It is an intensely private as well as a very public London story. We may infer that his youthful experience in the workhouse of Bishopsgate prompted his obsessive desire for escape, while it is likely that he somehow acquired his extraordinary skills while working as a carpenter’s apprentice; certainly he would have learned the uses of files and chisels while practising upon wood. He was a violent and dishonest man, but his series of escapes from Newgate transformed the atmosphere of the city, where the prevailing mood became one of genuine collaborative excitement. To escape from the most visible and oppressive symbol of authority-that “black cloud” which pursued Boswell-was in a sense to be freed from all the restraints of the ordinary world. We might then equate the experience of the prison with the experience of the city itself. It is indeed a familiar and often an accurate analogy, and the history of Jack Sheppard suggests another aspect of it. He hardly ever left London, even with the opportunity and indeed the pressing necessity of doing so; after three days “on the run” in Northamptonshire, for example, he rode back to the city. After his penultimate escape from Newgate he returned to Spitalfields, where he had spent his earliest days. After his final escape he was determined to remain in London, despite the pleas of his family. He was in that sense a true Londoner who could not or would not operate outside his own territory.
He possessed other urban characteristics. After his escapes he disguised himself as a variety of tradesmen, and generally behaved in a thoroughly dramatic fashion. To ride in a coach through Newgate was a mark of theatrical genius. He was profane to the point of being irreligious, while his violence against the propertied interests was not inconsistent with the egalitarianism of the “mob.” After one of his escapes a pamphleteer declaimed: “Woe to the Shopkeepers, and woe to the Dealers in Ware, for the roaring Lion is abroad.” So Jack became an intrinsic part of London mythology, his exploits celebrated in ballads and verses and dramas and fiction.
In 1750 the smell of Newgate had become pervasive throughout the neighbourhood. All its walls were then washed down with vinegar and a ventilation system was installed; seven of the eleven men working on that project were themselves infected with “gaol fever,” which suggests the extent of the pestilence within. Five years later, the inhabitants of Newgate Street were still “unable to stand in their doorways” and customers were reluctant to visit the shops in the vicinity “for fear of infections.” There were even directions for those who might come close to the criminals-“he should prudently empty his stomach and bowels a few days before, to carry off any putrid or putrescent substance which may have lodged in them.”
The prison was rebuilt in 1770 by George Dance, and was described by the poet Crabbe as a “large, strong and beautiful building,” beautiful, no doubt, because of its simplicity of purpose. “There is nothing in it,” one contemporary wrote, “but two great windowless blocks, each ninety feet square.” It was fired by rioters in 1780, and rebuilt two years later upon the same plan. It was in many respects now more salubrious and hygienic a prison than many others in London, but its ancient atmosphere lingered. A few years after the rebuilding, the new gaol “begins to wear a brooding and haunted air already.” The old conditions also began to re-emerge within the prison and, in the early years of the nineteenth century, it was reported in The Chronicles of Newgate that “lunatics raving mad ranged up and down the wards, a terror to all they encountered … mock marriages were of constant occurrence … a school and nursery of crime … the most depraved were free to contaminate and demoralise their more innocent fellows.”
The ministrations of Elizabeth Fry in 1817 seem to have produced some effect upon this “Hell above ground,” but official reports in 1836 and 1843 from the Inspector of Prisons still condemned the squalor and the misery. Immediately before the first of these reports, Newgate was visited by a young journalist, Charles Dickens, who from childhood had been fascinated by the looming gatehouse of the dark prison; by his own account in Sketches by Boz he had often contemplated the fact that thousands of people each day “pass and repass this gloomy depository of the guilt and misery of London, in one perpetual stream of life and bustle, utterly unmindful of the throng of wretched creatures pent up within it.” A “light laugh or merry whistle” can be heard “within one yard of a fellow-creature, bound and helpless, whose days are numbered” and who waits for execution. In his second novel, Oliver Twist, Dickens returns to those “dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so much misery and such unspeakable anguish.” Here Fagin sits in one of the condemned cells-Dickens notes that the prison kitchen is beside the yard where the scaffold is erected-and an engraving by George Cruik-shank, drawn after a visit to one such “hold,” shows a stone bench with a mattress across it. Nothing else is visible except the iron bars set in a thick stone wall, and the blazing eyes of the prisoner himself. The young Oliver Twist visits the condemned cell, through “the dark and winding ways” of Newgate, even though the gaoler has said that “It’s not a sight for children.” Dickens might be revisiting his own childhood, since his most formative early experience of London was of attending his father and family lodged in the Marshalsea Prison of Southwark. Perhaps that is why the image of Newgate always haunted him and why, towards the end of his life, at night, utterly wearied and demoralised, he returned to the old gaol “and, touching its rough stone” began “to think of the prisoners in their sleep.”
Dickens was writing of a period when Newgate had ceased to be a general prison and was instead used to confine those who had been sentenced to death (as well as those waiting to be tried in the adjacent Central Criminal Courts), but a further refinement was added in 1859 when the prison was redesigned to house a series of separate cells where each inmate was held in silence and isolation. In a series of articles published in the Illustrated London News the prisoner awaiting a flogging is described as “the patient.” The prison becomes a hospital, then, or perhaps the hospital is no better than a prison.
In this manner the institutions of the city begin to resemble one another. Newgate also became a kind of theatre when, on Wednesdays or Thursdays between the hours of twelve and three, it was open to visitors. Here sightseers would be shown casts of the heads of notorious criminals, as well as the chains and handcuffs which once held Jack Sheppard; they could at their wish be locked into one of the condemned cells for a moment, or even sit within the old whipping post. At the end of their tour they were conducted along “Birdcage” walk, the passage from the cells of Newgate to the Court of Sessions; here also they could read “curious letters on the walls” denoting the fact that the bodies of the condemned were interred behind the stone. The name of the walk is strangely reminiscent of a scene from Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago where an infant visits her father “before a double iron railing covered with wire netting” at Newgate-“carrying into later years a memory of father as a man who lived in a cage.”