However, at that time, and for many
months afterwards, the practice of steadily putting the chain upon the
door before it was opened prevailed generally, and for a long time served
as a record of that deep impression left upon London by Mr. Williams.
Southey, I may add, entered deeply into the public feeling on this
occasion, and said to me, within a week or two of the first murder, that
it was a private event of that order which rose to the dignity of a
national event. [2] But now, having prepared the reader to appreciate on
its true scale this dreadful tissue of murder (which as a record belonging
to an era that is now left forty-two years behind us, not one person in
four of this generation can be expected to know correctly), let me pass to
the circumstantial details of the affair.
Yet, first of all, one word as to the local scene of the murders.
Ratcliffe Highway is a public thoroughfare in a most chaotic quarter of
eastern or nautical London; and at this time (viz., in 1812), when no
adequate police existed except the _detective_ police of Bow Street,
admirable for its own peculiar purposes, but utterly incommensurate to the
general service of the capital, it was a most dangerous quarter. Every
third man at the least might be set down as a foreigner. Lascars, Chinese,
Moors, Negroes, were met at every step. And apart from the manifold
ruffianism, shrouded impenetrably under the mixed hats and turbans of men
whose past was untraceable to any European eye, it is well known that the
navy (especially, in time of war, the commercial navy) of Christendom is
the sure receptacle of all the murderers and ruffians whose crimes have
given them a motive for withdrawing themselves for a season from the
public eye.
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