Chapter 52

) that Fagin spent his last hours.

"They led him through a paved room under the court, where some prisoners were waiting till their turns came, and others were talking to their friends, who crowded around a gate which looked into the open yard. There was nobody there to speak to him; but, as he passed, the prisoners fell back to render him more visible to the people who were clinging to the bars; and they assailed him with opprobrious names, and screeched and hissed. He shook his fist, and would have spat upon them; but his conductors hurried him on, through a gloomy passage lighted by a few dim lamps, into the interior of the prison.

"Here he was searched, that he might not have about him the means of anticipating the law; this ceremony performed, they led him to one of the condemned cells, and left him there--alone.

"He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which served for a seat and bedstead; and casting his bloodshot eyes upon the ground, tried to collect his thoughts. After a while, he began to remember a few disjointed fragments of what the judge had said; though it seemed to him, at the time, that he could not hear a word. These gradually fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more; so that in a little time he had the whole almost as it was delivered. To be hanged by the neck, till he was dead--that was the end. To be hanged by the neck till he was dead.

"As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had known who had died upon the scaffold; some of them through his means. They rose up, in such quick succession, that he could hardly count them. He had seen some of them die--and had joked, too, because they died with prayers upon their lips. With what a rattling noise the drop went down; and how suddenly they changed from strong and vigorous men to dangling heaps of clothes.

"Some of them might have inhabited that very cell--sat upon that very spot. It was very dark; why didn't they bring a light? The cell had been built for many years. Scores of men must have passed their last hours there. It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead bodies--the cap, the noose, the pinioned arms, the faces that he knew, even beneath that hideous veil. Light--Light.

"At length, when his hands were raw with beating against the heavy door and walls, two men appeared: one bearing a candle, which he thrust into an iron candle-stick fixed against the wall; the other dragging a mattress on which to pass the night; for the prisoner was to be left alone no more.

"Then came night--dark, dismal, silent night. Other watchers are glad to hear the clocks strike, for they tell of life and coming day. To the Jew they brought despair. The boom of every iron bell came laden with one deep, hollow sound--Death. What availed the noise and bustle of cheerful morning, which penetrated even there, to him? It was another form of knell, with mockery added to its warning.

"The day passed off--day. There was no day; it was gone as soon as come--and night came on again; night so long, and yet so short, long in its dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours. At one time he raved and blasphemed; and at another howled and tore his hair. Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he had driven them away with curses. They renewed their charitable efforts, and he beat them off.

"Saturday night. He had only one more night to live, and as he thought of this, the day broke--Sunday.

"It was not until the night of this last awful day, that a withering sense of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon his blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive hope of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more than dim probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either of the two men, who relieved each other in attendance upon him; and they, for their parts, made no efforts to arouse his attention. He sat there, awake, but dreaming. Now he started up, every minute, and with gasping mouth and burning skin, hurried to and fro in such a paroxysm of fear and wrath that even they--used to such sights--recoiled from him with horror. He grew so terrible, at last, in all the tortures of his evil conscience that one man could not bear to sit there, eyeing him alone; and so the two kept watch together.

"He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth. His red hair hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn and twisted into knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Eight--nine--ten. If it was not a trick to frighten him, and those were the real hours treading on each other's heels, where would he be, when they came around again? Eleven! Another struck, before the voice of the previous hour had ceased to vibrate. At eight, he would be the only mourner in his own funeral train; at eleven----

"Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which had hidden so much misery and unspeakable anguish, not only from the eyes, but, too often and too long, from the thoughts, of men, never held so dreaded a spectre as that. The few who lingered as they passed, and wondered what the man was doing, who was to be hung to-morrow, would have slept but ill that night if they could have but seen him.

"From early in the evening until nearly midnight, little groups of two and three presented themselves at the lodge-gate, and inquired, with anxious faces, whether any reprieve had been received. These being answered in the negative, communicated the welcome intelligence to the clusters in the street, who pointed out to one another the door from which he must come out, and showed where the scaffold would be built, and, walking with unwilling steps away, turned back to conjure up the scene. By degrees they fell off, one by one; and for an hour in the dead of the night, the street was left to solitude and darkness."

When Mr. Brownlow and Oliver appeared at the wicket, and presented an order of admission to the prisoner, signed by one of the Sheriffs, they were immediately admitted to the lodge.

"The condemned criminal was seated on his bed, rocking himself from side to side, with a countenance more like that of a snared beast than the face of a man. His mind was evidently wandering to his old life, for he continued to mutter, without appearing conscious of their presence otherwise than as a part of his vision.

"'Fagin,' said the gaoler.

"'That's me,' cried the Jew, falling, instantly into the attitude of listening he assumed upon his trial. 'An old man, my Lord; a very old man.'

"'Here,' said the turnkey, laying his hand upon his breast to keep him down. 'Here's somebody wants to see you, to ask you some questions, I suppose. Fagin, Fagin, are you a man?'

"'I shan't be one long,' replied the Jew, looking up with a face retaining no human expression but rage and terror. 'Strike them all dead! What right have they to butcher me?'"

Since hanging by wholesale went out in England, Newgate has had no use for condemned wards, nor for its great number of condemned cells. The former are now broken up into cells, or used as exercise rooms or offices. Most of the latter are now punishment cells, in which refractory prisoners are confined. The demoralizing system of confinement in gangs has been done away with also, the cells in which the prisoners froze in cold weather have been made comfortable, and the standard of the management of the jail raised in every way. Such prisoners as may be condemned to death--there are only a few a year now, where in Dickens's boyhood there were several every week--are kept apart from their fellows and from each other. They are confined in an ordinary cell until they are convicted. Then they are transferred to a strong cell in the old condemned cell ward, and thence they travel to the scaffold.

Between the Old Bailey Court House and the condemned ward of Newgate is a yard called the Press Yard. The name has a hideous origin. This spot was for many years the scene of one of the most terrible tortures ever inflicted by the cruelty of man upon his kind, the awful torture of "Pressing to Death." This torture was imposed on prisoners held for higher crimes, like treason and felonies, who refused to answer in court. Nowadays, this would be construed into contempt of court. Until a century ago it was held an offense so hideous as to warrant death by torture. Nowadays we do not ask a prisoner to criminate himself. Then, if he did not, he was tortured; if he did he was punished anyway. The prisoner condemned to be pressed was stripped naked, except, for decency's sake, a cloth around the loins, and laid on his back on the pavement. Then iron weights were piled upon a board placed on his body, in increasing number, and on a diet of three morsels of bread a day and three draughts of water, he was left to perish miserably. He never needed a full day's rations. Sometimes he lasted for hours, and at others, as in the case of Mayor Strangeways, who was pressed for the murder of John Fussel in 1659, he died in a few moments. This poor wretch was stoned by the mob in the prison yard while undergoing the torture. Highwaymen, house-breakers, forgers, utterers of forged and counterfeit money, as well as murderers and traitors, were pressed to death. Brutal and callous as the era was, the shocking practice excited such denunciation in time that the victims were finally subjected to the torture privately in the room known as the Press Room whose door opens into the Press Yard. But the practice of pressing was kept up until as late as 1770.

The Press Yard to this day is devoted to quite as gloomy and deadly, if less revolting, service under sanction of the law. It is here that the executions of Newgate are performed. The gallows is set up close to the door out of which the prisoner is brought. There is no march to the gibbet through a throng of spectators as in most of our own jails. The doomed man gets his last glimpse of the sky through a stone funnel down which no ray of sunlight ever finds its way. As far as I remember, from my London days, the only sign the outer world has of the work going on within the prison walls is the hoisting of a black flag over the lodge, and I know not if even this ceremonial is still observed. From the gallows to the grave in Newgate used to be but a step. There was an old burying ground in the prison, now disused, which was opened in 1820. Thistlewood and the other Cato Street Conspirators were the first criminals buried in it. They were buried in the night on the day of their execution, without services, and many others like them in after years. A pit and a shroud of quicklime were the appropriate Newgate epitaph.

The ingenious fancy of Mr. Ainsworth has made Jack Sheppard's escape from Newgate one of the chief episodes of his famous book. The simple facts of his hero's evasion from the gaol are much less romantic, considering the number of prisoners it held. The escapes from Newgate were very few, and in almost every instance they owed a great measure of their success to the connivance of officials within the walls. Until the tidal wave of prison reform swept it clean of its old, corrupt practices, Newgate was managed largely for the benefit and profit of its guardians, from the keeper down. Each official was an adept at the art of extortion, and every palm that held a key was troubled with the itch. The prisoner could purchase most things he might desire, and even the chance of liberty was not beyond price. It was only the chance to be sure; his keeper would wink at the effort, but he must take the risk of being stopped upon his way by others, unless he could fairly buy his passage from his dungeon to the lodge gate. A few--a very few--did this, and got away. Generally the escapes were mere attempts, frustrated before the last barrier was passed. The most remarkable escape made from the prison, because it was accomplished without aid within or without the walls, was that of the Sweep. This ruffian, from practice in his trade of climbing chimneys, actually contrived to scale the rough stone wall in an angle of one of the jail yards, by working himself up with his back and feet, until he reached the leads, over which he made his way to the roof of a house in Newgate street, which he entered through the scuttle, and so went down stairs and into the street. Since that time the inner walls of Newgate have been smoothed, so that even a fly could not crawl up them, and spiked at the top to make assurance doubly sure.

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