"Often have we strayed here in session's time to catch a glimpse of the whipping place or that dark building on one side of the yard in which is kept the gibbet with all of its dreadful apparatus, and on the door of which we half expected to see a brass plate with the inscription, 'Mr. Ketch,' for we never imagined that the distinguished functionary could by possibility live anywhere else. The days of those childish dreams have passed away, and with them many other boyish ideas of gayer nature. But we shall retain so much of our original feeling that to this hour we never pass the building without something like a shudder."
The entrance to Newgate is through the keeper's lodge, which, with the house in which the keeper lives, occupies the centre of what has been well called "this vast quarry of stone." It fronts on the Old Bailey. The prisoner's quarters are in the wings, which extend from either side of the keeper's quarters. In the gloomy office, men with that indescribable prison air all such officials bear, lounge about, and come and go on business. There is iron everywhere, from the huge bolts on the outer doors, and the door inside of them, to the barred windows and other doors beyond number, that open and shut with a sullen clangor that goes echoing through the stone passages as if it would never die away. The smell of the jail is as powerful in its way as these evidences of its actual strength. It blows into your face in a strong breath when the door opens for you, and you find it lingering about you hours after your visit has been made. Some scientist ought to analyze this odor of the prison. It is unique. A soldier's barracks, a hospital, a ship's forecastle--all places, in short, where men live in close quarters--have an odor that tells of their origin; but the scent of the jail is different from all, and as horrible as the thing it recalls to you whenever you breathe it, or fancy you do.
"What London pedestrian is there," writes Dickens, in chapter 24 in the "Sketches by Boz," "who has not, at some time or other, cast a hurried glance through the wicket at which the prisoners are admitted into this gloomy mansion, and surveyed the few objects he could discern, with an indescribable feeling of curiosity. The thick door, plated with iron, and mounted with spikes just low enough to enable you to see leaning over them an ill-looking fellow, in a broad-brimmed hat, Belcher handkerchief and top-boots; with a brown coat, something between a great-coat and a 'sporting' jacket, on his back, and an immense key in his left hand. Perhaps you are lucky enough to pass just as the gate is being opened; then, you see on the other side of the lodge another gate, the image of its predecessor, and two or three more turnkeys, who look like multiplications of the first one, seated around a fire, which just lights up the white-washed apartment sufficiently to enable you to catch a glimpse of these different objects." In the next paper of the same series, he conducts us within the lodge. "One side is plentifully garnished with a choice collection of heavy sets of irons, including those worn by the redoubtable Jack Sheppard--genuine; and those said to have been graced by the sturdy limbs of the no less celebrated Dick Turpin--doubtful. From this lodge a heavy oaken gate, bound with iron, studded with nails of the same material, and guarded by another turnkey, opens on a few steps, if we remember right, which terminate in a narrow and dismal stone passage, running parallel with the Old Bailey and leading to the different yards, through a number of tortuous and intricate windings, guarded in their turn by huge gates and gratings, whose appearance is sufficient to dispel at once the slightest hope of escape that any newcomer may have entertained; and the very recollection of which, on eventually traversing the place again, involves one in a maze of confusion."