THE BLACK MUSEUM.
" MAKE care how you step," says a courteous official, who has 1. preceded the visitor up a staircase in one of the houses in Scotland Yard, and opened a door on an upper floor ; "we are obliged to throw a great deal of this about." The substance in question is a disinfecting powder, inimical to "the moth ;" the room is a large, bare-floored apartment, with barred windows, fitted up with wide shelves, which are divided into square com- partments; the centre is occupied by a shelved stand, also divided into compartments, and their contents are liberally sprinkled with the all-pervading powder. The room is that in which the articles of property taken from convicts about to undergo their sentences are stowed away until they are reclaimed by their owners ; the stand in the centre is a receptacle for objects of the " unlawful-possession " class, to which a large room up- stairs is also devoted. Overhead is the (‘ Black Museum," in which, during the last three years, pieces de conviction, which until then had been kept indiscriminately with the other property of criminals, have been arranged and labelled, forming a ghastly, squalid, and suggestive show. On entering the lower room, the visitor is struck by its odd resemblance to a seed-shop. Hundreds of hooks stud the rims of the shelves and the sides of the compartments, and from them are suspended hundreds of little packets, neatly made up in brown paper, tied with white twine, and severally distin- guished by large parchment labels, each bearing a neat inscription. The packets contain small articles taken from the prisoners, who in due course, after they are discharged from prison, will be brought to Scotland Yard, will have their portraits taken (by force, should they object to that process) ; the larger things are deposited in the compartments of the shelves, and every item, no matter how insignificant, is entered in the proper registers. A motley collection are the larger articles, with a preponderance among them of grimy pocket- books and greasy purses,—one trim and pretty hand-basket strikes the visitor's eye,—but there are valuable things in some of those parcels ; and downstairs, in the officials' room, is a mas- sive iron safe, fitted with sliding shelves, in which is kept a large collection of watches,
rings, chains, pins, scent-bottles, pencil- cases, and other jewellery, which arc either the lawful property of prisoners, or have been found in their unlawful possession and confiscated, but for whom no owners have been discovered. Among the watches are some beautiful specimens, one in particu- lar, taken from a costermonger, and of exquisite workmanship and ornamentation, is valued at fifty pounds.
The Prisoners' Property room is scrupulously clean and tidy, but the look of it is forlorn and squalid, the powder lies thick on everything, and the scent of moth and rot is in the air. Great bales of cloth and woollen stuff occupy the shelves of the central stand ; they are shaken, and beaten, and turned, but all to no avail ; the moth and the rot have got them, while the prison has got the former unlawful possessors of them, and the unwholesome weirdness peculiar to once worn, but long unused garments is upon the articles of wearing apparel which are hung or folded up in the room. This impression comes more strongly upon the visitor when he goes up higher still, into the topmost apartment, where heaps of clothing hang against the walls, some now, some worn. A girl's white fur jacket behind the door is a mere nursery for moths, a bunch of new boots of several sizes dangling from a peg at the and of a long string is all speckled with a measly mildew ; the heaps of shawls have a draggled and furtive look, and some children's clothing has a touch of its inseparable prettiness, even hero Old books, a picture or two, some worthless table orna- ments, innumerable articles, which could not be described or classed except as odds awl ends, form a portion of this collection, which goes on accumulating, and which has no ultimate destina- tion. " What is to become of all this ? " asks the visitor, and is answered, to his surprise, that nobody knows ; that the things are nobody's property, and nobody has the power to do anything with them,—a piece of information which makes them more ghastly and nightmarelike to the imagination than before. An ever-growing dust-heap, formed of thieves' clothing and unlawful possessions, with nobody to cart it away, to distribute it, or bury it out of sight for evermore ; an accumulating banquet always spread for the moth, the rust, and the rot,—the contents of those rooms are far from pleasant to think of. It seems supremely ridiculous, but it is a fact that nothing short of a legislative measure could rid the premises of these rotting garments out of whose every fold one might shake, with the dust, an image of squalor, crime, and punishment.
Outside the door of the Black Museum is a shelf, in the wall of the landing-place. The visitor passing it is aware of a huddled heap of dirty coats, a serge gown, and a coarse kind of rug, the skin of an animal, with the red and white hair on. Under the shelf, on the floor, lies some rough packing-cloth. Ile passes the heap carelessly—there's a little can full of a disinfecting fluid on the same shelf—and enters the Museum. What are his first im- pressions of it ? They are various,—that it is like a bit out of a gamekeeper's room, with a bigger bit out of a smith's forge, a touch of a carpenter's workshop, a broad suggestion of a harness- room, something of the marine-store complexion (and a good deal of its odour), a hint of the open-air stall in front of a pawn- shop in a very small way of business indeed, a little of the barrack-room gun-rack, with no "bright barrels" enforced ; a general air of lumber-room, with just a dash of anatomical museum, but above all, and increasing with every moment's prolonged observation, a likeness to the cutlery booth in a foreign fair, with all the knives symmetrically displayed, but unaccountably rusty and dim-bladed, as if the booth bad been shut up for half a century, and the salesman and his customers were all ghosts.
Opposite the door, and on the face of the wall to the right, are the objects, displayed on a wooden shelf with iron legs, which convey to the visitor a hint of the open-air stall in front of a pawn-shop in a very small way of business indeed. A common little looking-glass in a wooden frame, with a foot to it, four black glass buttons, two wisps of rope, a pair of trumpery earrings in a cardboard box, two bullets, a pipe, a cluster of soft, now dull, light brown hair, wound round a pad, a comb, a pocket-knife, and a little wooden stand covered with glass, are among the most notice- able articles. On the shelf to the right are a dirty Prayer-book, a pocket dictionary, a pair of boots, a gaudy bag worked in beads, and the crushed remains of a woman's bonnet, made of the commonest black lace, and flattened into shapelessness. In both these in- stances the other impressions of the place come in too, for over the shelf fronting the door hang workmen's tools, hammer, and cleaver, and spade, and beside that on the right, is just such a bundle as adorns the walls of the Marine Store ; it consists of a gown and petticoat, of cheap, poor stuff, bearing dreadful, dim Stains, and a battered crinoline. The visitor is in presence of the mean objects which perpetuate here the memory of two peculiarly horrible crimes. The soft brown hair is that of Harriet Lane, the buttons and the earrings are those which were found in the earth where her body had been buried, the bullets were taken out of her skull, the object under the glass-case is the sacred piece of her skin which completed the identification of the body ; the wisps of rope dragged her out of the earth under the warehouse, the cleaver, the hammer, and the spade are the implements with which the horrible deed which led to the murderer's detection were done. The knife was Thomas Wainwright's, the pipe was Henry's, and when the visitor is leaving the museum he will be shown, in the pack-cloth on the floor under the shelf outside the door, the wrapper in which the dismem- bered body was packed ; and in one of the dirty coats,--a horrid thing, with its hideous rents and smears,—Wainwright's vesture on the occasion. The coat-of the captain of the ' Lennie,' with the gash in the cloth torn by the knife of his murderer, and eaten through and through with moth and rot, is not nearly so disgusting an object ; and as for the serge robe of that poor rogue, "Professor Zendavesta," and the hide cloak of the confiscated " anatomical " wax African, who grins awfully in one corner of the museum, a real skeleton hand and arm considerately hidden behind him, they are
quite cheerful to look at in comparison. The Prayer-book and the other pitiful objects upon the shelf to the right were found on the body of Maria Clousen, the blood-and-mud-stained clothes were hers, and they contrast with grim irony, as evidences of an unpunished crime, with the adjoining objects, which tell of one brother hanged and the other in penal servitude.
Along the wall on the right side of the room is ranged a choice collection of guns, crowbars, and ," jemmies "—the latter are implements of the housebreaking industry, which admit of great variety, and are susceptible of highly artistic handling— and among them is a pair of tongs, unevenly rusted, and with a dirty paper-book, written all over with incoherent sentences, attached to it. The tongs are those with which a man named Macdonald killed his wife about two years ago ; the book is, it seems to the visitor, a record of the various phases of the man's insanity. They hanged him, though, and also the greater number of the proprietors of the horrid, labelled assortment of hammers, knives—including the bread, carving, and pocket varieties— razors, and pistols, which suggest a cutler's booth in a fair. There is dried blood on all the knives and razors, and on some of the hammers, and every one of them stands for a murder or a suicide ; in a terrible number of cases, for the murder of a wife by her husband. Several of the pistols, mostly beautiful weapons, are the instruments of suicide, and each is labelled with the name, date, and place. The simple suicides are almost all among the higher classes of society, and when the visitor asks how the pistol with which a gentleman of wealth and station shot himself has come into the keeping of the Museum, he is told :—" The family mostly do not like to have it, and so they ask the police to take it away." In a corner hang the clothes of the Rev. J. Watson, who murdered his wife at Stockwell ; the horse-pistol with which he shot her, and the heavy hammer which he bought to knock the nails into the chest in which he proposed to hide her body. So carefully had the murderer washed his trousers and his coat-sleeves, that the blood-stains could only be discerned with difficulty at the time of the investigation. But since the coat and trousers have been hanging on the Black Museum's walls, the stains have come out close and thick. "We many times notice that here," the visitor is told. The frightful weapons used by the 'Lennie' mutineers are here, neatly ranged under the photograph of the ringleader, "French Peter," and a " group " of the whole gang of ruffians, with a red - ink mark on four heads among the number, to indicate those who were hanged. Hard by is a bundle of letters, forming the correspondence which furnished much of the evidence against Margaret Waters, the baby-farmer. How much sin, shame, sorrow, and cruelty that small dusty bundle represents ! A small billycock hat, with a mask fastened inside the front rim, into which is packed a purse, a comforter, a small lantern, and a life-preserver, with a terrific knob of lead on it, is quite a cheerful object to turn to from all these grim relics of worse crimes, though the burglar who formerly owned the life-preserver informed the police who seized, but also rescued him, having come up on hearing his cries when he was caught between the iron bars of a window through which he was escaping, on a false alarm, that he had thoroughly intended to "do for" any one who should interrupt him, with that convenient weapon. A bundle of flash notes, Bank of Elegance issue, for which there is a fixed price, and a brisk sale on race-courses among bettors who can only read imperfectly or not at all ; the conjuring-book of Professor Zendavesta, which always opened at the same page, the only one on which there is a worked horoscope ; the wretched cheat's ill- spelled accounts, which reveal the stupendous credulity of the people, for they record an average of five hundred visitors a week ; and the letters addressed to him, chiefly by women, at least suffi- ciently educated to know better ;—these are almost amusing, after all that has been seen before. A forged betting ticket, which got the forger into trouble at the Nottingham races, is a curious and ingenious example of perverted cleverness. The forged ticket is identical with the real one, to all appearance. On very close inspec- tion, one sees that it is betSer printed than the genuine article. A large assortment of burglars' tools is not the least suggestive object here. The weapons of the thieves' war upon society are models of good workmanship, and of the adaptation of means to ends. When the neatest " centre-bit " of the carpenter's shop is compared with the deft, swift, noiselessly-working implement which goes into an iron shutter as a cheesemonger's scoop goes into a "fresh Dutch ;" when one looks at the wedges of finely-tempered steel, working between zinc side-bites ; at the two home- made dark lanterns, contrived with extraordinary cleverness out of a mustard-tin and a metal match-box respectively ; at the rope-ladder ; the "beautiful little jemmy," in a carefully- buttoned red flannel case,—this small, powerful tool is made of a piece of a driving-wheel belonging to the finest machinery, and the metal was, of course, stolen to make it—at the bright, slender skeleton keys ; at the footpads, which are enough to 'make one start at every creak of one's boards and stairs, however slight ; at the safe-breaking tools, which make one think there's 'nothing like the old stocking in the thatch, after all,—one is amazed at and sorry for the misused cleverness and perverted inventiveness to which these things testify. Among the skeleton keys is one delicate little contrivance, which at a first glance one might take for an ornament for a lady's chatelaine. It is in reality a double instrument for picking latch-keyholes,—one part forming the key, and the other lifting the spring. This pretty trifle was made from the brass clasp of a purse, and used with :suchsuccess by the inventor that in a short time he found him- self in prison. While one is actually inside the Black Museum, one cannot feel amused at anything ; but by the time one has turned into the Strand, the impression of the dreary reliquary of crime has so far passed away, that one can smile at the story told of the impudent simplicity of this poor, clever thief. "When he was discharged from prison," said the curator of the Black Museum, as he restored the delicate, dangling little bit of villany to its place, "the man came here, and asked us to let him have it back ! "
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