Prison-Bound: Dickens, Foucault and Great Expectations

Abstract

Great Expectations has been called an analysis of ‘Newgate London’,¹ suggesting that the prison is everywhere implicitly dominant in the book, and it has been a commonplace of Dickens criticism, since Edmund Wilson’s essay in The Wound and the Bow and Lionel Trilling’s introduction to Little Dorrit, to see the prison as a metaphor throughout the novels. Not just a metaphor, since the interest that Dickens had in prisons themselves was real and lasting, and the one kind of concern led to the other, the literal to the metaphorical. Some earlier Dickens criticism associated with the 1960s, and Trilling’s ‘liberal imagination’ stressed the second at the expense of the first, and Dickens became the novelist of the ‘mind forg’d manacles’, where Mrs Clennam could stand in the Marshalsea ‘looking down into this prison as it were out of her own different prison’ (Little Dorrit, 2.31.789). This Romantic criticism became a way of attacking commentators who emphasised the reformist Dickens, interested in specific social questions: Humphry House and Philip Collins, the last in Dickens and Crime and Dickens and Education (1962 and 1964).

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot’s curse

Blasts the new born Infant’s tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Blake, ‘London’ (1794).

London… the seat of inspection.

Bentham (1794)

I wander thro’ each charter’d street

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry

Every black’ning Church appalls,

And the hapless Soldier’s sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls.