The Birkenhead News and Wirral General Advertiser. — 1887-03-19 (Birkenhead, Merseyside, England)

PENAL  SERVITUDE.  CHAPTER M.  Rhyming is one of the luxuries of a prison. It takes the form of epigrams and sonnets, principally on account of the difficulty of preserving the valuable records from oblivion after they have been composed from memory and copied out on the slate. lithe slate is a short one there is not much room for a long ode, much less an epic, although I have known every description of Literary poetising having been done and safely spirited out of prison. But remembering that the discovery of a bit of cedar entails a fortnight's remission and short rations for three days, while the possession of writing paper is almost an impossibility, there is much to be admired in those literary gentlemen under Her Majesty's keeping who, like the original Edinburgh reviewers, cultivate literature on a little oatmeal. Many years ago, when very young, I had been fighting a forlorn hope on behalf of a democratic candidate for a Lancashire borough, and only lost by a mere trifle of votes. We had a gathering of radical celebrities to carry out the presentation. After the speeches were over, and when the merry feet were beating time with youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm, a select few who had been prosecuted in the bad old times, when the " charter " was still a dream, and the Chartist agitation was a painful record, sat down to talk of the past. One of them, who had abilities sufficient to fill any post, and who for a long time subsequent to that conversation piloted a great "daily" now no more, was lamenting that there was no time to write a great work unless a man could be shut up in prison for a year or two, when he might do something great. Poor fellow. He was magnanimous enough to give Mr. Gladstone a seat which he was tolerably certain of getting for himself, and twenty years afterwards he had the seclusion he so wistfully coveted, but the work was unwritten—perhaps owing to the change of prison discipline—but he did not take kindly to the reverse which was a legal offence, but one which VMS scarcely a moral deflection from the company rectitude of the directors of a public company. Another of the company told the story of his prison reel eations—how he opened a vein and wrote with his blood for ink until the visiting prison magistrate gave him leave to have pens, ink, and paper, when he wrote a volume of poems which were extremely popular a generation ago. He also told us how he wrote the political novel in which he attacked Furgue O'Connor, and parodied the chartist agitation. Another of the company had done two years for sedition, but he was a poor man and was denied the facilities for intellectual recreation, so his only resource was to lampoon the officers and drive the chaplain mad with theological insinuations. The conversation grew interesting, and we all harked back to Tom Cooper's celebrated prison rhyme, "The Purgatory of Suicides," and the wonderful genius which could tarn ancient and modern history into a biographical dictionary wherein every great suicide was located in a little hell for himself, and we all agreed that there was no poem equal to "The Purgatory of Suicide," both on account of the peculiar Spenserian stanza and the wealth of historical incidents which had risen apparently unbidden to the mind of the author while sitting in his solitary cell. Then we were told the incidents of Tom Cooper, of bow in his nine days' trial at Stafford, he had defended himself and baffled the SolicitorGeneral (Sir Wm. Follett). and the Judge had regretted that the whole county business of Staffordshire had been put back nine days owing to the obetinaocy of a chartist lecturer who was originally a cobbler. When Tom Cooper was turned out of gaol at the expiration of his sentence he had nothing but a bundle of