The Separate System — Philadelphia and the Bastille

Abstract

O n 8 March 1842, Dickens visited the most famous prison in the world — Cherry Hill, the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Opened only a dozen years before, it had become the international showplace for the Separate System, which the more advanced and articulate penologists of most countries tended to prefer: so when, seven months after that visit, Dickens published a long and uncompromising attack on it, he offended most leaders of professional opinion of this period. Nor could the friends of the system ignore this indictment by a writer of such international popularity. As the recent historians of Cherry Hill put it, they ‘rallied to its defence heroically, calling in experts whose opinions were far more authoritative than those of the British author’.¹ The volume and persistency of the attempts to rebut Dickens’s judgment was a gratifying tribute to his prestige — and not only in the Anglo-Saxon world: for when a German professor undertook an international tour in 1846, to report to the King of Prussia on current penal experiments, he too felt impelled to quote and discuss Dickens’s American Notes chapter on Philadelphia, since the views there expressed would, he said, influence German public opinion about prison discipline. He honoured no other layman, of any country, with such an attention. ‘It is an unquestionable fact,’ wrote another of his critics, in 18459 ‘that the fictions of Mr Dickens have had, and are now having, a most prejudicial influence, not only on the public mind at home, but also on that of the Continent of Europe. In some of the French Reviews … even the hallucinations of Mr Dickens are referred to as weighty evidence!’² As was mentioned earlier, his criticism of Philadelphia was still being professionally disputed half a century later. Most well-informed writers of the period, indeed, entirely disagreed with his judgment on this prison.