Excerpt from The History and Romance of Crime From the Earliest Time to the Present Day
The gaol of Newgate may be taken as the type of all the early prisons, the physical expression of manifold neglect and mismanagement from the thirteenth century down to our own times. The case of all prisoners in England was desperate, their sufferings heartrending, their treatment an indelible disgrace to a nation claiming to be civilized. The place of durance was sometimes underground, a dungeon, or subterranean cellar, into which the prisoners were lowered, to fight with rats for the meagre pittance of food thrown to them through a trap-door. These terrible oubliettes were too often damp and noisome, half a foot deep in water, or with an open sewer running through the center of the floor. They had no chimneys, no fire-place, no barrack beds ; the wretched inmates huddled together for warmth upon heaps of filthy rags or bundles of rotten straw reeking with foul exhalations. there was not the slightest attempt at ventilation, as we understand the word.
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