British Romanticism and Prison Reform

Jonas Cope

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781684485352, 9781684485369
• eBook ISBN: 9781684485376
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: Literature

In eighteenth-century Britain, criminals were routinely whipped, branded, hanged, or transported to America. Only in the last quarter of the century—with the War of American Independence and legal and sociopolitical challenges to capital punishment—did the criminal justice system change, resulting in the reformed prison, or penitentiary, meant to educate, rehabilitate, and spiritualize even hardened felons. This volume is the first to explore the relationship between historical penal reform and Romantic-era literary texts by luminaries such as Godwin, Keats, Byron, and Austen. The works examined here treat incarceration as ambiguous: prison walls oppress and reinforce the arbitrary power of legal structures but can also heighten meditation, intensify the imagination, and awaken the conscience. Jonas Cope skillfully traces the important ideological work these texts attempt: to reconcile a culture devoted to freedom with the birth of the modern prison system that presents punishment as a form of rehabilitation.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Solitary Confinement: “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”
• 2. William Godwin, “Mild Coercion,” and the Happy Prison Tradition
• 3. The Descent of Liberty: Leigh Hunt in Surrey Gaol
• 4. Keats, Byron, and the Idea of Transformative Confinement
• 5. John Clare: The Romantic Ascent
• 6. Jane Austen and Penitential Space
• Coda
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author