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The Solitary Prisoner
Harry Furniss
1910
15 cm high x 9.4 cm wide, framed
Special frontispiece for Part Two of A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy, Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing XIII, title-page for American Notes for General Circulation.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
There was a sailor who had been there upwards of eleven years, and who in a few months' time would be free. Eleven years of solitary confinement!
"I am very glad to hear your time is nearly out." What does he say? Nothing. Why does he stare at his hands, and pick the flesh upon his fingers, and raise his eyes for an instant, every now and then, to those bare walls which have seen his head turn grey? It is a way he has sometimes.
Does he never look men in the face, and does he always pluck at those hands of his, as though he were bent on parting skin and bone? It is his humour: nothing more.
It is his humour too, to say that he does not look forward to going out; that he is not glad the time is drawing near; that he did look forward to it once, but that was very long ago; that he has lost all care for everything. It is his humour to be a helpless, crushed, and broken man. And, Heaven be his witness that he has his humour thoroughly gratified! ["Philadelphia, and its Solitary Prison," 103]
The highly modern realisation of the victim of the new, "advanced" (and therefore, theoretically, calculated to be of greatest benefit to society) solitary system of the Philadelphia Penitentiary communicates by posture and shading alone the utter despair of the prisoner who has been incarcerated in total isolation. Charles Dickens here and elsewhere expressed distaste for the system which Great Britain introduced at Pentonville Prison, Middlesex. The frontispiece thus alerts the reader not merely to a highly moving description in Chapter Seven, "Philadelphia, and its Solitary Prison," but also for the author's disappointment on the other side of the Atlantic with the very real problems of what he had termed "the republic of my imagination" in a letter to actor and confidant William Macready.
The first cheap edition of American Notes for General Circulation (the title involving a pun on forged American bank notes "circulating" in Great Britain at the time), published by Chapman and Hall in 1850, was accompanied by a single illustration, marine painter Clarkson Stanfield's sketch of The Britannia, aboard which Dickens and his wife, Catherine, sailed on 4 January 1842 for North American on the writer's first tour of the eastern United States and Canada.
Long before his trip to the United States to write yet another travelogue by an Englishman abroad directed to English travellers, Dickens had expressed deep sympathies for those incarcerated without hope of release. Doubtless, his own childhood experiences in the blacking warehouse at Hungerfords Stairs, London, during his father's imprisonment in the Marshalsea for debt have contributed to his deep sympathy for the solitary system inmates at Philadelphia's Solitary Prison. Certainly, this would seem to be an unlikely spot for British tourists, even if Dickens were pursuing a sociological agenda akin to that of his predecessor, Mrs. Trollope, in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832).
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. , 1988.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. , 1980.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 13.
Created 10 January 2014
Last modified 14 January 2020