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
18 - The ‘Model Prison’
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
I repaired to the prison … an immense and solid building, erected at vast expense. I could not help thinking … what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old …
It being just dinner-time, we went first into the great kitchen, where every prisoner's dinner was in course of being set out separately … with the regularity and precision of clock-work … I wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest, working community, of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined half so well. But I learned that ‘the system’ required high living; and, in short, to dispose of the system, once for all, I found that on that head and on all others, ‘the system’ put an end to all doubt, and disposed of all anomalies. Nobody appeared to have the least idea that there was another system, but the system, to be considered.
Charles DickensThe ever ‘’umble’ Uriah Heep became Pentonville's Prisoner Number Twenty-Seven.1 He was the very model of a modern penitential. So beneficial had the experience of ‘the system’ been on his moral character that he wished those benefits bestowed on others, even on his own mother. ‘It would be better for everybody’, he opined, ‘if they got took up, and was brought here.’ Before he had been incarcerated, he admitted:
I was given to follies, but now I am sensible of my follies. There's a deal of sin outside. There's a deal of sin in my mother. There's nothing but sin everywhere – except here.
By 1850 when the serialised David Copperfield was published in book form none of Dickens's readers would have believed a word of this. They knew the Uriah Heep of old. They knew he had not changed, and could not change.
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- Shades of the Prison HouseA History of Incarceration in the British Isles, pp. 212 - 220Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019
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