I was surprised at the number of respectable men—such as solicitors, an ex-officer of Guards, a bank manager, a man of title, stockbrokers, cashiers, ex-officers of the army and navy, clerks, clergymen, etc.—in Coldbath Fields. Some of these had quite lost (supposing they ever had any) their pristine semblance of respectability; others, again, retained the appearance of persons of education, and spoke and deported themselves as such. A lamentable instance of the fatal effect of associating with the scum, and the ease with which a young man of good position can acquire the style and appearance of a vagrant, was exemplified in young B—. He was not more than 25 or 26, had been a subaltern in the — Guards, and came, moreover, of a good county stock; and yet in six short months he had so far degenerated as to be punished on the day his sentence expired for stealing a loaf from a fellow prisoner.

A worthy old man with grey hair and venerable appearance, and who might have passed for the chairman of a board of directors, appeared every morning at mine and other cells in the passage with a dust-pan, and with methodical precision removed the sweepings. He told me he had been a solicitor with a large connection, with chambers in — Street, and had a wife and grown-up family in a comfortable house in a well-known suburb. His imprisonment was perceptibly telling on him, and his hair and beard grew whiter every day.

A bustling, business-like man, one day attracted my attention. He was connected with the stores, and brought me a new pair of boots. He had been the manager of a London bank, and undergoing retirement for six months for some error regarding the ownership of £300.

A tall, smart-looking man that was pointed out to me, was, I was informed, an individual who attained notoriety some two years ago over a mining scheme. He was suffering two years’ incarceration for a miscalculation of over £7000.

A man who called himself Count H—, and an ex-convict to boot, was languishing for a year, because certain noblemen had had the bad taste to object to his having obtained money from them by false pretences. This nobleman! had a mania for petitioning the Home Office (I will give a specimen of his style hereafter).

In addition to these, numerous individuals who had been gentlemen in their day were known to me by sight. Conspicuous amongst them, was an old jail bird and ex-convict, who had 20 years ago been a captain in the army, and ever since had existed (and still is) in prison, for terms of seven, five, five, two, and one years. All the starch had been thoroughly wrung out of him, though he occasionally stood on a dilapidated kind of dignity. I once asked him where a friend of his had gone. He replied, “I don’t know; we don’t speak now; he’s no gentleman. Will you believe it, he had the impertinence to doubt my word.” As his word had been doubted a good many times during the past 20 years, I was considerably amused by this assumption of dignity.

Many prisoners are under the impression that they have only to petition the Home Office to procure a remission of their sentence. It seems perfectly immaterial to them, whether they have the slightest grounds for this assumption or not, and it frequently happens that, instead of mitigating their offence, they put matters in a more unfavourable light by airing their grievances, whilst others make a rambling statement referring to every subject but the one particularly concerning themselves.

Count H— was a specimen of this class. He was undergoing a well-merited 12 months’ imprisonment for defrauding the Dukes of S— and M— and other noblemen of sums of money, by representing himself as the son of some individual, which he certainly was not. It is, of course, possible that he may (to use a vulgar expression) have been “changed at nuss,” though the fact that he had previously undergone five years’ penal servitude for a similar offence minimizes the probability that he was acting under a misapprehension. The Count! had no sooner taken up his quarters than he expressed a desire to petition the Home Secretary. A “form” being supplied him, which he retained four days, eventually reappeared so blurred and smeared with blots and erasures that its transmission was impossible. A second attempt was more successful, and the following exhaustive specimen of penmanship and veracity struggled up to the Home Office, and eventually struggled back:—“That your petitioner, on being discharged from Pentonville Convict Prison, at the expiration of five years’ penal servitude, found that certain moneys and property, valued at several hundred pounds, had been stolen by his agent, who collected his rent on his estates in Italy; that being at that time without funds to go abroad, he had written to the Duke of S— and Duke of M— and others, asking for a loan until he received his rents. That his father really was Count H— and a friend of these noblemen, and that the charge of false pretences was consequently incorrect. That he had held diplomatic appointments, and been decorated for gallant service, and that he possesses a coronet with S.P.Q.R., all of which clearly proves his identity. In conclusion, your petitioner appeals to you with confidence as a lawyer of renown, and a scion of the noble house of Vernon.—Signed, H—.”

I have corrected “the Count’s” spelling as far as possible; the logic and composition were, however, past redemption. The rogue evidently knew the Home Secretary’s claim to “Royal descent,” as delicately hinted at in the concluding paragraph.

Another individual petitioned against his hair and beard being cut, on religious grounds, and quoted the Law of Moses as forbidding these formalities. This specimen did not, I believe, leave the establishment.

I was frequently struck by the vast difference in the sentences awarded in what appeared to me to be parallel cases, and tried in vain to discover any system that might be supposed to regulate them. It cannot be denied that a great difference of opinion exists apparently amongst judges on the subject of crimes and their punishment, and that whereas one judge will administer justice with harshness, another will attain the same desirable end with a regard to humanity. With these respective characteristics, the criminal classes are thoroughly conversant, and it would astonish the Bench if they heard how accurately their respective peculiarities are summed up. Thus one judge is credited with being very severe on conspiracy and long firm cases, whilst another is supposed to be “down” on burglars, whilst it is generally conceded that a plea of guilty will invariably fare better than one of not guilty. For my own part I fancied I had noticed that conspiracy is considered the most serious offence, and that two men conspiring to defraud another of £50 will run the risk of a severer punishment than the individual who unaided steals £500.

I will quote a few first offences which, apparently similar, differ considerably as regards their sentences:—

(a) A solicitor for passing a forged cheque for £18 that had been paid to him: 18 months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

(a) A bank manager for appropriating £300: six months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

(b) A wine merchant for complicity in a forged cheque, £52: sentence, 18 months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

(b) A commission agent for forging a £600 bill of exchange: 12 months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

(c) A clerk (with twenty years’ good character and recommended to mercy), for forging £50 and stealing employer’s cheque: sentence, twenty months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

(c) A City man, for a fraudulent mining scheme and forgery, whereby he obtained £7000: sentence, two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

(d) A shopman, for robbing his employer of £50: sentence, three months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

(d) A beggar boy, for stealing 1s. 6d.: sentence, three months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

There are men in Coldbath whose cards show upwards of seventy previous convictions, varying from a year to seven days; nor is it to be wondered at, considering the starvation that confronts them outside and the comfort that is accorded them in prison. One of these habitual vagrants on his periodical appearance was usually accosted with an official joke, “Same address, I suppose?” “Yes, please,” was the invariable reply; “no change since last time.”

One old man in the convalescent ward, suffering from rheumatism and asthma, who was supplied with dainties he could never have heard of before, confessed to me that he should have preferred six to the three months’ imprisonment he was undergoing. Another old vagrant (a City man) told me that he always made it a rule to sleep on a doorstep a day or so before Christmas Day to insure the Christmas meal of a loaf of bread, beef, pudding, and a pint of ale, stood by the Lord Mayor to every prisoner in Newgate. He was bewailing the loss of that charming residence, and telling me how, having foolishly omitted to make himself acquainted with the change of system, had subsisted last Christmas Day in “Coldbath” on dry bread and stirabout.

Foreigners of every description find their way into Coldbath, though the majority consists of Germans, mostly Jews. There is an advantage in belonging to this faith, as I was led to understand by a gourmand. It consists in receiving meat on Mondays in lieu of the usual bacon and beans. Circumstances, however, render the temporary embracing of this faith more difficult than they do that of Romanism, which is much in vogue; and as certain punishment would follow the certain detection, Judaism has not as many followers as the Australian meat would otherwise command.Flogging is usually administered for insubordination and malingering. For less serious offences the punishment cells and short commons usually have the desired effect. There are two descriptions of corporal punishment—the cat and the birch, usually reserved for youths. In the former case the culprit is lashed to a triangle; in the latter he is hoisted on what is euphoniously called a donkey. As a punishment, the cat, as applied in prisons, is not to be compared to its defunct namesake in the army or navy. It is sufficiently severe, however, to necessitate certain after-treatment—an item in the programme regulated rather by the “system” than humanity. A soldier was invariably admitted into hospital after undergoing corporal punishment; a prisoner is, however, flogged and then conducted to his cell.

These floggings are usually administered in the forenoon in presence of a surgeon, and before evening a zinc plaster—perhaps two—is applied to the recipient’s back. The performance takes place in a room off the main passage, and is not unattended with a certain amount of ceremony. The traffic is stopped, and no particulars transpire but the howls of the victim, which can be heard all over the building. Since the abolition of Newgate, Coldbath has risen in retributive importance, and garrotters sentenced to the lash here receive their punishment.

A one-legged garrotter was lately flogged; his leg, which had been amputated at the thigh, prevented his being securely tied, and his abortive struggles procured him a flogging infinitely severer than ordinarily experienced. Every blow fell on a different place, and the twenty lashes left twenty wheals, breaking the skin in a dozen different places. Sympathy with a garrotter would be out of place, and no one can doubt that he richly deserved his punishment; yet one’s bowels of compassion are instinctively moved by the description given to me by an eye-witness, of a lump of bleeding humanity alone and sobbing in a cell, and receiving at five in the afternoon a zinc plaster to apply to the back that had been torn and lacerated in the morning.

This treatment in no way reflects on the prison officials, who simply carry out the regulations; it is the system that is to blame, and is capable, like the dispensation of justice before described, of considerable improvement on the score of humanity.Floggings and birchings appear to have no effect on these hardened criminals, and though they shriek and bellow during the infliction, they invariably revert to the same offence, and qualify for a second edition. Shamming madness is a favourite form of malingering indulged in by prisoners. The uneducated mind, however, invariably resorts to the same tactics—a combination between the symptoms of idiocy and hydrophobia that generally fails in its objects, and invariably yields to treatment by the cat.

The boys that find their way into Coldbath are the most hardened young scamps I ever saw. They are supposed to be isolated, as required by recent agitation on the subject of juvenile offenders. That the isolation is a farce need hardly be said. At chapel they certainly occupy benches to themselves, but so do the various wards and trades; the tasks they are put to are similar to those done by adults; and the pains and penalties they undergo are identical in time and circumstance to those of the full-blown criminal. I have seen these urchins on arrival, with their knuckles in their eyes, blubbering in chapel, and a week later winking and making signs as if determined to assert their qualification to be clothed and treated like their adult fellow-prisoners.

Tearing up their clothes is the favourite pastime of these promising youths. I have frequently seen these children marched along a passage, handcuffed behind, and preceded by a warder carrying a bundle of rags three inches square, that formerly represented their linen and clothes. The treatment they receive puts this crime at a premium. Boys are admittedly vain, and desirous of appearing as men to their older associates, what more natural then, that a child (one of the instances I refer to could not have been fourteen) should aspire to the honour of appearing as a hero; marching through a crowded passage with his manly work conspicuously displayed, treated, moreover, like a real man, manacled, and eventually birched, and receiving the approbation invariably accorded by the criminal classes to the perpetrators of wanton mischief. One would suppose that in a huge building like Coldbath Fields these urchins might be absolutely isolated, and if their offences were punished without the publicity that at present attends them, they would soon be given up as not worth the consequence. That the treatment of this hardened class of boys is a difficult problem, cannot be denied, and the cunning and ingenuity they display is almost incredible. Fully aware that the visiting Justices only visit the prison once a fortnight, and that without their order a birching is impossible, it frequently happens that on the day of their discharge every article of their clothing is made into mincemeat. For this mischief they are absolutely free from any consequence, it being an offence against the prison, and not against the law. If a remedy was applied to this crime, similar to the Article of War that provides against the destruction of Government property, the delinquent might be handed over to a policeman, and this would effectually stop the practice.