Part 4

_1st Man._ Nay, nay— Our boats, loose spars, our masts, and half our decks Must serve us ere that pass. But, if indeed Nothing avail, and no help penetrate To this remote place, inaccessible Perchance for years, except to some wild bird— We came here knowing all this might befal, And set our lives at stake. God’s will be done. I, too, have felt the horrors of our fate: Jammed in a moving field of solid ice, Borne onward day and night we knew not where, Till the loud cracking sounds reverberating Far distant, were soon followed by the rending Of the vast pack, whose heaving blocks and wedges, Like crags broke loose, all rose to our destruction As by some ghastly instinct. Then the hand Of winter smote the all-congealing air, And with its freezing tempest piled on high These massy fragments which environ us:— Cathedrals many-spired, by lightning riven— Sharp-angled chaos-heaps of palaced cities, With splintered pyramids, and broken towers That yawn for ever at the bursting moon And her four pallid flame-spouts. Now, appalled By the long roar o’ the cloud-like avalanche— Now, by the stealthy creeping of the glaciers In silence tow’rds our frozen ships. So Death Hath often whispered to me in the night; And I have seen him in the Aurora-gleam Smile as I rose and came upon the deck; Or when the icicle’s prismatic glance— Bright, flashing,—and then, colourless, unmoved ice— Emblem’d our passing life, and its cold end. Oh, friend in many perils, fail not now! Am I not, e’en as thou art, utterly sick Of my own heavy heart, and loading clothes?— A mind—that in its firmest hour hath fits Of madness for some change, that shoot across Its steadfastness, and scarce are trampled down. Yet, friend, I will not let my spirit sink, Nor shall mine eyes, e’en with snow-blindness veiled, Man’s great prerogative of inward sight Forego, nor cease therein to speculate On England’s feeling for her countrymen; Whereof relief will some day surely come.

_2nd Man._ I well believe it; but perhaps too late.

_1st Man._ Then, if too late, one noble task remains, And one consoling thought. We, to the last, With firmness, order, and considerate care, Will act as though our death-beds were at home, Grey heads with honour sinking to the tomb; So future times shall record bear that we, Imprisoned in these frozen horrors, held Our sense of duty, both to man and God.

_The muffled beat of the ship’s bell sounds for evening prayers._ _The two men return: they ascend the steps in the snow—then the ladder—and disappear beneath the snow-covered housing of the deck._

A CORONER’S INQUEST.

If there appeared a paragraph in the newspapers, stating that her Majesty’s representative, the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench, had held a solemn Court in the parlour of the ‘Elephant and Tooth-pick,’ the reader would rightly conceive that the Crown and dignity of our Sovereign Lady had suffered some derogation. Yet an equal abasement daily takes place without exciting especial wonder. The subordinates of the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench (who is, by an old law, the Premier Coroner of all England) habitually preside at houses of public entertainment; yet they are no less delegates of Royalty—as the name of their office implies[4]—than the ermined dignitary himself, when surrounded with all the pomp and circumstance of the law’s majesty at Westminster. This is quite characteristic of our thoroughly commercial nation. An action about a money-debt is tried in an imposing manner in a spacious edifice, and with only too great an excess of formality; but for an inquest into the sacrifice of a mere human life, ‘the worst inn’s worst room’ is deemed good enough. In order rightly to determine whether Jones owes Smith five pounds ten, the Goddess of Justice is surrounded with the most imposing insignia, and worshipped in an appropriate temple: but when she is invoked to decide why a human spirit,

Footnote 4:

It is derived from _a coronâ_ (from the crown), because the coroner, says Coke, “hath conusance in some pleas which are called _placita coronæ_.”

‘Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d, No reckoning made, is sent to its account With all its imperfections on its head;’

she is thrust into the ‘Hole in the Wall,’ the ‘Bag o’ Nails,’ or the parlour of the ‘Two Spies.’

Desirous of having aural and ocular demonstration of the curious manner in which the office of Coroner is now fulfilled, we were attracted, a few weeks since, to the Old Drury Tavern, in Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane. Having made our way to a small parlour, we perceived the Majesty of England, as personated on this occasion, enveloped in an ordinary surtout, sitting at the head of a table, and surrounded by a knot of good-humoured faces, who might, if judged from mere appearances, have rallied round their president for some social purpose—only that the cigars and spirits and water had not yet come in. There was nothing official to be seen but a few pens, a sheet or two of paper, an inkstand, and a parish beadle.

When we entered, the Coroner was holding a friendly conversation with some of the jury, the beadle, and the gentlemen of the press, respecting the inferiority of the accommodation; and, considering the number of persons present, and the accessions expected from more jurymen, parochial officers, and witnesses, the subject was suggested naturally enough: for the private apartment of the landlord was of exceedingly moderate dimensions; and that had been appropriated as the temporary Court.

Here then, to a back parlour of the Old Drury Tavern, Vinegar Yard, Drury Lane, London, the Queen’s representative was consigned—by no fault of his own, but from that of a system of which he is rather a victim than a promoter—to institute one of the most important inquiries which the law of England prescribes. A human being had been prematurely sent into eternity, and the coroner was called upon—amidst several implements of conviviality, the odour of gin and the smell of tobacco-smoke—‘to inquire in this manner: that is, to wit, if they [the witnesses] know where the person was slain, whether it were in any house, field, bed, tavern, or company, and who were there; who are culpable, either of the act, or of the force; and who were present, either men or women, and of what age soever they be, if they can speak or have any discretion; and how many soever be found culpable they shall be taken and delivered to the sheriff, and shall be committed to the gaol.’ So runs the clause of the act of parliament, still in force by which the coroner and jury were now assembled. It is the second statute of the fourth year of Edward I., and is the identical law which is discussed by the grave-diggers in Hamlet.

The pleasant colloquy about the size of the room ended in a resolution to adjourn the Court to the ‘Two Spies,’ in a neighbouring alley. Time appeared, throughout the proceedings, to be as valuable as space, and the rest of the jurors having dropped in, the coroner—with a bible supplied from the bar,—at once delivered the oath to the foreman. The other jurors were rapidly sworn in batches, upon the Old Drury Bible, under an abridged dispensation administered, if our memory be correct, by the beadle.

‘Now, then, gentlemen,’ said the coroner, ‘we’ll view the body.’

Not without alacrity the entire company left their confined quarters to breathe such air as is vouchsafed in Vinegar Yard. The subject of inquiry lay at a baker’s shop, ‘a few doors round the corner,’—to use the topographical formula of the parish functionary—and thither he ushered us. A few of the window shutters of the shop were up, but in all other respects there was as little to indicate a house of death as there was to show it to be a house of mourning. If the journeyman had not been standing at the end of the counter in his holiday coat, it would have seemed as if business was going on as usual. There was the same tempting display of tarts, the same heaps of biscuits, the same supply of loaves, the same ranges of flour in paper bags as is to be observed in ordinary bakers’ shops on ordinary occasions. Yet the mistress of this particular baker’s shop lay dead only a few paces within, and its master was in gaol on suspicion of having murdered her.

Through a parlour and a sort of passage with a bed and a sink in it,the jury were shown into a confined kitchen. Here, on a mahogany dining-table, lay the remains covered with a dirty sheet. To describe the spectacle which presented itself when the beadle, with business-like immobility turned down the covering, does not happily fall within our present object. It is, however, necessary to say that it presented evidences of continued ill-usage from blows and kicks, not to be beheld without strong indignation. Yet this was not all.

‘The cause of death,’ said the beadle—_his_ mind was quite made up—‘is on the back; it’s covered with bruises: but I suppose you won’t want to see that, gentlemen.’

By no means. Everybody had seen enough; for they were surrounded by whatever could increase distress and engender disgust. The apartment was so small, that the table left only room for the jurors to edge round it one by one; and it was hardly possible to do this, without actual contact with the head or feet of the corpse. A gridiron and other black utensils were hanging against the wall, and could only be escaped by the exercise on the part of the spectators of great ingenuity of motion. This and the bed-place (bed-_room_ is no word for it) indicated squalid poverty; but the scene was changed in the parlour. There, appearances were at least kept up. It was filled with decent furniture—even elegancies; including a pianoforte and a couple of portraits.

These strange evidences of refinement only brought out the squalor, smallness, and unfitness for any part of a judicial inquiry of the inner apartments, into more glaring relief. Surely so important a function as that of a coroner and his jury should not be conducted amidst such a scene! Besides other obvious objections, the danger of keeping corpses in confined apartments, and in close neighbourhoods, was here strongly exemplified. The smell was so ‘close’ and insanitary, that the first man who entered the den where the body lay, caused the window to be opened. Two children, the offspring of the victim and the accused, lived in these apartments; and above stairs the house was crowded with lodgers, to all of whom any sort of infection would have proved the more disastrous from living next door, as it were, to Death. It is terrible to reflect that every decease happening among the myriads of the population a little lower in circumstances than this baker, deals around it its proportion of destruction to the living, from the same causes. True, that had it been impossible to retain the body where death occurred—as chances when several persons live in the same room—it would have been removed. But where.—The coroner and jury would have had to view it in the tap-room of a public-house.

There is another objection—all-powerful in the eyes of a lawyer. He recognises as a first necessity that the jurors should have no opportunity of communicating with witnesses, except when before the Court. But here the melancholy honours of the baker’s shop and parlour were performed by the two persons from whose evidence the cause of death was to be chiefly elicited;—the journeyman and a female relative of the deceased, who were in the house when the last blows were dealt, and when the woman died. They received the fifteen jurymen who were presently to judge of their testimony; and there was nothing but the strong sense of propriety which actuated these gentlemen on the present occasion, to prevent the witnesses from telling their own story privately in their own way, to any one or half dozen of the inquest, and thus to give a premature bent to opinions, the materials for forming which, ought to be strictly reserved for the public Court. Many examples can be supplied in illustration of this evil. We select one:—Some years ago, an old woman in the most wretched part of Westminster, was found dead in her bed—strangled. When the Coroner and jury went to view the body, they were ushered by a young female—a relative—who lived with the deceased. She explained there and then all about the death. When the Court re-assembled, she was—chiefly, it was understood, in consequence of what had previously passed—examined as first and principal witness, and upon her evidence, the verdict arrived at, was ‘Temporary insanity.’ The case, however, subsequently passed through more formal judicial ordeals, and the result was, that the coroner’s prime witness was hanged for the _murder_ of the old woman. We must have it distinctly understood that not the faintest shade of parallel exists between the two cases. We bring them together solely to illustrate the evils of a system.

On passing into the baker’s parlour, dumb witnesses presented themselves, which—properly or improperly—must have had their effect on the promoters of the inquiry. The piano indicated hours formerly spent, and thoughts once indulged, which, when imagined by minds fresh from the appalling reality in the squalid kitchen, must have excited new throes of indignation and pity. One portrait was that of the bruised and crushed corpse when living and young. Then she must have been comely; now no feature could be recognised as ever having been human. Then, she was cleanly and neatly dressed, and, if the pictured smile might be trusted, happy; now, she lay amidst dirt, the victim of long, long ill-usage and lingering misery, ended in premature death. The other, was a likeness of her husband. Had words of love ever passed between the originals of those painted effigies? Had they ever courted? It seemed that one of the jurors was inwardly asking some such question while gazing at the portraits, for he was visibly affected.

We all at length made our way to the ‘Two Spies’ in Whitehart Yard, Brydges Street. The accommodation afforded was a little more spacious than those of the Old Drury; but the delegated Majesty of the Crown had no dignity imparted to it from the coroner’s figure being brought out in relief by a clothes-horse and table cloth which were, during the inquiry, placed behind him to serve as a fire-screen. Neither did the case of stuffed birds, the sampler of Moses in the bulrushes, the picture of the licensed victuallers’ school, or the portraits of the rubicund host and of his ‘good lady,’ tend to impress the minds of jury, witnesses, or spectators, with that awe for the supremacy of the Law which a court of justice is expected to inspire.

The circumstances as detailed by the witnesses are already familiar to the readers of newspapers; but from the insecutive manner in which the evidence was produced, it is difficult to frame a coherent narrative. It all tended to prove that the husband had for several years exercised great harshness towards his wife. That boxing her ears and kicking her were among his ‘habits.’ On the Friday previous to her decease, the journeyman had been, as usual, ‘bolted down’ in the bake-house for the night, (such, he said, being the custom in the trade) and from eleven o’clock till three in the morning he heard a great noise overhead as of two persons quarrelling, and of one person dragging the other across the room. There were cries of distress from the deceased woman. Another witness—a second cousin of the wife—called on Saturday afternoon. She found the wife in a pitiable state from ill-usage and want of rest. Her left ear and all that part of the head was much bruised. There were cuts, and the hair was matted with congealed blood. The husband was told how much she was injured, but he did not appear to take any notice of it. A trait of the dread in which the woman lived of the man was here mentioned; she asked the witness to ask her husband to allow her to lie down. She dared not prefer so reasonable a request herself; although she had been up all the previous night being beaten. He refused. The cousin sat down to dinner with the wretched pair; only for the purpose of being between them to prevent further violence, for she had dined. She remained until half-past three o’clock, and during that interval the husband frequently boxed his wife’s ears as hard as he could; and once kicked her with great force. Her usual remonstrance was, ‘Man alive, don’t touch me.’ The visitor returned in the evening, and she, with the journeyman, saw another brutal attack, some minutes after which the victim fell as if in a fit. She was assisted into an inner room, sank down and never rose again. She lay till the following Sunday morning in a state of insensibility, and no attempt had been made to procure surgical assistance. A practitioner at last was summoned, gave no hope, and the poor creature died on Monday morning. The post mortem examination, described by the surgeon, revealed the cause of death in the blows at the side of the head, which he said was like ‘beefsteaks when beaten by cooks.’ No trace of habitual drunkenness appeared. The deceased had been, in the course of the inquiry, charged with that.

A lawyer would have felt especially fidgetty, while these facts were being elicited. The questions were put in an undecided rambling manner, and were so interrupted by half-made remarks from the jurors and other parties in the room, that it was a wonder how the report of the proceedings, which appeared in the morning newspapers, could have been so cleverly cleared as it was of the chaff from which it was winnowed. One or two circumstances occurred during this time which tended to throw over the whole affair the air of an ill-played farce. At an interesting point of the evidence, the door was opened, and a scream from a female voice announced ‘Please sir, the beadle’s wanted!’ There were four gentlemen sitting on a horse-hair sofa close behind some of the jury, with whom more than once they entered into conversation, doubtless about the case in hand. The way in which the coroner took notice of this breach of every judisprudential rule, was extremely characteristic: he said, in effect, that there was, perhaps, no actual harm in it, but it _might_ be objected to—the parties conversing might be relatives of the accused. In fact, he mildly insinuated that such unprivileged communications might warp the jurymen’s judgments—that’s all!

After the coroner had summed up, the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter against the husband. The Queen’s representative then retired, and so did the jury and the beadle; a little extra business was done at the bar of the ‘Two Spies,’ and, to use a reporter’s pet phrase, ‘the proceedings terminated.’

It is far from our desire, in describing this particular inquest, in any way to disparage—supposing anything we have said can be construed into disparagement—any person or persons concerned in it directly or remotely. Our wish is to point out the exceeding looseness, informality, and difficulty of ensuring sound judgment, which the system occasions. Indeed we were told by a competent authority that the proceedings at the Old Drury and ‘Two Spies’ taverns, formed an orderly and superior specimen of their class.

There is a mischief of some gravity, which we have yet to notice. The essential check upon all judicial or private dereliction is publicity, and publicity gained through the press in _all_ cases which require it; but the existing system gives the coroner the power of excluding reporters. He can, if he pleases, make a Star Chamber of his court, hold it in a private house, and conduct it in secret. Instances—though very rare ones—can be adduced of this having been actually done. Here opens a door to another abuse;—it is known that a certain few among newspaper hangers-on—persons only connected with the press by the precarious and slender tenure of ‘a penny-a-line’—find it profitable to attend inquests—not for legitimate purposes—for their ‘copy’ is seldom inserted by editors—but to obtain money from relatives and parties interested in the deceased for what they are pleased to call ‘suppressing’ their reports. This generally happens in cases which from their having no public interest whatever would not, under any circumstances, be admitted into the crowded columns of the journals; for we can with confidence say that any case in which the public interests are likely to be staked, once before the editors of any London Journal, and supplied by a gentleman of their own establishment, no power on earth could suppress it. It has happened again occasionally that, from the suddenness with which the coroner is summoned, and the slovenly manner in which his office is performed, an inquest that ought to have been made public has wholly escaped the knowledge of newspaper conductors and their accredited reporters, and has thus passed over in silence.

Let us here put up another guard against misconception. No imputation _can_ rest upon any accredited member of the press; the high state dignities which some men who have been reporters now so well support, are a guarantee against that. Neither do we wish to undervalue the important services sometimes performed by occasional or ‘penny-a-line’ reporters; among whom there are honourable and clever men. We only point out a small body of exceptional characters who are no more than what we have described—‘hangers-on’ of the press.

We now proceed to suggest a remedy for the inherent vices of ‘Crowner’s quests.’

In the report of the Board of Health on intramural interments, upon which a bill now before Parliament is founded, it is proposed to erect in convenient parts of London eight reception-houses for the dead, previous to interment in the cemeteries to be established. This will remove the mortal remains from that immediate and fatal contact—fatal, morally as well as physically—which is compulsory among the poorer classes under the existing system of sepulture. It appears that of the deaths which take place in the metropolis, in upwards of 20,000 instances the corpse must be kept, during the interval between the death and the interment, in the same room in which the surviving members of the family live and sleep; while of the 8,000 deaths every year from epidemic diseases, by far the greater part happen under the circumstances just described.