its name from a mill belonging to Westminster Abbey, the prison opened in 1816 as London’s largest, a £500,000 English Bastille lauded as the greatest in Europe for its revolutionary panopticon (Greek for all-seeing) design allowing centrally positioned guards to provide constant surveillance over 1500 transportation prisoners in six star shaped blocks.
The sights, sounds and smells of the multi-turreted stone fortress never left convicts who had passed through. Sitting on marshland and surrounded by a stagnant moat, its cold, damp and gloomy passages fuelled cholera, malaria, dysentery and scurvy. The ‘revolutionary’ Millbank was soon condemned for its design and conditions. The new penal science of dark, silent cells and isolation was, according to some newspapers emerging as a conscience voice, an abomination, an ‘unnatural…modern cruelty devised to impair the health, destroy the constitution, and obliterate the mind’.13 Reforming journalists described Millbank as ‘one of the most successful realisations, on a large scale, of the ugly in architecture, being an ungainly combination of the madhouse with the fortress’.14
But thousands of small boys endured this madhouse-fortress. Reforming journalist, social researcher and future Punch magazine founder, Henry Mayhew lamented ‘the little desperate malefactors…many are so young they seem better fitted to be conveyed to the prison in a perambulator than in the lumbering and formidable prison van’.15 One governor even recalled ‘a little boy six and half years old sentenced to transportation’.16
The Morning Chronicle — the first newspaper to steadily employ Dickens — had earlier declared ‘there is but one remedy — to place as much gun powder under the foundation as may suffice to blow the whole fabric into the air’.17 But sheer numbers of prisoners meant it could not be blown up, nor could little boys who veered from the ‘right path’ be spared.
Under pressure from reformers, some officials proclaimed they were endeavouring to better classify and manage prisoners based on age, criminal record, and behaviour, and take greater account of the capacity of young boys without education or moral guidance to understand the consequences of their thievery or falling under the influence of older boys and men. But the reality was a shadow of any stated intent, and houses of correction and prisons commonly held ‘thirty or forty [to] sleep together; and as they are, for young ones, of the very worst description of offenders, the consequence may easily be imagined’.18
Millbank was no exception. In between what Dickens described as a ‘melancholy waste’19 of ‘making money from old rope’ — picking apart thick strands of oakum, the old tarred rope fibres used between planks of a ship and sealed with hot pitch, for the prison to sell for re-use or other hard labour tasks — younger, smaller and weaker boys had to survive the same code of self-interest and self-preservation they had known on the street.
Bigger, more hardened boys, known as nobs, quickly educated or intimidated others to remain silent about their bullying, theft of food, corruption or sexual abuse. Under the code of the nobs, and the ancient code of ‘honour among thieves’, staying silent offered the best chance of avoiding punishment. Boys also had to obey a strict official code that, by the late 1830s, saw more younger offenders kept in silence and separation to prevent ‘contamination’ and allow longer periods of ‘reflection’ in the hope they would become more repentant. Breaking the silence, by word or gesture — even a meaningless smile to a fellow inmate — risked being strait-jacketed or shackled for days; sometimes soaked in water, beaten or whipped; or being ‘broken’ by spending time in ‘solitary confinement like a dog in a kennel’.20
Some boys baulked at the two codes of intimidating wardens or fellow boys and the appalling conditions. ‘Prisoners showed their resistance in various small ways such as working as slowly as possible, talking during their work, and stealing other prisoner’s products and passing them as one’s own…prisoners also threatened or bribed guards and other prison workers.’21 But some were broken: ‘Few days passed but some desperate wretch, maddened by silence and solitude, smashed up everything breakable in his cell in a vain rebellion against a system stronger and more merciless than death.’22
Millbank Prison Mayhew. Image courtesy Alamy Stock Photos, A67BWD
The ‘modern’ imposition of ‘darkness’ was a mental punishment seen to be more painful than the physical, and it would follow convicts all the way to Port Arthur and Point Puer. Dickens was appalled when he witnessed prisoners in America never looking upon a human countenance or hearing a human voice:
He is a man buried alive, to be dug out in the slow round of years, and in the mean time [sic] dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair…wasted in that stone coffin…hears spirits tempting him to beat his brains out on the wall.23
Dickens condemned it as ‘cruel and wrong’ and was supported by the Illustrated London News, the world’s first illustrated weekly news magazine, which called for an end to such ‘experiments…[that] degrade the sacred name of justice…make the law monstrous…a disgrace and sin’.24
Unlike some, Sparkes and Campbell did not have to endure Millbank’s experiments for a long period. Five weeks after his sentence in Nottingham, Sparkes was among those removed by longboat from Millbank to the prison hulk Euryalus in February 1839. Campbell followed the next year, two months after his sentence in Aberdeen.
Prison hulks, another penal experiment and expediency, were introduced in 1776 after the American Revolution. The decision was initiated as a ‘temporary’ two-year utilisation of unseaworthy and de-masted Naval and commercial ships as floating prisons, to help cope with the rising tide of prisoners and overcrowded gaols.
The first prison hulk was the Justitia, named for the Roman personification of justice and moral force, widely portrayed as Lady Justice with a blindfold signifying the law being applied with no regard to wealth or power. But few of wealth and power were to be found on the Justitia and what became a fleet of hulks at Chatham Thames estuary in north Kent — where Dickens spent some childhood years and incorporated some of his memories into Great Expectations — and Sheerness, Deptford, Woolwich, Gosport, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Cork. The ‘temporary’ hulk fleet lasted eighty years.
Some boys would have anticipated that after stints in Houses of Correction, regional gaols and a few months at Millbank they would soon be leaving such misery behind, about to embark on a voyage to a new and perhaps better opportunity — even an adventure. But their hopes were dashed, Sparkes and Campbell spending seven long months on Euralyus at Chatham in conditions that would cause even a resilient and optimistic boy to question his sentence to the other side of the world.
Gloriously launched by the British Navy in 1803, Euryalus was named after one of the Argonauts, the mythical Greek band of heroes accompanying Jason in his search for the Golden Fleece. As a 36-gun frigate, the ship had an illustrious naval history in the Napoleonic Wars accompanying Lord Nelson at the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, and the War of 1812, but there was nothing heroic or golden about it as an aged, de-masted prison hulk.
The outline of dismembered masts in the gloomy Thames mist might have reminded Sparkes and Campbell of the gibbets which horrified boys in Nottingham and Aberdeen. The hulks certainly had their ghosts: death rates had been as high as one in four when the first hulks were employed and were still one in ten by the turn of the 19th century. They were the pits for the unpitied, the physical and psychological conditions so bad some prisoners averred a preference to hang rather than endure what would come to be seen ‘of all the places of confinements that British history records…the most brutalising, the most demoralising and the most horrible’.25
Sparkes and Campbell were a little more fortunate than their predecessors, who were held in irons alongside older youths and adults before calls for better protection of children led to the Captivity
