[Charles Dickens, American Notes, Philadelphia, Eastern Penitentiary, Buried Alive (1842)]
“[119] …. Standing at the central point, and looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occassionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemakers’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and fade of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired.
He never hears of wife and children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison-officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair. His name, and crime, and term of suffering, are unknown, even to the officer who delivers him his daily food. There is a number over his cell door, and in a book of which the [119] [120] governor of the prison has one copy, and the moral instructor another; this is the index of his history. Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence; and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated …. [120]
[120] …. Every cell has double doors: the outer one of sturdy oak, the outer of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his food is handed …. [120] The first man I saw, was seated at his loom, at work. He had been there six years, and was to remain, I think, three more. He had been convicted as a receiver of stolen goods, but even after his long imprisonment, denied his guilt, and said he had been hardly dealt by. It was his second offence. He stopped his work when we went in, took off his spectacles, and answered freely to everything that was said to him, but always with a strange kind of pause first, and in a low, thoughtful voice. He wore a paper hat of his own making, and was pleased to have it noticed and commended.
He had very ingeniously manufactured a sort of Dutch
clock from some disregarded odd and ends; and his vinegar-bottle served
for the
pendulum. Seeing me interested in this [121] contrivance, he looked up
at it
with a great deal of pride, and said that he had been thinking of
improving it,
and that he hoped the hammer and a little piece of broken glass beside
it “would
play music before long.”
He had extracted some colours from the yarn
with which
he worked, and painted a few poor figures on the wall. One, of a female,
over
the door, he called “The Lady of the Lake.”
[121]
[Charles Dickens, American Notes, (1842)] ".... [106] Mount up these other stair with no less caution (there are traps and pitfalls here, for those who are not so well escorted as ourselves) into the housetop; where the bare beams and rafters meet overhead, and calm night looks down through the crevices in the roof. Open the door of one of these cramped hutches full of sleeping negroes. Pah! They have a charcoal fire within; there is a smell of singeing clothes, or flesh, so close they gather round the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgement-hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rates to move away in quest of better lodgings. Here too are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep, underground chambers, where they dance and game; the walls bedecked with rough designs of ships, and forts, and flags, and American eagles out of number; ruined houses, open to the street, whence, through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show: hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder: all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here. [106] ....
…. [108] What! Do you thrust your common offenders against the police discipline of the town, into such holes as these? Do men and women, against whom no crime is proved, lie here all night in perfect darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapours which encircle that flagging lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and offensive stench! Why, such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world! Look at them, man – you, who see them every night, and keep the keys. Do you see them every night, and keep the keys. Do you see what they are? Do you know how drains are made below the streets, and wherein these human sewers differ, except in being always stagnant?Well, he don’t know. He has had five-an-twenty young women locked up in this very cell at one time, and you’d hardly realize what handsome faces there were among ’em. In God’s name! Shut the door upon the wretched creature who is in it now, and put its screen before a place, quite unsurpassed in all the vice, neglect, and devilry, of the world old town in Europe. Are people really left all night, untried in those black sties? –Every night.
The watch is set at seven in the evening. The magistrate opens his court at five in the morning. That is the earliest hour at which the first prisoner can be released; and if an officer appear against him, he is not [109] taken out till nine o’clock or ten. –But if any one among them die in the interval, as one man did, not long ago? Then he is half-eaten by the rats in an hour’s time; as that man was; and there an end." [109]
[Arthur Lawrence, Sir Arthur Sullivan Life Story, Letters and Reminiscences, Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1899, reprinted Kessinger Publishing 2009, quotes from Sir Arthur’s correspondence c1899] “I found America in ‘79 very much what England probably was sixty years ago. Away from the more intellectual centres one would have described the disposition and attitude of mind of the American people as being ‘provincial.’ I am speaking of America twenty years ago, and of course that nation has made great strides since that time. It was a significant and unpleasant fact that all artists were looked at askance.
An artist had no social position at all in New York, and I think this especially applied to the musician. It is hardly worth while mentioning it now, perhaps, as American views on the subject have changed so completely, but as an instance of what I mean, I remember that, on one occasion, having accepted an invitation to dine one night at one of the best houses in New York, there was one vacant chair. It should have been occupied by a woman who was noted for her good looks and her good social position.
I afterwards discovered that her husband had prevailed upon her not to dine with us, as there was a distinguished Professor of Music with us. He thought it was so curious that she should be asked to sit down to the same table with a musician! If I remember rightly, he was a prosperous watchmaker in Broadway. Music in America in ’79 was in a very backward state in many important respects. When I went over there in ’85 a great change had taken place, and everywhere much greater consideration was shown to music – and to musicians.”[152f]
[Arthur Lawrence, Sir Arthur Sullivan Life Story, Letters and Reminiscences, Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1899, reprinted Kessinger Publishing 2009, quotes from Sir Arthur’s correspondence c1862]“I went about a good deal with Dickens. He rushed about tremendously all the time, and I was often with him. His French as not particularly good. It was quite an Englishman’s French, but he managed to make himself understood, and interviewed everybody. Of course he was much my senior, but I have never met any one whom I liked better. There was one negative [sic] quality which I always appreciated. There was not the least suspicion of the poseur about him. His electric vitality was extreme, but it was inspiring and not overpowering. He always gave one the impression of being immensely interested in everything, listening with the most charming attention and keenness to all one might say, however youthful and inexperienced one’s opinion might be. He was a delightful companion, but never obtruded himself upon one. In fact he was the best of good company.”[53]
