| The prisons of eighteenth-century England were notoriously corrupt and inhumane. The root of the problem was the nation's reliance on the "fee system" of prison management. Wardens purchased their offices and received no salary from the government. Instead, they collected their incomes by forcing inmates to pay exorbitant fees for food, bedding, and other goods and services. The impact of the fee system was catastrophic---while a small number of affluent prisoners served their time in comfort, thousands of destitute prisoners were herded into dungeons in which they starved, slept on stone floors, and were exposed to smallpox and other diseases.; In 1777, John Howard startled his fellow Britons by publishing The State of the Prisons, the first English prison reform tract that systematically catalogued the horrors of the nation's county jails, houses of correction, and debtors' prisons. Previous would-be reformers had discussed the hardships suffered by England's prison population in general terms, but Howard meticulously interviewed inmates, measured cells, and weighed the scraps of bread wardens sold to prisoners before he wrote his commentary on the English penal system. Seventeen years later, the title character of William Godwin's Things As They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams described his incarceration in a rural jail in precise, elaborately detailed prose that seems to have been lifted from The State of the Prisons: "Our dungeons were cells, 7 ½ feet by 6½, below the surface of the ground, damp, without windows, light, or air, except from a few holes worked for that purpose in the door." This dissertation suggests that Godwin, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Mary Hays, Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft and other eighteenth-century novelists laced the prison episodes in their narratives with facts, images, and rhetorical strategies that had previously appeared in the writings of Howard, James Oglethorpe, and other English prison reformers. More specifically, I analyze the development of prison reform discourse over the course of the eighteenth century and investigate the ways in which the English novelists of the period incorporated the findings of prison reformers in their representations of prison experience. |
