Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation in Charles Dickens ...

This book focuses on prison novels that have been read by a vast audience and have influenced the popular understanding of the prison. Therefore, the book’s corpus contains novels that may be classified as high literature but also works that may be categorized as popular literature.

Even though one cannot verify the influence of prison narratives on the citizen’s image of prisons as such, certain indications exist that suggest a link between the representation of prisons in certain narratives and the public idea of imprisonment. Sometimes one can be fairly certain that many recipients must have read or viewed a prison narrative. For instance, Mike Poole points out that serial publication ensured Dickens’ novels “a cultural currency greatly in excess of its merely literary reputation” (150). Indeed, when the publication of Dickens’ Great Expectations was halfway through its run in All Year Round, the magazine was selling approximately one thousand copies a week. This figure is significant because it represented many more copies than the daily circulation of the London Times (Carlisle “Critical” 445). Hence, the instalments of Dickens’ novels must have shaped the popular understanding of the prison in a significant way. Also, on the Internet Movie data base of the top 250 films of all times, female voters rate the film The Shawshank Redemption (1996) as the best (<http://www.imdb.com/chart/female>) and male voters as the second best film of all times (<http://www.imdb.com/chart/male>). One can conclude that a huge number of people have viewed this film and this must have influenced their perception of the prison as well. Furthermore, cases exist in which prison narratives actually caused social action. For example, the film I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! played a central role in the campaign to abolish the chain gangs in the south of the US. Also, the novel Birdman of Alcatraz led to the formation of the Committee for Release of Robert F. Stroud. “Thousands of letters were written through the efforts of the committee’s bulletins, to President Eisenhower and other federal officials” (Gaddis Birdman 255). Such prison narratives are important because they clearly influenced the public’s perception.