Introduction

Summary

The Introduction demonstrates the proliferation of prisons in eighteenth-century British culture, and in the novel in particular. It argues that by resituating novelistic prison scenes back within their original cultural contexts, their fourfold particularity as ideological and narrative spaces is made evident. Setting out the narrative distinctions between these four prison types – the criminal prison, debtors’ prison, the bridewell (or prisons for the working poor), and the state prison – this chapter stakes out the terms of the study and traces the relationship between fictional prisons and the prison reform movement that was steadily gaining traction in this period. It elaborates the contribution this analysis hopes to make to novel studies, stressing the sociality and interdependence of selfhood in eighteenth-century narratives, and the ramifications of this on claims that have been made for the novel’s role in the advent of modernity.

‘The English look on their isle as a sort of prison’, the Abbé Le Blanc declared in 1745, ‘and the first use they make of their love of liberty is to get out of it.’¹ In this jibe, the Abbé complains that the English routinely boast of their country’s superiority to mainland Europe, precisely in regard to its constitutional liberties. Yet they seem forever to be found traipsing across France or Italy on one grand tour or another. If England were so very enviable a nation, he wonders, why do the English never seem to want to stay there? Eighteen years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau revisited this idea. In The Social Contract he wrote: ‘the people of England believes itself to be free; it is quite wrong’.² This line turns the Abbé’s formulation on its head. The English think that they are free, but in truth they are in chains.

For these European writers, the English belief in their liberty is both ubiquitous and wrong: they are a nation behind bars. Both men frame the condition of Englishness as a yearning for freedom and a sense of incarceration, whether (for the Abbé) or not (for Rousseau) the English man or woman is aware of it. This study starts from the premise that British novelists of the eighteenth century were overwhelmingly aware of it. In the novel, the prison was so markedly prevalent a motif as to amount to an obsession. That obsession – its causes, its contexts, and its consequences – is the subject of this book.

Before either the Abbé or the exiled philosopher visited England, Daniel Defoe had foreshadowed them both. In 1724, in his less-than-grand tour of the ‘Whole Island of Great Britain’, Defoe observed: ‘There are in London, and the far extended bounds, … notwithstanding we are a Nation of Liberty, more publick and private Prisons and Houses of Confinement, than any City in Europe, perhaps as many as in all the Capital Cities of Europe put together.’³ Again the prison is a paradox: a declaration of national liberty is met by an excessive tally of lock-ups, the ‘far extended bounds’ of London containing an excess of prisons that refuse monolithic definition: public, private, later described as ‘tolerated prisons’, and ‘Houses of Confinement’, all of which he goes on to enumerate.⁴ By this time, Defoe had been interned in three of them himself: Newgate, the Fleet, and the King’s Bench.⁵ Eighteenth-century Britain is thus defined by a curious set of contraries: a recurring proclamation of freedom and a unique proliferation of prisons.

Prisons have always been spaces of extremes, containing society’s saints and its sinners, who are sometimes the same person. As Elaine Scarry has explained, the imprisoned body is also quintessentially revealing of the human condition. Analysing Jean Paul Sartre’s The Wall (1939), Scarry notes that Ibbieta begins to experience his death, not because he has sustained the wound that will kill him, but because ‘he has begun to experience the body that will end his life, the body that can be killed’.⁶ The prison pulls mortality into focus in this way. Unable to move freely through the world, the prisoner is made aware of the materiality and so the finitude of the body. It is this body that can be imprisoned, this body that can be chained and wounded, and this body that will die. But, as two of the most influential works of prison literature, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy (524) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) both exemplify, it is only the body that can be imprisoned. The prisoner’s identification with the life of the mind, or of the spirit, occurs not in spite of but precisely because of their physical bondage.⁷

The prison as a fictional motif is thus uniquely generative, tethered at once to the concerns of this world and the next, and it continues to inform nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature (it is central to the works of Charles Dickens, Albert Camus, and Jean Genet, to name a few). But neither before nor since has the prison been so prevalent or so particularised as it was during the period and place under discussion in this book. The most performed play of the eighteenth century in England was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), his ‘Newgate Pastoral’.⁸ The most widely reprinted artist was William Hogarth, and as Ronald Paulson noted, ‘no English artist painted more prison interiors than Hogarth’.⁹ While it was also gaining prominence in continental Europe, the prison was more pervasive in British art and culture than anywhere else.¹⁰ And nowhere was the prison more ubiquitous than in the eighteenth-century British novel. In the early novel, the prison was so reliably present as to come close to functioning as a defining marker of the genre.

Every definition of the novel is insufficient. Samuel Johnson’s − famously, ‘a small tale, generally of love’ − announces its deficiencies at the off by being unable to encompass either Robinson Crusoe (1719), in which nobody falls in love, or Clarissa (1747–48), one of the largest tales ever written.¹¹ Clarissa languishes in debtors’ prison, but Robinson Crusoe appears to challenge the contention that prison was a structuring motif of the early novel. Yet, in 1720, in the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe described his intentions with his earlier work in the following terms:

All these Reflections are just History of a State of forc’d Confinement, which in my real History is represented by a confin’d Retreat in an Island; and ‘tis as reasonable to represent one kind of Imprisonment by another, as it is to represent any Thing that really exists, by that which exists not.¹²

Like the English grand tour-ists that plagued the Abbé Le Blanc, Crusoe too looks on ‘his’ island as a prison. The passage promises to elucidate Robinson Crusoe, but if anything it renders the novel’s meanings more elusive. Defoe explains that imprisonment in fiction navigates between what ‘really exists’ and what ‘exists not’, between ‘real history’ and ‘just history’, between the facts of a ‘forced confinement’ and its fictions. But what is the ‘real’ imprisonment that the island experience of Robinson Crusoe represents? Whose is it? It is difficult to determine who authors these reflections: Crusoe or Defoe himself. In just this way, the prison in the novel undermines stable distinctions between the figure of the author, the narrator, and the incarcerated character.¹³ As a literary motif, it repeatedly blurs the contours of character and the epistemological limits of the fictional world.

I have begun with Robinson Crusoe, as so many studies of the eighteenth-century novel do, but the prison is very far from being the preserve of realist fiction. It scores each one of the novel’s fast-evolving genres: the comic picaresque, by Tobias Smollett in particular; amatory fiction by the likes of Eliza Haywood; the gothic (all but axiomatically); and most elaborately of all, the sentimental novel. Henry Fielding’s first work of prose fiction, Jonathan Wild (1743); his best-known, Tom Jones (1749); and his last, Amelia (1751), all turn around experiences of incarceration. Exploring this confluence of new narrative forms with dilapidated legal and architectural structures, the freedoms afforded by the first, and the fetters accorded by the other, will reveal a great deal about the tensions animating Hanoverian society, and about the protean genre of the novel that burgeoned in its midst.

This book will argue that the prison informs the British novel in the eighteenth century in unprecedented ways. I will turn to the post-revolutionary prison in the Conclusion. Here, I want to demonstrate the thickening of novelistic depictions of imprisonment between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth. Thomas Dangerfield’s Don Tomazo, an English picaresque novel in the Spanish tradition from 1680, is typical of the genre and a useful point of comparison. Tomazo is a wandering rogue whom the narrative follows to prison eleven times. One of his first imprisonments occurs in Scotland. When his horse falls ill, Tomazo becomes convinced that a witch has cursed him, and in order to dispel her power over him, he amputates one of her thumbs. The woman demands redress from a local magistrate:

[T]he English Lad was sent for, and upon a full examination of the matter, committed to Prison. For indeed he own’d the Fact, and upon what occasion he did it.… The rest of the Gentlemen offer’d to be his Bail; but nothing would serve but one of Tomazo’s Thumbs, which the Magistrate protested should be cut off, and given to the Old Woman to burn before his face. Which rigorous Sentence you may be sure did not a little trouble Don Tomazo. But Fortune, who knew he had more occasion for his thumb than the Old Woman, … by her assistance, and the Gentlemans [sic] industry, a Rope was convey’d to Don Tomazo, by means whereof he made his escape out of the Goal, without paying his Fees.¹⁴

Don Tomazo escapes a justice that is retributive and specular: a thumb for a thumb, a burning for an accusation of witchcraft. The narrative describes the Justice’s sentence as a ‘Mosaical Execution’, archaic as well as excessively vengeful.¹⁵ The prison is negatively and metonymically constituted: it is only the arrival of the rope, Don Tomazo’s means of escape, that signals the fact of his having been in prison at all. The prison is a blank space, a black hole in the novel. When the picaro is in gaol, the episodic adventures that form the stuff of his narrative are halted; for the novel to continue, he must escape it. In every sense, he does not have to pay for it.

By contrast, Newgate forms the climactic episode of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722). Moll’s entry into the prison is laden with time and space markers:

I was carried to Newgate; that horrid Place! My very Blood chills at the mention of its Name; the Place, where so many of my Comrades had been lock’d up, and from whence they went to the fatal Tree; the Place where my Mother suffered so deeply, where I was brought into the World, and from whence I expected no Redemption but by an infamous Death: To conclude, the Place that had so long expected me, and which with so much Art and Success I had so long avoided. I Was now fix’d indeed. … When I look’d round upon all the horrors of that dismal Place: I look’d on myself as lost, and that I had nothing to think of but of going out of the World, and that with the utmost Infamy; the hellish Noise, the Roaring, Swearing and Clamour, the Stench and Nastiness, and all the dreadful croud of Afflicting things that I saw there, joyn’d together to make the Place seem an Emblem of Hell itself.

… I Got no sleep for several Nights or Days after I came into that wretch’d Place, and glad I wou’d have been for some time to have died there.¹⁶

With ‘several Nights or Days’ Defoe signals that (topsy-turvy) diachronic time will enter this fictional prison, something he reiterates with ‘for so long’, ‘so long’, and ‘for some time’. His use of the capitalised ‘Place’, seven times in this short passage, insists too on the spatiality of Moll’s carceral experience. It is a place that is alive to history – to Moll’s personal history and to historicity itself. It was here that Moll’s mother ‘suffered so’, and where she herself ‘came into the world’. Moll is not in a prison, she is in Newgate, the most famous gaol in England. Her destination, like that of ‘so many of her comrades’, is ‘the fatal Tree’, the wooden gallows at Tyburn, half a mile away. Defoe alludes here to the mythic spaces that exist beyond London’s landmarks. The ‘fatal tree’, while being common eighteenth-century shorthand for Tyburn, also refers to the Edenic tree of knowledge through which mankind would know death. Moll’s crime thus gathers echoes of Eve’s sin, compounded by the phrase ‘Emblem of Hell’, and the allusion to The Pilgrim’s Progress in Newgate’s ‘stench and nastiness’: the gaol in Castle Doubting in Bunyan’s allegory is ‘nasty and stinking’ to Christian’s spirit.¹⁷ Where Don Tomazo immediately loosens the hold of the prison over his person and his narrative, Moll is ‘now fix’d indeed’ in hers.

Partly, this distance between the depiction of the prison in a novel from 1680 and one from the 1720s can be explained by the formal innovations of classic realism. Spatial and temporal markers proliferate in all kinds of narrative spaces in the eighteenth-century novel, as the works of Cynthia Wall and Paul Ricoeur in particular have made clear.¹⁸ But this does not explain the centrality of the prison to the eighteenth-century novel, in contrast to its inconsequentiality to so many seventeenth-century, picaresque novels. The causes for the eighteenth-century novel’s obsessive return to the prison are not singular. To use Patricia Meyer Spacks’ study of the idea of ‘privacy’ in the period, this ‘tangle … will not yield a single strand of meaning. The tangle is itself the subject.’¹⁹ Yet meanings will arise in the study and the tangles that follow, and I trust they will prove durable, revealing, and true.

This book’s first task is to resituate the prisons of the eighteenth-century novel within the cultural context from which they issue, and to which they speak. I aim thereby to reveal new layers of meaning in some of century’s most celebrated novels, as well as many that are still undeservingly neglected. Novelistic portraits of the prison disclose vital aspects of the place and purpose of Georgian prisons and the ideological work that they were understood to perform. This book makes the claim for, and stakes out the terms of, the particularity of eighteenth-century prison culture, in contrast to that of the nineteenth-century penitentiary. As J. C. D. Clark has complained, for far too long ‘the eighteenth century was made to seem important chiefly as a seed bed for the nineteenth’.²⁰ This is true of many areas of cultural inquiry, but, as this study will show, it is especially so with regard to the prison.

The prison in the eighteenth century was the focus of vociferous national debate over the nature of state punishment, culminating in 1779 with the passing of the Penitentiary Act. This Act called for the construction of two national penal institutions to house 900 convicted felons with the express aims of punishing and reforming them for a prescribed period of time, most of the cost of which was to be met by the state. Inmates were to sleep in separate cells, be subject to a strict disciplinary routine of hard labour and religious instruction, wear uniforms, and be fed a ‘hard diet’.²¹ These institutions were to be located outside cities, prison tourism would be banned, and visiting of any kind was to be strictly controlled. The consumption of alcohol at the prison ‘tap’ or bar would henceforth be forbidden, as would the keeping of pets, although in the old prisons like Newgate, dogs were not outlawed until 1792, and prisoners could keep pigs until 1814.²²

Before 1779, the standard legal position on imprisonment was that outlined by Henry de Bracton, the thirteenth-century jurist: ‘a prison ought to be used to detain men not to punish them’.²³ The early modern prison was not legally constituted as a place of punishment, much less reform. It was commercially run, and largely deployed as a holding cell; it was at trial that the legal punishments of the state were meted out. These included fines, branding, whipping, transportation to the colonies, or hanging at Tyburn. After the passing of the Penitentiary Act, the prison began to assume its modern status in juridical practice as the foremost secondary, or non-capital, punishment of the state for every criminal infraction bar murder, for which the death penalty remained. In the following chapters, I will argue that the novels of the eighteenth century were radically receptive to, and profoundly influential of, these vast, socio-political developments in ways that the prisons of Shakespeare, Lovelace, and Bunyan (or, for that matter, Dickens, Kafka, and Genet) were not.

But it is not only – or even primarily – the criminal prison that shapes the novels of this period. Tobias Smollett’s last novel, Humphry Clinker (1771), illustrates the extent to which eighteenth-century authors relied on a ready familiarity with a plurality of prison cultures among their readers. In this extract, Jerry Melford describes a visit to the home of Smollett’s fictional self, ‘S—’:

Every Sunday his house is opened to all unfortunate brothers of the quill, whom he treats with beef, pudding, and potatoes, port, punch, and Calvert’s entire butt beer. – He has fixed upon the first day of the week for the exercise of his hospitality, because some of his guests could not enjoy it on any other, for reasons I need not explain.²⁴

Melford assumes that his reader, and Smollett thereby assumes that his reader, will immediately understand the nature of the misfortunes afflicting these ‘brothers of the quill’ and the reasons for their being unable to gather at Smollett’s house for six days of any given week. They are so obvious he ‘need not explain’ them. Melford refers to the fact that a person who was in debt could avoid being imprisoned by his creditor if they ‘kept house’, or stayed at home, because the common law forbade forced entry into private property for the purposes of arrest on civil cases. Common law also prohibited civil arrests on a Sunday.²⁵ Anyone in danger of being arrested for debt, then, could only leave their house with impunity on that day of the week. These authors are effectively imprisoned in their homes for six days out of every seven in order to avoid incarceration. They exist in a ‘state of forc’d Confinement’, to use Crusoe’s (or else Defoe’s) doubly encased phrase.

It is telling that it is here that Smollett chooses to superimpose himself onto his fictional world. He is both present at the feast, a member of the brotherhood of quills: ‘S’, and elided, absented from it: — As in the extract from Defoe’s Reflections cited above, the extent to which the ‘real’ author of the novel is represented within it is radically unclear, destabilising subject/object positions in the narrative. The extract demonstrates the inextricability of the figure of the writer with the carceral condition in the novelistic imagination of the period. The title of the novel, Humphry Clinker, alludes to slang for prison − ‘the clink’ − and relatedly to the onomatopoeic sound of prison fetters that will come to confine its eponymous hero and arrest his picaresque adventures. This study will return the wider cultural contexts to carceral sequences such as these in the novel, in order to recover crucial resonances of their meanings that we are no longer attuned to.

To date, two major critical works have explored the prison in eighteenth-century literature: W. B. Carnochan’s Confinement and Flight (1977) and John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary (1987). The emphasis of Carnochan’s study ‘falls more on metaphysical than epistemological prisons’.²⁶ He is concerned with the metaphoric sense of constraint in eighteenth-century poetry rather than the state-sanctioned, walled imprisonments that mark so many of the period’s prose fictions. Carnochan’s contention is that metaphysical imprisonments function as a protective retreat from the terrifyingly wide-open spaces that the scientific discovery of ‘the infinite universe’ had opened up in the enlightenment mind. Prison imagery in Carnochan’s argument is concerned with ‘domesticating infinitude’.²⁷ My study’s focus, and indeed its findings, are almost entirely the reverse of these. There is nothing remotely comforting about the novelistic prison. In a more recent essay on the prison motif, Carnochan reflects: ‘A history of the prison theme in eighteenth-century Britain could come remarkably close to being an account of the literature of the age.’²⁸ The scope of his essay prevents him from providing such an account; this book begins the work necessary to do so.

It was John Bender who noted that ‘when the form of story-telling now called “the novel” emerged in the 1720s, it at once evinced an intimate self-consciousness concerning prison and confinement’.²⁹ Bender’s study outlines a series of ideological shifts in the language of penality from 1719 until the Penitentiary Act of 1779, and it remains a vital and probing account of the narrative of prison reform. He searches in the cultural expression of the eighteenth century for the causes of the ‘birth of the prison’, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, as a penal instrument in the nineteenth.³⁰ His argument is that ‘fabrications in narrative of the power of confinement to reshape personality contributed to a process of cultural representation whereby prisons were themselves reconceived and ultimately reinvented’.³¹ The novel in Bender’s study bears a proleptic, teleological relationship to the penitentiary in that realist narrative techniques generated a ‘structure of feeling’ out of which the cultural practices of the penitentiary were able to arise.³²

Starting with Robinson Crusoe in 1719, Imagining the Penitentiary argues that novelists introduced ‘time, sequence, and developing consciousness of character’ into the cultural consciousness.³³ Just as a fictional character is capable of moral reformation over time as a consequence of a specific sequence of events, so an inmate could be subject to character remodelling through a carefully controlled penal environment of hard labour and religious instruction. The prison sentence, he suggests, is the penal equivalent of the novel’s narrative arc. Henry Fielding is understood to provide the final piece of cultural apparatus necessary to realise the penitentiary idea through his omniscient narrators, who marshal the novel’s characters and events towards a desired outcome. In the narrator, the penitentiary finds its analogue for the panoptic prison warder: omniscient, largely invisible, and in ultimate control of a circumscribed environment. Bender concludes that the novel and the penitentiary are ‘comparable social texts’, which share an epistemology. Irrespective of content, the novel in Bender’s study is innately concerned with ‘the containment of heterodoxy’ since ‘narration itself invisibly controls, contains and becomes authoritative’.³⁴

I will return to the difficulties that Tudor experiments in penology pose to Bender’s thesis (and also to Foucault’s) in Chapter 3. At the outset, it is already clear that Bender reads eighteenth-century novels not for the particularity of the prison experience that they relay but for signs of the potential, nineteenth-century penality that they encode. One result of this is that he is only concerned with novels that feature criminals, which account for a tiny minority of eighteenth-century inmate populations, both in actuality and in the novels that were written about them. His theory cannot account for, and does not acknowledge, the marked generic diversity of prose renderings of the prison of the period.

In recent years, semiologist Monika Fludernik has analysed the metaphor of imprisonment across a large swathe of Western literature. Fludernik’s analysis ranges freely across centuries and continents, embracing thirteenth-century saints’ lives, the poems of Lord Byron, and the novels of Mark Haddon. Her emphasis, she explains, ‘is on perpetuation, not discontinuity’, and her work is ‘primarily concerned with universal constants of the carceral experience’, whereas this study is concerned to elaborate its historical specificity.³⁵ As with Carnochan, Fludernik’s interest lies not in fictional depictions of the prison but in the deployment of the prison as a metaphor through which to elaborate other aspects of human experience. She writes: ‘Imprisonment (at least metaphorical imprisonment) is a fairly familiar experience. We all, at times, feel confined in particular situations or relationships.’³⁶ Elsewhere, she explains that ‘few texts are concerned with imprisonment as such, whereas many situations in our lives are experienced as confining’.³⁷ Since most eighteenth-century novels do not appear to use the prison as a metaphor through which to figure other modes of constriction (Defoe, in fact, claims to have used a desert island as a means of figuring an experience of incarceration), Fludernik is largely silent on the corpus of texts that form the basis of this study.³⁸ As will become clear, ‘imprisonment as such’ was both the subject of a great many novels of this period and the ‘confining experience’ that they were specifically concerned to elaborate. But while I want to expand the remit of critics like Carnochan to focus on prose, Bender to include non-realist novels, and Fludernik to engage in a historicist analysis of the cultural contexts of the prison in fiction, my work is greatly indebted to each of them, and to Bender most profoundly.

This study is organised around the four distinct types of prison that predate the nineteenth-century penitentiary: criminal prisons, debtors’ prisons, the bridewell (prisons for the working poor), and the state prison. I propose that each of these prison types forms a distinct ‘habitus’, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term. Bourdieu explains that the habitus is a ‘system of long-lasting … structures of perception, conception and action’. Those who share a habitus display ‘a kind of affinity of style’, as a consequence of which, the habitus gathers what he calls a ‘practical unity’, though he adds, importantly, that ‘it is not a fate, not a destiny’.³⁹ I argue that eighteenth-century prisons form four of these freighted spaces, each with its own recognisable ‘structures of perception’ and ‘affinity of style’, which illuminate both the mechanics of that prison as a penal structure within Hanoverian culture and the structures of meaning in the prose fictions that turn around them.

These four prison spaces are narratively and ideologically distinct. Fictions of the criminal prison are often generically unstable, tonally sarcastic, and narrated in the third or second person, depicting a riotous, unruly space that very rarely contains children. The debtors’ prison, by contrast, is commonly depicted in a sentimental mode: first-person narratives reliably depict the suffering debtor in gaol surrounded by his ailing wife and children. Fictions of the bridewell grapple with the picaresque tradition in the novel, and feature an inmate population that is overwhelmingly female, made up of members of the labouring classes who are forced to perform exacting hard labour, something that happens nowhere else in Georgian prison culture. In the state prison, on the other hand, the inmate is ordinarily male, hailing from the very highest ranks of society, and is depicted in gothic tones as being deprived of any mental or physical stimulus whatsoever, with predictably disastrous repercussions. Novels that feature these prisons assume a ready familiarity with their distinct carceral identities, while also contributing to the shape and tenor of such spaces in print.

Structuring my analysis by type of prison runs counter to most contemporary criticism on the eighteenth-century gaol. It has long been assumed that all eighteenth-century prisons were essentially indistinguishable. Bender writes: ‘Commonality was central to the experience of the old prisons.… Newgate, the major strong house for accused felons and condemned criminals, contained numerous debtors too. Equally indiscriminate were the bridewells’, and prison historian Robin Evans agrees.⁴⁰ Criminal prisons did contain areas in which to house debtors. More expensive lodgings were available in the ‘master’s side’, and cheaper, less salubrious accommodation in the ‘common side’ of the prison. Newgate, the foremost criminal prison in the country, contained three master’s side debtors’ wards for men, and one for women, alongside four common side debtors’ wards, and one for women (quaintly known as ‘my lady’s hold’).⁴¹ In county gaols, many of which were little more than a single room adjoining the keeper’s house, demarcation between debtors and felons was either rudimentary or altogether lacking.⁴² Furthermore, indiscriminately housing different kinds of inmates together was the cause of frequent complaint by prison reformers of the 1770s. In his tour of London’s prisons in 1776, physician William Smith bemoaned the fact that in Tothill Fields bridewell ‘Debtors, felons, fines, and disorderly people, are all huddled together.’⁴³

Smith’s report was designed to persuade readers of the need for comprehensive national reform of the prison system, however. As such, his conflation of every type of prison into one, deplorable, undifferentiated mass was a necessary rhetorical step. It is a step that contemporary history has too often repeated unreflectively. Because in fact and, crucially, in fiction, these four types of prison – criminal, debtors’, bridewell, and state – retained distinct identities in legal practice, in a great many first-person accounts, and in the novels that were written about them. As we will see in the ensuing chapters, different prison types regularly perform different ideological and narratological work in the prose fictions of the period. Cumulatively, these fictions of the prison invite us to rethink familiar narratives of the early novel, and what it might mean to spend time ‘inside’.

Although my study is thus structured thematically, each chapter ends by focusing in depth on those novels that were the most demonstrably influential on subsequent renderings of the prison, and these move progressively through the period towards the Gordon Riots of 1780. In this, I aim to map the novel’s evolving relationship with the prison reform movement that was gaining traction in these years. My definition of ‘the novel’ is deliberately, necessarily loose. Like Michael McKeon, I take the early novel to be a fluid discursive field rather than a stable literary category.⁴⁴ I agree, too, with J. Paul Hunter that ‘no single word or phrase distinguishes the novel from Romance or from anything else, and to settle for “realism” or “individualism” or “character” as the defining characteristic diminishes the very idea of the novel’.⁴⁵ Like Guido Mazzoni, I find that the novel resists definition, comprising as it does ‘a corpus of protean texts, an aggregate of works that can effectively tell stories about absolutely anything in any way whatsoever’.⁴⁶ This study delights in, rather than denigrates, the generic instability of the novel in the eighteenth century.

It is important to state at the outset that the ‘British’ prisons that I analyse in the following pages are almost all, in fact, English. But Smollett is one of the most eloquent and prolific authors of the prison experience in the novel, and it is largely thanks to his Scottish heritage that this is framed as a study of ‘British’ prison fictions. For reasons that will become clear in Chapter 2, women novelists tend to spend less fictional time in prison than their male counterparts and, as a result, feature less often in this book than I would wish. Women writers’ fictional portraits of carceral experience are, however, profoundly revealing of unexpected modes of resistance against the strictures of social conformity, as I explore in Chapters 2 and 3 in particular, and their influence on the distinctive terrain of the four prison spaces in the novel is vast and vital. The Conclusion will elaborate the connections between these long-lived prison types, on the brink of their erasure in the nineteenth century.

Embedding prison fictions within their original cultural contexts reveals both their fourfold particularity as narrative and ideological spaces and their reciprocal relationship to prison reform discourse. This marks the first way in which this study works to reinvigorate our reading of the prison fictions of the Georgian period. The second is to map their pronounced sociality. The nineteenth-century penitentiary was funded by the state; it imposed uniformity, gendered segregation, solitude, and silence on its inmate population. None of these conditions pertained to the eighteenth-century prison. The state of being that no inmate seems able to access in a British prison is solitude. Prison is perhaps the least lonely space in eighteenth-century fiction. Giovanni Bernardi, who spent three decades in Newgate prison on questionable charges of treason under three successive monarchs, relays as an unremarkable aside in his 1729 autobiography that he fathered ten children during his incarceration. In every sense, he was not alone.⁴⁷

The prison in the eighteenth-century novel functions phenomenologically, not psychoanalytically, to use Gaston Bachelard’s distinction.⁴⁸ It affects the inmate from the outside in, and does not ordinarily enable an exploration of the innermost recesses of an individual psyche. Rather than retreating within themselves into an inviolable, unique interiority, inmates are repeatedly depicted as being troublingly porous to an immersive and degenerative social environment. In other words, the prison is not deployed in the early novel as a means to explore interiority or privacy, but instead illuminates the perils and at the same time the vital necessity of sociality and interdependence.⁴⁹

This tells us a great deal about the preoccupations of the genre. It also differentiates ‘the prison’ as a structuring idea from ‘confinement’. Richardson’s Clarissa traces the contours of a unique, self-authoring individual with unprecedented narrative attention, and it is a novel that is entirely structured around an experience of incarceration. Clarissa’s confinement – in her own rooms in her father’s house, and later in the brothel in London – is the reason why the characters write the letters that constitute her novel, and it is also what enables Clarissa to examine her own feelings and beliefs in such unrivalled detail. Her sequestration can be seen to foster her individualism, which is also an attempt at self-determinism.⁵⁰ The experience of incarceration in a state-sanctioned prison is depicted very differently in contemporary novels. In these spaces, the capacity of the inmate to transcend their environment is almost entirely absent, strikingly so. The novels I analyse in this study are more concerned with sociality than privacy, and with the relational and political rather than interior and domestic aspects of selfhood.

The socially embedded, publicly legible person that this book reveals is more accurately encompassed by the term ‘character’ – with its typographic, dialogic, and performative inferences – than the ‘freestanding’ private self, the new, bourgeois ‘individual’ that Ian Watt’s classic study has so enduringly stamped on the flyleaf of the eighteenth-century novel.⁵¹ In this, I am indebted to the work of Deidre Lynch, who first posed the question: ‘What happens if we do not assume that the history of character and the history of the individual are the same thing?’⁵² Lynch has persuasively argued that the eighteenth-century novel was more often concerned with elaborating sociality and interrelatedness, particularly with regard to fiduciary exchange, than with psychological depth and ‘inner meaning’. She points out that some of the century’s most popular novels were not about ‘individuals’ at all but about ‘money that talks: narratives that, like The Adventures of a Bank-Note (1770), were more intent on imagining society than imagining the self and that only with difficulty can be said to have central characters in the first place’.⁵³ For Lynch, character becomes oriented towards depth, becomes synonymous with ‘personality’ in its sense of unique, interior personhood, only in the aftermath of the Burney school of British novelists, in the 1790s. Before this, she contends, character was more often oriented towards legibility than depth.⁵⁴

Lynch’s work has proved foundational for much new criticism of the novel with which my own is in dialogue. Julie Park charts the ways in which ‘objects threatened to displace the subject as a locus for selfhood’ in ‘It-narratives’ of the eighteenth century.⁵⁵ Stephanie Hershinow begins her study of the oddly unshakeable innocence of the ingénue in the eighteenth-century novel by ‘sever[ing] the too-easy alignment of novelistic form with individual formation’.⁵⁶ And Aaron Kunin’s recent study begins with the provocative assertion that character is ‘not personal identity’ at all, ‘but a grouping based on a shared characteristic’. With Dickens as his talisman, Kunin demonstrates just how much information readers routinely glean through a reliance on inherited types − the miser, say, or the scamp − rather than through elaborate transcriptions of unique interiorities.⁵⁷

The repercussions of this debate are wide-ranging, largely because of the role that interiority and individuation have been understood to play in the advent of Western modernity. Charles Taylor has written that ‘our inescapable contemporary sense of inwardness’ is one way of describing what it is to be ‘modern’.⁵⁸ He traces the seismic cultural shifts that propelled this transformation, from the public spheres of the Delphic oracle, the temple, and the agora to the rational inquiry and reflective interiority of the modern subject. In Taylor’s account, Augustine and Descartes were pivotal to this development, but it is not until John Locke that what he calls the ‘punctual self’ became embedded in Western culture. This is a self that understands itself as a self.⁵⁹ It takes in sensations from the outside world and, relying on its own powers of enquiry, inference, memory, and sensory experience, generates knowledge, a moral sense, and (thereby) a sense of self.

Eighteenth-century protagonists of the novel, ensconced amid an unprecedented abundance of material stuff from which to obtain sense data, are understood in Watt’s classic account to reflect and inaugurate these new modes of individuation and interior selfhood. Watt claimed that Robinson Crusoe issues ‘as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’ cogito ergo sum was in philosophy’.⁶⁰ This aspect of his argument has proved extraordinarily durable. Nancy Armstrong, for instance, begins her study of the genre with the assertion that ‘the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same thing’. The subject, she explains, ‘is what we mean by “the individual”’.⁶¹

Yet as Taylor’s account makes clear, Locke’s empirical rationalism is neither the only eighteenth-century story nor the end of it. ‘There is another and rather different kind’ of philosophical tradition in this period, ‘which develops partly in opposition to it.… It crystallizes around a rival moral outlook, which comes to be known as the theory of moral sentiments, expounded in a set of influential writings by Francis Hutcheson.’⁶² Hutcheson’s most prominent mentees were Adam Smith and David Hume. And the eighteenth-century subject that emerges from these philosophies of selfhood is fundamentally social, moral only insofar as it is relational.⁶³

If, as Georg Lukács claimed, the novel as a form is uniquely capable of traversing ‘the via dolorosa of interiority’, above epic and lyric poetry, above drama, the question remains as to whether, formally, it must do so. And if not, when did it begin to assume its determining role in the ‘inward turn’ of Western modernity?⁶⁴ With Apuleius or Cervantes, with Defoe (as in Watt’s study) or the Burney school (as in Lynch’s)? In his characteristically measured – and in the end unarguable – way, Mazzoni proposes that ‘as a possibility that is always available, the inward turn traverses the history of the novel’ from ancient Greece to the contemporary moment.⁶⁵ For Mazzoni, inwardness becomes ‘a crucial element in the Western narrative space’ not in the wake of Defoe, Burney, or even Jane Austen, but ‘during the century of psychological realism, between the second half of the nineteenth century and modernism’.⁶⁶ As public plots lost their ability to shape meaning for the individual, the events that determined narrative migrated within. In Mazzoni’s account, it is with Virginia Woolf that external events become wholly subordinated to inner experience in the novel. And it is Freud, rather than Locke or Descartes, who provides the philosophical framework for these novel transcriptions of the self.

Yet Walter Scott, for one, was very clear that between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth, a decisive shift had occurred in characterisation in the novel. In 1827, in his essay on Clara Reeve and Charles Johnstone, Scott complains that: ‘every person introduced’ in Reeve’s The Old English Baron, from 1778, ‘is rather described as one of a genus than as an original, discriminated, and individual person’, which accounts for the book’s ‘tedium’. He adds that ‘this is a general defect in the novels of the period’.⁶⁷ Between The Old English Baron and Scott’s Lives of the Novelists, Romanticism, in which ‘discriminated’ ‘individuality’ attained epic (and, notably, poetic) dimensions, had revolutionised the intellectual and cultural landscape of Europe.

In the novels of this study, free-standing individuation and interiority will be shown to be sites of contest, rather than the already accomplished artefacts of (capitalist) modernity. With regard to economic practice, this is particularly evident in Chapter 2, on the debtors’ prison. The ‘criminal character’ of Chapter 1 is, however, ineluctably dialogic and externally directed. And when characters are peremptorily removed from their social and familial circles, as occurs in the fictional imprisonments of Chapters 3 and 4 on the bridewell and the state prison, the prisoner’s mental and physical deterioration is pronounced, profound, and entirely predictable. The prison space in the eighteenth-century novel elaborates most keenly what Taylor has described as the ‘webs of interlocution’ within which even the most radically individuated selfhood is sustained. ‘One cannot be a self on one’s own,’ Taylor reminds his readers.⁶⁸ The prisons of the eighteenth-century novel remind their readers of this, too, though in very different modalities and, as we will see, to very different ends.

In the eighteenth century, imprisonment was as likely to befall the unfortunate debtor as the unrepentant malefactor, the ‘disobedient’ servant, the prostitute, the pirate, and the wealthy, landed Jacobite rebel. It was a Whiggish as well as a Tory fictional motif. The plurality of the prison as a cultural structure was relayed through the generic fluidity of the novel as a form at this time: protean in character, the novel was able to embrace and to embody contrasting registers and rhetorical modes. In Lukács’ words, ‘only prose’ with its ‘unfettered plasticity and its non-rhythmic rigour can, with equal power, embrace the fetters and the freedom’ of a world whose meanings are no longer given, but must be forged anew.⁶⁹ In the following pages, the generic fluidity of the early novel will be shown to confront the antiquated immobility of the legal and architectural edifice of the prison space and, through that, the structure of Hanoverian legislature itself. In the process, I recover the distinct prison cultures of the eighteenth century, and the ideological conflicts that they stage. I begin with the criminal prison, a fecund source of narrative experimentation in the British novel and one of the most prolific sites of literary production in the country.