Charles Dickens A Visit to Newgate, I found to be an interesting text. Dickens, once had his entire family thrown into debtors prison because of his father's inability to manage funds. Only Dickens was spared from debtors prison because he was old enough to work off the debt. Therefore, his visit to Newgate must have been a very personal experience for him.
I noticed while reading that Dickens treated the prisoners he encountered as people not prisoners. He looks upon them with compassion. They are not bad people or criminals to Dickens. The prisoners are people who have had bad things happen to them. The women Dickens sees he comments on their looks and how they seem to have lost all hope of redemption, and yet the girl "still listens doggedly to her mother's entreaties, whatever they were" (Sketches by Boz). The girl maybe be in prison, living a life without a promise of anything better coming along, but she still listens to her mother and asks about people she cares about. After all to her prison is not a whole lot different from the life she was living before. The people in prison have been born into a life so similar that no one can "excite a passing thought" (Sketches by Boz). Life to them is nothing but one of despair, and no one can awaken their "contempt for feeling" (Sketches by Boz). Instead they sit and watch the days pass, but they possess no feeling. These prisoners are only shells of the former shells. Some will go to their deaths and others may eventually leave Newgate, but to them existence inside or outside of Newgate is the same.
For them death is better, death will release them from their miserable life. This reminded me of Nancy in Oliver Twist. Until Oliver arrived, Nancy much like the girl in Newgate was living without feeling. She cared for Bill and Fagin, but she didn't possess real emotion. Oliver gave that back to her when he awoken her female sensibility. After, Nancy begins to see the world differently however, she cannot live in it, and still has to die. Once she dies, Nancy is finally able to achieve peace because she is no longer being treated like she does not matter. She was redeemed by helping Oliver even though she had to die to be redeemed. Nancy still finds a better existence than the one she was in.
Lauren,
ReplyDeleteGood comments here on Dickens's sketch, with a very astute connection to Miss Nancy in his Oliver Twist. Your focus on the women helps your discussion gain greater depth than if you had tried to address all the types of prisoners. Note that the prison Dickens's family was in was the Marshalsea prison, not Newcastle; the former was the debtor's prison, the latter the criminal penitentiary. You are right, though, that prisons in general would have had an effect on him.
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ReplyDeleteI think that you are correct that their lives are terrible whether they are in prison or living outside. However, the description of the mother and daughter pairs seemed to suggest that the people were almost better off in prison. For example, the girl in prison seemed to be in fairly good shape, and probably get rest and food more consistently than she would outside. Her mother seems to live a much harder life--still working and trying to feed her family. It seems to me like life outside of prison involves a lot more hard work, starvation, and uncertainty.
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