On the following morning Samuel Johnson toured the scene of that night’s riots. “On Wednesday I walked with Dr. Scot to look at Newgate, and found it in ruins with the fire yet glowing. As I went by the Protestants were plundering the Sessions-house at the Old Bailey. There were not, I believe, a hundred; but they did their work at leisure, in full security, without sentinels, without trepidation, as men lawfully employed, in full day.” He added a curious statement: “Such is the cowardice of a commercial place.” By this he meant, no doubt, that there was no communal spirit or civic pride abroad to avert or prohibit these outrages; London, as a commercial city, had no defences except those of fear and oppression. When those twin guarantors of security were lifted, then theft and violence naturally and inevitably emerged in their stead. A “commercial place” is an arena of rapine and anxiety under another name. Samuel Johnson, who understood the pleasures and virtues of the city, also understood its debilitating faults better than any of his contemporaries.
But that day witnessed more than the smoking ruins of the Law. Horace Walpole termed it, in a phrase that was not then a cliché, “Black Wednesday.” It might almost have been termed Red Wednesday. That morning the “cowardice” of London was manifest in the closed shops and shuttered windows. Many of the citizens were so dismayed and astounded by the destruction of Newgate, and the complete failure of the city authorities to punish or apprehend those who were responsible, that it seemed to them that the whole fabric of reality was being torn apart before their eyes. And “round the smoking ruins people stood apart from one another and in silence, not venturing to condemn the rioters, or to be supposed to do so, even in whispers.” There was another curious aspect of this lawlessness. Some prisoners lately released sought out their gaolers, “preferring imprisonment and punishment to the horrors of such another night as the last,” while others actually returned to Newgate in order to wander among the smoking ruins of their erstwhile place of confinement. They were brought there by some “indescribable attraction,” according to Dickens, and they were found talking, eating and even sleeping in the places where their cells had once stood. It is a curious story but somehow all of a piece with the greater story of London, where many will dwell upon the same stones for the whole of their lives.
Troops had been stationed throughout the city, but the energy and purpose of the rioters were not significantly diminished; in fact the burning of the night before seemed only to have increased their rage and resentment. Threatening letters were posted up outside those prisons which had remained secure, including the Fleet and the King’s Bench, assuring their keepers and gaolers that they would be fired that night; the houses of prominent legislators were similarly picked out. The leaders of the riot declared that they would take and fire the Bank, the Mint and the Royal Arsenal-and that they would occupy the royal palaces. A rumour spread that the demonstrators would also throw open the gates of Bedlam, thus contributing a curious terror to the general fear of the citizens. Truly then the city would become a hell with the desperate, the doomed and the distracted wandering its streets against buildings collapsing and houses on fire.
That night it seemed that the fire of 1666 had come again. The rioters emerged upon the streets “like a great sea,” and it seemed their purpose “to wrap the city in a circle of flame.” Thirty-six major fires were started-the prisons of the Fleet, the King’s Bench and the Clink were all alight-while the soldiers fired upon the crowds with sometimes fatal effect. Some of the greatest conflagrations were in the vicinity of Newgate itself, beside Holborn Bridge and Holborn Hill, as if the destruction of the previous night had somehow magnetised the area so that it drew more vengeance upon itself. The image of the blank-faced doll, as some anonymous and infernal deity of the riotous city, seems appropriate.
