Newgate's history goes back a long way. It was a prison in the time of King John; Dick Whittington left money for the rebuilding of it, and his cat sat at the feet of the figure of Liberty that once adorned it. Judged, however, by the standards of its peculiar romance it may be said to have reached its highest splendour between 1783 and 1868. Tyburn was then a thing of the past and they hanged people outside the prison by the church clock :
And when St.Sepulchre's bell tomorrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls,
Every window near the scaffold was let and every roof crowded. As soon as the execution was over the hangman was selling the only genuine rope at a shilling an inch, and someone else was underselling him in Newgate street with spurious rope.
In the early nineteenth century 80,000 people are said to have gathered to see the execution of two murderers, Haggerty and Holloway, whose fame is now altogether lost. A pieman who was selling his wares had his basket upset, and a cart, overladen with onlookers craning their necks for a good view, overturned. Such a struggle ensued among the crowd, jammed together and half mad with fear, that over forty were killed and many others injured.
When Greenacre was hanged in April, 1837, not only were the church steps black with sleepers, determined not to miss the morning's entertainment, but boys clung all night to the lamp posts to. Another great night was that before the execution of Franz Muller, the German tailor who murdered Mr. Briggs in a train and might have escaped had he not taken his victim's hat and cut it down for his own use.
The crowd whiled away the time by singing choruses, and a first floor window cost £12. When, in 1849, Mrs. Manning, the Hortense of "Bleak House," was hanged in the dress that gave black satin a lasting unpopularity, Dickens wrote a letter to The Times denouncing the levity of the crowd, but these orgies survived his attack for another nineteen years.
The prison itself seems to have been a worthy stepping stone to the scenes outside it, an ugly, frowsy place full of every kind of contamination, moral and physical, where the prisoners could gamble and often get drunk; in which (this was in 1836) the ordinary thought it no part of his duty to attend to the young children there, and only knew that a prisoner was sick when he was asked to bury him.