"'I knowed my name to be Magwitch, christened Abel. How did I know it? Much as I knowed the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought that it was all lies together, only, as the birds' names come out true, I suppose mine did.
"'So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but what caught fright at him, and either drove him off or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg'larly growed up took up.'"
One of the most curious episodes of Newgate is connected with the hanging of the Rev. W. Dodd, for forgery, on Friday, June 6, 1777. The clerical malefactor preached his own funeral sermon in the chapel of the prison before he was led out to die, the text being from Acts XV, 23. The theatre of this remarkable valedictory went up in the smoke of the Gordon Riots, but there is a chapel in the reconstructed jail: "situated," says Boz, "at the back of the governor's house; the latter having no windows looking into the interior of the prison. Whether the associations connected with the place--the knowledge that here a portion of the burial is, on some dreadful occasions, performed over the quick and not over the dead--cast over it a still more gloomy and sombre air than art has imparted to it, we know not, but its appearance is very striking. The meanness of its appointments--the bare scanty pulpit, with the paltry painted pillars on either side--the women's gallery with its great heavy curtains--the men's with its unpainted benches and dingy front--the tottering little table at the altar, with the commandments on the wall above it, scarcely legible through lack of paint, and dust and damp--so unlike the velvet and gilding, the marble and the wood of a modern church--are strange and striking. There is one object, too, which rivets the attention and fascinates the gaze, and from which we may turn horror-stricken in vain, for the recollection of it will haunt us waking and sleeping for a long time afterward. Immediately below the reading desk, on the floor of the chapel, and forming the most conspicuous object in the little area, is the 'condemned pew': A huge black pen in which the wretched people, who are singled out for death, are placed on the last Sunday preceding their execution, in sight of all their fellow prisoners, from many of whom they may have been separated but a week before, to hear prayers for their own souls, to join in the responses of their own burial service, and to listen to an address warning their recent companions to take example by their own fate and urging themselves, while there is yet time--nearly four-and-twenty hours--to 'turn and flee from the wrath to come.' At one time--and at no distant period either--the coffins of the men about to be executed, were placed in that pew, upon the seat by their side, during the whole service." The chapel has been rearranged since the time in which Boz wrote, and the ghastliest part of its show done away with.