The Lady and Her Monsters by Roseanne Montillo Page B

By then it must have occurred to him that an article detailing the prison’s interior—the building, the prisoners, their doings, and how they spent their final moments—would entertain his readers. The dismal setting no doubt compelled him to visit, but he was probably also baffled by those who continually chose to attend the executions, because he made it clear from the beginning that he was writing for them. He wondered how it was possible that those moving to and fro about the city and in the vicinity of the prison could go by “without bestowing a hasty glance at its small, gated windows, and a transient thought upon the condition of the unhappy beings immured in its dismal cells.”

    Newgate Prison’s inner courtyard during the eighteenth century. It is here that most criminals where brought prior to their public executions, including George Foster, who underwent galvanism experiments at the hands of Giovanni Aldini. Charles Dickens, as did many others, passed by the prison on a daily basis, and he was prompted to write his famous essay “A Visit to Newgate.”
    He hoped to see those dismal cells as well as a glimpse of those unhappy beings inside who were on their way to the gallows. On more than one occasion he witnessed criminals being hung and used their lives and experiences in his books, such as Bleak House. But all in all, he found it deplorable that such occasions were often seen as amusing sociable gatherings, as if the passing of a human being at the hands of another carried with it a note of joviality.
    â€œI did not see one token in all that immense crowd of any emotion suitable for the occasion,” he wrote in a letter following the hanging of a famous prisoner. “No sorrow, no salutary terror, no abhorrence, no seriousness, nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow creatures to be so odious.”
    On a gray and desolate day akin to those described in many of his novels, Charles Dickens walked around the prison. He was struck most by the cells of the condemned, where the prisoners stayed just prior to their execution. “It was a stone dungeon,” he later wrote, “eight feet long by six wide, with a bench at the upper end, under which were a common rug, a Bible and a prayer book. An iron candlestick was fixed on the wall at the side; and a small high window in the back admitted as much air and light as could struggle in between a double row of heavy, crossed iron bars. It contained no other furniture of any description.”
    The institution was dilapidated and suffused by the odor of death and suffering. As Dickens looked at what was then an empty cell, he began to conjure the shape of a man, a doomed young man crouching upon himself. “Conceive the situation of a man,” he wrote. “Spending his last night on earth in this cell . . . [having] neglected in his feverish restlessness the timely warnings of his spiritual consoler; and now that the illusion is at last dispelled, now that eternity is before him and guilt behind, now that his fears of death amount almost to madness, and an overwhelming sense of his helpless, hopeless state rushes upon him, he is lost and stupefied, and he has neither thoughts to turn to, nor power to call upon.”
    Much like the phantom criminal convicted and awaiting execution in Dickens’s article, George Foster also found himself alone in his madness and fears of death. But his fears—as with those of the others condemned to die—must have gone beyond the actual moments on the gallows. Like many, he also must have feared eternity, as well as the possibility of not getting there at all.
    In the Murder Act, passed in 1752, dissection had been added to the sentence of hanging for the specific purpose of inflicting “further terror and a