Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I IN THE BEGINNING, 600–1500
- PART II SQUALOR CARCERIS, 1500–1750
- PART III EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
- 11 Diving into the Depths of Dungeons
- 12 Flotsam and Jetsam
- 13 Mr Bentham's Haunted House
- 14 The Angel of the Prisons
- 15 Mr Holford's Fattening House
- 16 Goodies and Noodles
- 17 Silence or Separation?
- 18 The ‘Model Prison’
- 19 The Universal Syllabub of Philanthropic Twaddle
- 20 Bleak House
- 21 Top Marks
- PART IV PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
19 - The Universal Syllabub of Philanthropic Twaddle
from PART III - EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART I IN THE BEGINNING, 600–1500
- PART II SQUALOR CARCERIS, 1500–1750
- PART III EXPERIMENTATION WITH IMPRISONMENT, 1750–1863
- 11 Diving into the Depths of Dungeons
- 12 Flotsam and Jetsam
- 13 Mr Bentham's Haunted House
- 14 The Angel of the Prisons
- 15 Mr Holford's Fattening House
- 16 Goodies and Noodles
- 17 Silence or Separation?
- 18 The ‘Model Prison’
- 19 The Universal Syllabub of Philanthropic Twaddle
- 20 Bleak House
- 21 Top Marks
- PART IV PUNISH AND BE DAMNED, 1863–1895
- PART V THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1895–1965
- PART VI SAFE AND SECURE? 1965–2018
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Howard abated the Jail-fever; but it seems to me he has been the innocent cause of a far more distressing fever which rages high just now; what we may call the Benevolent-Platform Fever. Howard is to be regarded as the unlucky fountain of that tumultuous frothy ocean-tide of benevolent sentimentality, ‘abolition of punishment,’ all-absorbing ‘prison-discipline,’ and general morbid sympathy, instead of hearty hatred for scoundrels; which is threatening to drown human society as in deluges, and leave, instead of an edifice of society fit for the habitation of men, a continent of fetid ooze inhabitable only by mud-gods and creatures that walk upon their belly.
Thomas CarlyleNot all supported penitentiaries; not all shared the humanitarian sentiment behind them; not all were as modulated as Sydney Smith in their critical reflections upon them. The times were a-changing. Expectations of extraordinary transformations had been roused but not realised. Doubt set in, and with doubt, distaste. One eminent Victorian went further than any other in voicing his contempt for the whole reformatory project. Nothing and no one would escape his viper's fangs.
In 1850 the so-called ‘Sage of Chelsea’, vastly influential social commentator, famed historian, and vitriolic polemicist, Thomas Carlyle, published his Latter-Day Pamphlets. These included an essay on ‘Model Prisons’, a brutal assault on what he called the ‘philanthropic movement’, members of which ‘embark in the sacred cause; resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water’.
Carlyle came from the Scottish Calvinist tradition, a ‘stern child of Ecclefechan’. He was Old Testament rather than New. He had long jettisoned the Christian God, but a rigid predestinarian pessimism and moral authoritarianism never deserted him. Although he knew no gospel, he could preach hell-fire. To be kinder to him than he was to others, the gastric ulcers that plagued him all his life may have contributed to his increasing irascibility. ‘Clay was in his blood, Calvinism in his head, dyspepsia in his stomach’ was one biographer's unkind but not unfair diagnosis. His nature was morose, and self-indulgent misery and hypochondria dogged his steps. The bitter tone of his work was a reflection of an unhappy life. Indeed life for him was a prison, but a prison of his own creation.
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- Shades of the Prison HouseA History of Incarceration in the British Isles, pp. 221 - 226Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019