- 1 While prisoners could order books, they needed to first earn the right to do so (according to the r (...)
1In 2013, the Ministry of Justice’s ‘ban’ on sending books to prisoners sparked a wave of protests by a variety of campaigners, including literary figures like Philip Pullman. It was ultimately declared illegal after being challenged in court by a female prisoner, Barbara Gordon Jones, who argued that her right to read books was severely limited by the new rules. Books were deemed essential to rehabilitation, and the limitations placed on obtaining reading material were considered too severe.1
2This recent debate is part of a long history of promoting—and restricting—reading practices in carceral institutions. Between the Victorian era and the eve of the First World War, whether prison administrators encouraged or hindered reading, prison libraries filled up and pens were put to paper. But how were the books selected? What were the prisoners allowed to read and write? And what did they actually read and write?
3In an environment where talking was mostly prohibited, the written word was, according to a prisoner in 1902, the ‘one bright light’ of cellular life (‘Report of the Commissioners and Directors of Prisons 1902’ 47). ‘Bibliotherapy’ became a way of escaping the tedium of life in a cell, keeping one’s sanity and fostering a sense of fellowship (within an imagined community of readers). Yet, while some forms of reading were encouraged and seen as ‘healthy’, others were denounced as ‘trashy’ (‘Supply of Books Report 1911’ and Brocklehurst 116). For the prison authorities, so-called healthy books were the key to moral elevation and a means of control; for the prisoners, they were the key to their escape from reality, if only for a moment.
4As a means of escape or subversion, writing poems, clandestine notes, private letters or secret diaries was another solution. But writing practices raise the question of literacy; those who could write prison memoirs were atypical and élite prisoners amongst the captive (and captivating) authors are overrepresented. Yet, scarce, obscure and at times unpublished letters and stories written by more ‘ordinary’ convicts also allow us to grasp how writing could become a way to self-assertion. If prisoners were not always—to borrow Foucault’s phrase—‘docile bodies’ (Foucault 140), neither were they always ‘docile minds’. ‘Pirate’ and approved writings together offer us an insight into the part played by the written word in the coping strategies of prisoners. The authorities—the chaplain, the governor, the reformers, the directors of the prison system—all created a hierarchy of proper and improper writings and readings which in turn placed inmates on a scale ranging from proper to improper prisoners, from redeemable to hopeless cases.
- 2 See, for example, Rivkah (2009) and Hameau (2018).
5Studying the history of prison reading and writing from above and from below reveals tensions between the perception of prisoners and the reality of life behind bars. The written traces left by the confined—in Britain and in other countries—have been studied as historical objects by a variety of experts who have been able to draw ethnological and archaeological conclusions based on their analysis.2 Prison writings have, therefore, long been of interest to those who are keen on writing the story of the confined, of their situations and experiences. Through the lens of history from below, those writings can shed light on the agency of prisoners, on their ability to think and act for themselves despite carceral constraints, and on their lived experiences.
6This article explores the consumption and production of a wide array of written works in the carceral world. It tries to show, through the texts written and read in jail, how the story and history of prisoners come to light. From escapism to protest, from moral elevation to fellowship, written words, authorised or clandestine, were (and still are) a ‘bright light’ in prisoners’ lives. To show the multiplicity of meanings that spoken and written words could take on, this article will first explore reading practices through a study of prison books and libraries, official reading recommendations and the prisoners’ own ‘reading lists’. It will then delve into the question of writing practices with an analysis of prisoners’ literacy as well as licit and illicit written words.
7‘Reading is my window’ is the title of Megan Sweeney’s 2010 book on American female prisoners. It focuses on reading practices in prisons and sheds light on the experience of Black women in particular, highlighting their struggles and empowerment through the reading of three popular genres (self-help books, urban crime stories and narratives of victimisation). Although Reading Is My Window addresses different temporal, geographical and cultural contexts, its title echoes the feelings of freedom that British Victorian prisoners—male or female—also experienced when holding a book. In a mostly windowless world saturated with silence or ripped apart by sudden shouting, the calm and soothing nature of written words (sometimes spoken out loud) was highly sought after by captive audiences. In the 1840s, incarcerated boys gushed about the ‘beautiful books’ that lady visitor Sarah Martin had brought them; in the 1900s, an Edwardian prisoner described reading as an ‘unqualified blessing’ (Martin 122; ‘Report of the Commissioners and Directors of Prisons 1902’ 47). But what did reading actually mean for captive prisoners? What were they allowed and actually able to read?
- 3 On the history of Victorian criminality, prisons and prisoners, see for instance Godfrey et al., Mc (...)
8To shed light on popular forms of reading in prison, this analysis will dwell on normative approaches and rebel practices. Yet, prison rules and library organisation in particular varied throughout England and the United Kingdom; as Janet Fyfe has shown, for instance, ‘prison libraries grew faster in Scotland than in the rest of Britain’, a tribute to the ‘traditional Scottish respect for education’ (Fyfe 110). Rules could moreover change in the time it takes to devour a best-seller. This essay will therefore not be a history of Victorian and Edwardian prison reading—for this would be much too ambitious a task—but a brief overview of the history of prisons and prisoners through their reading habits.3
- 4 Sentences in convict prisons would last for at least five years and were then reduced to three year (...)
- 5 Sir Joshua Jebb (1793–1863) played a key part in the shaping of the penal philosophies of his time. (...)
- 6 The Gladstone Committee was set up in 1894 as a response to a set of very critical articles publish (...)
9The British carceral system consisted in short-term prisons—local prisons, nationalised in 1877—and long-term prisons—referred to as convict prisons.4 From the 1850s until 1863, the Surveyor-General of Convict Prisons, Joshua Jebb, endeavoured to strike a balance between punishment and reform.5 However, his main successor, Edmund Du Cane, has remained famous, and perhaps infamous for some, for his ‘hard labour, hard fare and hard bed’ policy, as it was often described at the time. In the late 1890s, this severe approach was criticised by an investigative committee which called for the mitigation of harsh treatments with rehabilitation (‘Gladstone Report’).6
- 7 A prisoner, for instance, confided that he was tempted to insolently ask whether Stacpoole would re (...)
10The pendulum of authority also swung back and forth between clemency and severity according to the demands and rules of the separate system and the progressive stage system rules. The separate system called for the isolation of prisoners in their cells and their association for work in silence only; it was meant to foster self-analysis and redemption and it favoured the reading of certain books in solitude. A copy of the Bible was always to be found in prison cells. Standard issues also included The Narrow Way, a pious book for Anglicans (non-conformists were given Bunyan’s unavoidable classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress) and a didactic book entitled A Healthy Home and How to Keep It by Florence Stacpoole (‘Supply of Books Report’ 14). This moral instruction book was meant to foster domestic salubrity, but, ironically, the prison environment was a counter-example of these injunctions.7
- 8 The incentive and earned privileges scheme has been amended several times since it was introduced i (...)
11The progressive-stage system—the ancestor of the current ‘incentive and earned privileges’ scheme—granted prisoners ‘privileges’ (or conditional rights) based on what was deemed good behaviour.8 Rights were gradually secured throughout the 19th century, and by the early 20th century, convicts could borrow two books a week from the beginning of their sentences onwards. In local prisons—where the overwhelming majority of inmates were incarcerated—this system had drastic consequences. Indeed, 81% of the prisoners, who had been sentenced to less than a month in 1911, were limited to the standard selection provided in their cells. This was an improvement on the rules in force under Edmund Du Cane’s regime, which only allowed prisoners to borrow books after two months (‘Gladstone Report’ 7). Du Cane, the head of the prison system (officially, he was the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Convict Prisons, a title created after local prisons were nationalised in 1877) did not look kindly on reading books for pleasure. He claimed that ‘literary education has not the reformatory influence on prisoners which was once expected from it’ and referred to Reading Prison derisively as ‘Read-read-reading Gaol’ (Du Cane 79 and 57).
12Books were ‘ordered’ by means of a slate: on the day books were renewed, prisoners would use chalk to write on a slate the title of the book they wanted to borrow. This was used as an opportunity for special requests, especially in prisons where there was little light reaching the cells: some prisoners could then write on their slates that they simply wanted large characters, according to Basil Thomson, who directed several prisons (Thomson 116). Lack of light could turn reading into an impossible task, as indicated in 1896 by prisoners whose eyes were sore (‘Education Report’ 48). Books also needed to be kept in good enough condition to be read despite the number of hands that would leaf through them. One prisoner, Florence Maybrick, explains in her memoirs that she was employed as a ‘literary nurse’ in Aylesbury: she worked with the chaplain and the schoolmistress who did the book rounds every two weeks, exchanging around 250 books in a prison with roughly 250 cells. She was in charge of mending the much-handled books, ‘binding up their wounds’ (Maybrick 194–95) in her own words—a phrase which testifies to the special status and importance of the books, which are referred to almost as close companions to the imprisoned women and men.
13According to ‘One Who Has Tried Them’, an anonymous ex-prisoner writing in 1881, the local prison library offered ‘the most awful rubbish’ (‘One Who Has Tried Them’ 47). He thought only a few volumes were ‘readable’, which may suggest a desire to showcase his own level of education. William Beauchamp Nevill, another prison memoir author, refers to ‘a number of tattered old books, mostly ancient novels, which “the better class of prisoners” never used’ (Nevill 213).
14These remarks clearly hint at class distinctions. The idea that books were to elevate the ‘lower’ class of prisoners was not new; according to Janet Fyfe, these ideas can be traced all the way back to the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in the late 17th century. The question that has since preoccupied prison chaplains, teachers and governors is: what should prisoners read?
- 9 Prison guards also had a library. They were encouraged to read books about religion, temperance and (...)
15They were not just given devotional books; they could also pick from a selection of school books, books of moral instruction, books of secular instruction and library books (‘Supply of Books Report’ 4–5). But until the Gladstone Report (which led to an improvement of the prison collections), carceral library books had been collected haphazardly through private donations or orders placed by chaplains. The aforementioned prison director Thomson disdainfully describes most libraries’ collections as the ‘goody-goody type of literature’ (Thomson 115).9 After the Gladstone Committee, new books gradually appeared on library shelves and from the 1910s onwards, four books could be borrowed at the same time (‘Supply of Books Report’ 26).
16But the consideration granted to certain prisoners dictated specific attitudes on the part of the authorities. Local prisoners tended to be seen as intellectually inferior: a hierarchy drew lines between those whose crimes were seen as more serious—the ‘better sort’—and, in a twisted sort of logic, those whose offences were much less serious and who were considered socially inferior. Gender also led to different expectations, with women considered as more superficial and their readings as more frivolous. Cassell’s Popular Educator was supposedly in great demand in male prisons according to well-known prison chaplain Reverend G. P. Merrick. The Educator was a didactic guide whose moralistic cover illustration featured the sketches of two parallel life trajectories: that of an educated child becoming a venerable old man and that of a vicious, idle and alcoholic man turning into a disfigured vagrant (‘Gladstone Report’ 52). A 1910 report presented as a fact that women, as opposed to men, favoured bound magazines, which were relegated to the ranks of ‘enervating and frivolous’ readings (‘Supply of Books Report’ 31 and 25).
17But according to Basil Thomson, men would also pick ‘trashy novels’ (Thomson 116)—both women and men were surely looking for adventure to forget the dreariness of their lives. Prisoner Chicago May boasts in her memoirs that she read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon and L’Histoire de la réformation by pastor Jean-Henri Merle D’Aubigné, but she was an atypical inmate and her picaresque memoirs are not meant to depict her as anything but exceptional (Sharpe 208).
18The 1910 committee on prison books warned against what it saw as ‘novels of an unhealthy moral tone, novels of a morbidly introspective kind, and novels of the “trashy” order’ (‘Supply of Books Report’ 8). Recommended for young prisoners in particular were ‘stories of a healthy, bracing, outdoor nature’ like ‘Marryat, Fenimore Cooper, Walter Besant, Rider Haggard’. Supposedly their stories could ‘do nothing but good’. Examples of the ‘trashy’ kind of books mentioned by the authorities include ‘Robbery without Arms’, which the chaplains had ordered because in the story the ‘evildoer comes to a bad end’, but the committee deemed his ‘antecedent career of successful crime’ inappropriate. The committee recommended ‘good histories, biographies, books of travel, philosophical and political writings’—but did not consider small-town prison libraries worthy of the expense. This highbrow approach is typical of a tendency to instil among the prisoners feelings of imperial pride, respectability and obedience. In his 1898 memoirs, former prisoner Brocklehurst put it in bitter, colourful terms when he wrote ‘imagine a soupçon of warning against eternal damnation, and a general exhortation to look upon yourself as the blackest and vilest scum of the earth, and you will have a pretty fair idea of a medium sample of the moral and elevating literature which is ladled out to brighten the lives and cheer the hearts of the unfortunate dwellers in Her Majesty’s prisons’ (Brocklehurst 152). Magazines that allowed prisoners to follow the news were generally forbidden, reinforcing their isolation from the outside world (‘Supply of Books Report’ 10–11) when juvenile inmates in borstals could read the newspapers for an hour, three times a week. Lines were drawn in terms of age, with older prisoners more likely to be categorised as ‘irreclaimable’.
19There were therefore ‘proper’ books, meant to induce feelings of remorse and patriotic pride, and ‘improper’ ones that failed to instil, religious or nationalistic feelings. Inmates’ friends wishing to offer the prison library some books got a taste of the potential censorship at work to filter out ‘improper’ reading. Suffragette Marion Wallace Dunlop tried to have a long list of books sent to her and handed over to the library, but the prison authorities rejected many titles, arguing that the prisoner had little time to serve (three weeks left) and that the practice of book-giving was becoming ‘an abuse’ (HO 45/10389/170808). William Beauchamp Nevill evokes a prison schoolmaster who had ‘a positive mania’ that led him to remove any unclothed pictures of men and women since he considered them all ‘indecent’—revealing rather prudish attitudes.
20Rules, however, were not always followed. Prisoners showed great creativity to bypass them. For example, Chicago May would make deals with other prisoners to have more books than her legal allowance (Sharpe 207). Many prisoners used books to create mental landscapes that allowed them to escape, even for a short while. For ‘One Who Has Endured It’, reading was a ‘great solace’ and he is quite sure it prevented him from going mad. ‘I believe that if the authorities were to take away the books a very large proportion of the convicts, and particularly the better class, those who have lost a good position, would become insane’, he further claims (‘One Who Has Endured It’ 109). According to William Beauchamp Nevill, prison reading was, rather unsurprisingly, ‘invaluable’: those who could not yet read enjoyed picture books, while the blind had ‘raised-letter books’ (Nevill 126). He further notes that some inmates never read and remarks that, for those who did, this pleasurable activity was made more difficult by flickering lights and cell darkness.
- 10 Her best-seller was East Lynne, an 1861 serialised novel. The authorities must have appreciated the (...)
21Behind bars, popular writings could range from approved classics by Mrs Henry Wood or Charles Dickens to magazine stories meant ‘for the people’, sensational tales seen as ‘morbidly introspective’ by the staff and entertaining by the inmates (‘Supply of Books Report’ 8). Surprisingly perhaps, the most appreciated writer amongst prisoners was Ellen Wood, known as ‘Mrs Henry Wood’.10 Other popular authors were: Charles Dickens (no. 2), Sir Walter Scott (no. 5), Wilkie Collins (no. 6) and Alexandre Dumas (no. 8) (‘Supply of Books Report’ 62). Mrs Wood’s novels combined the sensational with the sentimental and she tackled sensitive social topics like divorce or female sexuality and independence, but remained strictly conservative.
22Convicts sometimes used books as a means of asserting their identity and their agency, their capacity to resist despite the prison constraints—at times quite forcefully. Amy Walters, an Irish woman incarcerated in Aylesbury, once stole matches to burn an anti-Catholic book. Some female prisoners annotated books in the margins, and even though this was illegal, it was often tolerated (Sharpe 209–10). This practice combined the pleasures of reading and writing, and it gave some inmates the opportunity of reclaiming some personal mental space.
23The prison world therefore drew dividing lines between approved books and clandestine, transgressive readings, and these borders echoed the prejudice that discriminated between prisoners on the basis of gender, but also class, religion or age. Popular ‘bookscapes’ were adventures that enabled prisoners to break free and, while the authorities hoped to control these regulated ‘escapes’, inmates tried to find ways to read what they wanted.
- 11 The journalist mentions Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Raleigh’s History of the World and Don Quixote (...)
- 12 Translated from the French (‘la prison est sans extérieur ni lacune’) by Alan Sheridan in 1977 (Fou (...)
24‘The seclusion of imprisonment promotes meditation, and it is not surprising, therefore, that some of the world’s most important works should have been penned or thought out in prison’ (‘Prison Poems and Inscriptions’ 2c): an 1897 press article dedicated to prison writing praised, in this rather superlative way, the works produced by certain inmates.11 But many of those who published their memoirs were rather atypical prisoners who often sought to hide their identity for fear of being branded as pariahs (hence the multitude of ‘One Who Has . . .’ and other pseudonyms). Indeed, writing was more discouraged than encouraged, prompting suffragette Constance Lytton to talk about the ‘luxury of writing’ a simple letter (Lytton 146). Because, as Foucault puts it, ‘the prison has neither exterior nor gap’, its insularity completely entrapped inmates, some of whom resisted loneliness and numbness with their pens and pencils (Foucault 238).12 Through their letters, inscriptions and stories, prisoners unknowingly provided the elements of a potential, indirect history of the prison and of themselves.
25The majority of prisoners came from working-class backgrounds, and even in the first decade of the 20th century, the proportion of perfectly literate inmates remained low (2% for women and 6% for men) (Hobhouse & Brockway 40). In 1912, in Holloway prison—famous for the presence of suffragettes within its walls—out of 11,532 female local prisoners, 1% were described as highly educated, 8.7% as illiterate and 63.6% as only able to read and write imperfectly (‘Judicial Statistics 1912’ 138). The 1870 Education Act had made provisions to improve literacy, but it was only in 1880 that education was made compulsory between the ages of 5 and 10, and it only became free in 1891. Prisoners often came out better readers and writers than they had been upon incarceration, but not by a great deal, and quite a few did not get any classes at all. Education was not a right, but a privilege, and it was determined by the length of the sentence served (those spending less than 4 months in prison were allowed no instruction at the end of the 19th century), age (for instance, women older than 40 were seen as too old to learn) and other, sometimes vague and arbitrary criteria.
26Most of those who wrote poems, stories or diaries—who saw themselves as writers—were not typical prisoners. Suffragettes and, more generally, political prisoners tended to be quite prolific. They had a cause to defend, a broader education due to their background and a need for publicity as well as a more tightly-knit community of potential readers. It is possible to argue, though, that popular forms of captive writing can encompass less traditional practices. Tattoos and letters are not commonly thought of as literary productions, but for the purpose of the present historical analysis, they can be considered just as worthy of interest as the memoirs and poems of inmates, and ultimately they can and have been used as historical documents. They can then be interpreted as ‘papers’ or ‘canvasses’ on which inmates expressed their individual stories. This conception of captivity writings as historical documents gives a voice both to ‘élite’ prisoners and more ‘ordinary’ ones, allowing us to hear more varied stories of lived captivity.
27The use of slang, for instance, reveals a sense of identity and community that can transpire in ‘thief writing’. In Jottings from Jail (1887), a prison chaplain, Reverend Horsley, refers to colourful wall inscriptions—graffiti—as ‘cacoëthes scribendi’, or ‘writing mania’. He lists an impressive number of examples, including ‘Lord save me from starvashun’ (Horsley 25). His endeavour may, at first, seem to be similar to that of the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and his Palimsesti del carcere (Palimpsests of Prisons, first published in 1888). But Lombroso, as a criminal anthropologist, sought to confirm theories about the ‘born criminal’ while Horsley, as a Christian writer, felt a responsibility to give equal consideration to all convicts.
28Horsley explains that poems could be scribbled on walls to express individual suffering, dreams (of food, often, for prison fare was scientifically designed to provide just enough to avoid starvation without ever risking satisfaction either):
O who can tell the panes I feel,
A poor and harmless sailor,
I miss my grog and every meal;
Here comes the blooming jailor. (Horsley 26).
- 13 The phrase means ‘he who endures will conquer/win’.
29Horsley’s choice of prison inscriptions and their spelling errors (like ‘panes’ for ‘pains’) suggest—if truthfully quoted—a desire to give a voice to the educated and uneducated alike: he claims that he once found a ‘vincit qui patitur’13 inscription (28), suggesting a more educated background for its writer than the average. Many convicts were preoccupied by time, reputation (claiming remorse or innocence) and the ‘loss’ of loved ones. These inscriptions allow modern readers to hear the musings of anonymous and yet inspired prisoners. They are centred round the self, its sense of time, its pride, its love—requited or not—its thirst for vengeance or absolution, its fears, its prayers and its complaints (against prison food, prison uncleanliness, prison chaplains, etc.) and, sometimes, its sexual desires. Popular forms of captive writing could also include written dialogues, suggesting a desire for interaction and, at times, humour. ‘Good-bye, Lucy, dear, I’m parted from you for seven long year (sic)’, wrote one Alf Jones. A reply then appeared, in the form of a quatrain:
If Lucy dear is like most gals,
She’ll give a few sighs or moans,
But soon will find among your pals
Another Alfred Jones. (Horsley 30).
30Prison graffiti provide historians with an insight into the mindsets of prisoners, their suffering and the ‘brave face’ strategies they adopted to survive in dark places.
31Not all forms of writings were welcome, according to the authorities: knowing how to write did not entail one could actually put pen to paper, and very often inmates had neither. If graffiti writing was popular, and if some prisoners took to using nails and pins to engrave pots, pans, bowls and basins, it was mostly because access to writing material was restricted. It was only in 1908 that the first female prison inspector, Dr Mary Gordon, secured notebooks for Holloway Prison, the largest local prison for women (Cheney 132). Still, even in the 1910s, having a notebook of one’s own to write one’s private thoughts was a privilege. Katie Gliddon wrote her prison thoughts and stories on her copy of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems with a pencil that had been smuggled inside the collar of her coat (Gliddon).
- 14 According to Ellis, a famous physician and eugenicist, quality works were published in The Summary. (...)
32Round about the same period, in other countries, some prisons did encourage writing through official magazines like Tam-Tam at the Grande Roquette in France or The Summary in Elmira Reformatory in New York (Ellis 182).14 But in British Victorian prisons, the writings that were encouraged often conveyed feelings of remorse and religious resolutions. Exercise books bear traces of this disciplined and constrained form of writing which often targeted idleness. James Meikeljohn wrote in 1883, in neat letters, in his school notebook: ‘there are no persons who enjoy life so little and are such burdens to themselves as those who have nothing to do. Such a man is in fact opposing the will of God, who has given us all faculties to make use of and improve to the best of our power’ (PCOM 3). However, whether those lines were sincere or not, they reveal a strategy: writing the words the authorities approved of was bound to improve the privileges their authors were given.
- 15 The police also had to find all the addressees and make sure that they were said to be respectable.
33Letters were the most common form of prison writing. In Aylesbury Convict Prison for women, in 1898, around 2,000 letters were written under surveillance (between twenty and thirty-five letters a week). The progressive stage system set up a series of rules that turned writing into a prerogative more than a right. Until the early 20th century, long-term prisoners were allowed to send and receive one letter after six months. Third- and second-class prisoners could send a letter every three months; only first-class prisoners could exchange correspondence once a month. All letters—incoming and outgoing—were read by the authorities; ‘improper’ content, slang and deletions (words and phrases that were crossed out) were forbidden.15
- 16 It is not possible to determine whether the poems quoted by Harris or other prison authorities and (...)
34While letters were meant as means of communication mainly, poetic works were ways of escaping the prison bars, of showing creativity in a monotonous world and of imagining mindscapes that went above and beyond the prison walls. Some members of staff like Mary Gordon praised captive poems: she refers to ‘one or two narrative poems which were clever, and contained scurrilous references to the staff, or which were tragic and sentimental’ (Gordon 193). Others, like Vernon Harris, who governed two male prisons before becoming a prison inspector, jeered at poems written by women in particular.16 He does however refer to a poem that seemed appropriate to him since it expressed regret:
Oh liberty, how sweet you are!
You seem so near and yet so far.
The heart for you does long again,
But still I am myself to blame,
For getting drunk and doing wrong
Has brought me to this doom so long. (Harris 784)
35He ridicules a poem written on a slate, which would therefore have been ephemeral. Captivity poems written in chalk were by nature transient. They seemed to convey feelings that needed expressing regardless of the durability of their medium. Some were clearly misunderstood by the authorities. Vernon Harris quotes the following:
A poor wanderer here to-day,
Where to-morrow I cannot say;
Perhaps in gaol, for aught I know –
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow. (Harris 787)
36He dismisses it as the work of a hardened criminal who has become de-sensitised to the fear of prison when this quatrain rather shows introspection and a realistic attitude toward the risk of reoffending. In general, Harris is similarly dismissive of the women’s love poems as being ‘mawkishly sentimental’, or as ‘love letters to men whom they are doing their utmost to betray’ and quotes one written by ‘a young unmarried mother, a prostitute, a shoplifter, and a coiner’ (Harris 791–92). Harris’s comments are laden with prejudice about female sexuality and suggest the poem writer’s hypocrisy. The poem, entitled ‘The Husband’s Farewell’, is composed of five octets and a closing quatrain. Harris tries to present the female prisoners as heartless, but ‘The Husband’s Farewell’ expresses pain at being parted. The use of the third person singular ‘she’ by the author might hint at a desire to distance herself from her conviction, but also suggests a sense of dispossession of her own self. Both the author and her husband were parted by their respective criminal sentences. In the second stanza, the husband’s words of remorse and caring attention for his family are reported:
Give my love unto my sister,
Ask her to look o’er my shame;
If on earth I ne’er should meet her
In Heaven we all shall meet again,
There to dwell with our dear mother
From the world of care and strife.
Entreat her to forgive her brother
The cloud he has cast o’er life.
37The lines give depth to the convict’s character and show more endearing character traits, revealing stories of fragmented lives, with a mother who must have died young since the couple had barely been married 12 months.
38While the separate system had prevailed from the first half of the 19th century, the rival silent system had not exactly been discarded. Communication between prisoners remained forbidden except under specific rules and was carried out in secret and through imaginative means. The prison historian Lucia Zedner described how inmates used ‘stiffs’, clandestine notes scribbled on gaslight paper (Zedner 206). Of these popular forms of writings little if anything remains, but their existence tells stories of isolation and of a will to overcome it. Bonds of companionship and friendship were formed, cemented, betrayed, wrecked and rebuilt through secret notes.
- 17 A special rule allowed them to receive clothing while incarcerated whereas other prisoners had to w (...)
39Furtive epistles could also be used to keep in touch with friends and family outside. Captivity notes allowed prisoners to test and push the supposedly impenetrable boundaries of prisons. Those notes weave a passage between the inside and the outside. Yet, we have to bear in mind that exchanging notes stealthily with the outside world was not easy. Suffragettes commonly used the grapevine because they could rely on a strong network and a spirit of camaraderie—between 1905 and 1914, around 1,000 of them spent several long days or weeks in prison. According to the historian Anne Schwan, they used the ‘secret power of the pen’ to share their stories, advertise their cause and, in certain cases, that of ‘ordinary’ prisoners, ‘making their experiences visible and audible’ (Schwan 150). Myra Sadd Brown put pen to toilet paper to get a note out to her children in 1912 (‘Mrs Sadd Brown to her three children and Mademoiselle’). To get essays, poems, political pieces and news in and out of prison, suffragettes could call on the help of those who had remained free. Some prisoners gave out notes while appearing in court, for themselves or other inmates; another technique consisted in hiding messages in the seams of clothing sent out to suffragettes.17 Behind bars, some suffragettes exchanged notes by hiding them in their stockings (Purvis 112). The notes were swapped during religious service, a practice that was common amongst ‘ordinary’ prisoners too. To write, some of those who worked in shoe workshops would sneak out some wax to create chess pieces or they would make ink pots out of bars of soap (Hobhouse & Brockway 163–64).
40Seditious ideas, at times quite humorous, would be written secretly—and the author of a prison wall inscription could remain anonymous—but displayed in a place where others would read it. Such writings expressed the identity of their authors and, often, showed that they had tried to turn their penal baggage into penal knowledge:
Dartmoor is a tidy place,
Chatham is the terror of our race,
Portland is not quite so bad,
Broadmoor is for those stark mad,
Pentonville is the hill of London,
Borstal, if you’re there you’re undone,
Portsmouth is a noted shop. (Horsley 31)
41Those rhymes listing English prisons would have made other inmates smile, perhaps knowingly for some. Political prisoners also made use of humour to promote their cause. T. D. Sullivan, an Irish nationalist, the author of ‘God Save Ireland’ and a Lord Mayor of Dublin, had his captivity poems published after a two-month stay in Tullamore Jail in the late 1880s. Entitled ‘Prison Poems, or the Lays of Tullamore’, they contain an ironic, politically committed and rhythmical description of the Irish prison:
Oh, Tullamore Gaol is a charming place
(Bang the bolts and clatter the tins),
’Tis Loyalty’s school for the Irish race
(At six a.m. the trouble begins).
Rub and scrub, and tramp away,
Pull and pick, and hammer all day,
Smash the stones and turn the clay
(And mourn for your political sins).
42The description of the Irish secretary is no less biting:
A dear old man is Featherstone-Haugh
(Bang the bolts and clatter the tins).
As tender and sweet as a circular-saw
(At six a.m. the trouble begins) (‘Sullivan’s Tullamore Poems’).
43Poems and various texts could also be turned into songs. Suffragettes in particular used singing as a way of rallying their supporters and lifting their spirits. The lyrics of ‘Chorus and Dance of Cabinet Ministers’ can be found in suffragette and artist Vera Holme’s prison papers. The song uses the tune of a well-known nursery rhyme (‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’ becomes ‘Here we go round the Suffrage Bill’) and makes several political points about suffrage, health care and the economy. Playfully but scathingly denouncing the force-feeding of political prisoners, the first stanza reads:
Here we go round the Suffrage Bill
The Suffrage Bill, the Suffrage Bill
Till we’ve fed women and made them ill
On a cold and frosty morning. (7VJH/1/1/03)
44Writing (or singing) would then serve to convey a political message but also to keep up the spirits of those who were deprived of the right to write and speak freely. Prison writing was often short and abrupt because there was no other alternative, but the choice of poetic forms reveals creativity, originality and resourcefulness.
45The stories read and written in prison paint a picture of the carceral world, both from above and from below. Constraints imposed on popular forms of reading and writing shed light on control strategies set up by the authorities to foster obedience (inside as well as outside the prison) and rehabilitation through meditation, introspection and with the help of rather austere shelves of books. The prison authorities’ ‘reading list’, so to speak, drew lines according to class, gender, religious and age distinctions, which were often born of prejudice.
46But read from the perspective of history from below, these stories of stories breathe life into the everyday reality of prison. The fondness of prisoners for adventure stories shows a desire to escape the monotony of life behind bars and the risks taken by prisoners to write secret notes, letters, poems, graffiti, tattoos, diaries, using whatever they could write on, be it a wall, gaslight paper or even their own skins, tell us of an unquenchable thirst for self-expression and assertion.
47The study of captivity writing and reading in the Victorian and Edwardian periods also foregrounds the need for a broadening of the usual definitions of ‘writing’ and ‘popular’. In a world of restrictions, noise and hard work, it was not (always) easy to write iambic pentameters, but a variety of notes and compositions, written for oneself or others, free men and women or fellow prisoners, show the prisoners’ minds were not always docile. If, as the author of Jottings from Jail suggests, ‘birds could not sing if they were reduced to counting the wires in their cage, in the hope of drowning thought’, then books, notes, poems—read and written—helped the ‘jailbirds’ voice their voices (Horsley 31).
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