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

The development of the ‘new’ reformative penitentiary—based on separation, religion, and work—was heavily influenced by the thoughts of early penologists. Cesare Beccaria’s An Essay on Crimes and Punishment (1764), Jonas Hanway’s Solitude in Imprisonment (1776), and John Howard’s State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777) were the most influential works. Beccaria did not explicitly argue in favor of penitentiaries. Rather, he believed that certainty of punishment in combination with ‘milder’ forms of punishment would effectively prevent criminal action. Hanway and Howard, on the other hand, were much more explicit with regard to the material goals that would distinguish prisons of the past from the penitentiary. The ‘new’ prison would lead to the moral reformation of the inmate. Solitary confinement in ‘therapeutic’ cells would produce feelings of guilt so that the prisoner would begin to reflect upon ‘the errors of his ways.’ Hanway believed that the remedy for all crimes lay in the isolation of the individual soul. Solitary confinement would promote the internalization of more exacting rules for regulating private conduct. While Hanway concentrated on the offender, Howard was much more interested in the construction of a ‘healthy’ and efficient prison institution.

The Penitentiary Act of 1779 introduced many of the features Howard had proposed: solitary confinement, religious instruction, and a strict labor regime. However, it still took thirty-seven years until the first ‘new’ convict prison, the General Penitentiary at Millbank on Thames, was opened in 1816. After the loss of the American convict depositories in 1776, the government extended its holdings of hulks, i.e., disused and decommissioned warships that had been used to hold convicts awaiting transportation to the penal colonies. “Put to dockyard, arsenal, and similar work during the day, the convicts returned to the hulks in order to eat and sleep” (McConville “Victorian” 134). Ultimately, the irremediable condition of the hulks proved to be rather unsatisfactory so that in 1779, the House of Commons set up a committee that was supposed to look for alternative options of transportation to rid Britain of convicts. In 1786, the government decided on Botany Bay in New South Wales, a harbor discovered by James Cook on his voyage along the eastern coast of Australia.¹⁰