Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

1737-1783.]

THE PRISONS.

117

and the thieves knew him. His business was to "let the matter ripen " when he had information of a house to be broken open or a mail to be robbed. When he was sure of a capital conviction, he took his man, and obtained forty pounds "blood-money." It was a thriving trade. "I remember," said Townsend, the Bow Street runner, "in 1783, when sergeant Adair was Recorder, there were forty hung at two executions."

The horrible state of the Prisons in 1738 has been already shown in some notice of a Report of a Parliamentary Committee.* We may trace in the writers of fiction how little the dominion of cruelty, neglect, and extortion had been diminished at the accession of George III. Fielding's Mr. Booth is committed by an ignorant justice to Bridewell, upon a charge of assaulting a watchman, when he had only interfered to prevent an outrage by two men of fortune, who bribed the constable to let them escape. When he goes to prison a number of persons gather round him in the yard, and demand "garnish." The keeper explained that it was customary for every new prisoner to treat the others with something to drink. The young man had no money; and the keeper quietly permitted the scoundrels to strip him of his clothes. All persons sent to Bridewell were treated alike, so far as the prison discipline was concerned. Three street robbers, certain to be hanged, were enjoying themselves over a bottle of wine and a pipe; the man without a shilling in his pocket, had the prison allowance of a penny loaf and a jug of water. Felons and debtors were in some cases separated; but there was

[graphic][merged small]

little distinction in the treatment of the burglar and the bankrupt. Those who could pay exorbitant fees had privileges and indulgences-a full meal and unlimited liquor. In 1773, John Howard, in his capacity of High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, had his eyes opened to the disgraceful condition of the prisons of England, and the enormities committed in them. Before 1775 he had personally inspected nearly every one of these abodes of vice made more wicked; of innocence corrupted; of human beings, whether innocent or guilty, subjected to filth, starvation, contagious disease, and the capricious temper of savage and mercenary gaolers. In 1777 he published his book "On Prisons." He awakened public attention to the evil; and the Legislature adopted some measures for its remedy-measures, however, founded upon no enlarged principles,-mere palliatives, that fitted a state of society

[blocks in formation]

118

SOCIAL REFORMERS-HOWARD.

[1737-1783. in which expediency might suggest a few obvious changes, but where principle made no attempt to go to the root of one of the most difficult of social questions, the mode of dealing with the criminal population. The system of the Hulks was commenced in 1776. In nineteen years 7999 convicts were ordered to be punished with hard labour on the Thames, and in Langston and Portsmouth harbours. It was something to have given fewer victims to the devouring maw of the gallows; but it was more than ten years before these offerings to Moloch had been diminished. But the Hulks utterly failed in producing the reformation of offenders. "Most of them, instead of profiting by the punishment they have suffered, forgetting they were under sentence of death, and undismayed by the dangers they have escapedimmediately rush into the same course of depredation and warfare upon the public." The system of transportation to New South Wales commenced in 1787.

The efforts of individuals to compensate for the neglect of the government, by associating benevolent persons in attempts to remedy social evils, were at this period very remarkable. The reform effected by Howard was the seed in good ground. But it was not always that energy such as that of Howard could be found in companionship with his practical sense; or, at any rate, that the objects aimed at by philanthropy should be so little liable to misdirection, and so certain in their results, as his purification of the prison system. Thomas Coram, the master of a merchant vessel, had seen in the

[graphic][merged small]

neighbourhood of Rotherhithe infants exposed in the streets-left to perish by their unnatural mothers. He laboured hard to establish a Foundling Hospital; and in 1739 obtained a charter for that institution which now possesses

[blocks in formation]

1737-1783.]

SOCIAL REFORMERS-CORAM-HANWAY.

119

enormous funds from subscriptions and from estates, but which had originally very inadequate means compared with the number of those who rang a bell at the gate of the hospital, left a child with a particular mark upon it, and waited its admission or rejection. In 1756, the governors obtained a parliamentary grant of 10,000l., and during the subsequent fifteen years had received more than half a million of the public money, to distribute in a manner calculated to produce far greater evils than those which they sought to remedy. The wise legislators stipulated, when the grant was first made, that all children above the age of two months should be received. The age was afterwards limited to six months. A basket was hung at the gate, in which the deserted child was deposited. Purveyors of Foundlings started up in the country districts, who carried infants to London in panniers slung across a horse. Many died on their journey. In four years from 1756, children to the number of 14,934 were taken under the management of this institution, of which only 4400 lived to be apprenticed. Parliament then interfered, and declared "that the indiscriminate admission of all children under a certain age into the hospital had been attended with many evil consequences, and that it be discontinued." The charity had offered a large premium for vice, and had been perfectly successful in the encouragement of what we now properly call "the great social evil." Another philanthropist, towards the close of the reign of George II., established two societies, which were incorporated in the subsequent reign. The one was "the Magdalen Asylum,"the other "the Marine Society." To take distressed boys out of the streets, educate them for the seaman's life, and place them in the merchant service or the Royal Navy, was an object of no doubtful good. Jonas Hanway, whose exertions mainly established these two charities, is stated to have been "the first man who ventured to walk the streets of London with an umbrella over his head."

[graphic][merged small]

Amidst a good deal of selfish indulgence in their own pleasures, about the middle of the eighteenth century, by the noble and the rich, there

120

HOSPITALS-SUNDAY SCHOOLS.

[1737-1783.

is abundant evidence that a feeling had been awakened of consideration for the miseries of the lowly and the indigent. Hospitals for the reception of the sick and the maimed were freely supported by voluntary contributions. The Westminster Hospital was the first of this character, having been instituted in 1719. St. George's Hospital dates from 1733; the London Hospital from 1740, in which year the Middlesex Hospital was also established; and the Small Pox Hospital was opened in 1746. But no benefit to society was greater than that produced by the partial extension of education to the humblest classes of the community. The old foundation-schools had, in too many instances, been wholly diverted from their original purpose of general instruction, to provide sinecures for clergymen, who pretended to instruct the few pupils to whom they could not refuse admission. Their funds were wasted and misappropriated till, in our own day, a man of extraordinary vigour tore down the cobwebbed screen that patronage and venality had raised up, to defraud the children of this land of their inheritance. What were called the Free Schools, or Charity Schools, dispensed reading and writing to select parties of boys and girls, marked out for the ridicule of their companions by a grotesque and antiquated costume. These boys were fortunate if they obtained a sufficient knowledge of arithmetic to serve behind a counter without a Ready Reckoner. Fielding has touched upon the state of popular instruction in his day, according to the experience of Joseph Andrews: "Joey told Mr. Adams that he had very early learnt to read and write, by the goodness of his father, who, though he had not interest enough to get him into a charity school, because a cousin of his father's landlord did not vote on the right side for a churchwarden in a borough town, yet had been himself at the expense of sixpence a week for his learning." The extension of instruction to which we have referred was the work of Thomas Raikes, the proprietor of the "Gloucester Journal." This excellent man was struck by the degraded state of the children in the suburbs of his city. On a Sunday their numbers were increased; and their filth and disorderly conduct more revolting. He procured a few women to teach some to read on the Sunday; he persuaded them to go to church with clean hands and face and combed hair; he gave them Testaments. Their self-respect was raised; from outcasts they became capable of honest industry. The good example was rapidly followed; and Sunday Schools were established all over the kingdom, after the successful experiment of 1781.

As we approach the period we have assigned as the limit to this general view of Manners, we find that there has been, in some degree, an awakening of society to a more decorous, and, we may therefore presume, to a more virtuous exhibition of character and conduct. Literature has been very materially purified. Scenes and expressions in writers of fiction, which were held to be natural and amusing in the middle of the century, were deemed gross and revolting towards its close. Whether these exceptionable passages were derived from the tone of the age-which is most probable; or were the oozings out of the impure thoughts of the writers, which we are unwilling to believe it is certain that they have condemned Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne to an oblivion from which their great powers would otherwise have saved them. We see, also, that the miseries of poverty and the degradation of ignorance had stirred up some feeling of what was required for the miti

1737-1783.]

METHODISM.

121

gation of evils not absolutely associated with humble station. In high life, the example of the Court was working a gradual reformation. But there were influences more potent in operation to produce a more vital change than Literature or Fashion.

The observant Frenchman to whom we have several times referred, M. Grosley, says, of "the sect of the Methodists,"" this establishment has borne all the persecutions that it could possibly apprehend in a country as much disposed to persecution as England is the reverse."* The light literature of forty years overflows with ridicule of Methodism. The preachers are pelted by the mob; the converts are held up to execration as fanatics or hypocrites. Yet Methodism held the ground it had gained. It had gone forth to utter the words of truth to men little above the beasts that perish, and it had brought them to regard themselves as akin to humanity. The time would come when its earnestness would awaken the Church itself from its somnolency, and the educated classes would not be ashamed to be religious. There was wild enthusiasm enough in some of the followers of Whitefield and Wesley; much self-seeking; zeal verging upon profaneness; moral conduct strangely opposed to pious profession. But these earnest men left a mark upon their time which can never be effaced. The obscure young students at Oxford, in 1736, who were first called "Sacramentarians," then "Bible Moths," and finally "Methodists," to whom the regular pulpits were closed, and who then went forth to preach in the fields-who separated from the Church more in form than in reality-produced a moral revolution in England which probably saved us from the fate of nations wholly abandoned

to their own devices.

The individuality of opinion and conduct which is so characteristic of England-so different to the "all men alike" of France-led the two founders of Methodism into different paths. The principle of individuality originally isolated them from the torpid religion and the lax morality of the college life. It sent them to preach to the neglected poor wherever vice and ignorance most abounded, without much regard to the discipline of the Church of which they were members. But the characters of Whitefield and Wesley were in some respects very different. Whitefield was satisfied with rousing the sinful and the indifferent by his own fervid eloquence, without providing for the systematic continuance of his personal efforts. His preaching created a host of followers, who, branching off in their several localities, were content to be led by men without education. Starting up as teachers from the lowest ranks, such men, although too vain and presumptuous to see their own incompetence, were nevertheless better judges, in many cases, than the educated clergy, of the mode in which rude natures could be most effectually awakened to penitence for sin. Wesley, on the other hand, saw the danger of this indiscriminate admission of every fanatic to be a gospel-preacher; and he instituted and perfected by his incessant labours that remarkable organization known as Wesleyism. The exertions of these two men, each pursuing tracks not essentially diverging however separate, had produced effects in half a century of which their opponents could have formed no adequate estimate. The clergy, who preached and wrote against the excesses

"Observations on England," vol. i. p. 356.

« AnteriorContinuar »