London: The Biography полностью

It was also remarked by Grosley that “melancholy prevails in London in every family, in circles, in assemblies, at public and private entertainments … The merry meetings, even of the lowest sort, are dashed with this gloom.” Dostoevsky observed the “gloom” which “never forsakes” the Londoner even “in the midst of gaiety.” The wine sold in London taverns was also considered “to occasion that melancholy, which is so general.” Even the theatre was held responsible for the unhappy distemper; one traveller described how the son of his landlord, after being taken to see Richard III, “leaped out of bed and, after beating the wainscot with his head and feet, at the same time roaring like one possessed, he rolled about the ground in dreadful convulsions, which made us despair of his life; he thought he was haunted by all the ghosts in the tragedy of Richard the Third, and by all the dead bodies in the churchyards of London.”

Everything was blamed except, perhaps, for the onerous and exhausting condition of the city itself.

There have been more prisons in London than in any other European city. From the penitential cell in the church of the Knights Templar to the debtors’ prison in Whitecross Street, from the Clink situated in Deadman’s Place, Bankside, to the compter in Giltspur Street, London has been celebrated for its places of confinement. There was a prison in Lambeth Palace where early religious reformers, the Lollards, were tortured, and a roundhouse in St. Martin’s Lane where twenty-eight “were thrust into a hole six-feet square and kept there all night,” four of the women being stifled to death. New prisons were always being built, from the Tun in Cornhill at the end of the thirteenth century to Wormwood Scrubs in East Acton at the end of the nineteenth century. The prisoners were obliged to wear masks in the new “model prison” at Pentonville, while the “new prison” of Millbank was supposed to have been built as a “panopticon” whereby each cell and inmate could be individually scrutinised.

By the early seventeenth century the London prisons, like its churches, were celebrated in verse:

In London and within a mile I weene

There are of layles or Prisons full eighteene

And sixty Whipping-posts and Stocks and Cages.

The first prison mentioned in this sorrowful litany is the “Gatehouse” at Westminster, and it is followed by an encomium upon the Fleet Prison.

The Fleet was the oldest of them all, older even than Newgate, and had once been known as the “Gaol of London”; it was also one of the first of the medieval city’s stone buildings. It was situated on the east side of the Fleet and surrounded by a moat with “tree clad banks” where now Farringdon Street runs down to the Thames. The lowest “sunken” storey was known as Bartholomew Fair, although the usual reports of brutality, immorality and mortality render it an ironic sobriquet. The prison was, however, most notorious for its “secret” and unlawful marriages performed by “degraded clergymen” for less than a guinea. By the early eighteenth century there were some forty “marrying houses” in taverns of the vicinity, with at least six known as the Hand and Pen. Women, drugged or intoxicated, could be taken there and married for their money; innocent girls could be duped into believing that they were lawfully joined. There was a watch-maker who impersonated a clergyman, calling himself “Dr. Gaynam”-or, perhaps, gain them. He resided in Brick Lane and it was his practice to walk up Fleet Street. Crossing Fleet Bridge “in his silk gown and bands,” he was known for his commanding figure, and a “handsome though significantly rubicund face.” In the locality he was named as the “Bishop of Hell.”

On several occasions the Fleet Prison was itself consigned to the flames, the last notable fire taking place in 1780 when a mob-led, perhaps appropriately, by a chimney-sweep-mounted an incendiary assault upon it. It was rebuilt in its old form, with many of its more interesting details left intact. Along what is now Farringdon Street, for example, the wall of the gaol had one open grating with bars across it. Here was placed an iron box for alms and, from within, one chosen inmate would call out perpetually “Remember the poor prisoners.” This was the prison in which was incarcerated Samuel Pickwick who, after speaking to those who lay there “forgotten” and “unheeded,” muttered, “I have seen enough … My head aches with these scenes, and my heart too.”

The Fleet Prison was demolished in 1846, but the site was not cleared for another eighteen years. Where once were walls and cells there emerged “blind alleys” which, even on summer days, were so narrow and crowded that they “are bleak and shadowed.” The atmosphere of the ancient place lingered even after its material destruction.