Prisoner for BlasphemyFoote, G. W. (George William)
Religion
Prisoner for Blasphemy
Foote, G. W. (George William)
Blasphemy; Trials (Blasphemy) -- Great Britain
My second day in Newgate passed like the first. Prison life affords few
variations; the days roll by with drear monotony like wave after wave
over a spent swimmer's head. We enjoyed Judge North's "opportunity" to
prepare our fresh defence in the way I have already described. We were
locked up in our brick vaults twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four;
we walked for an hour after breakfast in the courtyard; and the fifteen
minutes allowed for the "interview with two visitors" was, as before,
religiously deducted from the sixty minutes allowed for "exercise."
Mr. Wheeler sent in more books and papers, and I devoted my whole time,
except that occupied in answering letters, to preparing another speech
for Monday.
Sunday was a miserably dull day. No visits are allowed in that sacred
interval, a regulation which presses with great severity on the poorer
prisoners, whose relatives and friends are freer to visit them on Sunday
than during the week.
The confinement was beginning to tell on me. My life had been
exceptionally active, physically and mentally, and this prison life was
as stagnant as the air of my cell. Thus "cabin'd cribbed, confined,"
I felt all my vital functions half arrested. Dejection I did not
experience; my spirits were light and fresh; but the body revolted
against its ill-treatment, and recorded its protest on the conscious
brain.
How grateful was the brief hour's exercise on the Sunday morning! The
muffled roar of the great city was hushed, and the silence served to
emphasise every visual phenomenon. Even the air of that city courtyard,
hemmed in by lofty walls, seemed a breath of Paradise. I threw back my
shoulders, expanding the chest through mouth and nostrils, and lifted my
face to the sky. A pale gleam of sunshine pierced through the canopy of
London smoke. It might have looked ghastly to a resident in the country,
unused to the light London calls day, but to one immured in a prison
cell it was an irradiation of glory. The mind expanded under the
lustre; imagination preened its wings, and sped beyond the haze into the
everlasting blue.
Gallant Lovelace, in durance vile, boasted his unfettered mind, and
sang--
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."
True, but the model prison was not invented then, nor was the silent
system in vogue. Lovelace's apartment was, perhaps, not so scrupulously
clean as mine, but it commanded a finer prospect. He knew nothing of the
horror of opaque windows, and his iron bars did not exclude the air and
light.
At eleven o'clock my cell door was opened, and an officer asked me if I
would like to go to chapel. "Yes," I replied, for I was curious to see
what a religious service in Newgate was like, and any interruption of
the day's monotony was welcome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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