The Sun. — 1859-01-07 (London, England)

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 rentention of prisoners or punishment of criminals. That part appropriaten to male prisoners has in consequence been reconstructed, with what advantage the report of the ordinary of Newgate, lately published 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 following statement of facts may serve to clinch your representations as to the necessity of completing the alterations by reconstructing the portion appropriated to women, so as to admit of the classification 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 occupied 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 Department, 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 removed 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 associations on the heart of Celesti.na Somner may be imagined, when she informed her convict companions 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