Newgate Prison, London: visitors talking to prisoners through a grill. Wood engraving by W.B. Gardner, 1873, after M. Fitzgerald.

"Visiting-day In Newgate. Continuing our series of Sketches in the City of London at Newgate, which was described last week and the week before, we give one showing the visitors at the double grating, where they are permitted to see and talk with the prisoners on the appointed weekly visiting days, but always in the presence of a discreet and careful warder. It is very necessary to adopt these strict precautions in the manner of allowing prisoners to hold some intercourse with persons from the outer world, lest they should contrive to arrange plans for an escape, and to procure the instruments by which they might perform Jack Sheppard's feats and break out of gaol. This, indeed, is almost impossible in a well-regulated modern prison, which is arranged for the greatest security with the least infliction of painful restraint in the case of the untried, like those who are the inmates of Newgate, awaiting their turn to appear at the bar of the Central Criminal Court. There is one respect, however, in which the arrangement for the interviews of prisoners with their friends seems capable of improvement. If the opposite grating fronts, on both sides of the intervening space, were partitioned into separate boxes, closed at the side, to hold one person in each box, as is done at the Middlesex House of Correction and other prisons, the individual prisoner and his visitor, who may be his wife, father, or mother, would see only each other's faces looking directly across, and would be unseen by the people to their right and to their left. A warder might, in that case, be stationed at one end of the lane or long passage intervening between the two opposite gratings, looking straight along their line, so that no attempt could be made to pass anything across without his perceiving it. It would certainly be much better to keep the prisoners out of sight of one another, and to spare the visitors any needless exposure, when they meet under these distressing circumstances, though what they have to say must often be overheard. A mind not yet hardened to crime is likely to be touched with a wholesome sorrow by the interview, in such a place, with one who has a claim upon the sense of duty and natural affections."--Illustrated London news, loc. cit.