This post has been contributed by Spencer Dodd, University of Wisconsin-Stout. See more posts in response to the 24th Annual Dickens Society Symposium here and here.

Prisons loom large in the landscapes of Dickens, standing as discrete, foreboding edifices within the quintessentially “Dickensian” backdrop of blasted factory-towns and seedy East End slums. Following Matthew Sherrill’s discerning dissection of that storied adjective, I mean “Dickensian” here in the sense that it conjures vistas of the turmoil wrought by the Industrial Revolution: the human cost of haphazard urbanization, injustices dismissed under the vaguest of utilitarian auspices, inescapable and somehow inexplicable alienation, and soon (“Ditching Dickensian”). An enduring thread in Dickens scholarship considers his oeuvre as a protracted commentary on the conception of the prison-industrial complex in Victorian Britain, a critical conversation that owes much debt to the work of Michel Foucault. More recent scholarship generally affirms this formation of the prison as a site of erasure, abjection, and dissociation (Tyler 70-1). This thread saw significant representation at our July Symposium, with discussions of confinement, trauma, and incarceration abounding not only on the “Carceral States” panel but across papers and panels throughout the three-day event. The pervasive issues illuminated by these analyses of the work of Dickens (and of other Victorian novelists) clearly remain topical and relevant today.

On the first day of panels, Diana C. Archibald (UMass-Lowell) fittingly traced the first steps on our trek through the Dickensian carceral archipelago with an account of Dickens’s own journey westward in his American Notes for General Circulation (1842). With stunning clarity, Archibald drew connections between the horror and degradation Dickens saw in American prisons and the appalling conditions currently faced by captive migrants along America’s southern border. Dickens was particularly incensed by the blatant institutional racism of American prisons, noting that, in Boston, black juvenile prisoners far out-numbered imprisoned white children, an inequality exacerbated further by how, even then, the incarcerated made up a disproportionately large percentage of the American population (Dickens 34-5). To Dickens, the inhumane conditions, cruel personnel, and racial disparity inherent to this system of mass incarceration, as well as America’s continued dependence upon slavery, reflected the bitter, hypocritical truths hidden within and by the self-proclaimed land of the free. Despite the rising tide of abolitionist literature typified by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), many of Dickens’s (Northern) American contemporaries, most notably Hawthorne and Emerson, held the view that slavery’s moral evil would cause the practice to die out “naturally” – of its own accord, when the time was right (Smith 30, Emerson 9). To a committed social realist like Dickens, this position seemed laughable. Citing again the unconscionable conditions to which detained migrants are subjected, the rise of privately owned, for-profit prisons, and the staggering scale of mass incarceration in America, Archibald extended Dickens’s critique to the present moment, arguing that abolition did little to rectify the depredation Dickens described in American Notes, that plantations were merely replaced by prisons. This analysis of the prison-industrial complex and its related pipelines would figure heavily in coming discussions of Dickens’s other works, particularly A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations.

Nanako Konoshima (St. Agnes’ University, Japan) kicked off our panel on carceral states with a fascinating analysis of lines of sight in the spatial landscape of Dickensian confinement, noting uncanny similarities between the English marshes of GE and the French countryside of Tale. Having mapped out and compared the visual landscapes of these two novels, Konoshima noted that the details of the landscape embody the human drama and trauma that have taken place there; the living world bears signs of the journeys and experiences it has witnessed. In an engaging close reading, Konoshima demonstrated how the beacon that Pip saw illuminating the marsh and the gallows over the village fountain function as focal points in a shared psychic landscape. Konoshima argued that the spatial similarities between these two situations, in works that Dickens wrote around the same time, are more than coincidental and reflect the author’s preoccupations as well as the linear journeys of Pip and Darnay. Both linear landscapes are overseen and dominated by carceral infrastructure; baleful tracks guide the characters around the Newgate Prison and past the grim stone edifices of the Evremonde estate.

Next, Clara Defilippis continued our discussion of Tale with an excellent paper on the ethics and morality of Dickensian imprisonment. Defilippis, who has previously contributed several posts to the blog (find them here and here), argued that prisons shape and reflect the character of the imprisoned. In Dickens, prisons are thus always sites of moral development. Defilippis also explored this argument along spatial lines, describing how the moral gaze of others gravitates toward prison walls and encodes judgments upon the contained. Similarly, in Tale the sun overhead judges the France it bears down upon; no injustice, iniquity, or trauma can be buried forever by the walls of confinement.

Sean Grass (Rochester Institute of Technology) rounded out our carceral states panel with an analysis of arguably the only positive portrayal of a prison in Dickens’s oeuvre, the Newgate of GE. Grass notes that, through an unusual and unexpected metaphor, Pip compares Wemmick to a gardener and the prisoners to houseplants in need of nurturing. Elsewhere in Dickens, prisons do not value the growth and rehabilitation of the imprisoned. Incarceration, Grass argued, normally causes profound psychic damage to the Dickensian prisoner, as exemplified by the fate of Dr. Manette in Tale. Moral damage was a distinct possibility, too, as Dickens believed that long, punitive sentences could make prisons little more than finishing schools for criminals – they would enter as insolvents or petty thieves and finally exit as hardened marauders. But the Newgate of GE functions as a positive emblem of growth, reformation, and hope. Grass argued that the garden-prison of Newgate has made such a strong impression on Pip because it is a place of creativity and transformation, and thus an inspiration to him as he tries to climb the social ladder. Perhaps he desires the care of a nurturing hand like Wemmick’s as an antidote to his upbringing “by hand” and the efforts of Magwitch, Estella, etc. to shape his development for their own purposes.

And that concludes our voyage into the Dickensian carceral archipelago at the 24^th annual symposium – what a timely topic to have been “Recalled to Life” (Dickens, Tale 83). My own paper addressed specifically the dramatic transformation Dr. Manette experienced through his suffering in solitary confinement. By pairing Dr. Manette and “105 North Tower” with the case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I hoped to show that this transformation is shocking, a response to (and a symptom of) the profound loss wrought upon the world by the prison-industrial complex. As Dr. Archibald’s presentation made clear, the profundity of this loss is compounded by its unchecked continuation: the sun over Tale’s France that held the hanged man’s dangling shadow up to the world’s scrutiny, still lights on walls and cages.

Works Cited

• Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. Chapman and Hall, 1850.
• ———. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859. Ed. Richard Maxwell. Penguin, 2003.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” The Annotated Emerson. Ed. David Mikics. Harvard UP, 2012.
  
• Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. 1975. Trans. A.M. Sheridan. Pantheon, 1977.
• Sherrill, Matthew. “Ditching Dickensian.” The Paris Review, 30 April 2014.
• Smith, Caleb. The Oracle and the Curse. Harvard UP, 2013.
  
• Tyler, Imogen. Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. Zed Books, 2013.