The Self in the Cell

Narrating the Victorian Prisoner

Sean C. Grass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135384913
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Michel Foucault's writing about the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish has dominated discussions of the prison and the novel, and recent literary criticism draws heavily from Foucauldian ideas about surveillance to analyze metaphorical forms of confinement: policing, detection, and public scrutiny and censure. But real Victorian prisons and the novels that portray them have few similarities to the Panopticon. Sean Grass provides a necessary alternative to Foucault by tracing the cultural history of the Victorian prison, and pointing to the tangible relations between Victorian confinement and the narrative production of the self. The Self in the Cellexamines the ways in which separate confinement prisons, with their demand for autobiographical production, helped to provide an impetus and a model that guided novelists' explorations of the private self in Victorian fiction.

Chapter 1

Narrating the Victorian Prisoner

Providence has ordained that the change from evil to good is not to be wrought but at the price of suffering often recurring and long endured. And if the selection were left to criminals themselves, experience justifies the assertion, that, whatever might be the choice of the young offender, few punishments, indeed, would not be preferred by the veteran in crime to passing through a full course of reformatory discipline.

—Matthew Davenport Hill, A Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury of the Borough of Birmingham, 1848

CONVICTED IN 1723 OF DELIVERING FALSE TESTIMONY IN AN ATTEMPT TO EARN rewards, John Middleton was sentenced to stand for one hour upon the pillory at Charing Cross. Things could have been worse. He could have been whipped, or transported, or even hung. Instead, hands and head fixed to a wooden frame, he would simply stand for sixty minutes exposed to the scrutiny and derision of a London crowd. In the days leading up to Middleton’s appearance on the pillory, the authorities probably advertised the event, and they likely scheduled it—as was the custom—for the middle of a market day, when passers-by would be most numerous. Though Middleton probably knew these things, he could not have been prepared for what happened that day. An exceptionally ill-tempered crowd gathered even before Middleton arrived, and the moment he appeared, he was attacked. One eyewitness reported, “The mob was so numerous and violent … and pelted the said Middleton so barbarously that tho’ this Deponent hath seen several persons before stand upon the pillory he never saw any so much abused.”¹ Both the judge and the Crown had likely counted on eliciting just this public response. Few figures were more despised during the eighteenth century than informers, and false informers—like Middleton—were the most detestable variety.² Worse yet, Middleton had testified against London’s printers, ballad-singers, and pamphleteers, who were collectively expressing and fueling popular disaffection in the city. His lies constituted a sin against public opinion, and the very sight of him at Charing Cross incited the crowd. Within minutes of mounting the pillory, battered and choked by the rocks, mud, and other refuse heaped upon him, John Middleton breathed his last.

Very few convicts suffered quite this horribly on the pillory during the eighteenth century, but in many ways Middleton’s case is unexceptional. As J. M. Beattie writes in Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800, “[t]he offenses that judges and magistrates were anxious to punish by the pillory were acts that aroused deep public anger and hostility,” like crimes against children, sexual predation and deviancy, and various kinds of fraud.³ Sentences to the pillory allowed judges to identify and expose these offenders and allowed the public—if it wished—to participate directly in the administration of justice. Occasionally, the strategy backfired, and a prisoner pilloried for breaking an unpopular law or speaking out against an unpopular figure was treated indulgently or even freed by the crowd. More frequently, criminals from homosexuals to keepers of bawdy-houses were viciously abused. Less than a decade after Middleton’s death, John Waller died on the pillory at the Seven Dials, his ribs and skull fractured when he was trampled by an angry mob. Another man was stoned to death at Smithfield Market in 1756.⁴ Despite their savagery, incidents like these accorded perfectly with the Crown’s more comprehensive strategy for dealing with criminals during the eighteenth century: to punish publicly and severely, so that particular offenders would be disabled and others would be terrified into obeying the law. In pursuit of this aim, the authorities employed the pillory, stocks, public whippings, and public executions to deal with England’s criminals, since all of these punishments tended to display the operation of government power. They rarely sent convicted criminals to prison.

It may be impossible now to imagine a system of criminal punishment that does not have the penitentiary at its center—that does not depend, that is, upon the prison’s power to control offenders and perhaps even reform them in a separate space hidden from the public eye. We rely on penitentiaries to inculcate discipline and order, or at least to prevent disorder from seeping into the comfortable nooks of our contemporary world. We insist upon mandatory minimum prison terms for drug offenders, and life sentences without parole for the violent criminals we most fear. But it was not always so. Early in the 1700s, England’s prisons had to do with neither punishment nor discipline, for criminals typically stopped there only on the way to trial, sentencing, or execution. Almost all long-term inmates were debtors. As temporary depots for criminal transients but more permanent homes for the insolvent poor, prisons in 1750 were disorganized, unregulated, and uproarious—far cries from anything we would now recognize as institutions for punishing and disciplining criminality. A century later, this was no longer true. England’s penitentiaries became orderly, private institutions dedicated to the moral and psychological reformation of the criminal offender. The transformation of imprisonment during these hundred years emerged from evolving notions of criminality, the aims of punishment, and how those aims could best be achieved. As England remade its system of convict management between 1750 and 1850, it created modes of punishment with enormous social and psychological consequences, to be sure. It also created punishments with momentous narrative consequences for the Victorian prisoner.

II

Literature scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the importance of spectacle in the whippings, tortures, and executions that characterized eighteenth-century punishment but have done far less to consider how England’s prisons, too, played a deliberately public role. Just a year before John Middleton died at Charing Cross, Daniel Defoe caused the title heroine of Moll Flanders (1722) to observe of Newgate:

… ’tis impossible to describe the terror of my mind, when I was first brought in, and when I look’d round upon all the horrors of that dismal place.… the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful afflicting things that I saw there, joyn’d to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself, and a kind of an entrance into it.⁵

It is undoubtedly difficult for an astute reader to imagine Moll much “terrified” by anything, let alone by such mundane occurrences as roaring, swearing, and clamour. Even so, and despite her deliberate personal evasiveness, Moll’s description of Newgate captures the genuine state of most eighteenth-century jails. They were squalid, licentious, poorly built, and poorly managed. As temporary way-stations for criminals destined for other punishments, they needed to be little else. No government agents oversaw the old jails or ensured that they met particular standards, nor did money for their operation come from the Crown. Instead, jails were owned or at least operated by private entrepreneurs who hoped to turn a profit from managing their wards. The goal was to govern the most convicts at the least expense, and most old prisons were filthy, pestilent, and overcrowded as a result. More important, as Moll’s testimony hints, they differed from the penitentiaries of the following century in one especially crucial respect: the degree of contact they permitted inmates to have with the world beyond their cells.

Bender observes correctly in Imagining the Penitentiary that “most eighteenth-century prisons were not built purposely for confinement but were domestically organized,” which means that prisons—even including Newgate—were more like boarding-houses than places of punishment and detention.⁶ During the day, prisoners associated with one another quite freely in airing yards and common rooms, with the result (as Moll’s testimony shows) that most jails were deplorably awash in smoke, alcohol, and the oaths and blasphemies of the confined. Authorities cared little for how criminals whiled away the hours, so long as they attempted no violence or escape. For debtors, as the familiar experience of Charles Dickens shows, the comparison between prisons and boarding-houses was especially apt, since debtors could and frequently did bring their families to live with them in the squalor and misery of the cell. After all, debtors were obliged to pay rent for their cells, and they could hardly afford a second rent for family members who wished to live outside the prison. In many instances, though certain prisons were reserved for debtors, jails that held both kinds of inmates did not segregate debtors and criminals, so that civil prisoners and minor offenders were exposed to the rowdiest and most incorrigible of the lot.⁷ This easy contact between offenders of all kinds made prisons perfect places for criminals to meet, form associations, and plan future crimes. Not surprisingly, most Englishmen during the 1700s assumed that prisons played a greater role in countenancing crimes than in preventing or punishing them.

This easy familiarity characterized, too, the commerce that prisoners had with those outside of the prison walls. Lawyers, magistrates, constables, judges, and the families of inmates had obvious reasons for entering prisons, but jails teemed as well with other visitors, from provenders to prostitutes. As Paul Rock observes of debtors’ prisons, particularly, “[a]ny goods or services available outside the prison could be bought inside it and, as a result, the more prosperous institutions resembled market places” complete with butchers, chandlers, surgeons, and tap-houses.⁸ Criminal prisons, too, were commercial enterprises, and jailers were astonishingly creative at finding ways to make prisons into profitable places. Until the practice was outlawed in 1815, fee-taking was a natural feature of most jails and required prisoners to pay for their accommodations, meals, clothing, and other essentials. The prisoner who could pay handsomely could secure the best conditions, even including more comfortable chains. For the right price, he could also procure access to more tantalizing commodities: conjugal visits with spouses, lovers, or whores. In 1757, Gentlemen’s Magazine described Clerkenwell bridewell as a “great brothel,” but Clerkenwell was no special case.⁹ As late as 1814, during a Parliamentary inquiry into the administration of the Fleet and King’s Bench prisons, the warden of the Fleet called his jail “the largest brothel in London.”¹⁰ The keeper of Newgate confessed that he permitted conjugality, too, but only in order to prevent the outbreak of “more atrocious vice” like homosexuality and masturbation.¹¹ Meantime, under certain circumstances prisons afforded even more spectacular opportunities for commerce between inmates and the English public. Far from being the closed disciplinary institutions we now imagine, eighteenth-century jails, as Bender observes, “were treated as holiday curiosities.”¹² According to popular legend 3000 people turned out to visit the notorious highwayman James Maclean on the day before his execution in 1750, and the keeper of Newgate made £200 by “exhibiting” Jack Sheppard.¹³ All of these circumstances suggest that the old prisons, unlike modern penitentiaries, remained curiously liminal spaces, distinct from but nonetheless intimately connected with the world beyond the cell.

Prisons were permitted to persist in this remarkable—and remarkably public—fashion for several reasons. Simply put, allowing private jailers to manage convicts in any way was simpler for England’s authorities than regulating, staffing, funding, and policing the hundreds of local prisons that received English inmates during the eighteenth century. Indeed, the Crown seems to have been quite aware that its ability to staff prisons at all depended upon maintaining the profitability of the enterprise. In 1701 a bill that would have halted overcrowding at the Fleet and Queen’s Bench debtors’ prisons was rejected on the grounds that, with fewer prisoners, profits from the prisons would decline.¹⁴ Besides, prisons were not explicitly meant to punish or reform, and implicitly the old jails were far more punitive than their laxity suggests. The filth and stench of the prisons were unbearable and polluted entire neighborhoods. Through most of the century, prisons also posed a very real threat of deadly disease. During John Howard’s famous tour of England’s prisons in the early 1770s, he was obliged to travel on horseback, since the smell of his clothing after just a few hours in one of the prisons rendered him unfit for coach travel.¹⁵ He also disinfected his notes before he used them by laying them before the fire. As Sean McConville observes, “[o]utbreaks of gaol diseases were often fatal to witnesses, counsel and judges, besides prisoners and staff,” and such outbreaks contributed to the public perception that prisons really were dangerous places.¹⁶ In this objectionable way, the stench and pestilence of the prisons may even have reminded observers of just how far the prisons’ reach extended into the public sphere.

Beyond making prisons unpleasant and even hazardous for inmates, England’s authorities faced genuine ethical limitations to what they could impose upon the confined. Howard’s tour of the prisons revealed that 2,437 of England’s 4,084 inmates—or 60 percent—were in prison for debt, even though rates of incarceration for criminals, specifically, had risen since early in the century.¹⁷ The remainder were mostly accused or convicted criminals awaiting trial, sentencing, or execution. Through the eighteenth century, the preponderance of debtors in England’s prisons complicated the question of whether punitive or even disciplinary aims could fairly be introduced. It would have been improper, some reasoned, to subject debtors to mandatory labor and discipline, or to punish those prisoners who had not yet been found guilty but might be obliged to wait months for the next quarter sessions or assizes. While those awaiting execution clearly merited punishment, their sentences had already been handed down, and the ultimate exaction of justice for them would anyway come before God, not at the gallows. If they chose, therefore, to spend their last days drinking, carousing, or playing to the crowds gathered outside the prison, they would soon be justly served. This is all to say that, despite what we might now regard as dreadful physical conditions and deplorable disciplinary laxity in these eighteenth-century prisons, the Crown had few incentives to curtail the eminently public nature of the cell.

The English prison’s predominantly public character during this period mirrors, in most important respects, the Crown’s more comprehensive strategy for dealing severely and publicly with criminal offense. At least 160 crimes had been classified as capital felonies by the end of George II’s reign, and that number swelled to more than 200 under George III.¹⁸ While less than fifty percent of those sentenced to die actually went to the gallows, the severity of the criminal code and public nature of eighteenth-century executions suggest the emphasis that legislators placed upon deterrence. Until 1783, when the gallows was finally removed from Tyburn to Newgate, executions were preceded by a procession through London, during which the assembled witnesses could view and even participate in punishments by throwing rocks or other convenient missiles at the condemned. Public confession, written or oral, was usually part of this ritual, a condition of the condemned person’s shriving before facing the noose. Particularly brazen offenders might play to the crowd by jesting, drinking, and generally making light of the occasion on their way to the gallows.¹⁹ At the other extreme, especially detested criminals arrived at Tyburn already bloodied and battered, then were hung while tens of thousands of spectators looked on. After death, the most despicable felons could be gibbeted near the place of their offense or delivered to the medical college for dissection. These post mortem practices—designed to “display” the fruits of criminality—were codified under the 1752 Murder Act, which aimed “to impress a just horror in the mind of the offender, and on the minds of such as shall be present, of the heinous crime of murder.”²⁰ Lesser sanctions, including pillorying and whipping, also aimed to make punishment a public matter. In 1699, a new law governing claims to benefit of clergy changed the punishment from branding on the hand to branding on “the most visible part of the left cheek nearest the nose,” since authorities feared that a mark on the hand was too easy to conceal.²¹ Seven years later, the law was repealed: the more obvious mark had made offenders so subject to public scorn and mistrust that they became unemployable and were driven to poverty and, inexorably, back to crime. Like Middleton, Waller, and other criminals murdered on the pillory, offenders branded on the face during the eighteenth century fell victim to a system of public punishments that occasionally worked too well.

Among the sentencing options available to eighteenth-century judges and magistrates, only transportation seems at first glance to have served no explicitly public role. Really, though, transportation performed exactly the “public service” that England’s national program of convict management required. Sentences to transportation accounted for some 60 percent of all criminal offenders between 1700 and 1775, which means that most of England’s convicts were removed from rather than exposed to the public view.²² Even so, the Crown embraced transportation for many of the same reasons it embraced punishments like pillories, whippings, and executions: the punitive nature of the sentence, and the public reputation—if not quite the spectacle—of the penalty. Early in the century, the voyage was exceedingly miserable and dangerous, and those who survived the trip could expect to arrive in colonies that were still, by English standards, scarcely habitable. By the 1770s this perception had changed, and many of the social dregs whom England transported to America had better opportunities in the new world than in the old. Conventional wisdom tells us that the American Revolution suddenly and dramatically halted the flow of convicts to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION Solitude, Surveillance, and the Art of the Novel
• CHAPTER 1 Narrating the Victorian Prisoner
• CHAPTER 2 Prisoners by Boz: Pickwick Papers and American Notes
• CHAPTER 3 Charles Reade, the Facts, and Deliberate Fictions
• CHAPTER 4 “How Not to Do It”: Dickens, the Prison, and the Failure of Omniscience
• CHAPTER 5 The “Marks System”: Australia and Narrative Wounding
• CHAPTER 6 The Self in the Cell: Villette, Armadale, and Victorian Self-Narration
• CONCLUSION Narrative Power and Private Truth: Freud, Foucault, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood
• NOTES
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX