So these were the quarters which greeted each new arrival, a place which no physician would enter. In the 1760s Boswell noticed the cells, “three rows of ’em, four in a row, all above each other. They have double iron windows, and within these, strong iron rails; and in these dark mansions are the unhappy criminals confined.” These “dismal places” stayed with him all that day, “Newgate being upon my mind like a black cloud.” Casanova, briefly imprisoned there, described it as an “abode of misery and despair, a hell such as Dante might have conceived.” Wilhelm Meister, crossing the Press Yard on a tour of inspection, was “attacked as by a swarm of harpies and had no means of escaping but to throw a handful of half-pence amongst them for which they scrambled with all the fury of a parcel of wild beasts” while others “who were shut up, stretched forth their hands through the iron bars, venting the most horrible cries.” This is the yard to which Daniel Defoe consigned Moll Flanders in his narrative of her adventures; since the author himself spent some time incarcerated in Newgate in 1703, his account bears the mark of genuine remembrance. It is “impossible to describe the terror of my mind, when I was first brought in, and when I looked round upon all the horrors of that dismal place … the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful afflicting things that I saw there, joined to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it.” In more than one passage, however, it is emphasised that the inmates by degrees grow accustomed to this hell so that it becomes “not only tolerable but even agreeable” with its inhabitants “as impudently cheerful and merry in their misery as they were when out of it.” “‘It is natural to me now,’ one female prisoner declares, ‘I don’t disturb myself about it.’” This is of course an astute observation of Newgate manners, but it might perhaps be construed in the wider context of London itself. In the company of this “crew” Moll herself “turned first stupid and senseless, and then brutish and thoughtless” until she becomes “a mere Newgate-bird, as wicked and as outrageous as any of them.”
Some inmates were far from “thoughtless,”however, and contrived many ingenious plans of escape. The great heroes of London have often been those who freed themselves from the constraints of Newgate. The greatest of them all, Jack Sheppard, escaped from confinement on six separate occasions; for two centuries he remained a type or symbol of those who elude the practices of oppression with effrontery and bravery as well as skill. It is worth noticing, for example, that a report of the Children’s Employment Commission in the 1840s remarked that poor London children who had never heard of Moses or Queen Victoria had “general knowledge of the character and course of life of Dick Turpin, the highwayman, and more particularly of Jack Shepherd [sic], the robber and prison breaker.”
Jack Sheppard was born in White’s Row, Spitalfields, in the spring of 1702, and then placed in the Bishopsgate workhouse-built on the perimeter of the city, like Newgate itself-before being apprenticed to a carpenter in Wych Street. He broke free of his apprenticeship after six years of industry, even though he was within ten months of completing his terms, and turned to theft for his trade. In the spring of 1724 he was first imprisoned in the St. Giles Roundhouse, but was free within three hours after cutting open the roof and lowering himself to the ground with sheet and blanket. There “he joined a gathering throng” and made his escape through the lanes of St. Giles. A few weeks later he was arrested again, for a pickpocketing offence in Leicester Fields, and was incarcerated in the New Prison of Clerkenwell. He was taken to the “Newgate Ward” there and pinioned with links and fetters of great weight; he sawed through the fetters and somehow cut through an iron restraint before boring his way through an oaken bar some nine inches thick. The severed chairs and bars were afterwards kept by the prison authorities “to Testifie, and preserve the Memory of this extraordinary Event and Villain.”
For three months he was at liberty before being found by the notorious criminal and “thief-taker,” Jonathan Wild; Sheppard was now escorted to Newgate and, after being sentenced to death for three robberies, was consigned to the condemned hold. Even within that dreadful place, by some means or other, he managed to smuggle in a “Spike” and with that began to carve an opening in the wall (or perhaps ceiling); with the help of accomplices on the other side he was dragged out. It was the week of Bartholomew Fair, and he made his escape through the crowds of those going up Snow Hill and Giltspur Street into Smithfield. From there he travelled eastwards into Spitalfields, where he stayed at the Paul’s Head; on an eighteenth-century map, like that of John Roque, it is still possible to track his route. It is in any case a potent image-of a prisoner almost miraculously escaping from incarceration to join the crowds celebrating their own temporary liberty among the booths and shows of Bartholomew Fair.
During the next few days, according to Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged, he was seen by a “cobbler in Bishopsgate and a milkman in Islington.” In Fleet Street he entered a watch-maker’s shop and addressed the apprentice there, bidding him “stick to his Tools, and not use his Master to such ill Habits of working so late.” He promptly robbed the premises, but was pursued and taken. Then, once again, he was led to Newgate and in a secluded gaol was “fastened to the floor with double fetters.” Everyone came to see him, and everyone talked about him. He had become a true London sensation, the people “Mad about him” at a time of the greatest “idleness among Meckanicks that has been known in London.” They had all gone to the taverns and ale-houses, in other words, to discuss the prodigy. When certain reverend gentlemen visited his cell he declared that they were “Ginger-bread Fellows” and that “One File’s worth all the Bibles in the world.” The pagan temper of the Londoner is here revealed. “Yes, sir, I am the Sheppard,” he said while in confinement, “and all the jailors in the town are my flock.” A file was found upon him and he was removed to the “Stone Castle” on the fifth storey where he was chained to the floor, his legs secured with irons and his hands cuffed. These instruments were inspected daily, and Sheppard himself was under regular supervision.
And then, wonderfully if not miraculously, he escaped again. Somehow he managed to slip his hands through his handcuffs, and with a small nail managed to loose one of the links in the chains about his legs; like some “posture master” from Bartholomew Fair he then squeezed through the great chains which held him. With a piece of this broken chain he worked out a transverse bar from the chimney and climbed upwards into the “Red Room,” “whose door had not been unbolted for seven years.” With a nail he freed its bolt in seven minutes and got into a passage which led to the chapel; then with a spike from one of the interior railings he opened four other doors which were all locked and bolted from the other side. On opening the final door he found himself on the outside of the prison, with the roofs of the city below him. Then he remembered his blanket. He had left it in his cell. He returned all the way to the “Stone Castle,” through the chapel and down the chimney, in order to retrieve it. He returned to the outer air and, with the blanket spiked to the stone wall, slid down quietly.
Over the next few days, he disguised himself as a beggar and as a butcher, the two most familiar London types, while the streets around him were filled with ballads and broadsides proclaiming his latest escape. In the disguise of a foot porter he visited the printer of those “Last Dying Speeches” which, as he knew or guessed, would accompany his own journey to the scaffold. He robbed a pawn-broker in Drury Lane and, with the proceeds, bought a fashionable suit and a silver sword; then he hired a coach and, with that innate sense of theatre which never seemed to desert him, he drove through the arch of Newgate itself before visiting the taverns and ale-houses of the vicinity. Recaptured on that evening, two weeks after his escape, he was taken back to the prison from which he had effected such a remarkable exit, and constantly watched; when he was led to the court where the punishment of death was again pronounced, he was surrounded by “the most numerous Croud of People that ever was seen in London.” He was sentenced to be hanged within a week. There were reports that he would break away at Little Turnmill along Holborn-and on the road to Tyburn a penknife was taken from him-but there was to be no reprieve from what Peter Linebaugh has called his “final escape.”