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Updated: July 15, 2025
In the first apartment into which we were conducted—which was at the top of a staircase, and immediately over the press-room—were five-and-twenty or thirty prisoners, all under sentence of death, awaiting the result of the recorder’s report—men of all ages and appearances, from a hardened old offender with swarthy face and grizzly beard of three days’ growth, to a handsome boy, not fourteen years old, and of singularly youthful appearance even for that age, who had been condemned for burglary.
In one respect only was there variance from this settled custom to be perceived, and that was in that delicate mechanism embodying the triumphs of modern science, which facilitates transmission of thought, and which, by skillful adaptation, made this one chamber a focus to which ideas and feeling in every other apartment of that vast establishment converged, and which enabled one man, without rising from his chair, to issue his orders to every department, from press-room to composing-room, from foundation stone to the turrets of that tall pile, everything being governed by the will and impulse of a single mind.
Then she resumed aloud. "Do you know if she is a good workwoman?" "I believe so, mother." The superior rose, took a register from a shelf, appeared to be looking into it attentively for some time, and then said, as she replaced it: "Fetch in this young girl, and go and wait for me in the press-room."
But to drop metaphor. In the basement of the building you would find the press-room, with its steam engine, its furnaces, its presses, its dark demi-devils, and ghostly and ghastly gnomes and genii groping or flitting about amid the glare and gloom, begrimed and besmoked, seemingly at work at unhallowed yet supernatural toil, which toil, as if a punishment for sin, like that of Sisyphus, or the daughters of Danae in the heathen Tartarus, was eternal.
Amongst the burials there we read this entry: "July, 1797, Richard Parker, Sheerness, Kent, age 33. Cause of death, execution. This was Parker, the President of the Mutinous Delegates on board the fleet at the Nore. Once the gang had a man in its power, his immediate destination was either the rendezvous press-room or the tender employed as a substitute for that indispensable place of detention.
Corbet then went upstairs, much at that pace which characterizes the progress of a felon from the press-room to the gallows; here he remained for some time reckoning the money paused on the stairhead and again the slow, heavy, lingering step was heard descending, and, as nearly as one could judge, with as much reluctance as that with which it went up.
But then with fierce screams the mob broke loose, the three men were swept into the vortex of a fighting whirlpool. Some one opened the basement gate from the inside and a new stream poured in. The press-room filled crowbars got to work while men danced and wildly laughed and exulted in their vandal work. Then suddenly arose the cry of, "Police!"
Whether rolling about the town "very much in liquor," or "snugly moored in Sot's Bay," he was an easy victim. Another ineradicable weakness that often landed the sailor in the press-room was his propensity to indulge in "swank."
A few great men had died in the past two years, the machines worked with more clatter, and some of the trees in the Office garden were a few feet taller. But that was all the difference. I passed over to the press-room, and went through just such a scene as I have already described. The nervous tension was stronger than it had been two years before, and I felt the heat more acutely.
As a result of this state of affairs, we found a brother of the foreman occupying an easy position in the composing-room, a brother-in-law, two nieces, two nephews, and a son occupying easy positions at good salaries in the press-room and various other nephews and other semi-dependents working away under foremen who were related to them in the various departments.
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