The Sun.
London, England, 1859-01-07 00:00:00

71IE STATE OF NET/MATE.

Mr. I. Anderson Rose, ex-Under-Sheriff of
London, in a letter to a contemporary, says :
Some time ago attention was called to the state
of Newgate, and its utter unfitness for the renten-
tion of prisoners or punishment of criminals. That
part appropriaten to male prisoners has in conse-
quence been reconstructed, with what advantage
the report of the ordinary of Newgate, lately pub-
lished in your columns, has clearly disclosed ; but
the portion still used for the imprisonment of
women is as it was, and there are among those who
have the care and control of Newgate some opposed
to any further improvement of this gaol. The fol-
lowing statement of facts may serve to clinch your
representations as to the necessity of completing
the alterations by reconstructing the portion ap-
propriated to women, so as to admit of the classifi-
cation and separation of female prisoners and
criminals, of whom it may be said that while
women generally are better than men, when they
fall they sometimes discover (difficult perhaps) a
lower depth than the worst of men. To the facts,
however.
In one room I have seen confined in Newgate a
woman—Mary Ann Alice Seago by name—who had
beaten her step child to death under circumstances
of unparalleled barbarity. The process of murder oc-
cupied some considerable time • but I cannot write
the details, and it would be sickening to read them.
She was a clever, cunning woman, well educated,
and with a very competent knowledge of the law
relating to prisons, with which she often favoured the
officials, and full of grievances. Sir George Grey,
the then Secretary of State for the Home Depart-
ment, would not remove her from Newgate on
account of a supposed delicacy of health, and the
most effectual stop to the outrages committed by
this woman in prison was a threat to get her re-
moved from Newgate.
Confined with her was one Celestina Somner,
also well educated; convicted of cutting the throat
of her child, 10 years old, in a coal cellar, with a
carving knife, and whose conviction was secured
by the evidence of a servant girl, Rachel, who slept
usually in or on a bed in the kitchen, through
which the mother and daughter passed on their way
to the shambles in the coal cellar, and who,
awakened that night, heard the butcher in the act
of murder informing her victim that she would
"teach the —to tell lies." That servant girl—

her nervous system strung in an agony of fear—
became many years older that night ; for her
mistress, carving-knife in hand, came to Rachael's
bed to turn her over and see whether she was
to asleep, which she pretended to be. "I did not go
sleep," said this witness at the trial; "I lay awake
all night." The softening influence of prison asso-
ciations on the heart of Celesti.na Somner may be
imagined, when she informed her convict com-
panions that she was sorry she had not finished the
servant as well as her own child.

The last of the three companions was a woman
who, by three different men, had had three children,
who, wishing to visit a paramour in the country
(whether the father of any one of her, offspring I
forget, but I think not), and finding the expense
of movinc, all four more than she could afford,
deliberately took two of her children down to a
canal and held them under water until they were
dead. This woman before her trial trumped up a
deliberate lie with elaborate circumstances against
the policeman who took her into custody, which
she adhered to after trial and conviction, but in the
imminent prospect of the gallows she admitted the
whole to be false.
These three were associated together in one room,
—vain of the attention they excited and received,
—as such criminals usually tre, the more so the
worse the crime and the more notorious the criminal.
They were attended by the doctor, the clergyman,
the governor, the matron, the visiting magistrates,
the sheriffs, the under-sheriffs (to say nothing of