of Dr Price, from whom they underwent a revision, and received occasionally considerable alterations. With his papers thus corrected, Mr Howard came to the press at Warrington; and first he read them all over carefully to me, which perusal was repeated sheet by sheet, as they were printed. As new facts and observations were continually suggesting themselves to his mind, he put the matter of them upon paper as they occurred, and then requested me to clothe them in such expressions as I thought proper. On these occasions such was his diffidence, that I found it difficult to make him acquiesce in his own language, when, as frequently happened, it was unexceptionable. Of this additional matter, some was interwoven with the text, but the greater part was necessarily thrown into notes." So intent was he upon the publication of the work, that, "for the purpose," we are told by his biographer, Mr Brown, "of being near the scene of his labours, he took lodgings in a house close to his printer's shop; and during a very severe winter he was always called up by two in the morning, though he did not retire to rest till ten. His reason for this early rising was, that in the morning he was least disturbed in his work of revising the sheets as they came from the press. At seven he regularly dressed for the day, and had his breakfast; when, punctually at eight, he repaired to the printing-office, and remained there till the workmen went to dinner at one, when he returned to his lodgings, and putting some bread and raisins, or other dried fruit in his pocket, generally took a walk in the outskirts of the town, eating, as he walked, his hermit fare, which, with a glass of water on his return, was the only dinner he took. When he had returned to the printing-office, he generally remained there until the men left work, and then repaired to Mr Aikin's house, to go through with him any sheets which might have been composed during the day; or, if there were nothing upon which he wished to consult him, he would either spend an hour with some friend, or return to his own lodgings, where he took his tea or coffee in lieu of supper, and at his usual hour retired to bed."

In April 1777 appeared the work which had cost him so much labour. Its title was, "The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons. By John Howard, F.R.S." Although the work was very bulky, consisting of 520 quarto pages, with four large plates, yet 66 so zealous was he," says Dr Aikin, "to diffuse information, and so determined to obviate any idea that he meant to repay his expenses by the profitable trade of bookmaking, that he insisted on fixing the price of the volume so low, that, had every copy been sold, he would still have presented the public with all the plates and great part of the printing." Besides, he distributed copies profusely among all persons who possessed, or might possibly possess, influence in carrying his benevolent views into effect. "As soon as the book appeared,"

continues Dr Aikin, "the world was astonished at the mass of valuable materials accumulated by a private unaided individual, through a course of prodigious labour, and at the constant hazard of life, in consequence of the infectious diseases prevalent in the scenes of his inquiries. The cool good sense and moderation of his narrative, contrasted with that enthusiastic ardour which must have impelled him to the undertaking, were not less admired; and he was immediately regarded as one of the extraordinary characters of the age, and as the leader in all plans of meliorating the condition of that wretched part of the community for whom he interested himself."

To give an idea of the extent of the evils of the prison system in the time of Howard, and of the thorough manner in which these were taken cognisance of by him, we will present our readers with an abridgment of the introductory section of his work, in which, before passing to his special report on the state of the various prisons which he had visited, he gives a summary, or "General View of Distress in Prisons." The extracts will be found not only interesting in their connexion with Howard's life, but also interesting in themselves.

"There are prisons," he begins, "into which whoever looks will, at first sight of the people confined, be convinced that there is some great error in the management of them; their sallow, meagre countenances declare, without words, that they are very miserable. Many who went in healthy, are in a few months changed to emaciated, dejected objects. Some are seen pining under diseases, 'sick and in prison,' expiring on the floors, in loathsome cells, of pestilential fevers and confluent small-pox; victims, I must not say to the cruelty, but I will say to the inattention, of sheriffs and gentlemen in the commission of the peace. The cause of this distress is, that many prisons are scantily supplied, and some almost totally destitute, of the necessaries of life.

"Food.-There are several bridewells in which prisoners have no allowance of food at all. In some, the keeper farms what little is allowed them; and where he engages to supply each prisoner with one or two pennyworths of bread a-day, I have known this shrunk to half, sometimes less than half the quantity-out of, or broken from, his own loaf. It will perhaps be askedDoes not their work maintain them? The answer to that question, though true, will hardly be believed. There are few bridewells in which any work is done, or can be done. The prisoners have neither tools nor materials of any kind, but spend their time in sloth, profaneness, and debauchery, to a degree which, in some of those houses that I have seen, is extremely shocking. . . . The same complaint-want of food-is to be found in many county jails. In above half of these debtors have no bread, although it is granted to the highwayman, the housebreaker, and the murderer; and medical assistance, which is provided for the latter,

is withheld from the former. In many of these jails, debtors who would work are not permitted to have any tools, lest they should furnish felons with them for escape, or other mischief. I have often seen these prisoners eating their water-soup (bread boiled in mere water), and heard them say, 'We are locked up, and almost starved to death.' As to the relief provided for debtors by the benevolent act 32d of George II., I did not find in all England and Wales, except the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, twelve debtors who had obtained from their creditors the fourpence a-day to which they had a right by that act. The truth is, some debtors are the most pitiable objects in our jails. To their wanting necessary food, I must add not only the demands of jailers, &c. for fees, but also the extortion of bailiffs. These detain in their houses (properly enough denominated spunging-houses), at an enormous expense, prisoners who have money. I know there is a legal provision against this oppression; but the mode of obtaining redress is attended with difficulty, and the abuse continues. The rapine of these extortioners needs some more effectual and easy check: no bailiff should be suffered to keep a public-house. . . . Felons have in some jails two pennyworth of bread a-day; in some, three halfpennyworth; in some, a pennyworth; in some, none. I often weighed the bread in different prisons, and found the penny loaf seven ounces and a half to eight ounces: the other loaves in proportion. It is probable that, when this allowance was fixed by its value, near double the quantity that the money will now purchase might be bought for it; yet the allowance continues unaltered, and it is not uncommon to see the whole purchase, especially of the smaller sums, eaten at breakfast-which is sometimes the case when they receive their pittance but once in two days; and then, on the following day, they must fast. This allowance being so far short of the cravings of nature, and in some prisons lessened by farming to the jailer, many criminals are half-starved; such of them as at their commitment were in health, come out almost famished, scarcely able to move, and for weeks incapable of labour.

"Water.--Many prisons have no water. This defect is frequent in bridewells and town jails. In the felons' courts of some county jails there is no water; in some places where there is water, prisoners are always locked up within doors, and have no more than the keeper or his servants think fit to bring them; in one place they were limited to three pints a-day each-a scanty provision for drink and cleanliness.

"Air.-And as to air, my reader will judge of the malignity of that breathed in prisons, when I assure him that my clothes were, in my first journeys, so offensive, that in a postchaise I could not bear the windows drawn up, and was therefore obliged to travel commonly on horseback. The leaves of my memorandum-book were often so tainted, that I could not use it till

after spreading it an hour or two before the fire; and even my antidote a vial of vinegar-has, after using it in a few prisons, become intolerably disagreeable. I did not wonder that in those journeys many jailers made excuses, and did not go with me into the felons' wards. From hence any one may judge of the probability there is against the health and life of prisoners crowded in close rooms, cells, and subterranean dungeons for fourteen or fifteen hours out of the four-and-twenty. In some of these caverns the floor is very damp; in others there is an inch or two of water; and the straw, or bedding, is laid on such floors-seldom on barrack bedsteads. Where prisoners are not kept in underground cells, they are often confined to their rooms, because there is no court belonging to the prison-which is the case in many city and town jails; or because the walls round the yard are ruinous, or too low for safety; or because the jailer has the ground for his own use. Some jails have no sewers or vaults; and in those that have, if they be not properly attended to, they are, even to a visitor, offensive beyond description. How noxious, therefore, to people constantly confined in those prisons! One cause why the rooms in some prisons are so close is the window tax, which the jailers have to pay; this tempts them to stop the windows, and stifle the prisoners.

Bedding. In many jails, and in most bridewells, there is no allowance of bedding or straw for prisoners to sleep on; and if by any means they get a little, it is not changed for months together, so that it is offensive, and almost worn to dust. Some lie upon rags, others upon the bare floors. When I have complained of this to the keepers, the justification has been, 'The county allows no straw; the prisoners have none but at my cost.'

"Morals. I have now to complain of what is pernicious to the morals of prisoners; and that is, the confining all sorts of prisoners together-debtors and felons, men and women, the young beginner and the old offender; and with all these, in some counties, such as are guilty of misdemeanours only. In some jails you see and who can see it without sorrow?-boys of twelve or fourteen eagerly listening to the stories told by practised and experienced criminals of their adventures, successes, stratagems, and escapes.

"Lunatics.—In some few jails are confined idiots and lunatics. These serve for sport to idle visitants at assizes, and other times of general resort. Many of the bridewells are crowded and offensive, because the rooms which were designed for prisoners are occupied by the insane. When these are not kept separate, they disturb and terrify other prisoners.

"Jail Fever.-I am ready to think that none who have given credit to what is contained in the foregoing pages, will wonder at the havoc made by the jail fever. From my own observations in 1773, 1774, and 1775, I was fully convinced that many more

prisoners were destroyed by it than were put to death by all the public executions in the kingdom.* This frequent effect of confinement in prison seems generally understood, and shows how full of emphatical meaning is the curse of a severe creditor, who pronounces his debtor's doom to rot in jail. I believe I have learnt the full import of this sentence from the vast numbers who, to my certain knowledge, and some of them before my eyes, have perished by the jail fever. But the mischief is not confined to prisons. In Baker's Chronicle, p. 353, that historian, mentioning the assize held in Oxford in 1577 (called, from its fatal consequences, the Black Assize), informs us that all who were present died within forty hours-the lord chief baron, the sheriff, and about three hundred more'-all being infected by the prisoners who were brought into court. Lord Bacon observes, that 'the most pernicious infection next the plague, is the smell of a jail when the prisoners have been long, and close, and nastily kept; whereof,' he says, 'we have had in our time experience twice or thrice, when both the judges that sat upon the jail, and numbers of those who attended the business, or were present, sickened and died.' At the Lent assize in Taunton, 1730, some prisoners who were brought thither from Ivelchester jail infected the court; and Lord Chief Baron Pengelly, Sir James Sheppard, sergeant, John Pigot, Esq. sheriff, and some hundreds besides, died of the jail distemper. At Axminster, a little town in Devonshire, a prisoner discharged from Exeter jail in 1755 infected his family with that disease, of which two of them died; and many others in that town afterwards. The numbers that were carried off by the same malady in London in 1750-two judges, the lord mayor, one alderman, and many of inferior rank -are well known. It were easy to multiply instances of the mischief; but those which have been mentioned are, I presume, sufficient to show, even if no mercy were due to prisoners, that the jail distemper is a national concern of no small importance.†

* It may be necessary to remind our readers here that the annual number of public executions in Howard's time was fearfully large.

+ Of the famous "Black Assize" at Oxford, mentioned in the text as an instance of the malignity of the jail fever, the following is the account given by the chronicler Stowe :-"The 4th, 5th, and 6th days of July 1577 were holden the assizes at Oxford, where was arraigned and condemned one Rowland Jenkes for his seditious tongue; at which time there arose such a damp, that almost all were smothered. Very few escaped that were not taken at that instant. The jurors died presently. Shortly after died Sir Robert Bell, lord chief baron; Sir Robert D'Olie, Sir William Babington, Mr Weneman, Mr D'Olie, high sheriff; Mr Davers, Mr Harcourt, Mr Kirle, Mr Phetplace, &c. &c. There died in Oxford three hundred persons; and sickened there, but died in other places, two hundred and odd, from the 6th of July till the 12th of August, after which day died not one of that sickness, for one of them infected not another, nor any one woman or child died thereof." An occurrence so horrible gave rise of course to much speculation at the time, and various strange explanations were had recourse to, of which the following will serve as a specimen :-" Rowland