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In the year 1728, an opinion was entertained that much cruelty and rapacity were exercised by the keepers of the great prisons in London. It was known that they had almost unlimited power in their hands, that they were not subject to regular inspection, and that it was scarcely possible to bring them to justice for their treatment of those committed to their charge. It was argued, that it is impossible to depend upon the lenity of men who have such powers over their fellow-creatures, and that these officers must be supposed more than human if they did not occasionally abuse their authority. Of their having actually done so, many rumours had from time to time reached parliament. But in making out a case for inquiry, its strongest supporters had but a very slight forecast of the horrors it was to divulge. It may here be remarked, that before the proper arrangements for official responsibility and regular systematic management in such matters as prison discipline or the custody of the insane were devised, our free parliament did incalculable service by its inquiries and exposures. In that august assembly, every tale of formidable injustice or oppression was sure to receive a ready auditory; and its power was so transcendent, that every door flew open at its command, and no influence could protect the wrong-doer from its sweeping vengeance. With such a body in existence, even the worst governments which Britain has known could not keep up those mysterious agents of tyranny, secret state-prisons, which continue to be the curse of every despotic country. Yet it will be seen, that for want of some more immediate and direct responsibility, the abuses in the prisons even of this country had risen to a very dreadful height.

The member who headed the inquiry was Colonel Oglethorpe. He was a man of literary talent—a dashing and intrepid soldier, but still more renowned for his wide and active benevolence. It is to him that Pope alludes in the lines:

A committee obtained by his influence, did not conduct its inquiry in easy state in St Stephen's, but appalled the guilty parties by immediately repairing to the prisons, and diving to the furthest recesses of their dungeons. In the Marshalsea, it found that even those who paid excessive fees for their lodgings, were laid in lairs above each other on boards set on tressels, where they were packed so close together, that many were believed to have died from mere deficiency of air. There was no doubt that many others, debtors, had come to a miserable end by starvation. Some were found in the last stage of attenuation. Those who could not provide for themselves, had nothing to feed on but a scanty charity-allowance from the benevolence of individuals, which, when distributed among the whole, furnished each with sometimes only a few peas in the day; and at intervals of several days, an ounce and a half of meat. 'When the miserable wretch,' say the committee in their report, 'hath worn out the charity of his friends, and consumed the money which he hath raised upon his clothes and bedding, and hath ate his last allowance of provisions, he usually in a few days grows weak for want of food, with the symptoms of a hectic fever; and when he is no longer able to stand, if he can raise 3d. a day to pay the fee of the common nurse of the prison, he obtains the liberty of being carried into the sick-ward, and lingers on for about a month or two, by the assistance of the above-mentioned prison portion of provision, and then dies.' The committee made more lifelike this horrible description of the state of the prison by describing the results of their efforts to relieve the sufferers. They said: 'On the giving food to these poor wretches—though it was done with the utmost caution, they being only allowed the smallest quantities, and that of liquid nourishment—one died; the vessels of his stomach were so disordered and contracted for want of use, that they were totally incapable of performing their office, and the unhappy creature perished about the time of digestion.' These prisoners were debtors, not criminals. We make our extracts from the reports, just after having heard in a scientific society an examination of the dietary of a large district of prisons. The difficulty appeared to be, to find the medium that would preserve health without making the criminal's living in some measure luxurious; and it appeared that, by almost every dietary in actual use in the district, the prisoners fattened; in fact, they profited so much in constitution by sobriety, good air, and regular food, however simple, that it was found a difficult matter to give them what might be considered a bare sufficiency, without raising their physical condition, and sending them out of prison with improved constitutions. So different is imprisonment for crime in the present age, from imprisonment for debt a hundred and twenty years ago.

The condition of many of the prisoners for debt in England, though few knew the actual extent of its horrors, was well known to be wretched, and several humane persons had made charitable bequests for their support. Colonel Oglethorpe's Committee made inquiry as to the employment of these charities, and disclosed incidents of singular villainy. It appeared, for instance, that in the Marshalsea there were several charities; and that the prisoners might be sure of benefiting by them, it was arranged that they should elect six constables, and that these constables should choose a steward, who was to receive and disburse the charities. Like a corporation, the steward had a seal which he appended to the receipts for the money received for the charities. The officers of the prison had carried on a systematic perversion of these charities, either through connivance of the steward elected by the constables, or by imposing on him. In the year 1722, however, it happened that a man named Matthew Pugh, an active, clever exponent of abuses, was chosen steward. He discovered several charities, the knowledge of which had been entirely suppressed, the proceeds being drawn by the officers of the prison. He found, that to facilitate their fraud, they had got a counterpart of the common seal, with which they certified the receipts. Pugh got a new seal made; and to prevent a new system of fraud being carried out, he got a safety-chest fixed to the prison wall, with six locks, requiring for opening it six separate keys, which were put into the hands of the six constables. The committee, in describing how audaciously these precautions were defeated, shew distinctly how slight were the checks on the conduct of prison-officers in the reign of George II. They say: 'But this public and just manner of receiving and disbursing the charities was disliked by the keeper and his servants; and they complained to the judge of the Palace Court, and gave information that the said Pugh was a very turbulent fellow, and procured a rule by which it was ordered, that Matthew Pugh should no longer be permitted to have access to the said prison or court; and the prisoners are allowed to choose another steward; and accordingly, John Grace, then clerk to the keeper, was chosen steward by those in the keeper's interest; but the constables, in behalf of the prisoners, refused to deliver up the keys of the chest, where their seal was, insisting that all receipts should be sealed as usual in a public manner, that they might know what money was received; and thereupon the said chest was broke down, and carried away by the said William Acton (the keeper) and John Grace.'—Parliamentary History, viii. 736. Hence the deaths from starvation reported by Colonel Oglethorpe's Committee.

The reports of the committee were varied by statements of atrocious cruelties committed on the prisoners, by their committal, whenever the prison-officers thought fit, to damp and loathsome dungeons full of filth, by heavy irons being forced on them, and even by the application of the thumbkins, and other such tortures as were applied in the previous century to the Covenanters. Thus, after narrating an attempt made to escape, and the severities used on those who had participated in it, the committee say: 'One of them was seen to go in (to the keeper's lodge) perfectly well, and when he came out again, he was in the greatest disorder; his thumbs were much swollen, and very sore; and he declared that the occasion of his being in that condition was, that the keeper, in order to extort from him a confession of the names of those who had assisted him and others in their attempt to escape, had screwed certain instruments of iron upon his thumbs, so close, that they had forced the blood out of them with exquisite pain. After this, he was carried into the strong room, where, besides the other irons which he had on, they fixed on his neck and hands an iron instrument called a collar, like a pair of tongs; and he being a large lusty man, when they screwed the said instrument close, his eyes were ready to start out of his head, the blood gushed out of his ears and nose, he foamed at the mouth, and he made several motions to speak, but could not: after these tortures, he was confined in the strong room for many days with a heavy pair of irons called sheers on his legs.'

It is not to be denied that some of the charges made by the committee were not ultimately confirmed. It is natural for humane men, becoming for the first time acquainted with extensive cruelties, to tinge their narrative with the indignation they feel, and thus give it a prejudiced and exaggerated tone. Even committees of the House of Commons are not entirely exempt from such failings. But for our purpose, which is that of noticing the progress of civilisation and humanity in the period that has elapsed since the inquiry, it is sufficient to know, that there must have been an extensive foundation in facts for the horrors detailed by the committee. If it could not be distinctly proved that an individual officer had murdered any prisoner by the use of a particular torture, yet the instruments of torture described in the above extract were in the prisons—they were seen and handled by the committee, who were not to suppose that they were kept for no use. They state, that it had become the practice for the keepers 'unlawfully to assume to themselves a pretended authority as magistrates, and not only to judge and decree punishments arbitrarily, but also to execute the same unmercifully.'

In the exercise of this authority, the keepers seem to have imitated the cruelties of the classical tyrant Mezentius, commemorated by Virgil as chaining the living to the dead, for the committee say: 'The various tortures and cruelties before mentioned not contenting these wicked keepers in their said pretended magistracy over the prisoners, they found a way of making within the prison a confinement more dreadful than the strong room itself, by coupling the living with the dead; and have made a practice of locking up debtors who displeased them in the yard with human carcasses. One particular instance of this sort of inhumanity, was of a person whom the keepers confined in that part of the lower yard which was then separated from the rest, whilst two dead bodies had lain there four days; yet was he kept there with them six days longer; in which time the vermin devoured the flesh from the faces, ate the eyes out of the heads of the carcasses, which were bloated, putrid, and turned green during the poor debtor's dismal confinement with them.'

Some of the accounts given by the committee are as grotesque, without being so horrible. A certain Captain John M'Phaedris had been a person of considerable fortune, and, like many of his contemporaries, had been a victim to the South-sea speculation, which appears to have made all the debtors' prisons more than usually full between the years 1720 and 1725. He refused to pay the exorbitant fees demanded by the keeper for accommodation, and maintained that they were illegal. To silence so troublesome a person, he was turned, unsheltered, into the yard, where he had to remain exposed to the weather day and night. 'He sat quietly,' said the committee, 'under his wrongs, and, getting some poor materials, built a little hut to protect himself as well as he could from the injuries of the weather.' The keeper, seeing this ingenious abode, exclaimed with an oath that the fellow made himself easy, and ordered the hut to be pulled down. 'The poor prisoner,' we are told, 'being in an ill state of health, and the night rainy, was put to great distress.'

In another instance, a prisoner had been committed to a cell so damp, as the witnesses described it, that they could sweep the water from the wall like dew from the grass. A feather-bed happened by some odd accident to be in the place, and the prisoner tore it up, and, for warmth, buried himself in the contents. Being covered with cutaneous sores, the feathers stuck to him, as if he had been subject to the operation of tarring and feathering. One Sunday, the door of the cell being left open, he rushed out, and entered the prison chapel during divine service—a horribly ludicrous figure. The committee, on the conclusion of the incident, say, 'he was immediately seized and carried back into the sad dungeon; where, through the cold, and the restraint, and for want of food, he lost his senses, languished, and perished.'

Such were the features of the system of mistreatment pursued in the London prisons, thirty years after the general liberties of the subject had been secured by the Revolution. We may in a subsequent paper advert to some of the particular cases which came under the attention of courts of justice.