Mr. Andrew L. Crick

The story of the Victorian prison has its roots deep in the British past. Currents flowing as early as the 1770s began the tide of reform that would eventually culminate in the penitentiary system of the mid-1800s, but the wellspring of late eighteenth-century debate surrounding penal reform lies even further back. In 1690, John Locke published his seminal work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.1 In it, he developed a materialist conception of human nature, and argued that no ideas are innate. According to Locke, all our thoughts result from impressions we receive through our five senses (and from the ideas we may then synthesize from these original, simple thoughts). This philosophical move was so important to the reform movement of the 1770s and beyond because it implied that human nature is malleable. If the character of empirical man is formed through the environment as it acts on his senses, then that character can be changed with a change of environment. This consequence was by no means lost on the generations of reformers to come, and indeed it rests at the core of their enterprise. Reform depends upon the belief that people can change, that they can be improved. By the time the intervening century had come and gone, Locke's materialism had been discussed and refined by a distinguished list of intellectuals, including Shaftsbury, Mandeville, Hutchinson, Butler and Hume. As Hume himself intoned, these men, "tho' they differ in many points among themselves, seem all to agree in founding their accurate disquisitions of human nature intirely upon experience."2 With the philosophical claim germinating for the better part of an hundred years, the stage was set for a group of men (and soon women) to test the hypothesis.

Toward the close of the eighteenth century John Howard, an unknown Bedfordshire squire, was the first to embark upon a sustained and comprehensive campaign to reform the prison. During his journeys to investigate the gaols, he traveled over 42,000 miles and visited all manner of institutions for housing the criminal and the poor.3 At this early date, there was no systematic and coordinated arrangement for dealing with the incarcerated, though the coming decades would witness a gradual if haphazard move toward nationalizing and standardizing penal institutions. Arguing that "A chapel is necessary in agaol,"4 Howard's motivating interest in reform stemmed from religious conviction. He felt that all souls were open to salvation if they could be made to change their ways, and due to the influence of Lockean empiricism, the notion that people were intractable due to original sin had given way to the idea that anyone and everyone could be saved through a change of heart and behavior. Thus Howard proposed treating the prisoners well, encouraging them, in order to effect enduring transformation in their character and to help them qualify for eventual redemption. He recommended, for instance, "Let the sober and diligent be distinguished by some preference in their diet, or lodging; or by shortening the term of their confinement: and giving them, when discharged, a good character. This last will be a strong incitement of good behavior. . . . A chaplain is necessary here in every view. To reform prisoners, or to make them better as to their morals, should always be the leading view in every house of correction."5

Howard's agenda for improving prisoners extended beyond merely patting them on the back for good behavior though, or exhorting them to accept Christ into their hearts. He pressed for fundamental changes in the prison environment specifically to reach the moral habits and imagination of the incarcerated through their bodies. As historian Michael Ignatieff argues, "Materialist psychology, by collapsing the mind-body distinction, seemed to offer a scientific explanation for Howard's claim that men's moral behavior could be altered by disciplining their bodies. Materialist psychology implied that a regimen applied to the body by the external force of authority would first become a habit and then gradually be transformed into a moral preference. Through routinization and repetition, the regimens of discipline would be internalized as moral duties."6 Howard frequently criticized contemporary practices where "prisoners [are] crowded in close rooms, cells, and subterraneous dungeons, for fourteen or fifteen hours out of the four and twenty. In some of those caverns the floor is very damp: in others there is sometimes an inch or two of water: and the straw, or bedding is laid on such floors; seldom on barrack-bedsteads. . . . Some gaols have no sewers or vaults."7 He wanted to clean up the prison and improve the diet, air quality and overall surroundings of the prisoners in order to change the routine of their bodies and thus reach their minds. In addition to better sanitary and dietary conditions, another significant piece of Howard's strategy involved his "wish to have so many small rooms or cabins that each criminal may sleep alone."8 Up to this time, prisoners were lumped together indiscriminately, and Howard felt that this enabled the more incorrigible convicts to influence others adversely. This cellular division came to be called the "separate system." Though it would not become widely practiced for another half century, when the time came it would prove a crucial component in the growing influence of the state to manipulate its wards. Howard's concept of solitary confinement would also spark the imaginative genius of Jeremy Bentham a short decade later, and lead to the creation of an architectural principle that would eventually affect Victorian culture at the deepest level.

Ten years after Howard's work was published, Jeremy Bentham began a series of letters describing the design for a new structure that would incorporate many of Howard's earlier suggestions, most particularly the notion of separate confinement for prisoners. While in Russia, Bentham wrote to a friend back in England about "the Panopticon; or The Inspection-House"9 as Bentham termed it. In 1791 Bentham collected these writings and printed them in one volume, though that volume never made it to the booksellers. Still, Bentham was fueled by conviction in the potential of his design to alter behavior among its residents. The Panopticon was conceived as a circular building with individual cells around theperiphery and a watchtower in the center with a direct line of sight radiating out to each discrete cell. In this arrangement, and by the means of special lighting, the cells would become spaces of perpetual observation, while the onlooker in the tower remained invisible to the objects of his gaze. "The essence of it consists, then," Bentham explained, "in the centrality of the inspector's situation, combined with the well-known and most effective contrivances for seeing without being seen."10 In Bentham's eyes, the principle behind the all-seeing eye of the Panopticon would internalize the gaze of authority and make the recalcitrant police themselves into proper behavior. For Bentham, this mechanism could be applied beyond the prison itself, and indeed he originally conceived of the Panopticon as a factory, where inmates could be put to work as a cheap labor force and produce goods at low cost for the master of the Panopticon. In his enthusiastic crusade, Bentham went so far as to dismiss most every social problem, once it benefitted from application of the Panoptical principle. "Morals reformed--health preserved--industry invigorated--instruction diffused--pubic burdens lightened--Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock--the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied--all by a simple idea in Architecture!"11

For the next twenty years, Bentham endeavored to convince Parliament to help fund the construction of the Panopticon. Significantly though, up through his final rejection in 1811, the government shied away from fully supporting Bentham's project. On the one hand, dissenting voices from various corners had been critical of efforts to establish a paid police force during the 1780s. An initial attempt in 1785 floundered, and though a bill was passed in 1792 establishing the first salaried police magistrates and a small staff of paid constables in London, it was not until 1829, under the direction of Sir Robert Peel, that Parliament would ratify a plan for pervasive and systematic changes in the organs of law enforcement under the New Police. In the 1790s, the government may have been wary and politically incapable of forwarding a plan that appeared to yield the state more influence than the public was prepared to accept at the time. In addition, doubts surfaced about the kind of power the Panopticon situated in the hands of one man, and questions were raised about the efficacy of the separate system. Writing in 1793, William Godwin argued that secluding prisoners would cause them to be dispirited and melancholy, and might even lead them to madness. Reform was to be accomplished by example and moral suasion, not by coercion. According to Godwin, authoritarian measures brutalized rather than reformed a person. "Coercion cannot convince, cannot conciliate, but on the contrary alienates the mind of him against whom it is employed. Coercion . . . can have no proper tendency to the cultivation of virtue."12 After an articulate and forceful launch, the plans for prison reform conceived by Howard and Bentham languished as the century drew to a close. "Resistance to solitary confinement remained widespread and was one major reason why penitentiary ideas spread so slowly in England after the years of innovation in the 1780s."13 "By the mid-1790s the reforming impetus that gave birth to the penitentiary had spent itself."14 The reform debate however was not dead; it merely went into a kind of hibernation. In the decades to come, public anxiety over rising crime rates and the concern of the propertied classes about maintaining social order would heat up and revive the legacy of Howard and Bentham.

Government throughout England in the eighteenth century was a local affair. No elaborate or effective central bureaucratic structure existed to link systems of law enforcement, and there were many forces in play that retarded any motion toward consolidation of government power. To begin with, the gentry was very much against such measures, preferring to maintain its own hegemony out in the rural county parishes away from London. As scholar David Philips illustrates, "Eighteenth-century England was very decentralized administratively--more like a federation of semi-autonomous units than a unitary state--with the central government having very little direct governmental contact with the mass of the population. . . . The key figure for administration of local government and law was the local justice of the peace; unpaid . . . he was usually the local squire or parson. . . . The gentry, having won their position of power in the seventeenth century and enjoyed that power throughout the eighteenth century, had no intention of losing it again to the central government; a government might exert control over a paid, centralized bureaucracy, but there was very little they could do to discipline an unpaid, decentralized group of men."15 Thus, the penitentiary plans succumbed in part to the same pressures lobbying against the formation of a regularized, centrally administered police network. When Patrick Colquhuon, a friend of Bentham who was also familiar with Howard's work, pressed for establishing a paid police force to monitor the inferior orders of society, and to help safeguard "the morals of this useful class of the community,"16 he met stiff resistance. Some were so opposed to the increase in state power implied by proposals similar to Colquhuon's that in the first round of talks concerning the establishment of a strong police force, a representative of the City of London warned of "a System of Police, altogether new and arbitrary in the Extreme, creating without Necessity, new Officers [the Commissioner], invested with extraordinary and dangerous Powers, enforced by heavy Penalties, and expressly exempted from those Checks, and that Responsibility, which the Wisdom of the Law has hitherto thought necessary to accompany every extraordinary Power."17 Representatives of the working class, who were wary of police surveillance and intrusion, as well as some of the radicals and liberals in Parliament, sided with the City of London and joined forces to combat the police bill of 1785. However, it was the support of the gentry en masse that enabled these groups to defeat the bill, and though seven years later a police bill would emerge from Parliament, it was to be severely curtailed.

In 1815, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, both soldiers and officers returned to Britain in large numbers. Though the country experienced a brief commercial boom at this time, by 1817 the economy was lagging again. Unemployment and falling wages in the industrial towns weighed heavily on the working class. As a result of these hardships, "in new manufacturing areas crime was often an alternativeto unemployment,"18 leading to a "sharp rise in criminal activity after 1815."19 Domiciling the soldiers who returned from the wars placed added stress on the urban scene, and public institutions swayed under the weight of burgeoning population, idled workers and increasing unrest. Significantly during this period, "a distinctive new anxiety began to appear in the pamphlet literature that explained crime to the propertied classes after 1815. The writers dwelt on the connection between criminality and political disaffection among the working class."20 Agitation for political and economic reform increased, and tensions between the government and the population mounted. "The climax came in Manchester on 16 August 1819, when the local magistracy ordered the yeomanry to apprehend speakers at a huge but peaceful reform demonstration in St. Peter's Fields. The soldiers turned on the crowd and eleven were killed at 'Peterloo.' Both the desire of radicals for revenge and the penetration of the radical movement by government spies and agents provocateurs were responsible for further outbreaks in the following year--a weavers' rising in Scotland and the 'Cato Street conspiracy' to assassinate the Cabinet in London."21 Whereas the end of the eighteenth century found the gentry solidly against any increase in centralized state power, now considerable anxiety among the propertied classes about criminal activity and political agitation brought new support for an organized state apparatus that could deal with such disturbances. More than ever before, the "gentry frequently expressed [fears]--of Jacobin mobs baying at their gates--and the explicitly revolutionary ideas of some leaders of the working classes."22

Once again, police and prison reform entered the political consciousness of the country. Debate centered on the formation of institutions capable of quelling the widespread social unrest, and the rhetoric of reform revived discussions of how to cure delinquent segments of society. Moreover, with the recent end of the wars, a new source of administrative influence and ability became available to penal reform for the first time. Decommissioned officers and retired soldiers, because of their military training and experience, possessed the skills necessary to run a highly disciplined institution effectively. The men exiting the service brought with them talents and traits that had not been widely present in society when Howard and Bentham were lobbying for change in penal organization. As a consequence, reform gained a professional cachet it had hitherto lacked. "The professionalization of reform was accomplished by the professionalization of prison and police staff. Tighter prison discipline, like tighter supervision of the streets, depended on the recruitment of men with an aptitude for the exercise of strict authority. . . . At the end of the Napoleanic Wars . . . a large number of half-pay officers and NCOs began to move into careers in institutional discipline."23 In addition, the public began to conceive of the prison as an increasingly important component of the social structure as these military officers, often of respectable social station, began to take up posts within the carceral system. As Ignatieff maintains, "The movement of gentlemen officers into positions formerly the preserve of petty tradesmen attests to the increasing importance of prisons as institutions in the minds of the middle-class public."24

With the incorporation of ex-servicemen into the penitentiary project, a change in the very language of incarceration began to occur as well. The keeper became a "governor," the turnkey a "warder," and what had been a prisoner's apartment now was termed his "cell."25 This shift in the vocabulary of imprisonment reflected the transformation in the cultural consciousness regarding the criminal's relation to society then underway. The separate system pioneered by Howard forty years before returned (though it would not experience its most complete expression until the height of the reform movement in the 1840s), and a renewed concern both for prisoners' souls and for manipulating their environment to spark the fires of conscience and morality emerged. The military language of discipline coincided with the religious philanthropists' desire for cleanliness and order. The celebrated Quakeress Elizabeth Fry, for instance, picking up where Howard left off, spoke at length about the need for tidy surroundings and a usefully structured day for the women prisoners of Newgate. Unlike Howard though, Fry only lobbied for separation at night, so prisoners could be alone with their thoughts and turn toward redemption.. During the day, Fry championed the arguments of Godwin and held that communal work and recreation were essential to maintaining good spirits among the incarcerated. Fry first visited Newgate in 1813, and began calling regularly in 1817 with the hope of reforming the character of the women within. Her widely publicized good works with the prisoners (she taught women to sew, read to them and admonished them to look to the future judgment of God that they might mend their ways now here on earth) helped focus the public eye on the penitentiaries as institutions of correction, and her efforts contributed to sustain the reformatory component in the penal code currently under revision. In an undated letter to Walter Vennin, Fry speaks at length of the value in prison discipline, and of the clear benefits she finds her visits bringing to the women of Newgate: "[T]he more extensive my observation of the effects of prison discipline is, the more confident I feel of its importance; and that, although the work will be gradual, yet through the Divine blessing its result will be sure. Not only that many will be stopped in their career of vice, but some truly turned from their evil ways, and the security and comfort of the community at large increased by our prisons . . . being so arranged and attended to that they may become schools where the most reprobate may be instructed in their duty towards their Creator and their fellow mortals, and where the very habits of their lives may be changed. . . . We continue to have much satisfaction with the results of our efforts in Newgate--good order appears increasingly established, there is much cleanliness amongst our poor women, and some very encouraging proofs of reformation in habit, and what is much more, in heart."26

While the work of individual philanthropists like Fry continued to play well in the media and influence various members of Parliament, the most important developments in penal reform now began to arise ona broader institutional scale. In 1823, under the sponsorship of Sir Robert Peel, Parliament passed the Gaols Act, which required magistrates to submit annual reports of their prisons. These "Schedule B's," as they were called, resulted in increasingly distinct classification of prisoners, dividing them into various subgroups with the idea of keeping the worst offenders isolated so they would not contaminate the reformation of lesser criminals. This kind of bureaucratic shift in procedure started to bring the country's penal system under the central eye of Parliament (a federalizing process that would later culminate in the Prison Act of 1877, gathering the penal system of Britain under one authority by nationalizing all local prisons). Improving the administrative record keeping of inmates enabled more detailed manipulation of convict life (a trend that would extend to photographing even released inmates by the 1860s, and fingerprinting them in the 1890s), and this compilation of data underwrote renewed efforts to bring the separate system to complete fruition. The surveillance capabilities of the government received another boost in 1829 with the enactment of the New Police Act. Under the sponsorship of Peel once again, thismeasure established a professional, uniformed cadre of paid police to be deployed throughout London. An effort that had been summarily defeated back in 1785 by a coalition of liberals, aldermen of the City of London, representatives of the working class, and the gentry as a group, now became law. This time the gentry backed it, and even the press favored the bill, though they had opposed such legislation in 1785 and again as recently as 1823.27 Still, there was some opposition to the New Police Act. Agitated members of the working class were up in arms about what they saw as a threatening consolidation of power to be used against them. They decried, "the present abominable and oppressive Police Act, [for] investing himself [Peel] with the power and jurisdiction of the magistracy of nearly ONE HUNDRED PARISHES and that of their Officers, a truly formidable and dangerous power to be vested in the hands of ONE SINGLE MAN, and in open violation of the antient and excellent laws of the realm."28 These concerns were not unjustified, for the coming decades were to see increasing police activity in the poorer neighborhoods, and instances like the one where "a policeman, Popay, had infiltrated a working-class political union as an agent provocateur"29 were not at all uncommon. Nonetheless, the existence of a flourishing and increasingly capable police force had become an accepted (and even appreciated) fact of life for most of the middle class and gentry by the 1830s. Social unrest and its representation in the press during the past decades had slowly worked on the consciousness of the governing and propertied classes, and they came to support a centralized state organ that could help secure the peace. As Philips posits, "The radical and revolutionary ideas of the 1790s, the large-scale political agitation of the 1815-1819 period culminating in Peterloo, the disturbances associated with the trial and funeral of Queen Caroline in London in 1820-21, and the industrial disturbances in Lancashire in 1826--all these caused men of property to think more favourably of a strong police force."30 The Parliamentary Acts during this period propelled British society into a region increasingly dominated by a powerful, organized and ubiquitous apparatus of state surveillance and control, a region soon to be expressed by its most representative emblem: Pentonville Prison.

In 1842, a new prison was opened in Pentonville. Designed by architect Joshua Jebb, it utilized many of the basic principles earlier outlined by Bentham in his plans for the Panopticon. Space was allocated with an eye to keeping inmates under constant surveillance, and the separate system originally conceived by Howard worked to isolate prisoners from each other. In addition, a program of silence was introduced which prohibited convicts from even speaking to one another. With Pentonville, all the earlier discourses of reform came together in one structure for the first time, and the daily life of an individual prisoner was monitored and controlled as never before. Prison discipline achieved a heretofore unparalleled thoroughness, and the state realized a new mechanism for experimenting with the instruments of manipulation and influence. As professed by John Burt, a man involved with overseeing the Pentonville project, "The Pentonville Prison was erected for the purpose of submitting to actual experiment a new system of discipline. That system differed in some of its chief characteristics from all previous systems, and it was subjected to peculiar tests, both from the highly criminal character of the prisoners, and from the long duration of their imprisonment."31 Furthermore, "The distinctive characteristic of the discipline was the combination of severe punishment with a considerable amount of instruction and other moral influences."32 In its very form, Pentonville embodied the governing classes' growing desire for control over the delinquent and dissident elements of society. This new prison was viewed as a panacea for the anxieties of the well-to-do, and as a result funds were successfully levied to duplicate the Pentonville model throughout the country. Indeed, "By 1850, ten new prisons had been built on the Pentonville model, and ten more had been converted to the separate system."33

Whereas Newgate had been the standard by which the prisons and gaols of Britain were measured during the efforts of the early philanthropic reformers, Pentonville now gave expression to an age of increased state power, expanded bureaucratic sophistication and improved methods of statistical analysis. In many ways, Pentonville obviated the concerns that had been voiced by Howard and Fry several decades before. Fry in particular was disturbed by the lack of order and organization in the Newgate she visited during 1817. "The movement of reform which Elizabeth Fry dramatised by her readings in Newgate started above all in a genuine revulsion from the undisciplined character of the majority of English gaols about 1817, and it is impossible to understand why Pentonville . . . and the other penitentiaries were designed as they were . . . unless one understands the moral objections made to the old order. The builders of Pentonville were trying to solve problems raised by Elizabeth Fry herself."34 "While the design of Pentonville isolated and exposed the inmate before the gaze of authority, Newgate was a dark, damp warren of wards, yards, privies, and staircases nowhere affording authority a clear vantage point for inspection and control."35 In contemporary analyses of convict society in Newgate, one finds a certain unease expressed about the inmates' ability to dictate the terms of their own confinement, to govern their daily lives so to speak. Newgate utterly lacked the centralized, efficient oversight that Pentonville had perfected. Within Newgate, "Internal order, such as it was, was enforced chiefly by the inmate subcultures,"36 and this troubled those who looked close enough to realize this was indeed the case. "[T]he image of an entrenched inmate netherworld, ruling an institution of the state with its own officers, its own customs, and its own rituals"37 unsettled the reformers, and motivated them in no small measure to endorse changes that would bring convict society firmly under the control of those who ran the prisons. This unease helps explain the decisive return of the separate system at Pentonville, and it explains in part how totally Pentonville dominated the mid-century penal landscape. It soon became a symbol of the age in striking and unsettling ways, but nowhere did the prison invade the cultural consciousness as it did through the pen of that most popular of Victorian writers, Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens began his association with the penal system quite early in life, and it was to haunt and fascinate him throughout his later years. Perhaps more than any other trope in his fiction, the prison looms in both literal and figurative forms. Countless scenes and indeed the bulk of some novels occur within the confines of imprisoning spaces: the Hulks, Newgate, the Fleet, Old Bailey and the Marshalsea are standard features; convicts and police detectives figure prominently. Characters frequently find themselves struggling to emancipate their lives from various incarcerating forces, and themes of bondage and arrest are paramount. As a creative artistic force in play throughout the mid-Victorian period then, Dickens interrogates the prison's influence on society and renders its impact with a comprehensiveness, sophistication and depth of insight unparalleled in the writing of his contemporaries. As a result, his life and work provide a potent and unique point of entry into the Victorian preoccupation with the carceral. In Dickens, we find an expression of the subtle but profound consequences of Bentham's Panopticon not only as it was realized in the Pentonville Prison, but even more disturbingly as the power of this architectural and organizational principle manifested itself in social discourse far beyond the walls of the prison proper.

From the early age of twelve, the prison began to play a formative role in the life of the young Dickens. His prodigal father John, despite an adequate if not comfortable yearly income, had difficulties managing the family finances. When an outstanding debt of forty pounds was called in, Dickens's father found himself short of the funds. Legal action was taken by the creditor, James Karr, and John Dickens was subsequently incarcerated in the Marshalsea. Although his father's confinement lasted only a short three months, it was a long time for Dickens to bear the humiliation of an improvident parent and the prospect of supporting himself without familial assistance. While his mother and younger siblings moved into the prison to reduce costs, Dickens continued in the occupation he had entered a few weeks earlier. Working for James Lamert, a friend of the family, the despondent Dickens spent his days in an oppressive shoe-blacking warehouse. The original agreement had been for Dickens to pursue his education during breaks for lunch, with Lamert as instructor, but this agenda soon faltered as the demands of business encroached upon an already inconvenient routine. The anguish caused by his father's arrest, coupled with the youth's own adverse circumstances during this time, later prompted the author to review his childhood with considerable distress: "The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life. . . . I never said, to man or boy, how it was that I came to be there [in the blacking warehouse], or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was there. That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I."38 As a grown man, when Dickens recalled this scene from his youth, he confessed, "I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began. I never saw it. I could not go near it. . . . My old way home by the Borough made me cry, after my eldest child could speak."39

The impact of these months on the developing Dickens cannot be underestimated. His introduction to prison existence and the lives of criminals, which originated during his Sunday visits with his family in the Marshalsea, evolved into a lifelong curiosity for what he would later term the "attraction of repulsion"40 in the lives of convicts. As an adult, this fascination led him to inspect personally the sites of numerous penitentiaries, both in England and America. Dickens considered the New York prison house The Tombs "a hell on earth," and the penal system in Philadelphia "was to become one of his chiefhatreds."41 While touring Philadelphia he visited the Eastern Penitentiary and was moved by the conditions he found there to remark, "The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. . . . In its intention, I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: . . . because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear."42

Though Dickens had already profiled a scene of incarceration in his vignette entitled "A Visit to Newgate,"43 his first sustained fictional portrait of prison life occurs in The Pickwick Papers, though it is a rather gentle introduction to the carceral when compared with his later work. To begin with, Mr Pickwick is detained in the Fleet Prison by choice. He refuses on principle to pay a debt charged against him. Mr Pickwick rents an apartment during his tenure at the Fleet, and is never really in danger of having to remain to the point of serious inconvenience. He can always purchase his liberty if he tires of setting an example. Still, Mr Pickwick encounters other inmates far less fortunate than himself, those who lack the means to secure a reprieve of any kind. In Mr Pickwick's meeting with the languishing Chancery prisoner in particular, Dickens presents a man sorely treated by two decades of confinement. With this portrait of penal life, Dickens takes up the theme of incarceration and makes it his own. Greatly disturbed by the plight of the Chancery prisoner, Mr Pickwick cries out against the fact that "this man [has] been slowly murdered by the law."44 Even more discomfiting is the testimony of the prisoner himself, who relates, 'There is no air here. . . . The place pollutes it. It was fresh round about, when I walked there, years ago; but it grows hot and heavy in passing these walls. I cannot breathe it. . . . Twenty years, my friend, twenty years in this hideous grave! My heart broke when my child died, and I could not even kiss him in his little coffin. My loneliness since then, in all this noise and riot, has been dreadful. May God forgive me! He has seen my solitary, lingering death.'45 So severe are the physical circumstances of the Chancery prisoner's captivity that "he had grown so like death in life, that they knew not when he died."46

This early Dickensian representation of prison life articulates concerns already expressed by Howard and Fry in their crusade to reform the prisons several decades before. The emphasis centers on bad hygiene, cramped quarters and physical discomfort. Whereas Howard contended "that [prison] air, corrupted and putrified, is of such a subtile and powerful nature, as to rot and dissolve heart of oak,"47 the Chancery prisoner laments the 'air here. . . . I cannot breathe it.' In the world of Mr Pickwick, the prison is a local phenomenon, and Dickens has not yet conceived of the carceral as a systemic trope pervading the culture with the kind of dominance and ubiquity that Pentonville will soon suggest. However, the shift in Dickens's conception of imprisonment is on the horizon. In Oliver Twist, his very next novel, convicts and delinquency emerge as substantial elements in the plot. Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger, the underworld figures over whom Fagin presides--all these characters infect society with the perpetual threat of crime, and they also speak to the anxiety of capture and incarceration which the underworld fears. While Fagin himself is finally apprehended and condemned to death for his crimes, it is Bill Sikes who best reflects the development of Dickens's thinking on the carceral. After murdering Nancy, Sikes becomes haunted by guilt, returns to London and the scene of his crime, and ends up hanging himself by accident in the midst of his escape. During his flight, "all the people he met--the very children at the doors--seemed to view him with suspicion."48 His anxiety convinces Sikes that a ghastly phantom pursues him and keeps him always in sight of its horrible gaze. Indeed his last words, shouted in abject terror, are 'The eyes again!'49 While it is clearly possible to read the end of Sikes in Christian terms, where sin is its own punishment and guilt the inevitable consequence of doing evil in a world governed by God, this sequence also unveils Dickens's interest in mechanisms of judgment and the rhetoric of delinquency. Though the narrator confides, "Let no man talk of murderers escaping justice, and hint that Providence must sleep,"50 the focus on suspicious eyes and the gaze of accusation mirrors the discourse surrounding Pentonville and recalls Bentham's discussion of the ideal penitentiary. Thus theProvidential eye of God transforms into the Panoptic eye, and the rhetoric of institutional authority controls Sikes quite effectively. After all, the last place he should go is London, for that is where he murdered and that is where he is most likely to be caught. It is as though Sikes returns to London precisely in order to be apprehended, to be punished, because despite himself he has absorbed the gaze of authority and cannot elude its certain condemnation.

Twenty years after Oliver Twist, after Dickens had personally inspected prisons on both sides of the Atlantic, and indeed well after Pentonville had become the prototypical model for the incarceration of felons in Victorian society and the police apparatus of Britain had grown substantially, Dickens wrote Little Dorrit. In this work, the prison becomes the focal point of action and the figure around which the characters must organize their lives. William Dorrit is incarcerated in the Marshalsea for debt in much the same way that Dickens's own father John had been during the author's childhood, and as the years pass by, his entire sense of self is shaped by his convict status. Labeled as an irresponsible delinquent, William Dorrit comes to despise himself. He accepts the rhetoric of his own position as it is articulated by the society which has placed him there in a process that eventually will cost him his own sanity. "'O despise me, despise me!' he pleads to his daughter, 'Look away from me, don't listen to me, stop me, blush for me, cry for me--even you, Amy! Do it, do it! I do it to myself! I am hardened now, I have sunk too low to care long even for that.'"51 Over time, the prison has divided William Dorrit against himself, stripped him of dignity and led him to refuse the sympathy of his beloved girl. The carceral institution has invaded William's perception to the extent that he can no longer separate himself from the condemning rhetoric levied against him as a convict and a prisoner. Thus, he is left a confused man: "[N]ow boasting, now despairing, in either fit a captive with the jail-rot upon him, and the impurity of his prison worn into the grain of his soul, he revealed his degenerate state to his affectionate child."52

Clearly, though Dickens still situates his narratives within actual prisons, his interest in imprisonment has expanded beyond the mere physical structure and led him to delve into the psychological impact of being a convict. In addition, Dickens begins to investigate the very discourses of confinement and separation by which society makes sense of itself. The growth of the carceral system in Britain over the preceding century has started to infect the Victorian sensibility to such a degree that the very notion of character and identity now brings with it a sense of its own potential criminality. Pip's search for identity in Great Expectations for instance is grounded fundamentally in the gestures of the convict Magwitch; as he pursues his expectations, Pip's association with the criminal becomes ever clearer and more troubling. An excellent illustration of this striking trend occurs in a phrase frequently used to depict Little Dorrit's Mr Merdle. He is constantly portrayed "clasping his wrists as if he were taking himself into custody."53 While this description initially has a comic effect, it soon belies a certain narrative anxiety. In a novel where the prison figures so prominently and in so many ways, a kind of paranoia about observation and capture invades the text and casts into doubt whether characters even own the language that defines them. In Mr Merdle's case, suicide becomes the ultimate custodian of character and removes Mr Merdle from the stage altogether. His is an act of complete self-abnegation, surrendering to the belief that somehow his very existence is an act of delinquency.

A similar self-erasure occurs when William Dorrit gains release from the Marshalsea. When the legacy of a previously undiscovered fortune becomes public knowledge, he is free to leave prison. But the blemish of the chamber and the discourse of delinquency that has bound him for so long remains inured within his psyche and eventually destroys him. The Marshalsea has subliminally corrupted his self-esteem to such a degree that his newfound wealth is unnatural to him. He cannot conduct himself comfortably because he still views himself under the stigma of the term "debtor," even though he has paid back all the money he owed. At a dinner party given by Mrs Merdle, the power of the prison reasserts itself a final time and drives William irrevocably insane. He imagines himself back in the Marshalsea, and in an outpouring of disjointed, barely coherent phrases he descends into a fog that lasts until his death a few weeks later. The psychological conditioning of the cell-block has impacted his spirit irreversibly, and it costs him his life. "The broad stairs of his Roman palace were contracted in his failing sight to the narrow stairs of his London prison; and he would suffer no one but [Amy] to touch him, his brother excepted. They got him up to his room without help, and laid him down on his bed. And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, canceled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea. When he heard footsteps in the street, he took them for the old weary tread in the yards. When the hour came for locking up, he supposed all strangers to be excluded for the night."54 So ingrained is the vocabulary of the criminal within William Dorrit that he cannot imagine himself outside of the rubric that the Marshalsea has constructed around and through him. The only language left to him is that of the carceral.

The extension of the prison from a physical space of detention into the language of identity formation and cultural representation marks the realization of Bentham's dream, but in a way he probably never foresaw. When the mechanism of the Panopticon goes verbal and invades the terrain of language, the consequences extend beyond the reformers' vision of "curing" and "rehabilitating" inmates. In a perverse and unsettling twist, many of the innocent begin to doubt their own purity and moral stature for no other reason than the carceral language available to them turns the gaze of authoritarian sanction on them every time they attempt to speak or formulate a thought. Of course this is not to claim that all Victorians ran around feeling spied upon, but nonetheless it is true that the increasing reach of the state through various measures of surveillance and manipulation began to tell on the consciousness of the age. In his study of penal reform in post-Enlightenment France, Michel Foucault has traced this growing reach in the devices of power, and it applies equally to the Victorian moment in Britain (though admittedly its development was less rapid than in France). Foucault investigates the rise of surveillance as a mode of discipline and social control, and he takes Bentham's Panopticon (and by extension Pentonville as actually constructed in 1842) as the definitive expression for this new intrusive form of constant inspection. To outline his essential argument, Foucault maintains that the mechanisms of (state) power manage to become intrusive to such a degree in the nineteenth century that even the victims of oppression become themselves elements of that oppression. This occurs even while the physical brutalization of prisoners diminishes under the wave of the reform movements (in 1800, over 200 capital offenses existed in Britain, but by 1841, only eight remained, and in practice, the death penalty was generally imposed only for murder).55 Foucault writes, "Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers."56

Hence, the legacy of the Enlightenment, and the tide of reform which it inspired, are most strikingly felt not in the increase of something like democratic freedom and human rights, but in the vast expansion of power in various social institutions to mold and control human behavior in a way that became much more subtle and effective than the Ancien Régime's system of justice, which regularly had criminals drawn and quartered publicly as an expression of its power. Clearly Dickens is aware of the dangers inherent in the emerging structures of the carceral, especially as they impinge upon language. One might even see his "exuberant recognition of grotesquerie" as an attempt "to preserve forms of experience fromencroaching methods of control"57 (Witness the plethora of bizarre and antic characters who populate the Dickensian world. Their fundamental strangeness confers on them a type of individuality resistant to wider social forces, and their language, which is often stamped by peculiar linguistic ticks, is somewhat liberating as well). Still, especially in his later works, Dickens registers too many instances of rhetorical self-policing to claim that he feels much optimism about preserving private space. Characters are often trapped within the prison-house of language and cannot find a way out. In his story "The Chimes," Dickens registers this dilemma in a scene where Trotty Veck castigates himself in the words of his superiors, turning their descriptions of him into his own. Repeating the upper-class rhetoric against the poor which he has previously heard from Alderman Cute and Sir Joseph Bowley, Trotty cries, 'Unnatural and cruel! . . . Unnatural and cruel! None but people who were bad at heart: born bad: who had no business on the earth: could do such deeds. It's too true, all I've heard to-day; too just, too full of proof. We're Bad!'58 In this moment of self-condemnation, Trotty internalizes the critical eye of his oppressors by absorbing their rhetoric, by allowing it to define him, so that he begins to fault himself in the language of the powerful, the language of the upper class who view him as "born bad." Trotty falls victim to the propaganda which is meant to denigrate him and keep him in his place. He starts to oppress himself in the midst of a power dynamic where everyone becomes simultaneously and inescapably aa policeman over themselves according to standards of what is socially acceptable and "normal."

Trotty's experience, while representative of the Panopticon's influence as a kind of arche-writing in the construction of the Victorian self, is not unique to the world of fiction he inhabits. As a discourse, it was very much alive in the British society which lived and breathed and read of Trotty Veck in the pages of Dickens's 1844 tale. Reverend Clay, a prison chaplain who visited Pentonville during the 1840s, spoke of the immense power the carceral system of isolation and observation conferred on him and other men of the cloth. He indicated that "a few months in the solitary cell renders a prisoner strangely impressible. The chaplain can then make the brawny navvy cry like a child; he can work on his feelings in almost any way he pleases; he can, so to speak, photograph his thoughts, wishes and opinions on his patient's mind, and fill his mouth with his own phrases and language."59 It is this ability to inflict and inflect language itself with the rhythms of guilt and the cadences of judgment that so distinguishes the remarkable but nefarious power of the Panopticon in Victorian culture. The perfection of Howard's separate system within the walls of Pentonville accomplished a great administrative and punitive slight of hand. As critic Jeremy Tambling contends, "isolation becomes a means of bringing prisoners to a state where they will carry on the reform work of the prison in their own person, where the language of the dominating discourse is accepted and internalised."60

In 1856, the County and Borough Police Act made it compulsory for all areas to have a police force throughout England and Wales. We have already seen how photographing prisoners in the 1860s and fingerprinting them in the 1890s extended the reach of the state surveillance system, and this Police Act helps explain how "police surveillance grew especially in the 1850s."61 The Police Act may also account for an observation made by Henry Mayhew, the chronicler of London's poor during the early 1850s. While investigating the pastimes of his subjects, he noted, "The amusement of the street-children are such as I have described in my account of the costermongers, but in a moderate degree, as those who partake with the greatest zeal of such amusements as the Penny Gaff (penny theatre) and the Twopenny Hop (dance) are more advanced in years. Many of the Penny Gaffs, however, since I last wrote on the subject, have been suppressed, and the Twopenny Hops are not half so frequent as they were five or six years back."62 The Penny Gaffs and the Twopenny Hops were suppressed by the police as lewd and unfit entertainment, and the irony is that Mayhew's depictions enabled the police to curb these activities. Mayhew's taxonomy of the poor imprisoned them in categories and identified elements of their lives that had hitherto remained unknown and invisible. Thus, Mayhew exposed the poor to the authorities, and in his very attempt to improve conditions for the destitute by investigating and recording their lives, he unwittingly assisted the apparatus of state power in controlling and restraining this segment of society.

The kind of intense and sprawling classification system devised by Mayhew in his sketches of the London poor was itself a form of carceral accounting. By dividing up the nameless masses into discrete subgroups, Mayhew articulated distinctions and suddenly made the impoverished segments of society knowable in a way they had not been before in their obscure anonymity. Mayhew's work was contemporaneous with the first official census, which was conducted in 1851, and it echoed the kind of categorization and analysis initially given official form by the establishment of the Royal Institute of Statisticians in the 1830s. Man himself was becoming an object of knowledge during this period, to be counted, surveyed, investigated and finally manipulated. As the gaze of inquiry turned to individual persons, John Burt became able to see Pentonville as the experiment he claimed it was. Recall his statement that "The Pentonville Prison was erected for the purpose of submitting to actual experiment a new system of discipline."63 The taxonomical enterprise manifested in work like Mayhew's actually came to replace the original rehabilitative program that originally helped spawn the mindset of human classification and management in the first place. Seduced by the power of the carceral structure, the state's interest in reform gave way to a mania for ever more subtle and certain methods of social and cultural control. Consequently, as Foucault posits, "[T]he prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them; . . . it is not so much that they render docile those who are liable to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subjection."64 "On such bases, the vocabulary of power is sited, where, for additional prop, not the law, but the norm is the standard, and where not acts, but identities are named."65 Evidence of this transformation can be found in the 1862 garotting panic that so energized the London populace for the better part of a year.

The London police reports of 1862 indicate a sudden surge in muggings throughout the metropolitan area. This startling increase caught the public eye and there was much discussion about this disconcerting crime wave. In one incident which received widespread attention in the press, a Member of Parliament had his watch stolen as he emerged from the House of Commons on 17 July 1862. The outcry against these episodes was swift and sustained, with people calling for a decisive crackdown on the criminal elements in society. It is important to note the dramatic shift in (or rather the death of) the rhetoric of reform during this period. The notion that prisoners and criminals were let off too easily, that their punishment was too soft, began to circulate widely. Consequently, voices in the press could claim, "With the exception of a very few enthusiasts, all the world agrees that the purely reformatory principle, on which our criminals have for many years been treated, is in the main a failure."66 Furthermore, "The first object of punishment, whatever may be said, is not to reform the criminal, but to deter others from crime."67 "The hardship inflicted on the convict should be very great, and his existence ought to be extremely miserable; moreover his misery should be notorious."68 What accounts for this seemingly drastic change in punitive philosophy? The rise to prominence of human biology, as manifested in 1859 by Darwin's groundbreaking Origin of Species and other works of the time exploring issues of instinct and inheritance,69 disrupted prevailing conceptions of human nature in much the same way that Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding had done nearly two centuries earlier. Only this time, human traits came to be viewed largely as innate and heritable. If a person's character were a matter of physiology and not stimulus, then no amount of nurturing and reform would alter the criminal being. What is more, during the garotting panic the press began to demonize the criminal in a way that exploited the nascent biological conceptions of human nature that were then current. Convict caricatures depicting the criminal class as "beetle-browed, simian-featured louts" appeared in Punch, and felons who could no longer be transported were gossiped about as "folk devils."70

The move to distinguish and classify a separate and irredeemable criminal class at this juncture points rather impressively to the fabrication of pathological identities which the garotting panic encouraged. As Jennifer Davis attests, "a study of the garotting panic and the ensuing changes in the area of convict treatment does serve to isolate a critical period during which one of these 'outcast' groups within the working class, namely the 'criminal class', was defined by policy-makers and officials, and during which policies were initiated which would not only control this group, but also fix its boundaries."71 It's not so much that the state consciously exploited public fears in order to justify an expansion of its own powers of surveillance, though that was part of the story. Rather, the entire culture was caught up in a discourse of criminality the end result of which actually created the conditions which it allegedly only described. Looking a bit more closely at the arrest statistics for the Metropolitan Police, Davis finds that "the start of the panic preceded any 'crime wave', and that the subsequent bulge in the number of recorded street crimes is attributable more to the panic itself than to an actual increase in robberies with violence."72 If "the startling increase in recorded street violence did not begin until July 1862--after the panic had begun,"73 then it appears as though "police activity 'created' crime."74

Davis's account of the garotting panic of 1862 sheds considerable light on the process by which the carceral discourse arising out of Bentham's Panopticon and a continued expansion of police power came to overwhelm the Victorian age. It also provides a compelling historical vindication of the transition from tropes of architectural confinement to figures of incarceration in language itself that Dickens chronicled so masterfully in his fiction. Foucault's influence in bringing this peculiar but fascinating narrative to light must be acknowledged as well. Though some scholars have criticized Foucault for foisting his conceptual paradigm upon the British scene prematurely, there can be no doubt that his reading of a culture managing to incarcerate itself becomes increasingly accurate the closer one comes to the turn of the nineteenth century. We might quibble about dates and degrees, but not about the underlying trend. Foucault's own reading of the nineteenth century also helps throw into relief just how massive Dickens's creative achievement was. As Tambling suggests, "With Foucault's work . . . it may be possible to see how the physical growth of the modern prison is also the beginning of its entering into discourse and forming structures of thought, so that the literal and the metaphorical do indeed combine, and produce the Dickens whose interest is so clearly in both ways of thinking about the prison."75 It seems fitting that the most popular and enduring writer of the age should be the one to capture imaginatively the spirit of that age in the way Dickens unquestionably did. Of course capturing the spirit of the age was what the entire carceral project was about, and it may have caught Dickens as a much as he caught it. Constructing the Victorian prison was a hazardous business, one whose success was so complete that in the end, the builders imprisoned themselves.

2 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 646. First published in 1739-1740. For a more detailed account of the empirical equation, Hume offers the following: "An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions of reflexion, because derived from it. . . . the impressions of reflexion are only antecedent to their corresponding ideas; but posterior to those of sensation, and derivíd from them. The examination of our sensations belongs more to anatomists and natural philosophers than to moral" (8).

69 See Thomas Plint, Crime in England: its Relation, Character and Extent (Gilpin, 1851). Quoted in William James Forsythe, The Reform of Prisoners 1830-1900 (Kent: Croom Helm, 1987) 169. Speaking of the criminal class, Plint says, "a large majority of the class is so by descent and stands as completely isolated from the other classes, in blood, in sympathies, in its domestic and social organisation . . . as it is hostile to them in the whole ways and means of its temporal existence" (153). Also, consult Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 2nd ed. (J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1919). First published in 1883. Dalton argues, "The ideal criminal has marked peculiarities of character: his conscience is almost deficient, his instincts are vicious, his power and self-control is very weak, and he usually detests continuous labor. The absence of self-control is due to ungovernable temper, to passion or to mere imbecility . . . he has neither sympathy for others nor the sense of duty, both of which lie at the base of conscience. . . . Their vagrant habits, their illegitimate unions and extreme untruthfulness, are among the difficulties of the investigation. It is, however, easy to show that the criminal nature tends to be inherited" (42).