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

Hence, at that time, fictionalized first-person narratives began to be used as ideological means of justifying and legitimating the existence and work of prisons. In contrast to Grass (11), this book does not see a necessary link between first-person narration and the prison. It is rather the case that all narrative structures can be used to express various different attitudes toward the prison. Nevertheles, it is of course true that many fictional prison narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually legitimate the prison.

By the early 1860s, two types of prisons existed in Britain, namely the convict prisons on the one hand, and the local prisons on the other. The convict prisons held offenders who had been sentenced to a minimum of three years, while petty offenders were sent to the local prisons for very short periods. The Prison Act of 1865 created the local prison by amalgamating the jail and the house of correction. After 1865, the local prisons like Newgate Prison performed the functions of jails in the American sense and simultaneously served as places of punishment for those sentenced for terms of up to two years. Before 1877, local prisons were administered by county and borough magistrates, while convict prisons were run by the central government. Under the 1877 Prison Act, the local prisons were brought under central government administration together with the convict prisons. A year later, administrative power was transferred from the local magistrates to the Prison Commission in Whitehall, working under the chairmanship of Sir Edmund Du Cane.¹³

The major reason for the nationalization of local prisons was a (typically Victorian) cry for uniformity. The obligation to enforce hard labor was a major feature of the 1865 Prison Act. Du Cane thus appointed a medical and scientific prison committee which, for example, decided that prisoners sentenced to hard labor should daily ascend 8,640 steps on the treadwheel. The fact that the inmates’ toil was entirely wasted provided an additional psychological complement to the physical torment. Furthermore, the law established a progressive dietary which was so meagre in its early stages as to constitute deliberate starvation.