sentiment created was, “The figure written on the floor of that cell
looks faint.” When he died or was murdered, “There is such and such a
figure rubbed off our slate.”
Mr. Eden made these figures signify flesh and blood, even to those who
never saw their human faces. When he had softened a prisoner's heart
then he laid the deeper truths of Christianity to that heart. They would
not adhere to ice or stone or brass. He knew that till he had taught a
man to love his brother whom he had seen he could never make him love
God whom he has not seen. To vary the metaphor, his plan was, first warm
and soften your wax then begin to shape it after Heaven's pattern.
The old-fashioned way is freeze, petrify and mold your wax by a single
process. Not that he was mawkish. No man rebuked sin more terribly than
he often rebuked it in many of these cells; and when he did so see what
he gained by the personal kindness that preceded these terrible rebukes!
The rogue said: “What! is it so bad that his reverence, who I know has
a regard for me, rebukes me for it like this?--why, it must be bad
indeed!”
A loving friend's rebuke is a rebuke--sinks into the heart and
convinces the judgment; an enemy's or stranger's rebuke is invective and
irritates--not converts. The great vice of the new prisons is general
self-deception varied by downright calculating hypocrisy. A shallow
zealot like Mr. Lepel is sure to drive the prisoners into one or other
of these. It was Mr. Eden's struggle to keep them out of it. He froze
cant in the bud. Puritanical burglars tried Scriptural phrases on him as
a matter of course, but they soon found it was the very worse lay they
could get upon in ---- Jail. The notion that a man can jump from
the depths of vice up to the climax of righteous habits,
spiritual-mindedness, at one leap, shocked his sense and terrified him
for the daring dogs that profess these saltatory powers and the geese
that believe it. He said to such: “Let me see you crawl heavenward
first, then walk heavenward; it will be time enough to soar when you
have lived soberly, honestly, piously a year or two--not here, where
you are tied hands, feet and tongue, but free among the world's
temptations.” He had no blind confidence in learned-by-heart texts.
“Many a scoundrel has a good memory,” said he.
Here he was quite opposed to his friend Lepel. This gentleman attributed
a sort of physical virtue to Holy Writ poured anyhow into a human
vessel. His plan of making a thief honest will appear incredible to a
more enlightened age; yet it is widely accepted now and its advocates
call Mr. Eden a dreamer. It was this: He came into a cell cold and stern
and set the rogues a lot of texts. Those that learned a great many he
called good prisoners, and those that learned few--black sheep; and the
prisoners soon found out that their life, bitter as it was, would be
bitterer if they did not look sharp and learn a good many texts. So they
learned lots--and the slyest scoundrels learned the most. “Why not?”
said they, “in these cursed holes we have nothing better to do; and it
is the only way to get the parson's good word, and that is always worth
having in jail.”
One rogue on getting out explained his knowledge of five hundred texts
thus: “What did it hurt me learning texts? I'd just as lieve be learning
texts as turning a crank, and as soon be d--d as either.”
This fellow had been one of Mr. Lepel's sucking saints--a show prisoner.
The Bible and brute force--how odd they sound together! Yet such was
the Lepel system, humbug apart. Put a thief in a press between an Old
Testament and a New Testament. Turn the screw, crush the texts in, and
the rogue's vices out! Conversion made easy! What a wonder he opposes
cunning cloaked with religion to brutality cloaked under religion.
Ay, brutality, and laziness, and selfishness, all these are the true
foundation of that system. Selfishness--for such a man won't do anything
he does not like. No! “Why should I make myself 'all things to all men'
to save a soul? I will save them this one way or none--this is my way
and they shall all come to it,” says the reverend Procrustes, forgetting
that if the heart is not won in vain is the will crushed; or perhaps not
caring so that he gets his own way.
To work on Mr. Eden's plan is a herculean effort day by day repeated;
but to set texts is easy, easier even than to learn them--and how easy
that is appears from the multitude of incurable felons who have
swapped texts for tickets-of-leave. Messieurs Lepel, who teach solitary
depressed sinners the Bible with screw and lifted lash and no love
nor pity, a word in your ear. Begin a step higher. Go first to some
charitable priest and at his feet learn that Bible yourselves!
Forgive my heat, dear reader. I am not an Eden, and these fellows rile
me when I think of the good they might do, and they do nothing but force
hypocrisy upon men who were bad enough without that. I allow a certain
latitude; don't want to swim in hot water by quarreling with every
madman or every dunce, but I do doubt any man's right to combine
contradictory vices. Now these worthies are stupid yet wild,
thick-headed yet delirious--tortoises and March hares.
My sketch of Mr. Eden and his ways is feeble and unworthy. But I
conclude it with one master-stroke of eulogy--He was the opposite of
these men.