eel the
sensation of crime in the air. First and foremost one must place the
murder of Montague Tigg.

The grinning Carker of "Dombey and Son" is ground to death under the
wheels of a locomotive at a French railway station; Quilp, of "The Old
Curiosity Shop," is dramatically drowned; Bill Sykes' neck is broken by
the rope meant for his escape; Bradley Headstone and his enemy go together
to the bottom of the canal; while the mysterious Krook, of "Bleak House"
is disposed of by spontaneous combustion.

Certainly such a gallery of horrors could not be invented purely out of an
imaginative mind, and must admittedly have been the product of intimate
first-hand knowledge of criminals and their ways.

Doubtless there was a tendency to improve moral conditions as things went
on. Britain is not the dying nation which the calamity howlers would have
us infer.

In the year 1800, there were--notwithstanding the comparative sparseness
of population--eighteen prisons in London alone, whereas in 1850, when
Dickens was in his prime and when population had enormously increased,
that number had been reduced one-third.

In the early days the jailor in many prisons received no salary, but made
his livelihood from the fees he could extort from the prisoners and their
friends; and in some cases he paid for the privilege of holding office.
Not only had a prisoner to pay for his food and for the straw on which he
slept, but, if he failed to pay, he would be detained until he did so.

In Cold Bath Fields prison, men, women, and children were indiscriminately
herded together, without employment or wholesome control; while smoking,
gaming, singing, and every species of brutalizing conversation obtained.

At the Fleet Prison there was a grate or iron-barred window facing
Farringdon Street, and above it was inscribed, "Pray remember the poor
prisoners having no allowance," while a small box was placed on the
window-sill to receive the charity of the passers-by, and a man ran to and
fro, begging coins "for the poor prisoners in the Fleet."

At Newgate, the women usually numbered from a hundred to one hundred and
thirty, and each had only eighteen inches breadth of sleeping-room, and
all were "packed like slaves in the hold of a slave-ship."

And Marshalsea, which Dickens incorporated into "David Copperfield" and
"Little Dorrit," was quite as sordid, to what extent probably none knew so
well as Dickens, _pere et fils_, for here it was that t