The Revival of Religion in the Eighteenth Century

John S. Simon

It is admitted that Wesley changed the spirit of the age in which he lived. It is impossible to estimate the magnitude of that change unless we form some idea of the condition of England at the time when the great evangelist did his revolutionary work. We will try to give details from which that condition may be judged.

Macaulay, in the famous third chapter of his History, which contains his sketch of England in the seventeenth century, affirms that, if the England of 1685 could, by some magical process, be set before our eyes,

“We should not know one landscape in a hundred, or one building in ten thousand. The country gentleman would not recognize his own fields. The inhabitant of the town would not recognize his own street. Everything has been changed but the great features of nature, and a few massive and durable works of human art. Everything would be strange to us. Many thousands of square miles, which are now rich corn-land and meadow, intersected by green hedgerows, and dotted with villages and pleasant countryseats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or fens abandoned to wild ducks. We should see straggling huts built of wood and covered with thatch, where we now see manufacturing towns and seaports renowned to the farthest ends of the world. The capital itself would shrink to dimensions not much exceeding those of its present suburb on the south of the Thames.
History, vol. 1. p. 292, Cabinet ed.

Macaulay’s vivid words come to our mind when we try to imagine the condition of England in the century, which witnessed the work and the triumphs of the Evangelical Revival. With slight alteration the description applies to the eighteenth century. We are so accustomed to the England of to day, with its huge towns and its abounding population that we find it difficult to understand that it was not until the nineteenth century that the aspect of the country was strikingly transformed. The best authorities agree that the population of England remained stationary from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century; then came a time of rapid increase, which began to manifest itself in the eighteenth century; but, as we have suggested, the increase did not reach an astonishing rate until the last century. Then the big towns spread over the green fields and began to swallow up the country.

England, at the close of Elizabeth’s reign, only contained two and a half millions of persons. In the time of James II, the population, according to Macaulay’s estimate, was between five and five and a half millions. But, in the seventeenth century, owing to the growth of agriculture, and probably to the increasing activity of the English in textile industries, there was an extraordinary addition to the population of the island. In his Six Centuries of Work and Wages, Professor Thorold Rogers estimates the population of England in 1772 as seven and a half, or, possibly, eight millions. It will be seen that, as compared with our present numbers, the population of England in the eighteenth century was small.

It may assist us to understand the condition of the country in respect of population if we note that, in 1700, London contained only about five hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. Fifty years later the population had increased by not more than fifty thousand. When John Wesley formed his Society in the Foundery, he lived in a city that contained less than six hundred thousand persons.

The size of London in the eighteenth century impresses us by its comparative insignificance. But when we turn to the country the contrast between the past and the present is even more striking. If we begin in the North we are instantly reminded of Macaulay’s description of the sparsely populated land. Lancashire in the seventeenth century was scantily peopled. It was one of the poorest of the English counties. It took rank with Cumberland. When the various counties were assessed for ship money in 1636, the two counties stood nearly at the bottom of the list in respect of opulence. As to the matter of population, in 1773 Liverpool contained 34,407 inhabitants, and Manchester and Salford 27,246. The return for Bolton and Little Bolton in the same year is 5,339; and for Bury, in 1772, 2,090. Yorkshire was sprinkled over with little towns, and was one of the poorest counties. Even Leeds, in 1775, only contained 17,121 persons.

Journeying from the sparsely populated North, and passing through the Midlands, we find that England, in the eighteenth century, was a country of small towns and little villages, which were encompassed by great stretches of waste and poorly cultivated land. We pause for a moment at Birmingham. A note on Wesley’s ‘Plan’ of the town informs us that in 1700 it contained 15,082 inhabitants. After that date it rapidly increased. In 1731 the population numbered about 24,000 persons.

Leaving Birmingham and journeying into the West, we still feel that the England of the eighteenth century was an unoccupied country. The only town that arrests our attention is Bristol. In the middle of the century its population was 33,000. In 1775 Bristol, Clifton, and Bedminster contained at least 35,440 inhabitants. When we remember that, in the eighteenth century, Bristol was the second city in the kingdom, we may judge of the size of other towns.

In these days, when a Manchester man travels to London in the morning, transacts business in the city, and returns to his northern home in the evening; when England thrills, as in a moment, at the report of some great event contained in the newspapers; when the heart-throb of London is felt throughout the Empire, it is difficult to understand the condition of isolation in which the capital stood during the eighteenth century. The problem does not only concern the relation of London to the provinces. It is a singular fact that the districts of London were divided from each other by sharp lines. Sydney, in his England and the English in the Eighteenth Century, says –

‘Though the extent of the city was commensurately limited, the inhabitants of the various districts which it comprised were not only almost totally unacquainted with each other, but were quite distinct in their habits, manners, and characteristics. Obviously, this common ignorance originated in the complete lack of communication which then existed, and which precluded one section of the community from paying frequent visits to the other section … Such a state of isolation tended to produce peculiarities. These peculiarities were never corrected, and the consequence was that those resident in the districts situated to the west of Temple Bar differed as much from the householders and shopkeepers of Bishopsgate Without, Whitechapel, Stepney, and the other localities which lay on the Essex side of the City, as they now do from the peasantry of Brittany, or the Western Pyrenees.’
Vol. i. p. 43.

The fact of the isolation of the districts into which London was divided in the eighteenth century has been overlooked by those historians who have only been conscious of the life, the thought, the acts, and the manners of the people who lived west of Temple Bar. The greatest discovery that the modern historian has made is the discovery of the people of England. In the eighteenth century, the leaders of the Church and of the State seemed to be ignorant of the existence of what we call ‘the masses.’ They little thought that, in the next century, the crowds that moved before their eyes as in a haze would emerge into sun-bright clearness, holding in their hands the mastery of the nation.

If the districts of London were isolated from each other, what shall be said of the relation of the provinces to the mother city? Picturesque writers and imaginative artists have done much to make the eighteenth century fascinating and charming. Sketches of old coaching days embellish the pages of daintily bound books, and the exquisite scenes which are pictured elicit from the unwary enthusiast a passionate cry for ‘the good old times.’ But hard facts interfere with artistic illusions. Let any man read the descriptions of the adventures of Arthur Young, as he plunged through the morasses and quagmires, which by courtesy were called roads, in his attempts to ascertain the agricultural condition of the counties of England, and he will sympathize with the strong language, which the testy traveller so frequently employed. Not only was the state of the roads abominable, but, even where they were sufficiently sound to bear the passage of a stage-coach, any attempt to travel from the provincial towns to London was fraught with so much peril that only the most urgent necessity induced men to undertake it. Let us select one instance. At the present time the journey from Liverpool to London is quickly and safely accomplished in a few hours. Sydney tells us that, in 1753, intercourse between Liverpool and London, as well as between that port and the interior of the country, was very rare. In that year there was not a single stagecoach that left Liverpool for any other town than London. The journey to the metropolis occupied four days, and this was considered very swift travelling.

The old Lancashire and Cheshire stage-wagons, which started from the Axe Inn, Aldermanbury, London, every Monday and Thursday, were ten days on the road in summer and eleven in winter.
Vol. ii. p. 19.

It was not until April 1774 that a stagecoach began to run between Liverpool, Warrington, and Manchester, and that only ran thrice a week. The expresses now flash along the line from Liverpool to Manchester every hour, and accomplish the journey in forty-five minutes. The flight of the express and the crawl of the stage-wagon mark the difference between the eighteenth and the present century.

If London was an isolated city, if the provincial towns were nearly cut off from communication with each other and with the capital, what was the condition of the villages? Professor Rogers says -

There is, I believe, no part of the Western world in which so little change was induced on the fortunes, on the life, and on the habits of the people, as there has been in rural England from the peaceful reign of Henry III to the earlier years of George III.
Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 86.

What does that statement imply? It implies that the villages were so completely shut off from all intercourse with the other parts of the country that, for five centuries and a half, that is, for fifteen or sixteen generations, there was no appreciable alteration in the condition of the rustics of England. Rogers further says -

Changes of dynasty, civil wars, changes in religion, had occurred without making a break, or leaving a memory, in the routine of rural existence.

Now and again, in these days, we are sometimes startled by reports of incidents in village life, which seem to indicate that for hundreds of years, in secluded spots, time has stood still. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the rural life of England proceeded along the dull dead level on which it had moved since the days of Henry

III.

When we have sufficiently considered the indisputable fact of the isolation of the capital from the towns, and of both from the villages and hamlets of England in the eighteenth century, we shall begin to perceive one element of the problem that was faced and solved by the men who were the leaders in the Revival which transformed and transfigured the face of England. We watch with interest and wonder John Wesley and his comrades pushing their way on horseback over wild mountains, into valleys and dales, which were inaccessible to ordinary travellers. We can understand why John Wesley so often records the ‘staring’ of the people who crowded round him. The sight of a strange face in some of the towns and in all of the villages of England in the eighteenth century, excited amazement, and furnished a thrilling topic of conversation at the ale-bench and the hearthside.

At the present time, the social condition of the people of England is attracting keen attention. Abundant statistics are being gathered, and the theorist and the practical man make use of them according to the bent of their minds. In the eighteenth century a few enlightened men studied the condition of sections of the population, but it is difficult to discover any complete survey of the state of the people at large. Professor Rogers, in his Six Centuries of Work and Wages, has laid us under an enduring obligation, and from the pages of his invaluable book it is possible to get a glimpse of a fascinating subject.

Guided by Professor Rogers, we find that, judged by the standard of wages, and comparing the wages received with the cost of the necessaries of life, the fifteenth and the first quarter of the sixteenth century were ‘the golden age of the English labourer.’ In the sixteenth century his circumstances changed. Hard times set in, and, with various fluctuations, continued. In the first half of the eighteenth century, however, the agricultural labourer was better off than he had been since the ‘golden age.’ The calculations in Professor Rogers’s book are carefully made, and are reliable. In the eyes of a town mechanic, at the present time, the wages paid to farm-labourers, even in an ‘age of gold,’ would appear contemptible, but the modern mechanic is often oblivious of the fact that the amount of wage must be measured by its capacity to meet absolutely necessary expenses. Cheap and abundant food, a life lived in surroundings that conduce to health, the absence of temptations to spend money on unnecessary things, all must be considered when we are asked to decide the question of wage. There can be little doubt that, at the present time, many agricultural labourers are in a better condition than thousands of the artisans of our towns; in the first half of the eighteenth century the superiority of the position of the agricultural labourer in some parts of the country is undeniable. The villages were left

To dumb forgetfulness a prey;

Their inhabitants were afflicted with an apathy that irritates a modern progressive; the cottages in which the people herded defied every law of sanitary science; the men possessed the uninquiring mind of the serf; the women drudged; most of the children were uneducated: but, so far as food for the body is concerned, and so far as a superficial happiness is concerned,

Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,

is not altogether a fanciful picture created by Goldsmith’s graceful pen.

Considerable information concerning the condition of the working classes in the eighteenth century may be gathered from Professor Rogers’s pages. We will content ourselves by noting a few facts that will cast light upon the people among whom John Wesley and his fellow evangelists did their principal work. It is fortunate that Arthur Young does not content himself with giving us information about the wages paid for agricultural labour exclusively; he also inserts information concerning the price paid to other workers. Professor Rogers, gathering this information together, says that the highest wages were earned by colliers.

At Newcastle they could get 15s. a week, and at Wakefield 11s. In iron and cutlery works the weekly wages were 10s. at Rotherham and 13s.6d. at Sheffield. Workmen in porcelain at Liverpool, Burslem, and Worcester received, respectively, 8s.11d., 9s.6d., and 9s. The average weekly payment for spinning and weaving was 8s.7d.; the lowest wages, out of seven localities, being paid at Manchester for fustians, 7s.1d.; the highest at Wakefield for cloth, 10s. The average wages of women in textile manufactures was 4s.2½d.; of boys, 2s.11¾d.; and of girls, 2s.7d. The drugget-weavers of Braintree earned about 9s.; the wool-combers 12s.; the Wilton carpet-weavers from 10s. to 12s.; the Gloucester pin-makers from l0s. to 12s.; the woollen manufacturers of Henningham, 7s.; the combers from 12s. to 14s.; the steel-polishers of Woodstock from 15s. to 42s.; the blanket-weavers of Witney from l0s. to 12s. The best-paid workmen in textile fabrics were the wool-combers, who earned on an average, wherever they were, about 13s. a week; the lowest, the say and calamanco weavers of Lavenham, who were paid 5s.9d.

Comparing these wages with those paid in some localities to the agricultural labourer, we are not surprised to find evidence of the town-ward drift, which has become so pronounced in our own time. The best-paid agricultural labourers were those in Kent and Middlesex, and they received a weekly wage of 11s.4d. The worst paid were those of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire; they got 5s.2½d. a week. Young tells us that, taking all things together; the wages of the manufacturing labourer were, on the average, 8d. a week beyond those of the agricultural labourer. He incidentally mentions that in the West of England the farm-labourers were paid only 5s. and 6s. all the year round.

Turning from those whom we are accustomed to call the ‘working classes,’ we must briefly refer to the condition of the shopkeepers and the traders of London and the provinces. Their position, judged by the sketches, which have survived in the pages of the novelists of the period, differed greatly from that of the tradesmen of the present day. In country towns, especially, their life was slow and comparatively uneventful. Their goods were brought to them by stage-wagons that crawled along the ill-kept roads, or were carried by packhorses that plunged through the mud in which they nearly foundered. The shops were small; ill lighted, and contained a scanty supply of goods. Market-day brought some bustle into the country towns; but, at other times, the tradesman had leisure to bask in the sunshine at the door of his shop, or to gossip with his cronies at the alehouse table. It is difficult to estimate the average income of the eighteenth century shopkeeper, but one thing must be borne in mind - on the trading class fell, with crushing weight, that great burden of taxation which was the result of the prolonged campaigns that were fought on the Continent. Those taxes made serious inroads on their uncertain income, and extorted from them many a groan. In London, trade was more briskly and profitably done, but, even there, the citizen was only too familiar with that dark figure of Care, which still dogs the footsteps of the man of commerce.

Above the labourers and the tradesmen, in social rank, stood ‘the upper classes.’ They dwelt in a region of their own. That region lay far from the common tracks of men. Its line of demarcation was sharply defined. We do not think that the aloofness of the upper classes arose, in all cases, from any conscious contempt for persons who were in an inferior social position. It seemed rather the product of indifference. East of Temple Bar was an unknown country. With rare exceptions, the people who lived there were uninteresting and not worth discovering. And so the members of the ‘upper classes’ lived within the ring fence of ‘good Society.’ They consorted together to talk politics and literature and art in coffee-house and club; they cultivated luxury and pleasure with an assiduity which, if the same energy had been spent on nobler things, would have raised England to a conspicuous height of moral greatness; they excited themselves over trifles, and wasted in frivolity and dilettantism the golden opportunities God had given them for the service of man; and, all the time, millions of Englishmen lay around them perishing of neglect. We keenly appreciate the literary and artistic aspects of the eighteenth century; we recognize the efforts of Addison and Johnson to raise the moral tone of the literature and of the cultured people of the day; but it is difficult to restrain our impatience in the presence of the fatal paralysis of sympathy which made it impossible for the upper classes to imagine those reforms which, in a brighter and more vitalized age, have changed the condition of the people of England. Mr. Sydney has gathered together, in his England and the English in the Eighteenth century, a number of remarkable facts relating to the condition of the upper classes in the times of which he writes. We shrink from his conclusion that ‘nine-tenths of the English people of quality in the eighteenth century were either knaves or fools.’
Vol. ii. p. 123.

It is difficult to resist the evidence he produces; but charity suggests a more lenient verdict. It is unfortunate when the ‘people of quality’ in a country are devoid of a sense of responsibility; when they lack moral earnestness; when they are out of touch with the rest of their countrymen; when the spectacle they exhibit to those who are eager to imitate them is that of a luxurious race loving pleasure and forgetting God.

When we turn from the contemplation of the classes whose condition we have considered, we find that we have not finished our investigation into the condition of the people of England. The lower sections of the working classes are always subject to variations of fortune, which tend to make their lot hard and cruel. Beneath them, in this country, there are many thousands who have no claim to be considered as workers: they live in the helplessness and suffering that are the results of habitual poverty. During the earlier years of the eighteenth century, the condition of the country, as we have seen, was prosperous; but after a time harvests failed, prices rose, work was scarce, and thousands of the English people were brought to the verge of starvation. In London the existence of poverty was marked. Sydney considers that much of this poverty was due to early and improvident marriages, to unthrifty habits, and to drunkenness; but, on the other hand, he thinks that a vast amount of it arose from the lack of employment. Hundreds who were able and willing to work could not find in London any means of subsistence.
Vol. i. p. 66.

Dr. Wendeborn, a German minister who lived for many years during the eighteenth century in London, was much impressed by the spectacle of English poverty. He says -

There are in no country such large contributions raised for the support of the poor as in England, yet there is nowhere so great a number of them; and their condition, in comparison with the poor of other countries, appears truly the most miserable. They never seem to be apprehensive, or to think of making any provision for a time of want. In Germany and other northern countries of Europe, the poor keep always in mind that it is cold in winter, and that no harvests or fruits can be reaped from the earth while it is covered with snow. On this account they consider in time the warmer clothing they will then require, and lay up such a store of provisions as their circumstances allow, in order to prepare themselves in the best manner possible for the inclemency of that season. But, in England, it seems as if the poor and necessitous never looked forward, or would not trouble themselves to think of what may happen to them in future. They neither foresee the winter’s cold, nor the scarcity of that season; and, therefore, when it arrives, are the most forlorn beings imaginable. The lower classes of people have no disposition to be frugal or provident. When trade becomes dull and employment scanty, they who maintained themselves by their labour must either beg or obtain support for themselves and their families from the parish. In those counties and towns where manufactures are carried on, there is for this very reason the greatest number of poor; for as soon as any particular branch of them is on the decline, the workmen who were employed in it are threatened with want, and in danger of starving.
A View of England towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century, vol. i. p. 113.

In another place, he says -

In no other country are poorer to be seen than in England, and in no city a greater number of beggars than in London. A foreigner who hears of many millions annually raised for the benefit of the poor ... will find himself unable to explain how it happens, that in his walks he is, almost every hundred yards, disturbed by the lamentations of unfortunate persons who demand his charity.

In Professor Rogers’s Six Centuries of Work and Wages the question of poverty is exhaustively discussed. With much skill, insight, and knowledge, he states the problem, which still awaits solution. At the present moment we are only concerned with it in its relation to the eighteenth century. With the authority of a master of his subject, Mr. Rogers declares that, with the exception of about fifty years in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, ‘the wages of labour have been a bare subsistence, constantly supplemented by the poor-rate.’ In modern times a considerable amelioration in the condition of some kinds of labour has been effected, but there can be no doubt that Rogers’s statement is correct so far as concerns the condition of labourers’ wages during the second half of the eighteenth century.

It must not be supposed that the nation was callous to the appeal made by the sufferings of the poor. Much poverty was relieved by private benevolence, and more by doles from the poor-rates. The annual expenditure in poor-rates is said to have trebled between the close of the reign of Anne and the year 1750. The sum raised astonished a foreigner like Dr. Wendeborn. It amounted to, at least, three millions. He cries -

The revenues of the kingdom of Denmark are six millions of thalers, which answers to one million of pounds sterling; and those of Sweden amount hardly to a million and a half, English money. With half of the provision of the poor in England, therefore, whole realms, crowns, armies, navies, and other expenses of the State are supported! How much matter is here for an arithmetician, a financier, and a philosophic observer.
A View of England, vol. i. p. 117.

Although Dr. Wendeborn does not ‘presume’ to say that the funds for the poor were mismanaged and misapplied, other writers have not exercised a similar reticence. Dr. Franklin, for instance, roundly affirmed that the enormous sum collected annually for the poor in England ‘increased their number as well as their wretchedness.’

We have spoken of the extraordinary ignorance of each other, which, like a black dividing-line, separated class from class in the England of the eighteenth century. That line was strongly marked, and its existence was constantly evidenced. If we wish to understand how much the governing classes of a country know of the conditions of those whom they govern, we ought to inspect their criminal code. If we find that it only contains measures of repression and punishment, we may be sure that its framers know little of the people whom they so shamefully misgovern. Let us apply this test to the England of the eighteenth century. Every man who is acquainted with the code then existing will be of Rogers’s opinion, that -
The desperation which poverty and misery produce, and the crime they suggest, were met by a code more sanguinary and brutal than any, which a civilized nation had ever heretofore devised, or a high-spirited one submitted to.
Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 490.

Sir Samuel Romilly, in his Observations on a Late Publication, intituled Thoughts on Executive Justice, reviews the criminal law of England, and says -

The first thing which strikes one is the melancholy truth that among the variety of actions which men are daily liable to commit, no less than one hundred and sixty have been declared by Act of Parliament to be felonies without benefit of clergy; or, in other words, to be worthy of instant death.

Romilly founds his statement on Blackstone’s Commentaries; and, in a note, he draws attention to the fact that, since the publication of those Commentaries, the number of felonies had been considerably augmented by the legislature. Sydney says

To steal a horse or a sheep; to snatch property from the hands of a man and run away with it; to steal to the amount of forty shillings in a dwelling-house, or privately to the value of five shillings in a shop; to pick a pocket of only twelve pence and a farthing; these offences all continued till the end of the eighteenth century to be punishable with death.
England and the English, vol. ii. pp. 268, 269.

Mr. John Latimer, in The Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, gives a list of the persons executed in that city during the first half of the eighteenth century. The list is confessedly incomplete, but, so far as we can judge by its details, executions for murder were comparatively infrequent. Out of the seventy-seven criminals whose cases and crimes are cited, only eighteen suffered death for murder. The rest were executed for offences, which would now be punished by imprisonment. It is no wonder that the number of executions in England was great. Lecky tells us that, when Blackstone wrote, it was a very ordinary occurrence for ten or twelve culprits to be hung on a single occasion, and for forty or fifty to be condemned at a single assize. In 1732 no less than seventy persons received sentence of death at the Old Bailey. In the same year eighteen persons were hung in one day in the town of Cork.
History of England, vol. i. p. 505.

Execution by hanging was not the only form of punishment inflicted on criminals. The barbarities inflicted on a man who was found guilty of high treason are too horrible to be described. It is enough to say that, so late as 1746, eight persons were slowly done to death by the hands of the executioner. If a man refused to plead on a capital charge, then the law directed that he was to be laid naked on his back, in a dark room, and weights of stone or iron were to be placed on his breast till he died. This hideous punishment was inflicted in England in 1721 and in 1735. A criminal was sentenced to the same fate in 1741, but he escaped by at last consenting to plead. This disgraceful law was not repealed till 1771. It is almost incredible that women who were found guilty of murdering their husbands, or of the other offences comprised under the terms high or petit treason, were publicly burnt, in accordance with a law which was not abolished till 1790. It is true that in practice, before the fire touched the body of the woman, the executioner mercifully strangled the victim; but sometimes, as in a case, which occurred in 1726, the fire interfered with the process of strangulation, and a considerable time elapsed before the agonies of the woman were ended.

It is painful to record these brutalities, but it is impossible to understand the temper of the English people in the eighteenth century unless we do so. An utter callousness to the sufferings of criminals prevailed. We may go further. Those sufferings were a source of pleasurable excitement to the crowds that witnessed them. When the death-carts rumbled along the road from Newgate to Tyburn, the pavements were crowded with spectators. From the windows of the houses, hosts of people looked out with admiration upon the jaunty men who, with nosegays on their breasts, journeyed on the solemn path that broke away so suddenly into eternity. Let the wanderer along the present Oxford Street imagine the scene. Let him try to conceive the possibility of its repetition to day. He will then be able to form some idea of the immeasurable distance that divides us from the spirit and the customs of the eighteenth century.

We ask in amazement if any voice was raised in Church or State, against the brutal punishments contained in the criminal code of England. The answer is disappointing. The ascertained facts show that, so far as the executions for felony are concerned, not only was there an absence of protest, but such executions were approved by the most enlightened opinion of the time. We have mentioned Sir Samuel Romilly’s Observations. His little pamphlet was written in answer to a publication intituled Thoughts on Executive Justice. In that publication the author declared that the statutes concerning the punishment of crime in England were such as no stranger could contemplate without imagining the English nation to be ‘the happiest people under the sun, or without admiring the disposition of the whole, as well as the adapting of every part to the public good.’ So enamoured of our ‘sanguinary’ code was the author that he exhorted judges to enforce the laws with the utmost rigour, expressing the opinion that these laws approached as near to perfection as any law could be expected to do which emanated from ‘the finite wisdom of humanity.’ It is strange that, according to Sir Samuel Romilly, some of the learned judges to whom the Thoughts on Executive Justice was addressed seemed inclined to try the terrible expedient, which was recommended. With shame we confess that the writer of this publication, which drew forth such a noble protest from Sir Samuel Romilly, was a prominent clergyman of the Evangelical party in the Church of England.

It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century was well on its way that the English nation woke up to the fact that the spectacle of a public execution has a brutalizing effect upon those who witness it. What wonder, then, that in 1783, a year when fifty-one persons were executed in London, Dr. Johnson was found protesting against the proposed abolition of the Tyburn processions? Boswell relates that, one night, in March 1783, at the Literary Club, the subject of the discontinuance of these ghastly parades was discussed. Dr. Johnson, speaking to Sir William Scott, said -

The age is running mad after innovation, and all the business of the world is to be done in a new way. Men are to be hanged in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation.

Someone present ventured to argue that such a step would be a vast improvement.

No, sir [thundered Johnson], it is not an improvement. They object that the old method drew together a number of spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties; the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it; why is all this swept away?

When we consider the opinions of such a man as Dr. Johnson, we do not wonder that the law held on its sanguinary way unchecked by the protests of judges and legislators. When the eighteenth century was drawing to a close, a new spirit of philanthropy made its presence felt in English society. To that spirit Sir Samuel Romilly made his appeal. By slow degrees the Statute Book of England was cleansed of its more glaring cruelties, and brought into harmony with the ideas of pity and mercy, which men had learned from the new revelation of the forgiving love of God.

It will be admitted that the condition of the prisons of a country reveals its character. The people who are careless of the way in which prisoners awaiting trial, or serving their sentences, are treated, write a sentence of condemnation against themselves. Judged by this test, the England of the eighteenth century stands condemned. It is impossible to exaggerate the loathsomeness of the dens in which men and women were then confined, or the abominations that were hidden behind the sullen walls of our prisons. In 1729, through the influence of General Oglethorpe, a commission was obtained for investigating the condition of the three London prisons for debtors. Beginning with the Fleet, the commission discovered that it was divided into two classes, known as the Common Side and the Master’s Side. The former contained three wards, tenanted in all by ninety-three persons, many of whom were compelled to lie upon the bare floor, through inability to provide a bed for themselves; in several rooms on the chapel stairs men and women, sick and ill, lay on the floor without a rag to cover them; the warden, not satisfied with extracting large sums of money, had locked them in filthy cells in default of payment, had caused them to be manacled, and when they died, had appropriated to his own use any effects which they had possessed.
Sydney, England and the English, vol. ii. pp. 308, 309.

Sydney says -

It would require more space than here can be afforded to enumerate a tithe of the enormities that had been practised in that foul den. Of the instruments of torture, which had been employed by the warden, it is enough to say that when they were produced for the inspection of the committee, they caused a thrill of horror to run through all who were present.

As to the ‘strong room’ in the prison, the following description, taken from the Report of the Visiting Committee, must suffice -

This place is like a vault, like those in which the dead are interred, and wherein the bodies of persons dying in the said prison are usually deposited till the coroner’s inquest hath passed upon them; it has no chimney nor fireplace, nor any light but what comes over the door or through a hole of about eight inches square. It is neither paved nor boarded, and the rough bricks appear both on the sides and top, being neither wainscoted nor plastered.

What adds to the dampness and stench of the place is it’s being built over the common sewer, and adjoining to the sink, and where all the nastiness of the prison is cast.

Twenty years later the noxious fumes emitted by Newgate prison attacked, and eventually killed, two judges, the Lord Mayor, one alderman, and others to the number of sixty persons and upwards, while sitting in the Old Bailey Sessions House. Carlyle would have considered this massacre as a broad suggestion on the part of nature concerning the brotherhood of man.

The work of General Oglethorpe casts a ray of light on the condition of the London prisons. But both in the metropolis and the provinces the state of the jails continued for many years to be infamous. After a considerable interval of time, John Howard, in Burke’s fine phrase, commenced his ‘circumnavigation of charity.’ We have taken one illustration of prison life in the eighteenth century from London. We will take another from the West of England. In 1774, John Howard visited the Castle prison at Gloucester, and found it in a wretched condition. The floor of the main ward was so ruinous that it could not be washed; the male and female felons were herded together in a single day-room; a large dunghill lay against the steps leading to the dormitories, and the jailer, having no salary, made his living out of the profits of the liquor sold to the prisoners, and by taxing the debtors brought under his charge. Howard noted that many prisoners died there in the course of the year. Newgate prison, in Bristol, was overcrowded with inmates, but was in a better sanitary state than that of Gloucester, though the ‘dungeon’ or night-room for male felons, often densely crowded, was eighteen steps underground and only seventeen feet in diameter. Howard’s note is: ‘No bedding, nor straw.’ In the yard the criminals of all ages and both sexes mingled with the insolvent debtors; even the poorest of the latter class paying the jailer, who had no salary, ten pence halfpenny a week for the lodgings in which they were incarcerated by their creditors. At the time of Howard’s visit there were thirty-eight felons and fifty-eight debtors in Newgate. Bridewell was in a worse state than the jail, the rooms being very dirty, and the air offensive from open sewers. There was no bedding, no employment, insufficient water, and the only food was two pennyworth of bread per head daily. At Lawford’s Gate Bridewell there was -

a dark room, the dungeon, about twelve feet by seven, in which the felons slept, except those who could afford to pay for beds. The rooms were without chimneys, and yet the inmates were never allowed to leave them. A prisoner had no allowance for food, except where he was very poor, when he had two pence a day.
Latimer’s Annals of Bristol pp. 406, 407.

Our knowledge of the condition of the prisons of England does not arise exclusively from the revelation of General Oglethorpe’s commission and from the reports of John Howard. In the eighteenth century they were the scenes of the constant visits of the Wesley’s and of Whitefield, and from the pages of their journals abundant materials for constructing the repulsive picture of prison life in England during the eighteenth century may be gleaned. Their work was continued, under more favourable circumstances at the beginning of the next century by Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, whose self-denying labours at last produced some impression upon the minds of those who were responsible for the treatment of debtors and criminals. The comparative failure of the attempts made by Oglethorpe and Howard to effect permanent reforms in the jails of the country strengthens our conviction that a condemnatory verdict must be cast against the humanity of the ruling classes of England in the eighteenth century.

We have seen that, in the eighteenth century, England was a country of isolated towns and lonely villages. In addition, we have noted that, taking London as an example, the towns were divided into independent sections by the estrangement of class from class, and by a striking lack of sympathy. It is sympathy that knits a people together. Where it is absent, national character suffers. Our moral faults have no mercy on our social life. They wound it at every point, and constantly threaten it with destruction, If it had not been for the coming of a day when Englishmen saw each other in a new light, when, to their surprise, they discovered that they were brethren, the history of this country would have been a story of the withering of all social virtues, and of the perishing of all that is most God-like in man.