Abstract
Just about a year after Pentonville opened, one of its prisoners died and an inquest was held. The Coroner, the redoubtable Thomas Wakley, remarked that ‘Out of doors there is a strong feeling against this place, and some persons can hardly find terms vehement enough to use in speaking of it’, so he insisted on a very full investigation. He called, among other witnesses, the Reverend Whitworth Russell (an Inspector of Prisons, and Commissioner of Pentonville), who ‘explained the regulations of the prison, some of which were rather startling, and elicited a good deal of observation from the Coroner’. But he concluded his evidence: ‘Whatever the public may now think of this prison, I am much more afraid that by and by they will say that the inmates are too well treated, rather than not well enough.’1 It was a shrewd prophecy, and Dickens proved to be one of the spokesmen of changing public opinion on this issue — and not just a spokesman, for according to several well-informed contemporaries it was he more than anyone else who brought about this change in public opinion.
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Notes
Hoyles, Religion in Prison, 35–7; William Eden, Introductory Discourse on Banishment, 1787, quoted by Barnes and Teeters, 294.
W. L. Clay, Our Convict Systems, 1862, quoted by D. L. Howard, 59.
Kingsmill, Prison and Prisoners, 2nd edn, 1852, 130–7; Burt, 4, 23, 60.
See Mildred G. Christian, ‘Carlyle’s Influence upon the Social Theory of Dickens’, The Trollopian, (later MCF), March and June, 1947.
Sheila M. Smith, ‘Propaganda and Hard Facts in Charles Reade’s Didactic Novels,’ Renaissance and Modem Studies, iv, (1960), 135, 138, 140–3. The Edinburgh Review, article to which she refers is Fitzjames Stephen’s celebrated essay ‘The Licence of Modem Novelists’, reviewing Little Dorrit, It is Never too Late to Mend, and Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bront,ë (July 1857, cvi, 124–56). Dickens took the unusual course of replying to it (’Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review’, HW, 1 August 1857; MP, 628–34), and the Edinburgh, (October 1857, 594) acknowledged his protest.
John Manning, Dickens on Eduction, Toronto, 1959, 203;
Joseph Amould, Memoir of Thomas, First Lord Denman, 1873, ii, 332. I have discussed Dickens’s views on teacher-training in Dickens and Education, Chapter vii,.
K. J. Fielding, ‘Edwin Drood, and Governor Eyre’, The Listener, 25 December 1952, 1083. Dr Fielding produces other examples of this proclivity in ‘Charles Dickens and the Department of Practical Art’, Modem Language Review, xlviii, 1953, 270–7, and in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit, and “The Liberator”‘ N & Q, cxcviii, 1953, 254–6. The Mr Creakle of the earlier chapters of DC, was of course based on Dickens’s own schoolmaster Mr Jones (see my Dickens and Education, Chapter i,) — but, I have argued, there is no connection between the Creakle of Salem House and the Creakle of the Model Prison, except the name.
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© 1994 Philip Collins
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Collins, P. (1994). The Pentonville Experiment. In: Dickens and Crime. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23545-2_6
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