Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq, vol 1 | Page 7

Ten pounds and a half of good white bread, and sevenpence to purchase potatoes and salt, or milk, per week. Bread and pence, at the very lowest, two shillings and six-pence per week. Now, if we reckon one shilling and six-pence, at the very lowest rate, for _washing, lodging, clothing_, and firing, which are all found in plenty and very good of the sort, he receives the value of four shillings per week. The bread, &c. is quite as much as, or rather more than, a moderate man can eat; and this person, who has seen a great deal of the world, seriously informs me that he enjoys here, happiness, ease, and comfort, compared to what he had to encounter out of prison; and as he professes to be very well pleased with waiting upon me, he dreads the approach of his release. Every person in the jail has the same allowance, and if they choose to work, the Governor enables them to earn from threepence up to one shilling a-day over.
Now, my good friends of Kirkeaton, although I will not recommend you to do any thing to get sent to jail, yet, I will tell you what I would do if I were in your situation. I would work hard from Monday to Saturday, and at the end of the week if I found that my wages were not sufficient to support myself, my wife, and children, in the common necessaries of life, I would, on the following Monday, try a fresh plan. Instead of going to work, I would go to a neighbouring magistrate, Lord Milton, or Lord Fitzwilliam, for instance, if they were within reach, and I would tell him that I had left my wife and family chargeable to the parish, as I was unable to support them by my labour; but as I knew the leaving of my family as an incumbrance upon the parish was an offence against the laws, for which I was liable to be committed to prison, and as I did not wish to give the parish officers more trouble than was absolutely necessary, I had come to request his lordship to make out my mittimus, that I might go to jail as soon and as peaceably as possible. I know what the corrupt knave of the Morning Post will say, "Ha! he is in a prison himself, and he wants now to get all his followers there also." But suppose this were the case, which it is not, you would not, could not, be worse off than Lord Milton's constituents are. But I have said this a thousand times within the last five years; nay, I always said this, seeing that a poor labouring man is twice as well off in a jail as he is out of it, as to meat, drink, washing, and lodging.
Now, my friends and fellow countrymen, the writing the history of my own life, during my confinement in a prison, will not, I trust, be considered presumption in me; because I follow the example of Sir Walter Raleigh and many other patriotic and eminent men who have gone before me. I am not much of a copyist, but I am not ashamed of being accused of endeavouring to imitate the brave and persecuted Napoleon, who is writing his Memoirs during his imprisonment on the barren rock of St. Helena. Napoleon I esteem the most illustrious and eminent man of the present age, both as a profound statesman and a brave and matchless general. Although he never appeared to evince so sincere a desire as could be wished, to promote the universal liberty of man to the extent that I contend, and have always contended for, yet, when I reflect upon the period in which his energetic mind was allowed to have its full scope of action, and when I recollect the powerful armies and fleets that he had to contend with, and the phalanx of tyrants who were at various times leagued together against him, I am disposed not to examine too nicely and with too critical an eye the means that he used to defend himself against their unceasing endeavours to destroy him, and to restore the old tyranny of the Bourbons. He is, like myself, a prisoner, and imprisoned by the same power; only in his case they have not even the forms of law to justify them in his detention. He is a prisoner upon a barren rock, but I have not the least hesitation in pronouncing him to have been, both in the cabinet and the field, as to talent and courage, unrivalled in the pages of modern or ancient history. Neither the reformers nor the people of England had any share in sending him to St. Helena, nor ought they