Prison and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Drawing on an array of literary, penological, archival, and visual sources, this study explores the abundance of prison scenes in the eighteenth-century British novel. Revealing the four distinct prison cultures of the period, it illuminates how the narrative and ideological meanings of these institutions have been distorted by our long-held fascination with the criminal penitentiaries of the nineteenth century. Ranging from the early Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate to the prison sackings of the Gordon Riots of 1780, what emerges are not narratives of interiority and autonomous individuation, but something like the opposite of this: tales that stress the interdependence and sociality of eighteenth-century selfhood. Contextualising the carceral scenes of writers like Defoe, Haywood, Sterne, Smollett, and the Fieldings, Prison and the Novel invites us to rethink familiar accounts of the novel as a form, and of what it means to spend time inside.