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

Chapter Two

What is a Prison

The ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ Prison System in Great Britain

Since this book deals with the ways in which prison novels and films narrate British debtors’ prisons, penal colonies, convict prisons, and borstals, a brief history of these institutions is in order. Although in eighteenth-century Britain whippings, brandings, the pillory, and the gallows were employed as forms of punishment, confinement also played a central role in the judicial process. Three types of prison-like institutions existed at the time, namely the jails, which contained felons and debtors as well as those held for trial or awaiting the execution of a sentence, the houses of correction, which were intended to suppress idleness and vagrancy, and the debtors’ prisons.

All of these ‘old’ institutions were dark, filthy, and disorderly places. The debtors, who were either held in debtors’ prisons or confined together with felons in jails, were particularly unruly elements. Their imprisonment was not meant as punishment but used to secure the debtor until the debt was paid.