Many Kinds of Prison: Charles Dickens on American Incarceration and Slavery
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2019.i14.285Abstract
When the famous British novelist Charles Dickens arrived in North America in 1842, he came at an ideal time to examine the effects of the first wave of penal reform and prison building. His eye-witness account offers valuable insight into American incarceration practices. Taking a stand on the debate over what form incarceration ought to take, Dickens lands squarely in the camp of those supporting the Congregate or Auburn System, a type of penitentiary that allowed inmates to be with each other by day, performing work silently but in proximity to other human beings. Dickens opposed the misguided Separate or Pennsylvania System which enforced utter isolation through almost perpetual solitary confinement. Dickens not only exposes the cruelty of this system but he illuminates the cruelty of American slavery, yet another form of imprisonment. Most importantly, Dickens exposes the special brand of hypocrisy born of American exceptionalism that he discovers on his trip and lambasts the young republic for its blind boasts about ideals Dickens thought were not being upheld: Freedom and Justice. Dickens’s travel book, American Notes, contains markers that point toward the 20th- and 21st-century future of mass incarceration, and his powerful literary journalism is still relevant today.References
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Fiction, and Film. Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2007.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The
New Press, 2012.
“A Motion to Censure Representative John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts.” History, Art & Archives: US
House of Representatives. https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1800-1850/A-motion-tocensure-Representative-John-Quincy-Adams-of-Massachusetts/. All websites last visited December
12, 2019.
Archibald, Diana C. “Introduction.” American Notes for General Circulation. By Charles Dickens. Montreal:
Universitas Press, 2018.
---. “Language in Place: A Computational Analysis of Dickens’ ‘American Notes.’” Nineteenth-Century Prose
46.1 (Spring 2019): 149-184.
Brattin, Joel J. “Slavery in Dickens’s Manuscript of American Notes for General Circulation.” Dickens and
Massachusetts: The Lasting Legacy of the Commonwealth Visits. Eds. Diana C. Archibald and Joel J.
Brattin. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. 147-162.
Breslow, Jason M. “What Does Solitary Confinement Do to Your Mind?” Frontline 22 April 2014.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/what-does-solitary-confinement-do-to-your-mind/.
Collins, Philip. Dickens and Crime. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994.
“Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.” NAACP. https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. 1842. Ed. with introduction by Patricia Ingham.
London: Penguin, 2000.
---. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 3. Eds. Madeline House Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Johnson, Louise H. “The Source of the Chapter on Slavery in Dickens’ American Notes.” American Literature
14.4 (January 1943): 427-30.
Gilfoyle, Timothy J. “‘America's Greatest Criminal Barracks:’ The Tombs and the Experience of Criminal
Justice in New York City, 1838–1897." Journal of Urban History 29.5 (2003): 525–554.
Gottschalk, Marie. “Democracy and the Carceral State in America.” The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 651 (January 2014): 288-295.
Grass, Sean. “Narrating the Cell: Dickens on the American Prisons.” Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 99.1 (January 2000): 50-70.
---. The Self in the Cell: Narrating the Victorian Prisoner. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Meckier, Jerome. “Dickens and Tocqueville: Chapter 7 of American Notes.” Dickens Studies Annual 45
(2014): 113-123.
Metzner, Jeffrey L. and Jamie Fellner. “Solitary Confinement and Mental Illness in U.S. Prisons: A Challenge
for Medical Ethics.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online 38.1 (March
2010): 104-108.
Rice, Stian. “How Anti-immigration Policies Are Leading Prisons to Lease Convicts as Field Laborers.”
Pacific Standard 7 June 2019. https://psmag.com/social-justice/anti-immigrant-policies-are-returningprisoners-to-the-fields.
Roberts, Leonard H. “The Historic Roots of American Prison Reform: A Story of Progress and Failure.”
Journal of Correctional Education 36.3 (September 1985): 106-109.
Rothman, David. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Boston: Little
Brown, 1990.
Tambling, Jeremy. Dickens, Violence and the Modern State: Dreams of the Scaffold. Houndsmills:
Macmillian, 1995.
Weir, Kirsten. “Alone in ‘the Hole’: Psychologists Probe the Mental Health Effects of Solitary Confinement.”
American Psychological Association 43.5 (May 2012). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/05/solitary.
Wilson, David. “Testing a Civilisation: Charles Dickens on the American Penitentiary System.” Howard:
Journal of Criminal Justice 48.3 (2009): 280-296.
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