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

When the first convict prison was finally opened at Millbank in 1816, thousands of convicts were still being transported to Australia each year. It is also worth noting that even though Millbank used solitary cells and attempted to isolate prisoners from their fellows to prevent ‘contamination,’ Millbank did not become a truly reformative penitentiary. In part the problem arose from the increase of prisoners which overwhelmed the arrangements.¹¹

In 1842, another convict prison was established at Pentonville. This prison also opened as an experiment in the so-called Philadelphia (or ‘separate’) system, in which the prisoners had to remain in permanent solitary confinement. Pentonville relied heavily on attempts to turn its prisoners into Christian citizens, and isolated the inmates completely. Prisoners had to wear hoods when they emerged from their cells; the construction of the walls hindered communication between prisoners; and only the governor, prison officers and the chaplain were allowed to see the individual inmate in the cell. In the early 1840s, all prisoners who entered Pentonville were to be transported to Australia after a severe test of eighteen months of solitary confinement. The prison authorities eventually reduced this test to nine because of the toll it took on physical health and sanity. Once the prisoner was in a compliant state, he was taught the basics of a handicraft trade, indoctrinated by the prison chaplain and otherwise prepared for life overseas. The ‘best behaved’ were still transported to Australia but granted a certificate that allowed conditional release, while the ‘ill-conducted’ were delivered in chains to a penal colony for years of debilitating toil, harsh conditions of living, and crushing discipline (McConville “Victorian” 136). More and more convicts stayed in Britain, until in 1853, this informal practice was put on a legal footing and called ‘penal servitude.’

As Grass has shown (33–36), in the nineteenth century, the prison chaplains began to write down the stories of individual prisoners, and ensured that these accounts would say the ‘right thing’ about the usefulness of the ‘therapeutic’ separation in prison. More specifically, prison authorities wished to hear first-person accounts that began in depravity and ended in the ‘glorious’ religious awakening engendered by solitary confinement, and this official propaganda was precisely what they were presented with.¹²