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

“The largest and most notorious debtors’ prisons, Ludgate, King’s Bench, the Fleet and the Marshalsea, were in London” (Ignatieff 29).¹ At the time, a debt of even a few shillings could mean imprisonment for life. Since debtors were not proper felons, the prison authorities had only limited control over them. In both jails and debtors’ prisons, debtors often brought their wives and children with them, thus contributing to the typical disorder of these institutions. All eighteenth-century prisons were open to people from outside, who visited these institutions with the observational curiosity and nonchalance of zoo visitors. For example, after 8 a.m., the gates of the Marshalsea “were open to almost anybody, with very few restrictions” (Philpotts 140) so that, at that time, imprisonment was still a public matter. In jails and debtors’ prisons, the prison officers were supposed to derive their income from the fees owed by prisoners for various services (like the buying of food or drinks outside). Furthermore, the jailers had almost no staff and tolerated a wide measure of self-government on the part of those confined: “The usual complaint about prisons was that occupants passed their time in games, gambling and drunkenness. […] Life in an eighteenth-century prison could be tumultuous, but it would be a mistake to confuse disorder with anarchy” (McGowen “The Well-Ordered” 83).

Between 1718 and 1775, about thirty thousand felons were transported to the American penal colonies, where they were sold to private masters for the whole term of their sentence. The interruption of transportation following the independence of the American colonies and increasing numbers of convicted criminals produced a crisis that led to the Penitentiary Act of 1779. However, it is worth noting that even before the American Revolution, fewer convicts were shipped to the American colonies so that more and more prisoners remained ‘at home.’ According to Beattie (546), between 1772 and 1775, sentences to transportation declined by more than 40 per cent in Surrey, while the proportion of sentences to imprisonment at the same time quadrupled.

The interruption of transportation in 1775 offered an opportunity to rethink the arrangements for dealing with prisoners.