It was a monstrous building designed to call forth horror

From Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing by Kate Colquhoun. Page 188. Remembering that the Victorians were among the first to adopt reforms compared to other countries.

Making its way east through the ashen light of the late afternoon the police van clattered to a halt outside Newgate, the most fearsome prison in Victorian imagination. For more than a thousand years a gaol had stood on the site of the City’s westernmost gate, a mere ten minutes’ walk from the Bank of England and St Paul’s Cathedral. It was a monstrous building designed to call forth horror, its scowling bulk, pitted granite flanks and chilling, iron-spiked walls emphasising the inevitability of punishment for crime.

The schoolboy Charles Dickens had gazed at this exterior with mingled feelings of awe and respect, noting how dreadful its rough, heavy walls and low massive doors appeared … looking as if they were made for the express purpose of letting people in and never letting them out again. This building had been one of the landmarks in the narrow radius of Müller’s former London life but the familiar was made strange by his arrest. He could hear the resounding boom of St Paul’s bells. His friends still toiled in nearby Threadneedle Street amid the human din and harsh rattle of hooves and wheels. They moved, anonymous in the feverish crowd of clerks, lawyers, vagrants, day-workers and prostitutes, passing from grand buildings to mean dwellings in squalid courts, while he followed only the orders of his captors.

Rain had turned the cold streets pewter. Omnibuses passed on their journeys between the Bank and the West End. Bewigged lawyers with bundles of papers tied in red tape, clerks in their black gowns, and employees of the neighbouring Central Criminal Court hurried past in the shadows of the austere building, as Müller entered the gaol through the iron-bound, nail-studded oak wicket gate. Directed by warders, he passed through two more barred doors and along sombre stone passages lit with dull lamps, arriving at the whitewashed Bread Room. He stood as his details were entered solemnly in the vast, vellum-bound register, a florid copperplate hand noting his name, height, age, birthplace and occupation. It was recorded that he was committed by Mr Flowers from Bow Street and by Mr Humphreys the coroner, pending trial on the charge of wilful murder against Thomas Briggs. Spaces for the trial date, the judge’s name, the verdict and the sentence remained blank.

Newgate housed several hundred prisoners in recently ‘improved’ single cells, each of them awaiting their trials at the opening of the next court sessions. If they were found guilty, they would be removed to other prisons; if convicted of murder they stayed to await their execution. Conducted along flagged corridors, Müller traversed narrow stone stairways and winding passages, through a succession of locked iron doors, each opened by an identically uniformed turnkey. Small windows gave onto open courts but admitted little light or air to diffuse a broth of smells that thickened throughout the place. He passed a room with glass panelling used by solicitors to meet with their clients, crossed a court and entered a glass-roofed gallery ranging up over four floors with cells branching off on either side.

Müller’s cell was about seven feet wide, thirteen feet long and ten feet high. It contained a table that folded up against the wall, a small three-legged stool, a copper washbasin under a tap in the wall and a water closet or lavatory. Three triangular shelves in the corner held a Bible, prayer book, plate, mug and bedding. The floor was asphalt with a grating to admit heated air. A gaslight with tin shade was fixed to the wall. At one end was a high window with fixed panes and crossed iron bars.

The prisoner was given a pint of meat and vegetable soup and eight ounces of bread. His breakfast would be a pint of gruel alternately seasoned with salt and molasses, and on four evenings each week his dinner would consist of a pound of potatoes and three ounces of meat. While he waited for his trial in the adjoining Central Criminal Court, he would exercise daily in an open yard under forty-foot walls surmounted by iron pickets, walking three yards apart from his fellow prisoners. He would also attend services and sermons in the small chapel, sitting every morning (and twice on Sundays) on a low form behind railings. He would only be allowed visits from the prison authorities or members of his defence team. Because his case was considered ‘remarkable’ an officer was put on guard outside his cell around the clock. Sometimes, Müller would talk to him.