Part 1

“_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”—SHAKESPEARE.

HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

N^{o.} 20.] SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 1850. [PRICE 2_d._

A DETECTIVE POLICE PARTY.

The fresh-complexioned, smooth-faced officer, with the strange air of simplicity, began, with a rustic smile, and in a soft, wheedling tone of voice, to relate the Butcher’s Story, thus:

“It’s just about six years ago, now, since information was given at Scotland Yard of there being extensive robberies of lawns and silks going on, at some wholesale houses in the City. Directions were given for the business being looked into; and Straw, and Fendall, and me, we were all in it.”

“When you received your instructions,” said we, “you went away, and held a sort of Cabinet Council together?”

The smooth-faced officer coaxingly replied, “Ye-es. Just so. We turned it over among ourselves a good deal. It appeared, when we went into it, that the goods were sold by the receivers extraordinarily cheap—much cheaper than they could have been if they had been honestly come by. The receivers were in the trade, and kept capital shops—establishments of the first respectability—one of ’em at the West End, one down in Westminster. After a lot of watching and inquiry, and this and that among ourselves, we found that the job was managed, and the purchases of the stolen goods made, at a little public-house near Smithfield, down by Saint Bartholomew’s; where the Warehouse Porters, who were the thieves, took ’em for that purpose, don’t you see? and made appointments to meet the people that went between themselves and the receivers. This public-house was principally used by journeymen butchers from the country, out of place, and in want of situations; so, what did we do, but—ha, ha, ha!—we agreed that I should be dressed up like a butcher myself, and go and live there!”

Never, surely, was a faculty of observation better brought to bear upon a purpose, than that which picked out this officer for the part. Nothing in all creation, could have suited him better. Even while he spoke, he became a greasy, sleepy, shy, good-natured, chuckle-headed, unsuspicious, and confiding young butcher. His very hair seemed to have suet in it, as he made it smooth upon his head, and his fresh complexion to be lubricated by large quantities of animal food.

——“So I—ha, ha, ha!” (always with the confiding snigger of the foolish young butcher) “so I dressed myself in the regular way, made up a little bundle of clothes, and went to the public-house, and asked if I could have a lodging there? They says, ‘yes, you can have a lodging here,’ and I got a bedroom, and settled myself down in the tap. There was a number of people about the place, and coming backwards and forwards to the house; and first one says, and then another says, ‘Are you from the country, young man?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘I am. I’m come out of Northamptonshire, and I’m quite lonely here, for I don’t know London at all, and it’s such a mighty big town?’ ‘It _is_ a big town,’ they says. ‘Oh, it’s a _very_ big town!’ I says. ‘Really and truly I never was in such a town. It quite confuses of me!’—and all that, you know.

“When some of the Journeymen Butchers that used the house, found that I wanted a place, they says, ‘Oh, we’ll get you a place!’ And they actually took me to a sight of places, in Newgate Market, Newport Market, Clare, Carnaby—I don’t know where all. But the wages was—ha, ha, ha!—was not sufficient, and I never could suit myself, don’t you see? Some of the queer frequenters of the house, were a little suspicious of me at first, and I was obliged to be very cautious indeed, how I communicated with Straw or Fendall. Sometimes, when I went out, pretending to stop and look into the shop-windows, and just casting my eye round, I used to see some of ’em following me; but, being perhaps better accustomed than they thought for, to that sort of thing, I used to lead ’em on as far as I thought necessary or convenient—sometimes a long way—and then turn sharp round, and meet ’em, and say, ‘Oh, dear, how glad I am to come upon you so fortunate! This London’s such a place, I’m blowed if I an’t lost again!’ And then we’d go back all together, to the public-house, and—ha, ha, ha! and smoke our pipes, don’t you see?

“They were very attentive to me, I am sure. It was a common thing, while I was living there, for some of ’em to take me out, and show me London. They showed me the Prisons—showed me Newgate—and when they showed me Newgate, I stops at the place where the Porters pitch their loads, and says, ‘Oh dear,’ ‘is this where they hang the men! Oh Lor!’ ‘That!’ they says, ‘what a simple cove he is! _That_ an’t it!’ And then, they pointed out which _was_ it, and I says ‘Lor!’ and they says, ‘Now you’ll know it agen, won’t you?’ And I said I thought I should if I tried hard—and I assure you I kept a sharp look out for the City Police when we were out in this way, for if any of ’em had happened to know me, and had spoke to me, it would have been all up in a minute. However, by good luck such a thing never happened, and all went on quiet: though the difficulties I had in communicating with my brother officers were quite extraordinary.

“The stolen goods that were brought to the public-house, by the Warehouse Porters, were always disposed of in a back parlor. For a long time, I never could get into this parlor, or see what was done there. As I sat smoking my pipe, like an innocent young chap, by the tap-room fire, I’d hear some of the parties to the robbery, as they came in and out, say softly to the landlord, ‘Who’s that? What does _he_ do here?’ ‘Bless your soul,’ says the landlord, ‘He’s only a’—ha, ha, ha!—‘he’s only a green young fellow from the country, as is looking for a butcher’s sitiwation. Don’t mind _him_!’ So, in course of time, they were so convinced of my being green, and got to be so accustomed to me, that I was as free of the parlor as any of ’em, and I have seen as much as Seventy Pounds worth of fine lawn sold there, in one night, that was stolen from a warehouse in Friday Street. After the sale, the buyers always stood treat—hot supper, or dinner, or what not—and they’d say on those occasions ‘Come on, Butcher! Put your best leg foremost, young ’un, and walk into it!’ Which I used to do—and hear, at table, all manner of particulars that it was very important for us Detectives to know.

“This went on for ten weeks. I lived in the public-house all the time, and never was out of the Butcher’s dress—except in bed. At last, when I had followed seven of the thieves, and set ’em to rights—that’s an expression of ours, don’t you see, by which I mean to say that I traced ’em, and found out where the robberies were done, and all about ’em—Straw, and Fendall, and I, gave one another the office, and at a time agreed upon, a descent was made upon the public-house, and the apprehensions effected. One of the first things the officers did, was to collar me—for the parties to the robbery weren’t to suppose yet, that I was anything but a Butcher—on which the landlord cries out, ‘Don’t take _him_,’ he says, ‘whatever you do! He’s only a poor young chap from the country, and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth!’ However, they—ha, ha, ha!—they took me, and pretended to search my bedroom, where nothing was found but an old fiddle belonging to the landlord, that had got there somehow or another. But, it entirely changed the landlord’s opinion, for when it was produced, he says ‘My fiddle! The Butcher’s a pur-loiner! I give him into custody for the robbery of a musical instrument!’

“The man that had stolen the goods in Friday Street was not taken yet. He had told me, in confidence, that he had his suspicions there was something wrong (on account of the City Police having captured one of the party), and that he was going to make himself scarce. I asked him, ‘Where do you mean to go, Mr. Shepherdson?’ ‘Why, Butcher,’ says he, ‘the Setting Moon, in the Commercial Road, is a snug house, and I shall hang out there for a time. I shall call myself Simpson, which appears to me to be a modest sort of a name. Perhaps you’ll give us a look in, Butcher?’ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘I think I _will_ give you a call’—which I fully intended, don’t you see, because, of course, he was to be taken! I went over to the Setting Moon next day, with a brother officer, and asked at the bar for Simpson. They pointed out his room, upstairs. As we were going up, he looks down over the bannisters, and calls out, ‘Halloa, Butcher! is that you?’ ‘Yes, it’s me. How do you find yourself?’ ‘Bobbish,’ he says; ‘but who’s that with you?’ ‘It’s only a young man, that’s a friend of mine,’ I says. ‘Come along, then,’ says he; ‘any friend of the Butcher’s is as welcome as the Butcher!’ So, I made my friend acquainted with him, and we took him into custody.

“You have no idea, Sir, what a sight it was, in Court, when they first knew that I wasn’t a Butcher, after all! I wasn’t produced at the first examination, when there was a remand; but I was, at the second. And when I stepped into the box, in full police uniform, and the whole party saw how they had been done, actually a groan of horror and dismay proceeded from ’em in the dock!

“At the Old Bailey, when their trials came on, Mr. Clarkson was engaged for the defence, and he _couldn’t_ make out how it was, about the Butcher. He thought, all along, it was a real Butcher. When the counsel for the prosecution said, ‘I will now call before you, gentlemen, the Police-officer,’ meaning myself, Mr. Clarkson says, ‘Why Police-officer? Why more Police-officers? I don’t want Police. We have had a great deal too much of the Police. I want the Butcher! However, Sir, he had the Butcher and the Police-officer, both in one. Out of seven prisoners committed for trial, five were found guilty, and some of ’em were transported. The respectable firm at the West End got a term of imprisonment; and that’s the Butcher’s Story!”

The story done, the chuckle-headed Butcher again resolved himself into the smooth-faced Detective. But, he was so extremely tickled by their having taken him about, when he was that Dragon in disguise, to show him London, that he could not help reverting to that point in his narrative; and gently repeating, with the Butcher snigger, “‘Oh, dear!’ I says, ‘is that where they hang the men? Oh, Lor!’ ‘_That!_’ says they. ‘What a simple cove he is!’”

It being now late, and the party very modest in their fear of being too diffuse, there were some tokens of separation; when Serjeant Dornton, the soldierly-looking man, said, looking round him with a smile:

“Before we break up, Sir, perhaps you might have some amusement in hearing of the Adventures of a Carpet Bag. They are very short; and, I think, curious.”

We welcomed the Carpet Bag, as cordially as Mr. Shepherdson welcomed the false Butcher at the Setting Moon. Serjeant Dornton proceeded:

“In 1847, I was dispatched to Chatham, in search of one Mesheck, a Jew. He had been carrying on, pretty heavily, in the bill-stealing way, getting acceptances from young men of good connexions (in the army chiefly), on pretence of discount, and bolting with the same.

“Mesheck was off, before I got to Chatham. All I could learn about him was, that he had gone, probably to London, and had with him—a Carpet Bag.

“I came back to town, by the last train from Blackwall, and made inquiries concerning a Jew passenger with—a Carpet Bag.

“The office was shut up, it being the last train. There were only two or three porters left. Looking after a Jew with a Carpet Bag, on the Blackwall Railway, which was then the high road to a great Military Depôt, was worse than looking after a needle in a hayrick. But it happened that one of these porters had carried, for a certain Jew, to a certain public-house, a certain—Carpet Bag.

“I went to the public-house, but the Jew had only left his luggage there for a few hours, and had called for it in a cab, and taken it away. I put such questions there, and to the porter, as I thought prudent, and got at this description of—the Carpet Bag.

“It was a bag which had, on one side of it, worked in worsted, a green parrot on a stand. A green parrot on a stand was the means by which to identify that—Carpet Bag.

“I traced Mesheck, by means of this green parrot on a stand, to Cheltenham, to Birmingham, to Liverpool, to the Atlantic Ocean. At Liverpool he was too many for me. He had gone to the United States, and I gave up all thoughts of Mesheck, and likewise of his—Carpet Bag.

“Many months afterwards—near a year afterwards—there was a Bank in Ireland robbed of seven thousand pounds, by a person of the name of Doctor Dundey, who escaped to America; from which country some of the stolen notes came home. He was supposed to have bought a farm in New Jersey. Under proper management, that estate could be seized and sold, for the benefit of the parties he had defrauded. I was sent off to America for this purpose.

“I landed at Boston. I went on to New York. I found that he had lately changed New York paper-money for New Jersey paper-money, and had banked cash in New Brunswick. To take this Doctor Dundey, it was necessary to entrap him into the State of New York, which required a deal of artifice and trouble. At one time, he couldn’t be drawn into an appointment. At another time, he appointed to come to meet me, and a New York officer, on a pretext I made; and then his children had the measles. At last, he came, per steamboat, and I took him, and lodged him in a New York Prison called the Tombs; which I dare say you know, Sir?”

Editorial acknowledgment to that effect.

“I went to the Tombs, on the morning after his capture, to attend the examination before the magistrate. I was passing through the magistrate’s private room, when, happening to look round me to take notice of the place, as we generally have a habit of doing, I clapped my eyes, in one corner, on a—Carpet Bag.

“What did I see upon that Carpet Bag, if you’ll believe me, but a green parrot on a stand, as large as life!

“‘That Carpet Bag, with the representation of a green parrot on a stand,’ said I, ‘belongs to an English Jew, named Aaron Mesheck, and to no other man, alive or dead!’

“I give you my word the New York Police-officers were doubled up with surprise.

“‘How do you ever come to know that?’ said they.

“‘I think I ought to know that green parrot by this time,’ said I; ‘for I have had as pretty a dance after that bird, at home, as ever I had, in all my life!’”

“And _was_ it Mesheck’s?” we submissively inquired.

“Was it, Sir? Of course it was! He was in custody for another offence, in that very identical Tombs, at that very identical time. And, more than that! Some memoranda, relating to the fraud for which I had vainly endeavoured to take him, were found to be, at that moment, lying in that very same individual—Carpet Bag!”

Such are the curious coincidences and such is the peculiar ability, always sharpening and being improved by practice, and always adapting itself to every variety of circumstances, and opposing itself to every new device that perverted ingenuity can invent, for which this important social branch of the public service is remarkable! For ever on the watch, with their wits stretched to the utmost, these officers have, from day to day and year to year, to set themselves against every novelty of trickery and dexterity that the combined imaginations of all the lawless rascals in England can devise, and to keep pace with every such invention that comes out. In the Courts of Justice, the materials of thousands of such stories as we have narrated—often elevated into the marvellous and romantic, by the circumstances of the case—are dryly compressed into the set phrase, “in consequence of information I received, I did so and so.” Suspicion was to be directed, by careful inference and deduction, upon the right person; the right person was to be taken, wherever he had gone, or whatever he was doing to avoid detection: he is taken; there he is at the bar; that is enough. From information I, the officer, received, I did it; and, according to the custom in these cases, I say no more.

These games of chess, played with live pieces, are played before small audiences, and are chronicled nowhere. The interest of the game supports the player. Its results are enough for Justice. To compare great things with small, suppose LEVERRIER or ADAMS informing the public that from information he had received he had discovered a new planet; or COLUMBUS informing the public of his day that from information he had received, he had discovered a new continent; so the Detectives inform it that they have discovered a new fraud or an old offender, and the process is unknown.

Thus, at midnight, closed the proceedings of our curious and interesting party. But one other circumstance finally wound up the evening, after our Detective guests had left us. One of the sharpest among them, and the officer best acquainted with the Swell Mob, had his pocket picked, going home!

HEALTH BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT.

There was a story current in the city of Mosul, about the time that the first edition of “The Hundred and One Nights” began to be popular in Oriental society, of a certain Prince who was taken ill of the plague. Though his retinue was large, he was the only person who was in imminent danger. The Court physician was also at death’s door, and a strange doctor was sent for, who pronounced the Great Man to be in a fearful state of debility, but retired without prescribing. The Prince waited long and anxiously for remedies, but in vain. He clapped his hands to summon a slave. “Where,” he exclaimed, “is the physic?”

“Sun of the Earth,” exclaimed the Nubian, “it is all taken!”

“And who has dared to swallow the medicine designed for the anointed of Allah?”

“As it is written by the Prophet,” returned Hassan, “‘when the sheik sickens, his slaves droop.’ Thy whole household was sick, and clamoured for medicine; and, lo, the man of drugs straightway drenched them therewith, ordering us all, on pain of the Prophet’s curse, not to give thee so much as a single grain of rhubarb.”

“Breath of Mahomet,” ejaculated his Mightiness; “am I then to die, and are my slaves to live?”

When a Mussulman is puzzled what to say, he invariably exclaims, “Allah is merciful;” which was Hassan’s consolation.

“Let the wretched mediciner appear!” commanded the Prince.

The doctor came. “Illustrious father of a hundred generations!” said the general practitioner, “thine own physician only could cure thee, and he lies on his pallet a helpless being. _I_ may not so much as look at thy transcendant tongue, or feel thine omnipotent pulse.”

“Wherefore? O licenciate of the Destroyer!”

“Inasmuch as I may not infringe the _vested rights_ of thine own special and appointed physician. The law—even that of the Medes and Persians, which never altereth—forbids me. Thy slaves I _may_ heal, seeing that no vested rights in them exist; but——”

Here the Prince interrupted the speaker with a hollow groan, and sank on his pillow in despair.

The Arabic manuscript, from which this affecting incident was translated, ends with these words—“and the Prince died.”

This story is evidently a foreshadowing of what has recently happened in reference to the metropolis of this country and the Public Health Act. London was _in extremis_ from the effects of density of population, filth, bad air, bad water, the window-tax, and deficient drainage. It called in certain sanitary doctors—the regular consulting body, namely, the Government, being too weak to afford the slightest assistance. The result was, that a prescription, in the form of the Public Health Act, was concocted,—but was made applicable to every other member of the great retinue of towns, _except_ to the Imperial City; which was exempted in consequence of the existing Vested Rights in crowded houses, deadly stenches, putrid water, foggy courts, and cesspools. “Although,” in the words of a resolution, passed at the meeting which formed the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, “the strenuous efforts made in the metropolitan districts to procure a sanitary enactment mainly contributed to the passing of the Public Health Act; yet these districts were the only parts excluded from the benefits of that enactment. This exclusion has led to much misery and a great sacrifice of life.”

This exception was so monstrous, that even the Corporation of the City of London took powers under their own Sewers’ Act for the preservation of the health of the people dwelling within the City boundary,—who number no more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand out of the two millions of us who are congregated in civic and suburban London. The remaining one million eight hundred thousand are left to be stifled or diseased at the good pleasure of Vested Interests. Indeed, it is ascertained that a quarter of a million of individuals absolutely _do_ die every year from the want of such a sanitary police as the Public Health Act, amended by some few additional powers, would establish. What number of persons are really sent out of the world from preventable causes. It is also true that those causes can be efficiently removed for about a halfpenny per head a week; or threepence per week per house; or about eight times less than those who die unnecessarily cost the public in hospitals, poor’s rates, and burial. In the “Journal of Public Health” for November, 1848, and August, 1849, it is shown by elaborate tables, that the direct cost of, and estimated money loss through, typhus fever alone in the metropolis, amounted during the four years, 1843–1847, to one million three hundred and twenty-eight thousand pounds, or two hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred pounds annually. This sum is exclusive of the amounts contributed for the purchase and maintenance of fever hospitals. For 1848, when the mortality from typhus had increased to three thousand five hundred and sixty-nine, the direct cost and money loss was estimated at four hundred and forty thousand pounds.

This cold-blooded way of putting the really appalling state of the case is, alas! the only successful mode of appealing to that hard-headed, though sometimes soft-hearted, periphrasis, John Bull, when he is under no special exciting cause of dread. His heart is only reached through his pocket, except when put in a state of alarm. Cry “Cholera!” or any other frightful conjuration, and he bestirs himself. To cholera we owe the few sanitary measures now in force; but which were passed by the House—as a coward may seem courageous—in its agonies of fright. The moment, however, Cholera bulletins ceased to be issued, John buttoned up his pockets tighter than ever, and Parliament was dumb regarding public health, except to undo one or two good things it had done. The inflated promises of the legislature collapsed into thin air, on the very day the danger was withdrawn. It was the legend over again of the nameless gentleman who, when he was sick, swore he would turn a monk; but when he got well “the devil a monk was he.” Ever since, sanitary legislation has been as much a dead letter in the Metropolis, as if the deadly condition of some of its districts had never been whispered between the wind and the nobility of Westminster, in Parliament assembled.