The System of the World

-Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708

THERE WAS AN OLD JOKE that Newgate must be like Heaven, for the way to it was straight and narrow. It must have originated with a waggish prisoner, not with any free man. For a free man would approach Newgate through ways (from the west, Holborn, from the east, Newgate Street) that were broad and crooked. For the convenience of Newgate’s exclusive membership, however, there was a short-cut, a chute or gutter running straight and narrow for about an hundred paces from the holding-pens of the Court to the southeastern corner of the Prison. It was one of those sacred and inviolable English rights-of-way, hemmed in by high walls to either side. For the owners of the properties to the left and to the right sides of it did not love to see long necklaces of chained prisoners marching to and fro across their back yards.

In particular, the property to the right, as one went from the Bailey to the Prison, had notably fastidious and particular tenants. For that parcel, a good acre and a half, was the demesne of the College of Physicians. Your common Newgate felon knew it only as a mystery and a terror. A mystery because no part of it could be seen, owing to the high featureless wall that lined the chute. A terror because the bodies of poor men, cut down from the Treble Tree, were sold to that College by the enterprising Jack Ketch. And there, instead of being given a Christian burial, they were cut up into pieces, ensuring that the unquiet spirit that once animated those dismembered parts must roam the earth until Judgment Day.

To Jack Shaftoe it was no terror because when Ketch had done with him there’d be little left of him to cut up. And neither was it a mystery. For he had made a bit of a study of the place. Just on the other side of that wall, he knew, was a garden, where Physicians could stroll about and stretch their legs, or relax on benches, after a long night of cutting up dead criminals. The remainder of the ground was claimed by a great building that had been thrown up, after the Fire, by one Robert Hooke. It was famous because its turret was decorated with a large golden Pill. But it faced the other way, toward Warwick Lane, turning its back upon Newgate. Dead prisoners were brought in through the back way: a cul-de-sac, running from Prison to College, called Phoenix Court.

In the Old Bailey yesterday, a certificate had been bestowed upon him, a sort of diploma. A considerate bailiff had toted that rare document back up the straight and narrow way to Newgate, following Jack and Jack’s entourage of cudgel-toting gaolers, and presented it to the officialdom there. The import of this paper was that Jack had graduated from the Press-Room, and might now be admitted to the Condemned Hold.

According to the ways of the place, this meant that he exchanged the Press-Room’s lead weights for fetters of iron.

These now sprawled around him on the oaken planking. For the Condemned Hold was furnished with wooden shelves that kept some of its occupants up above the floor, and at the moment Jack had the whole place to himself. Jack did not feel the weight of his chains unless he attempted to move.

The discomforts that the chains inflicted upon his body, though, troubled him less than the unmistakable whiff of Mockery present in these arrangements. What ink was to a writer, fine metals-mercury, silver, gold, and watered steel-had always been to Jack.

That metals consisted partly of water was obvious from the fact that, when you heated them up, they became fluids. But some other substance must be combined with water in order to create a metal. The missing ingredient was supplied by invisible rays from the planets, which penetrated the ground and combined with the water that was there in the earth. The rays from that dimmest and most sluggish of planets, Saturn, created the basest of all metals, lead. Jupiter was responsible for tin and Mars for iron. Venus did copper, the moon silver, Mercury, obviously, accounted for mercury, and the Sun made gold. This was why the gold-hungry Spaniards, in their explorations and conquests, had never strayed far from the Equator, for that was where the Sun beat down most directly, and produced the richest deposits of its precious Element.

As even the most ignorant miner understood, base metals were continually being transmuted into nobler ones by a kind of dark vegetation within the earth. A deposit of lead, left to ripen in the ground for some centuries, would become silver, and silver would in time become gold.

For many years Jack had derived pride and fame from a supposed affinity between himself and Quicksilver, that shimmering fluid spirit. According to a learned man Jack knew, by the name of Enoch, Mercury (the planet) ran closer to the Sun than any other body, and whipped round it at terrific speed, without being consumed. Jack had flattered himself by seeing, in that, a token of his relationship with the Sun King. For as the Alchemists loved to jabber, “What is above is as that which is below, and what is below is as that which is above.” Jack might have sprung from the basest imaginable stock, the commonest folk in the whole world, but he had been transmuted over time into a man linked in the common mind with quicksilver and with gold.

Which made it all the more offensive that, since he had been brought to Newgate, he’d been been immobilized by the basest of metals, substances that did not in any way partake of the spirit of quicksilver. The best face he could put on it was that he had moved from lead (in the Press-Room) to iron (in the Condemned Hold)-a small but indisputable step up the ladder.

These Alchemical ruminations were now most rudely broken in upon by a persistent choking and gagging noise. Some one else had entered the Condemned Hold; and, from the sounds of it, he had swallowed his own tongue. This was most irregular. It was a common enough thing for free men to pay a gaoler to let them go in to the Condemned Hold for a few minutes’ time and gape at the soon-to-be-dead men, much as people would go to Bedlam to see the Raving Mad; but the practice had been suspended for as long as Jack Shaftoe was in the place, for Ike Newton was leery of escape-plots. So this choking wretch, whoever he was, must have some special dispensation. Jack rotated his head-carefully, for the iron neck-collar had a few nasty burrs on it-and saw naught save a wee hand gripping a rope. Rotating his head a bit more, and sacrificing some neck-skin, he at last got sight of a boy, standing on tiptoe, and hanging himself. That is, he had a noose round his neck and was holding the free end of the rope up above him, acting as his own gallows. Seeing that he had at last got Jack’s attention, he now went in to a phantastickal parody of a hanged man, rolling his eyes, pawing at the noose with his free hand, and dancing about the Condemned Hold on tippy-toe when he wasn’t spasmodically twitching.

“It is not bad,” was Jack’s verdict after a particularly affecting round of convulsions, “but I have seen better. In fact, I have done better. I once followed your trade, boy.”

“What trade is that, Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds?” asked the boy, letting the rope drop.

“That of hanging from condemned men’s legs to make ’em die faster, and thereby undercutting Jack Ketch, who demands far too much silver for a quick death.”

“Then you know why I’m here,” said the boy.

“Knew it the moment I spied the noose. What’s the going rate nowadays?”

“A guinea.”

“Oh, you’re a sly one. Don’t you know I can’t afford guineas?”

“Everyone knows. Don’t hurt to ask, though.”

“Very shrewd. I commend you. But tell me this: does the Mobb mock me now, for having had so much, and lost it?”

“No,” said the boy, “they love you for it.”

“Never!”

“When you were Jack the Coiner, and flyin’ above London in yer Sky-Chariot, in a golden waistcoat, with that Papist henchman, they din’t care for none of that,” said the boy. “But now you’ve been brought low, and lost all, and are Jack the Vagabond again, why, the people are sayin’, he’s all right, he is! One of us, like.”

“And that is why they came to the Court of Sessions to crown me even as the King was being crowned at Westminster,” Jack said. “So ’twasn’t mockery at all.”

“Blokes are raising pints and saying ‘God save the King,’ and they don’t mean George the German.”

“You know, I got a homily the other day, when I was being Pressed, from the ghost of that Papist henchman, as you called him, and he had some things to say concerning Pride. And my mind went back to Amsterdam, 1685, when I had to choose between two Opportunities. One, to go out into the world and become a man of affairs and make a lot of money, all to impress a certain Lady and make her think I was the right man for her. Two, to write off that venture, lose all, remain in Amsterdam, and go on being the feckless Vagabond I’d always been, and to rely upon the said Female for food, shelter, et cetera.”

“Which did you choose?” asked the boy.

“Don’t blame you for not being able to guess,” said Jack, “for as all London knows, I have been a money-man, Jack the Coiner, and I have been a Vagabond, too, in the estate you see me here. The answer is, I chose to seek my fortune. Failed. Lost all. Then got a fortune I had not ever looked for. Lost it though. Got it back. Lost it. Got another-the story is somewhat repetitious.”

“Yes, I was noticing.”

“Anyway, point is, now I’m back where I started again, and have been presented, I am beginning to realize, with the same choice as before-yet now all is changed! If I’d stayed in Amsterdam, would she’ve loved me-or found me tiresome company? Would I’ve loved her? Or found her too bossy and tight-laced?”

These and other rhetorical questions and imponderable Mysteries of Creation spilled from Jack’s lips, until he became aware that he had thereby driven the boy away, or put him to sleep. He was alone again in the Condemned Hold, and would be for some time yet. It was a bargaining ploy on the part of the gaolers, no less effective for being crude and obvious. In time they would come and offer to lighten his chains in trade for some silver, or move him to an apartment along the Press-Yard, in exchange for gold. Obviously they might expect to fetch a higher price if they let him suffer for a while first. The Condemned Hold was not as dark as the Press-Room was, for there was a window high in the wall that admitted some light from Newgate Street. But in due time the sun set and that window went dark. Jack, who had not even a copper to buy himself a candle, was left with naught to entertain him but remembered images.

He was thinking back to that straight and narrow passage. At its far end there was a sort of wicket, called by some the Gate of Janus, where prisoners entering the Bailey from the prison went to the left if they were females, and to the right if they were males, so that each sex was conducted into a different holding-pen. This was done strictly for appearances. Within Newgate, men and women mixed freely. But visitors to the Old Bailey saw strict segregation in the pens, and (Jack supposed) heaved great sighs of relief to see that the place was run in a virtuous manner. As the sessions proceeded, the prisoners were let out of the pens one by one, and each returned a few minutes later. The lucky ones were literally smoking from freshly applied brands, the unlucky came back whole and unmarked, as they were destined for Tyburn, or for America. But at the end of the session, all of them-male and female, branded and condemned-were bottlenecked together through the Gate of Janus where they began their return up the chute to Newgate Prison. And just there, in the Old Bailey, near that gate, was a place where a free person might stand and gaze directly into the face of every prisoner who passed by.

Most of the men who collected in that place were thief-takers. Plenty such had been there yesterday, after Jack had been sentenced. But Jack, reviewing the scene in his mind, phant’sied that there had been a woman there, too, a woman veiled in black scrim so that he could not see her face. But she wanted to see his, evidently. He was just drifting in to a delightful reverie, concerning this, when he was molested by sudden lanthorn-light, and then by a hand shaking his shoulder. He opened his eyes a crack, then grumbled and closed them. The light waned as it was directed elsewhere. Jack opened his eyes full, and gazed up into the face of Sir Isaac Newton.