Читать книгу The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens - Steve Harris - Страница 9

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A LAW UNTO THEMSELVES

There are many pleasant fictions of the law…but there is not one so…practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye.

— Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

Experience, newspapers, Boz sketches, and reading of Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers, Mr Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge helped many in Van Diemen’s Land piece together some understanding of the causes and circumstances of their lives.

New industrial machines of the 19th century had unleashed power and profit for the cradle of the British Empire, but impoverishment and pain for many. With thousands of poor rural families trying to escape unemployment and poverty by fleeing to larger towns and cities without any promise of work or shelter, and the exodus coming at the same time as the demobbing of the army and navy at the end of the Napoleonic wars, Britain’s population almost doubled from about eight million to fifteen million by 1841.

What was harder to understand was that many unemployed, poor and hungry families felt they had no choice but to set their children — nearly forty percent of England’s population in the 1830s were aged fourteen and under — on a path of dangerous uncertainty. Thousands, especially boys, were forced to thieve to help sustain a family, or simply abandoned onto the street by impoverished, imprisoned, abusive or drunkard fathers, stepfathers or mothers. Others were orphaned.

The result was a rising tide, estimated at twenty-five percent a year,1 of youngsters forced to survive by cunning and crime. The outbreak of pickpocketing, theft and house break-ins fuelled a moral panic among middle and ruling classes worried about their personal well-being and property being at risk from immoral and dangerous ‘felons’ and ‘undesirables’. Although when some of the same offences were committed by their own children, they were dismissed as mere ‘pranks’ or ‘frolics’, as a Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions acknowledged:

Sons of persons of the highest rank in this country…often commit offences out of the exuberance of spirits and activity, which the law, if it visited them at all, must visit by sentences of great severity…(offences) passed over as frolics in the sons of the rich are treated in the children of the poor as crimes of magnitude.2

But the pride and prejudice of the ‘haves’, such as the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon, who admitted to his own boyhood poaching and fruit thieving, insisted such offences of the ‘have nots’ be rigorously pursued. The profane language, gambling and sexual licentiousness of street boys and girls further challenged English morality and stoked fears of a fracturing of the very foundations of English society, built on obedience to God and law. There were concerns that there would be a replica of the dark moment portrayed by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge — the 1780 Gordon riots in London in which the Army killed nearly 300 people protesting on a range of economic, nationalist, social and religious issues — or even of the French Revolution of 1789–1799.

Boy thieves and scavengers were seen to be ‘cradled in iniquity’,3 corrupted from birth and dangerous, or perishing under parental neglect, abandonment or tutoring. Living in what was seen as Godless depravity, running wild on the streets, they were variously known as ‘street urchins’ or ‘street arabs’ and then ‘undesirables’ before a new catch-all term emerged: ‘delinquent’, derived from the Latin for offender.

Depiction of a scene in London’s criminal underworld, as illustrated in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Oliver introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman, illustration, George Cruikshank, 1837. Image courtesy The Charles Dickens Page website. https://charlesdickenspage.com/illustrations_web/Oliver_Twist/Oliver_Twist_05.jpg

Young children pickpocketing in the streets of England, as illustrated in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Oliver amazed at the Dodger’s Mode of ‘going to work’, illustration, George Cruikshank, 1837. Image courtesy The Charles Dickens Page website. https://charlesdickenspage.com/illustrations_web/Oliver_Twist/Oliver_Twist_06.jpg

Within a few years, tens of thousands of delinquents were pressed into court rooms and the harshness of correction houses or workhouses. Many a boy would, like Oliver Twist, plead ‘Please Sir, I want some more’, but there was never more food, or sympathy. In the British newspapers some reformers and critics lamented a world where adults created or administered the very environment that forced children into crime, and then exacerbated the problem through legal and judicial zealotry. But the moneyed, pious and powerful reflected an Old Testament view that some, including children, are naturally evil and wicked. Insisting that such depraved, deviant and dangerous street urchins had to be put onto the ‘right path’ and a higher state of Godly grace, and to preserve and promote the overall ‘good’ the state had to control and punish any dangerous forces and ‘win’ the war.

In this climate of impoverishment, fear and loathing, children comprised nearly half the population, but had no laws protecting their childhood. There was nothing to ensure they lived in a proper home or attended school, or were protected from the perils of drinking, gambling or sex. Nothing to stop boys as young as six being used in dangerous work of climbing inside chimneys and scrapping in dirty and dangerous textile mills and factories. They were a generation whose childhood was bereft of family, love, shelter, food, clothing, education and morality, a generation not living as children in heart and mind but not yet adults. Dickens himself had narrowly avoided the same reality: just two days after he turned twelve the author’s father was sent to Marshalsea Prison over a debt to a baker. While his mother and younger siblings joined their father in gaol for three months before the debt was paid off, Charles was despatched to Warren’s Blacking Factory at Hungerford Stairs on the Thames to paste labels onto blacking pots for ten hours a day, six days a week, for a shilling a day. The Dickens family was relatively fortunate. Other fathers were jailed for petty offences — one was taken from his family for stealing nails to build his son a rabbit hutch — or fined when they clearly had not a penny to their name, and the absence of any household income, legitimate or otherwise, forced wives and children to steal or starve on minimal parish aid.

From 1744, a Vagrancy Act had declared street boys ‘rogues’ and ‘vagabonds’ and sentenced them to houses of correction for up to two years, often with a whipping to drive home the message, while others over twelve were effectively dragooned into ‘his Majesty’s Service, either by sea or land’. But as the criminal tide of ‘alien’ boys rose, so did the arsenal of severe laws and punishment. The number of crimes for which a person risked a walk to the gallows rose to more than 220 by the early 1800s, not just for murder, treason, rape and counterfeiting, but also for pickpocketing, shoplifting, poaching and burglary — the common purview of children. There was ‘probably no other country in the world in which so many and so great a variety of human actions are punishable with the loss of life as in England’.4

The 1824 Vagrancy Act made it criminal for boys to even engage in their favourite street pastimes of playing and betting on skittles, coin-tossing, marbles or cards. Hungry boys stealing someone’s vegetables or fruit were deemed criminal three years later under a Malicious Trespass Act — one conservative MP opining that country gentlemen had ‘suffered much by the deprivation of our turnips’ by young thieves, so ‘we have at length determined to put an end to this practice and my good friend the Minister has been so obliging as to make it death’.5

In 1829, Sir Robert Peel introduced a full-time professional police force for greater London and new constables enthusiastically pursued the ‘enemy’, an estimated 50,000 poor and criminal within 5 miles (8 km) of St Paul’s Cathedral.6 New laws allowed police to apprehend, without warrant, anyone they thought to be ‘loose, idle and disorderly…or whom he shall have just cause to suspect of any evil designs’, or found between sunset and 8am sleeping or loitering outdoors and unable to give ‘a satisfactory account of themselves’.7 A new, tougher Poor Law Act in 1834 disgusted Dickens, and his coverage of it for the Morning Chronicle partly inspired Oliver Twist. He was outraged that workhouses denied relief for many seeking shelter and food due to poverty, illness, mental or physical disability, or the plight of babies, children, and the aged. The core concern of authority was only whether they were ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ poor: those deemed to be at the door from ‘idle, disorderly or thriftless habits, have reduced themselves to merited indigence and disgrace’, and would find life inside ‘harsh, monotonous and characterised by the intent of improving the inmate’s moral character’. Such ‘improvement’ could come through halving of an already miserable diet, time in the ‘black hole’, or removal to a ‘pauper farm’ where contractors warehoused the poor even more cheaply.8

Some could see the demon of law-making could have unintended consequences, especially when, as Newgate prison schoolmaster Thomas Wontner observed, ‘any legal statutes are constructed with no other view than to protect the rich from punishment…protecting the rich…against the poor’.9 Reforming reporters like Dickens, George Reynolds, Henry Mayhew and John Binny were appalled that boys as young as five and six were being clad in prison dress and branded felons for the ‘heinous’ offences of throwing stones, knocking on doors and blocking a street passage, the same crimes that, ‘if equally visited, would consign almost every child in the kingdom to a jail’.10

Convicts well understood the truth spoken by Dickens:

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.11

Many convicts had spent time at Newgate prison, as Dickens had as a visitor, where its schoolmaster could see that neither the law, nor the world, was any friend of the juvenile with ‘no parent, or those of such habits and temper as would have rendered orphan-ship a blessing, and that in all probability, most of them…never had a kind or affectionate sentiment imparted to or drawn out of them, by any human being they could look to as a friend’.12 Wontner and Dickens were asking the timeless question: ‘If a country does nothing for a man, what shall allure him to obedience to its laws?’13 And so ‘delinquent’ boys had ‘been driven to take up arms against society, meeting, from their earliest recollections, with nothing but an enemy in man’.14

To survive the enemy, boys honed their skills, attitudes and codes on the streets and in flash houses run by Fagin characters where magistrates reported children as young as eight being ‘initiated into the trade of picking pockets’15 and seeing their peers and other criminals ‘sitting and drinking together on terms of good fellowship, inculcating a view that they could continue to rob without fear of punishment’.16

For many boys, life on the streets was safer than their home life and more exciting and rewarding. One magistrate, William Miles, said, ‘these urchins are taught to look upon the world as a fisherman views the waters: all that can be obtained…depends upon the skill or luck, or in the terms of the common adage, ‘all is fish that comes to their nets’.17 Pickpocketing and thieving realised enough to eat and sleep under a roof, and garnered the badges of manhood such as alcohol, tobacco and female company. The London Metropolitan Conservative Journal described how the ‘abandoned of both sexes…after prowling for their prey, return to their lairs either moody from disappointment or flushed with gin and success’18 and magistrate Miles told the House of Lords boys cheerfully told him of spending their criminal gains on ‘every pleasure arising from a life of dishonesty’, and even those younger than twelve ‘revel in the fruits of their plunder and though extremely young, live with girls indulging in every form of debauchery’.19

One boy told Miles, ‘look ye here Sir, the charm of it is, it comes so easy and it goes just as light, it is better than hard work. It is no wonder boys never reform if they have been in the least successful’;20 for in this ‘lottery adventure in each day’s life’, as Miles described, such ‘excitements are attainable at so easy a rate is it strange that these children are fascinated and abandon themselves to crime?’21

The prevailing view was, as Miles told the House of Lords, ‘among the uneducated the human mind is more prone to evil than virtue’.22 Dickens had seen it too: ‘All people who have led hazardous and forbidden lives are, in a certain sense, imaginative and if their imaginations are not filled with good things they will choke themselves with bad ones.’23

The juvenile ‘delinquents’ were seen as ‘a race…different from the rest of Society, not only in thoughts, habits and manners, but even in appearance, possessing, moreover, a language exclusively…their own’,24 a generation living the reality of Fagin that ‘every man’s his own friend, my dear…he hasn’t as good a one as himself anywhere’,25 pitting their cunning and daring against the world and seeing punishment and vice as signs of manhood.

By the early 1800s young delinquents accounted for nearly thirty percent of Britain’s committals, but the law allowed no mercy or differentiation for children in the way in which they were charged, the form of trial and punishment, and how and where it was to be enforced. Even young children faced the scaffold: in 1814 five children under fourteen were hanged at the Old Bailey, the youngest just eight, more than 100 children under fourteen were sentenced to death for theft in the thirty-five years leading up to Oliver Twist, and the death sentence for those under sixteen would last until 1908.

Notwithstanding all the laws against ‘delinquency’, some struggled to grasp a long-standing legal principle of doli incapax where a child of seven and under was capable of ‘mischief’ but not criminally punishable because they were deemed too young to know right from wrong, incapable of being sorry and understanding. The 17th century jurist Sir Matthew Hale articulated that, ‘an infant of eight years of age, or above, may commit homicide, and shall be hanged for it…if it may appear that he had knowledge of good and evil, and of the peril and danger of that offence.’26 A century on Sir William Blackstone reinforced Hale but argued that, ‘the capability of doing ill…is not so much measured by years and days as by the strength of the delinquent’s understanding and judgment’.27

The British newspapers reaching Hobart Town reported some magistrates and judges refused to try young children, declaring them ‘an infant under the age of discretion’28 but others, like Sir Joseph Littledale, refused to accept ‘that a child of ten years is incapable of committing [a] felony’.29

Death sentences for children were mostly commuted, but Britain’s ruling classes had long had more taste for punishment than nurture, and what some called the ‘demon of obstinancy’ meant law-makers, judges and magistrates could not see that unjust laws unjustly enforced ‘subvert[ing] the very foundation they would establish’.30 As the chaplain of Coldbath Fields House of Correction lamented:

When a boy is taken into custody…he loses his character, and it is with the greatest difficulty he can ever come into society again; he then falls into crime as a matter of necessity; he becomes a continual criminal, and we do not lose sight of him until he either dies or commits some crime that will subject him to transportation.31

Reformist voices such as Quaker Elizabeth Fry had the same concern, arguing the ‘abandoned wickedness’ of incarceration meant prisoners were punished but gained ‘nothing…but confirmation in the habits of depravity, and afterwards turned out again upon the public, fitted by the punishment of one crime for the perpetration of others. Thus both parties are losers’.32

Calls to separate imprisoned juveniles had been advocated since the 1810s, but were not seriously or uniformly trialled. So it remained common in Newgate prison, alongside the Central Criminal Court, to see boys like John Walsby, just eight, among seasoned and often drunken men and women criminals while awaiting trial after ‘sneaking’ one shilling and one pence from a till so he could buy ‘bread, and cakes and fruit’. As The Times reported: ‘To look at this babe in the gaol of Newgate, under a warrant…which is authority for the detention of the most hardened ruffian, would make many people laugh but many more weep at such a mockery.’33 Even through to the 1850s, young children could still be found in Houses of Correction: the governor of Westminster Bridewell ‘had under his charge one boy not much over five years old and ten more under eight years’.34 When asked why they had stolen some boots, many an eight-year-old would to reply, ‘Cause I haven’t got none of my own.’35

But time in prison was a badge of honour to some. The Governor of Coldbath said:

The punishment of prison is no punishment to them; I do not mean that they would not rather be out of prison than in it, but they are so well able to bear the punishment, and the prison allowance of food is so good, and their spirits so buoyant, that the consequences are most deplorable.36

Some, like the Metropolitan journal in London, asked a deeper question:

Is not prevention better than remedy? Is it not the duty of a paternal government to put an end to the nursery of crime? By not interfering with this juvenile delinquency, they procure a continual supply of subjects for the hulks, the colonies and the gallows.37

But the prevailing answer was an Old Testament belief that ‘juvenile crime is a moral disease’38 and regardless of age or ignorance those who made the wrong moral choice deserved to be severely punished under God’s law and man’s law.

Some, like magistrate William Miles, gave the House of Lords another view, that the absence of fear of prison, and easy money and gratification, gave juvenile boys ‘the means to banish thought’,39 and so:

the listening victim is dazzled and allured on step by step from the path of virtue, until he reaches that fatal point where he loses sight for ever of all moral restraint upon his actions, and the broad and easy road of vice is full before him.40

Was it possible that some young boys might reach this ‘fatal point’ of blindness to all moral restraint? To tread a lifepath from playfully tossing skittles to fatally wielding a stone-hammer?

It now seemed so in Hobart Town, with two boys charged with the murder of an overseer. Two boys whose names had now emerged. They were Henry Sparkes and Charles Campbell.