The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens. Steve Harris

      Millbank Prison Mayhew. Image courtesy Alamy Stock Photos, A67BWD

      The ‘modern’ imposition of ‘darkness’ was a mental punishment seen to be more painful than the physical, and it would follow convicts all the way to Port Arthur and Point Puer. Dickens was appalled when he witnessed prisoners in America never looking upon a human countenance or hearing a human voice:

      He is a man buried alive, to be dug out in the slow round of years, and in the mean time [sic] dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair…wasted in that stone coffin…hears spirits tempting him to beat his brains out on the wall.23

      Dickens condemned it as ‘cruel and wrong’ and was supported by the Illustrated London News, the world’s first illustrated weekly news magazine, which called for an end to such ‘experiments…[that] degrade the sacred name of justice…make the law monstrous…a disgrace and sin’.24

      Unlike some, Sparkes and Campbell did not have to endure Millbank’s experiments for a long period. Five weeks after his sentence in Nottingham, Sparkes was among those removed by longboat from Millbank to the prison hulk Euryalus in February 1839. Campbell followed the next year, two months after his sentence in Aberdeen.

      Prison hulks, another penal experiment and expediency, were introduced in 1776 after the American Revolution. The decision was initiated as a ‘temporary’ two-year utilisation of unseaworthy and de-masted Naval and commercial ships as floating prisons, to help cope with the rising tide of prisoners and overcrowded gaols.

      The first prison hulk was the Justitia, named for the Roman personification of justice and moral force, widely portrayed as Lady Justice with a blindfold signifying the law being applied with no regard to wealth or power. But few of wealth and power were to be found on the Justitia and what became a fleet of hulks at Chatham Thames estuary in north Kent — where Dickens spent some childhood years and incorporated some of his memories into Great Expectations — and Sheerness, Deptford, Woolwich, Gosport, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Cork. The ‘temporary’ hulk fleet lasted eighty years.

      Some boys would have anticipated that after stints in Houses of Correction, regional gaols and a few months at Millbank they would soon be leaving such misery behind, about to embark on a voyage to a new and perhaps better opportunity — even an adventure. But their hopes were dashed, Sparkes and Campbell spending seven long months on Euralyus at Chatham in conditions that would cause even a resilient and optimistic boy to question his sentence to the other side of the world.

      Gloriously launched by the British Navy in 1803, Euryalus was named after one of the Argonauts, the mythical Greek band of heroes accompanying Jason in his search for the Golden Fleece. As a 36-gun frigate, the ship had an illustrious naval history in the Napoleonic Wars accompanying Lord Nelson at the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, and the War of 1812, but there was nothing heroic or golden about it as an aged, de-masted prison hulk.

      The outline of dismembered masts in the gloomy Thames mist might have reminded Sparkes and Campbell of the gibbets which horrified boys in Nottingham and Aberdeen. The hulks certainly had their ghosts: death rates had been as high as one in four when the first hulks were employed and were still one in ten by the turn of the 19th century. They were the pits for the unpitied, the physical and psychological conditions so bad some prisoners averred a preference to hang rather than endure what would come to be seen ‘of all the places of confinements that British history records…the most brutalising, the most demoralising and the most horrible’.25

      Sparkes and Campbell were a little more fortunate than their predecessors, who were held in irons alongside older youths and adults before calls for better protection of children led to the Captivity becoming the first hulk set aside exclusively for boys in 1823. But it was deemed unsuitable and, after two years, was replaced by the Euryalus, a ship which a Select Committee on Gaols and Houses of Correction also recommended in 1835 be abandoned immediately. But authorities did nothing for another seven years, during which another 2500 boys under fourteen, some as young as eight or nine, were hustled aboard.26

      Regardless of age, such boys were seen by authorities in simple terms: as prisoners who were no longer entitled to walk in the land of their birth and were being banished for the ‘good’ of the country, and perhaps for themselves.

      The conscience of Britain was beginning to be stirred by social reformers like Elizabeth Fry, Quakers like Samuel Hoare, evangelical politicians like Thomas Buxton, lawyer-authors like Thomas Wontner, and reporter-authors like Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew and George Reynolds. But authorities steadfastly wanted to cleanse themselves of unwanted ‘vermin’, drain away the ‘dregs’ and win the war on ‘wickedness’.

      Young boys on the frontline were not spared, judged more on reputation and looks than the seriousness of their offences and denied benefits of understanding or mercy. So as two casualties of the war, Sparkes and Campbell had to be held in what a Royal Navy captain described as a ‘floating Bastille’.27