BOOKS.
FIVE YEARS OF PENAL SERVITUDE.*
Tins is no romance. The publishers assure us that it is a real record of five years' penal servitude, by one who has served his time, and we see no reason to doubt it. There is an unmistakably genuine ring in the narrative, which Defoe or Mr. Gilbert could not imitate. It is a simple, unvarnished account, so far as we can judge, of a convict's life in Newgate, Millbank, and Dartmoor. No one could have written the book who had not had what the author terms "peculiar facilities for seeing a great deal of the workings of the system of penal servitude." His explanation of his conviction and imprisonment is that he was drawn into the meshes of the law by a man who was too clever for him, and who fled the country and left him •to meet a charge to which, in the absence of his ensnarer, he had virtually no defence ; that he was found guilty and recommended to mercy by the jury ; and that the Judge pronounced upon him the lightest sentence which the law allowed. If we may judge of the man by his book, his misfortunes were greater than his crimes ; he writes in a manly strain, gravely, and without any moroseness, of his experi- ence ; and it is quite clear that when once he was found guilty, he bore his lot with cheerful endurance. Had he obtained the maximum number of marks which a convict can obtain in a year, viz., 2,902, he would have got twelve months and three weeks struck off the term of his sentence ; and in point of fact, he re- ceived a remission of twelve months and ten days, a proportion which speaks highly for his good-conduct. The prison authori- ties liked him, and we can see in his book the qualities which raised him to the most responsible post which a convict can hold, that of " buttie," or assistant to the Clerk of the Works at
Dartmoor.
Of Newgato, in which he was first confined, he carried away very unpleasant recollections. He liked, indeed the chaplain, Mr. Jones, who never talked "cant," who could see through the hypocritical dodges of artful prisoners, but who had a happy way of saying kindly, unobtrusive, helpful words. Mr. Jones, too, gave him excellent advice about worldly matters ;—told him to be careful to destroy all letters as soon as read, for prosecutors' solicitors were not very particular as to how they got information, and half-a-crown with a warder sometimes went a long way ; and showed him how by beating and rubbing the strands of old rope, the picking of oakum was made much easier. The baths in the prison were good; the cells were clean, "fearfully, spot- lessly clean ;" and the ventilation was well attended to. The warders were not altogether a bad set, their worst fault—in the eye of a prisoner, a very venial one—was that they occasionally * Five Tears' Penal Servitude. By One who has Endured it, London; Bentley and Co.
foil asleep in their too long hours of duty. Our author had three pounds of oakum given him to pick, and he had his cell to wash out and scrub ; but he was not overworked. Still, looking at the prison with a critical, practised eye, all the arrangements at Newgate struck him as bad. They boiled the beef in a foolish way that was not seen at any other prison, and the soup was tasteless.
Frivolous rules, unheard of elsewhere, were enforced; the men, for example, were ordered to march to chapel with their hands behind them, like schoolboys. The warders were too few for
their work, and in the regulations and arrangements there was an air of ineffective fussiness unknown in convict establishments. He tells one story which seems to corroborate his aspersions on the management of Newgate in the somewhat remote days of which he speaks. A convict under a long sentence managed to pick up a nail, or to extract the nail out of the " fiddle," as the instrument used in picking oakum is called, took a brick out of the roof of his cell, removed others, got on the roof, and then, not caring to drop into the street below, returned to his cell and sounded his signal spring gong. And while these noisy operations were going on, the warders were supposed to be patrolling the galleries, and peering into the cells through the spy-holes in the doors ! From Newgate our author went to Millbank Penitentiary. This was a change for the better. The Millbank soup, made from heads and shins of beef, and thickened with a large variety of vegetables, was excellent, as he minutely records. The diet was not monotonous, for plenty of vegetables were grown within the prison, and but for the fact that the tins in which dinner was served were occasionally disgracefully dirty, a prisoner could not complain of the fare. The clothes supplied were good, though the flannel was by no means "superfine Welsh," but rather of the nature of an anchorite's hair shirt. The cells, which measured ten feet by ten, were clean, and would have been not unpleasant, had the windows looked outwards instead of inwards. He had to use the water-bucket with which the cell was supplied as a seat and as a table. He was set to work at tailoring, and if he had to go to the infirmary, he found the warders there "about the greatest brutes in the place." But he had the necessaries and some of the com- forts of life. There was time for reading, and books were pro- curable. Tobacco found its way into the prison, in spite of regulations to the contrary, by warders who were "squared" by " pals " outside. Those who were ignorant had the benefit of the schoolmasters' services ; and a prisoner who had earned his full complement of marks during the first two years was promoted to the rank of "a teaman,"—that is to say, he received one pint of tea every evening, instead of gruel. Of course, if he lost his class by misconduct of any sort—or, as the prisoners phrased it, " smashed the teapot "—he reverted to plain gruel. If he wished to speak to a warder, he had only to push a small lath of wood through the inspection window ; and if he wished to see the governor, doctor, or chaplain, he had only to lay his little hair- broom at the door of his cell, and the signal was attended to. On the whole, life at Millbank Penitentiary was not much more intolerable than many a country house on a wet day ; and we can fancy many a prisoner thinking it port after storm, and looking back with half-pleasure on the days when he served "her Majesty for nothing at Millbank." The author's next place of confinement was the large convict prison at Dartmoor, where he figured as " No. ..i5,790." Thither he was taken, with thirty-nine other prisoners, including two or- dained clergymen, a decent old man who had got into trouble— innocently, our author thinks—on account of stolen stamps, a 'Whitechapel pickpocket whose " lay " was stealing pewter pots, and a young man of fortune, guilty of embezzlement. Life there was not positively unendurable. It was necessary, indeed, to resign oneself to slavery, but the loss of liberty was the chief hardship. It was no use to try to escape ; the civil guard and warders had orders to fire with their rifles on a fugitive ; there is a standing reward of £3 for the arrest of an escaped convict, and his uniform is so marked that there is no avoiding capture. Striking or threatenfilg an officer was punished by the offender being put in fetters, by solitary confinement, or even by flogging. The warders were apt to worry those whom they disliked by send- ing them to be cropped every few days, and to offend decent men by putting them in company with foul-mouthed brutes. The doctor and apothecary seem to have been an odd pair, and the latter sorely vexed our author. "Men are given pills or castor oil, which they have to swallow there and then, in the middle of their dinner. Fancy getting up in the middle of eating fat boiled mutton to take a dose of castor oil I" Or, to quote another tale of horror, fancy a person suffering from acute cold being stripped
in a windy passage, and made to wait two hours for the doctor ! Our author meditated his revenge on the apothecary, and he had it sooner than he expected. It was his duty, as assistant of the Clerk of the Works, to serve out wall-papers for the officials' quarters, and he thought of avenging himself by giving to the
bullying apothecary some hideous pattern. But the first thing to be served out for the apothecary turned out to be a coffin-plate
and fittings : he kept spirits for private consumption in a medi- cine-bottle on his shelves ; some one of his many foes, it is sus- pected, deliberately substituted a bottle of strychnine of like appearance, and the poor apothecary swallowed a dose which would have killed twenty men.
There was another side to prison life at Dartmoor. Our convict had time to study Spanish and Geometry, and to read Motley, Froude, Macaulay, and Napier. Latin books were pro- eurable,—a circumstance which throws light on " the unfortunate nobleman's" recent apparent revival of his Stonyhurst acquire- ments. The prison had a much better reputation in the criminal world than Chatham, where, as one convict expressed it, "Them as 'as any pluck in 'em turns savage, and them as 'asn't, they knocks under, and gets ill, and lots on 'em die." The company, though not select, was amusing, varied, and communicative. One prisoner would tell how with a crooked stick he managed to rob pantries. The "lay " of another was to pass " shine," or bad coin, at public-houses ; the dodge of a third to dress himself up in black, attend fashionable churches, and pick pockets. One thief told how he and a lady " pal " had eased a gentleman at Cowes Regatta of £300 in bank-notes. A Jew known as " Old Pilo." liked to talk of his beloved mother, and of his feats in the way of disposing of stolen goods at his warehouse in the Minories. One communicative pickpocket, who was being com- miserated with on the fact that the hard work of the prison • spoiled his fingers, and unfitted him for delicate professional duties, explained that a few bread-and-water poultices and the wearing of greased gloves would set matters all right. A celebrated thief, who was known as " the Earl," and who stole, as a rule, only from the upper classes of society, stated that he had one thing especially heavy on his mind, and that was that he had once cheated a poor pensioner out of five sovereigns by putting " duffers " in their place. The prisoners were not unfriendly to each other, and our author received much well-meant advice as to what he should do when he left prison. One proposed to set up a distillery of illicit spirits in
a villa at St. John's Wood ; another wished him to open a fraudulent loan office ; a third was sure a good business was to be done in palming off on jewellers " doublets " or "trip- lets," i.e., sapphires or topazes made in pieces, the front only being genuine.
The general impression which the book leaves is that our con- vict system errs not so much on the side of cruelty as of
stupidity. It is stupid to debar men from the humanising in- fluence of writing letters to their wives and friends. It is stupid to take the man who is about to be released up to London by train handcuffed, so that be runs the risk of being known when he is set free, and to turn him adrift on the world in clothes which stamp him as a jail-bird. " I could not but compare," says our author, " the liberation of some of the men I saw dis- charged to the uncarting of the deer at Windsor, to whom a certain amount of law' is given prior to the royal hounds being started off in pursuit." It is stupid to employ warders ill-paid, ignorant, and corrupt. It is stupidity and worse to mix up those who are imprisoned for the first time with callous " second timers." There are some more debatable matters mooted in the book. For instance, our author is strongly in favour of flogging, which is, he thinks, the only effectual mode of dealing with the worst characters, and especially " the London roughs." But there are unmistakably sound suggestions in the book, which the Directors of Convict Prisons should look to. It would be odd if an ex-convict proved the means of calling attention to and obtaining an alteration in the stupid rules to which we have referred.
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