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Updated: October 14, 2025
Pickwick complied with the invitation, and sat himself down; when Mr. Weller, who stationed himself at the back of the chair, whispered that the sitting was merely another term for undergoing an inspection by the different turnkeys, in order that they might know prisoners from visitors. 'Well, Sam, said Mr. Pickwick, 'then I wish the artists would come. This is rather a public place.
If my reader will permit me to refer to my own labours, I would wish to remind him of an old “Nut” of mine, in which I endeavoured to demonstrate the defective morality and economy of our penal code a system, by which the smallest delinquent is made to cost the state several hundreds of pounds, for an offence frequently of some few pennies in value; and a theft of a loaf is, by the geometrical scale of progressive aggrandisement, gradually swelled into a most expensive process, in which policemen, station-houses, inspectors, magistrates, sessions, assizes, judges, crown prosecutors, gaols, turnkeys, and transports, all figure; and the nation is left to pay the cost of this terrible array, for the punishment of a crime the prevention of which might, perhaps, have been effected for two-pence.
Through all the monotony of six of those interminable ten days, the same Judges and others on the bench, the same Murderer in the dock, the same lawyers at the table, the same tones of question and answer rising to the roof of the court, the same scratching of the Judge's pen, the same ushers going in and out, the same lights kindled at the same hour when there had been any natural light of day, the same foggy curtain outside the great windows when it was foggy, the same rain pattering and dripping when it was rainy, the same footmarks of turnkeys and prisoner day after day on the same sawdust, the same keys locking and unlocking the same heavy doors, through all the wearisome monotony which made me feel as if I had been Foreman of the Jury for a vast cried of time, and Piccadilly had flourished coevally with Babylon, the murdered man never lost one trace of his distinctness in my eyes, nor was he at any moment less distinct than anybody else.
"All you want the poor thing to do is to suffer in silence. Withdraw twenty yards from him." He set the example by retreating; the others, Hawes included, being off their guard, obeyed mechanically the superior spirit. Carter's cries died away into a whimpering moan. The turnkeys looked at one another, and with a sort of commencement of respect at Mr. Eden. "Parson knows more than we do."
"But," said Aramis, "why do you speak more freely of Seldon than of second Bertaudiere?" "Because, in my opinion, the crime of the man who writes a distich is not so great as that of the man who resembles " "Yes, yes, I understand you. Still, do not the turnkeys talk with your prisoners?" "Of course." "The prisoners, I suppose, tell them they are not guilty?"
For, besides the exasperating tendency to self-assertion which such treatment as his must have bred on a man like him, his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude.
In the course of a tour of some weeks on the shores of the Adriatic, I heard more than one disquieting report. Near Rimini the house of a landed proprietor was besieged by a little army. In one place, all the inmates of the goal walked off, arm-in-arm with the turnkeys; in another a diligence came to grief just outside the walls of a city.
His teeth closed with a snap at the treachery of it, and with his left hand he pulled back one of the levers that which should arouse the jailers, turnkeys and guards. Instead of the insistent clangor which he expected, there was silence. "That wire has been cut," the stranger volunteered. With clenched teeth the warden pulled the police alarm.
Why, even I should not be at all afraid of a robber when he is double-ironed and locked up in a cell, and I should enter guarded by a pair of turnkeys!" "I know it, my dear lady, I know it, and I feel that I ought to overcome this weakness or do my duty in its despite." "Yes, and if you would consent to go, Father Gray, I would not mind going with you myself, if that would encourage you any!"
"H'm; but wot if we don't know the right turnin's to take, an' run straight into the jaws of other turnkeys, p'r'aps, or find other doors an' gates that his bunch o' keys won't open?" "Why, then, we'll just fail, that's all; an' if they should scrag us for it, no matter." "It's a bad look-out, but I'll try," said Ben. Next morning this plan was put in execution.
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