As a result of the exertions of Mrs Fry and others, the lot of women in prison had materially improved. They were kept apart from men and they had female warders to guard them. And yet they were to suffer much the same prison regime as the men: solitude, silence and hard labour, although not of the first class, being spared the impropriety of the treadwheel and the arduousness of stone-breaking and the crank.

In many respects they were considered worse than male prisoners. Their criminality was unnatural, their coarseness unfeminine, their behaviour capricious or hysterical and informed by low cunning, and all the while they were aware of how relatively untouchable they were. In 1862 an anonymous work purporting to be by a prison matron, Female life in Prison, was published, followed two years later by the even more lurid Memoirs of Jane Carpenter, a Female Convict, emanating from the same hand. That hand, however, did not belong to a prison matron but to the pulp novelist Frederick William Robinson. His sketches and stories, based upon actual records, were so realistic as to be mistaken for first-hand accounts, although some suspected that they came from the hand or artistry of Mary Carpenter who had written extensively on penal matters and who shared a surname with the memoirist. They spoke of ‘women harder to tame than creatures of the jungle … whom physical restraint transforms into a wild beast rather than a human being’, but also of the degrading treatment to which they were subjected. The tales were well-told, sensational and titillating.