Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century -- Fiction
* The effect of this little bit of science may be thus
stated--Men for two years had been punished as refractory
for not making all day two thousand revolutions per hour of
a 15 lb. crank, when all the while it was a _45 lb. crank_
they had been vainly struggling against all day. The
proportions of this gory lie never varied. Each crank tasked
the Sisyphus three times what it professed to do. It was
calculated that four prisoners, on an average crank marked
10 lb., had to exert an aggregate of force equal to one
horse; and this exertion was prolonged, day after day, far
beyond a horse's power of endurance, and in many cases on a
modicum of food so scanty that no horse ever foaled, so fed,
could have drawn an armchair a mile.
Five minutes more Mr. Eden had placed in Mr. Lacy's hands a list of
prisoners to whom a free pardon ought now to be extended, some having
suffered a somewhat shorter period but a greater weight of misery than
the judges had contemplated in their several sentences; and others being
so shaken and depressed by separate confinement pushed to excess that
their life and reason now stood in peril for want of open air, abundant
light, and free intercourse with their species. At the head of these
was poor Strutt, an old man crushed to clay by separate confinement
recklessly applied. So alarming was this man's torpor to Mr. Eden
that after trying in vain to interest him in the garden, that observer
ventured on a very strong measure. He had learned from Strutt that he
could play the fiddle; what does he do but runs and fetches his own
violin into the garden, tunes it, and plays some most inspiriting,
rollicking old English tunes to him! A spark came into the fishy eye
of Strutt. At the third tune the old fellow's fingers began to work
impatiently. Mr. Eden broke off directly, put fiddle and bow into
Strutt's hand, and ran off to the prison again to arrest melancholy,
despair, lunacy, stagnation, mortification, putrefaction, by every art
that philosophy and mother-wit could suggest to Christianity.
This determined man had collected his teaching mechanics again, and he
had them all into the prison the moment Hawes was out. He could not get
the cranks condemned as monsters--the day was not yet come for that; so
he got them condemned as liars, and in their place tasks of rational and
productive labor were set to most of the prisoners, and London written
to for six more trades and arts.
A copy of the prison-rules was cut into eight portions and eight female
prisoners set to compose each her portion. Copies to be printed on the
morrow and put up in every cell, according to the wise provision of Rule
10, defied by the late jailer for an obvious reason. Thus in an hour
after the body of Hawes had passed through that gate a firm and adroit
hand was wiping his gloomy soul out of the cells as we wipe a blotch of
ink off a written page.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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