On arrival the prisoners were fettered and “ironed,” passing under the gate to be led to their appropriate dungeon; they passed, on the left, the keeper’s house beneath which was the “hold” for those condemned to hang. A prisoner confined in this subterranean area, which did not perhaps differ very much from the dungeon before the Fire, is quoted in Anthony Babington’s
Immediately to the right of the gate was the drinking cellar. This was run by a prisoner who was allowed a profit on sales. Since it was also below ground it was lit by candles “placed in pyramidal candlesticks made of clay”; those inmates who could afford the prices were allowed to drink themselves into senselessness day or night, with gin variously known as “Cock-my-Cap,” “Kill-Grief,” “Comfort,” “Meat-and-Drink” or “Washing-and-Lodging.” One prisoner recalled that “such wretchedness abounds there that the place has the exact aspect of hell itself.” Beyond this cellar tap-room, going along Newgate Street, were located a “stone hall” for common debtors and a “stone hold” for common felons. These were “virtually unlighted dungeons” strewn with “unutterable filth.” “Trampling on the floor, the lice crawling under their feet made such a noise as walking on shells which are strewn over garden walks.” The rest of the prison rose upward, for “master” prisoners and female prisoners.
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.”
