I am not about to give an opinion as to the propriety or impropriety of
capital punishments. On this point good men have differed, and will
differ, I dare say, for some time to come. What I wish to impress upon
the philanthropic or Christian reader is the horrible nature and
atrocious effect of a public execution.
A few Sunday evenings since I was passing by Newgate, along the outside
of which a considerable crowd had been collected. Respectable mechanics,
with their wives and children, were staring at its dreary stone walls.
Ragged boys and girls were romping and laughing in the streets. All the
neighbouring public-houses were filled with a tipsy crowd. Here and
there a few barriers had been erected, and workmen were engaged in
putting up more. Why were these preparations made? For what purpose had
this crowd collected? A man was to be hung, was the reply. I resolved
for once to see the tragedy performed. To me or the living mass around,
that man was an utter stranger. I had never seen him or heard the sound
of his voice; all I knew was that he had led an outlaw's life, and was to
die as outlaws ofttimes do. How strange the mysterious interest with
which death clothes everything it touches! Is it that looking at a man
so soon to have done with life we fancy we can better pry into the great
secret? Do we deem that seeing him struggle we shall die more manfully
ourselves, or is it merely the vague interest with which we regard any
one about to travel into distant regions, all unknown to him or us, and
the secrets of which he can never return to tell? Be this as it may, I
went back at twelve. The public-houses had been closed, decent people
had gone home to bed; but already the crowd had become denser, already
had the thief and the bully from all the slums and stews of the
metropolis been collected together. You can easily recognise the
criminal population of our capital. The policeman knows them
instinctively, as with their small wiry figures, restless eyes, and pale
faces, they pass him by. One can tell them as easily as one knows the
child of Norman origin by his noble bearing, or the Anglo-Saxon by his
blue eyes and rosy cheeks. There is generally something fine, and
genial, and hearty about an English mob. On the night of the
peace-rejoicing you might have taken a lady from one end of London to the
other, and she would not have heard an objectionable word, or been
inconvenienced in the least; but the mob of which I now write seemed
utterly repulsive and reprobate; all its sympathies seemed perverted. It
is a hard world this, I know, and it has but little mercy for the erring
and the unfortunate; but that they should regard it with such evil eyes,
that they should be so completely estranged from all its recognised modes
of thought and action, that it should seem to them such a complete curse,
was what I was not prepared to expect. It really made one's blood run
cold to hear the mob around me talk. The man to be hung had rushed into
a jeweller's shop as it was being closed, beaten the shopman, who tried
to defend his master's property, with a life-preserver, and then left him
for dead. But he had not said one word about his accomplices, and the
crowd evidently admired him rather than not. "The ticket-of-leave man
was out on starvation," as one of them informed me. "The Government," I
drop the expressive adjective by which the noun was prefixed, "dodges
him, and if he steals it is only what he must do, and if murder follows
it is not his fault, and Government is unjust in hanging him for it."
Such was the popular notion of the subject in my immediate neighbourhood.
Government seemed to have planned the opportunity for the holders of such
opinions to ventilate them. Till eight o'clock these men were to be
formed into one compact mass; and how were they to pass their time if
they did not talk? and here who was there to lift up his voice on behalf
of law and order? and if there were such, who would have listened?
Realise the state of the case. Look around! Where do you see the clear
front and unabashed presence of honesty and virtue? The virtuous and the
honest have long been in bed. Here there is a fight. That bundle of
rags, with matted hair covering all the face so that you cannot clearly
see a feature, is the Clare Market Pet, and she has just encountered
Slashing Sal, between whom and herself there has been mortal enmity for
years. Both women--yes, they are women, nor so fallen are they but that
the temperance agent or the city missionary may yet lead them to a
diviner life, and _He_ may smile on them who never yet turned away
repentant son or daughter of sin and shame--are very tipsy, very dirty,
and very red. Shrieking and cursing, the Clare Market Pet rushes on
Slashing Sal, who is by no means loth for the encounter. A ring is
formed, men and boys halloo and encourage, and the battle rages
furiously, though both women are far too drunk to do each other any
serious harm. At length the Clare Market Pet is vanquished and order is
restored, just as we are told tranquillity reigns at Naples. "Please
give me a penny," says a girl of about fourteen, and I find myself in the
midst of a group of youthful costermongers and their wives, who have come
here for a lark, just as they frequent the penny gaff, or crowd the
gallery in the Victoria. I listen to their slang till I feel sick, as I
think for what a future of crime and its result they are now rapidly
ripening. In this Christian land can no agency be formed that shall save
these young heathens? Again, I find a female standing by my side; she is
horridly dirty; she stinks of gin; her face is that of the confirmed
sot--of one who has given up home and husband, and comfort, and decency,
for the accursed drink. She looks very piteously in my face. "And so
they are going to hang the poor man," she exclaims; "they have no mercy
on him." "You forget," I reply, "the poor man whom he murdered, and on
whom he had no mercy." "No, I don't," she exclaims with tipsy gravity;
"he had no right to kill the man, and ought to be punished; but ain't we
all morally bad?"--but here the conversation ends, for she has sunk down,
maudlin, stinking with gin, and overcome by it and weariness, on the
doorstep. Ah, these doorsteps, let us look at them. To-night the police
don't bid the _habitues_ move on. What crowds are collected on
them,--ragged boys, who, perhaps, have nowhere else to sleep,
wild-looking women unbonnetted and shoeless, with red, uncombed hair,
faces very much marked with the small pox, only seen on such occasions as
these--old men crouch on them for whom home has no charm, and life no
lustre, and girls whose rouged cheeks and shabby finery tell to what
wretchedness and degradation, though young in years, they have already
come. Let them sleep on, if they can, on their stony mattress, beneath
this inclement sky, out in this cold December night; they are happier now
than they can be in their waking hours! But look at the windows, all
lighted up and filled with gay company. Those two beautiful girls--let
us hope they are not ladies--not English mothers or wives--who have just
stepped out of the brougham, and are now gazing from a first-floor on the
wild human sea beneath, will sit playing cards and drinking champagne all
night; yet scarce have the sounds of Sabbath bells died away, and in a
few hours a man is to be hung, and these girls, all sensibility and
tears, will sit with their opera glasses during the fearful agony, as if
merely Grisi acted or Mario sang.
Let us take another stroll through this living mass. The workmen have
put up the last barriers--the clock strikes three--a crowd, dense and
eager, has planted itself by the Old Bailey. The yard is thrown open,
and three strong horses, such as you see in brewers' drays, drag along
what seems to be an immense clumsy black box. It stops at the door of
Newgate nearest to St Sepulchre's. Women shriek as it rumbles over the
stones, and you shudder, for instinctively you guess it is the gallows.
By the dim gas-light you see workmen first fix securely a stout
timber--then another--and then a beam across from which hangs a
chain--and now the crowd becomes denser. Let us leave it and enter the
house, at the top of which we have previously engaged a seat.
We are some eight or nine in a very small room, and most of us are
amateurs in hanging, and it seems to us a very pleasant show. Some of us
have come a long way, and most of us have been up all night. We have
seen every execution for the last ten years, and boast how on one day we
saw one man hung at Newgate, and took a cab and got to Horsemonger-lane
in time to see another. A rare feat that, and one of which we are justly
proud. We talk of these things, and how we have seen criminals die, till
some of us get very angry, and flatly contradict each other. Altogether
there is somewhat too much mirth in the house, though we could not have
had a better place had we paid 5 pounds for it. The women are too
exuberant and full of fun. It is true, as the girls say to each other,
"they don't hang a man every day," but the gaiety is discordant. Over
the way _he_ is just waking up from his troubled sleep. A thin waif of
smoke goes up from the dark dreary building opposite--are they boiling
him his last cup of tea? See, there is a light in the press-room! Ah,
what are they doing there? St Sepulchre's strikes six. The door at the
foot of the scaffold opens, and very stealthily, and so as to be seen by
none but such as are high up like ourselves, a man throws sawdust on the
scaffold, and disappears again; we see him this time with a chain or
rope. All this while the hydra-headed mob beneath amuses itself in
various ways. It sings songs, chiefly preferring those with a chorus--it
hoots dogs--it tosses small boys about on its top. As we look from the
window, we think we never saw such a mob before. Far as the eye can
reach towards Ludgate-hill on one side, and Giltspur-street on the other,
it is one mass of human heads; the very air is tainted with their
odour--we smell it where we are. Our amateur friends are in excellent
spirits; they have not seen so many people at an execution for some
years. They are agreeably surprised; they all thought the man would not
have been hung, and had backed their opinions by bets.
A long wearisome night was it, even to us--and it is not yet eight. The
roar of the crowd is so great--can _he_ hear it within?--that we cannot
catch the sound of the neighbouring chimes; but we see signs that the end
is approaching. The police have filled up the intervening space between
the scaffold and the crowd. A bell tinkles dismally, horridly. We look
beyond the scaffold down into the open doorway, and there they are,
ascending the stairs. First the chaplain, then the criminal, and then
Jack Ketch. Marley walks steadily, with pale face and eyes cast down,
and places himself immediately under the rope. He trembles slightly as
his legs are being fastened, his hands had already been pinioned behind.
A nightcap is drawn over his face, the rope is adjusted round his neck,
Jack Ketch hastens down the ladder, the chaplain, reading the burial
service all the while, steps back, down goes the drop, a woman or two
shrieks, there is a slight convulsive movement of the body, and what was
a minute back a living man is now a dishonoured corpse. There he dangles
in the cold north wind for an hour. We cannot get away, as the crowd is
determined to see the last of it, and will not move. It stops to hoot
Jack Ketch, as he comes to cut Marley down at nine o'clock. Till then,
there he hangs, a tall, well-made man, with fine dark whiskers, in his
very prime, heedless of the sixty thousand glaring eyes all round, with
hands clasped as if supplicating that divine mercy which all born of
woman need, and which may God grant us in our dying hour. Away hastes
the crowd to its business or its pleasure; and when a short time after I
pass by the very spot where that hideous throng had stood, blaspheming in
the very presence of death, butchers' and carriers' carts filled up the
vacant space, and the past night seemed a ghastly dream.