Abstract
In 1777, an English court condemned the Reverend William Dodd to be hanged for hatching a loan scam from which he profited. None other than Samuel Johnson thought the penalty was too harsh and participated in a minor literary fraud of his own by penning a plea for mercy titled The Convict’s Address to His Unhappy Brethren under Dodd’s name. Although this plea was unsuccessful and Dodd was hanged on June 27, 1777, when a friend later questioned Johnson about whether Dodd could have published such a lucid work, Johnson attempted to disguise his own authorship by responding, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”1
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Notes
See George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson, rev. by L. E Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), Vol. 3, The Life (1776–1780), pp. 165–67.
See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed., trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 195–228.
Plato, “Crito,” in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Great Books of the Western World 6 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2007), p. 216.
Plato, “Gorgias,” in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Great Books of the Western World 6 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2007), p. 265.
See Rosalind C. Love, “The Latin Commentaries on Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae from the 9th to the 11 th Centuries,” in A Companion to Boethius in the Middle Ages, ed. Noel Harold Kaylor Jr. and Philip Edward Phillips, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 30 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2012), pp. 75–133. One way to assess the popularity of a medieval work is take stock of the number of glosses; in the case of the Consolation, Love records “nearly eighty extant manuscripts and fragments from the period up to about the year 1100 which transmit annotation” (pp. 82–96).
Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in A World of Ideas, 8th ed., ed. Lee A. Jacobus (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), p. 213.
Marin Luther King Jr., “For Martin Luther King and Boston,” Southern Leadership Conference, April 23, 1965. Pamphlet, Boston Athenæum.
See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1994), and Conversations with Myself, foreword by President Barak Obama (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
Some other critical studies that examine prison from the perspective of imprisoned thinkers, writers, artists, and so on, include the following: W. B. Carnochan, “The Literature of Confinement,” in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, ed. Norvel Morris and David J. Rothman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 427–55;
Jamie S. Scott, “Christians and Tyrants: The Prison Testimonies of Boethius, Thomas More, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Toronto Studies in Religion 19 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995);
Paul Strauss, In Hope of Heaven: English Recusant Prison Writings of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 1995);
Ioan Davies, Writers in Prison (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990);
H. Bruce Franklin, Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);
Elissa D. Gelfand, Imagination in Confinement: Women’s Writings from French Prisons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983);
and D. Quentin Miller, ed., Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013).
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Phillips, P.E., Vile, J.R. (2014). Introduction. In: Phillips, P.E. (eds) Prison Narratives from Boethius to Zana. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428684_1
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