"It was market morning. The ground was covered nearly ankle deep with filth and mire, and a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary ones as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a dense mass; the whistling of the drovers, the barking of the dogs, the bellowing and the plunging of the oxen, the bleating of the sheep, the grunting and the squeaking of the pigs, the cries of the hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarreling on all sides, the ringing of bells and roar of voices that issued from every public house, the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping, yelling, the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market, and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng, rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene which quite confounded the senses."
It may be remembered too, vide "Great Expectations," chapter 20, that when Pip came up to London to find his guardian, Mr. Jaggers, he beguiled that time while awaiting his return to his office by wandering about the neighborhood, and so "came into Smithfield, and the shameful place being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where I saw the great black dome of St. Paul's bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate prison." Whenever he writes of the jail, he does so in the same spirit. His earliest impressions of it struck the keynote for his whole life's view of it. What those early impressions were one may discover in that paper of the "Sketches by Boz" which, in their collected shape, bears the number 24, and has for title, "Criminal Courts."
"We shall never forget the mingled feelings of awe and respect with which we used to gaze on the exterior of Newgate in our schoolboy days. How dreadful its rough, heavy walls, and how massive the doors appeared to us--the latter looking as if they were made for the express purpose of letting people in and never letting them out again. Then the fetters over the debtor's door, which we used to think were a bona fide set of irons just hung up there for convenience sake, ready to be taken down at a moment's notice and rivetted on the limbs of some refractory felon. We were never tired wondering how the hackney coachman on the opposite stand could cut jokes in the presence of such horrors, and drink pots of half-and-half so near the last drop.