Convict Voices: Women, Class, And Writing About Prison In .
University of New HampshireUniversity of New Hampshire Scholars' RepositoryUniversity of New Hampshire Press: Open Access Books2014Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing aboutPrison in Nineteenth-Century EnglandAnne SchwanFollow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/unh pressPart of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Literature in English, British IslesCommons, Social History Commons, and the Women's History Commons
C O N V ICT VOICES
B e co min g M o d er nNew Nineteenth-Century StudiesSe r i e s E di t or sSarah Way ShermanDepartment of EnglishUniversity of New HampshireJanet Aikins YountDepartment of EnglishUniversity of New HampshireJanet PolaskyDepartment of HistoryUniversity of New HampshireRohan McWilliamAnglia Ruskin UniversityCambridge, EnglandThis book series maps the complexity of historical change and assesses theformation of ideas, movements, and institutions crucial to our own time bypublishing books that examine the emergence of modernity in North Americaand Europe. Set primarily but not exclusively in the nineteenth century, the seriesshifts attention from modernity’s twentieth-century forms to its earlier moments ofuncertain and often disputed construction. Seeking books of interest to scholarson both sides of the Atlantic, it thereby encourages the expansion of nineteenthcentury studies and the exploration of more global patterns of development.For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.upne.comAnne Schwan, Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison inNineteenth- Century EnglandKatherine Joslin and Daneen Wardrop, editors, Crossings in Text and TextileSarah Way Sherman, Sacramental Shopping: Louisa May Alcott, Edith Wharton,and the Spirit of Modern ConsumerismKimberly Wahl, Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in anAge of ReformHildegard Hoeller, From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice inNineteenth- Century American FictionBeth L. Lueck, Brigitte Bailey, and Lucinda L. Damon-Bach, editors, TransatlanticWomen: Nineteenth- Century American Women Writers and Great Britain
ANNE SCHWANConvict VoicesWomen, Class, andWriting about Prison inNineteenth-CenturyEnglandUniversity of New Hampshire PressDurham, New Hampshire
Universit y of New Ha mpshire Presswww.upne.com/unh.html 2014 University of New HampshireAll rights reservedManufactured in the United States of AmericaFor permission to reproduce any of the material in this book,contact Permissions, University Press of New England,One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon nh 03766; or visitwww.upne.comLibrary of Congress Control Number: 20149350355 4 3 2 1
Für Rudolf und Brigitte Schwan
CONTENTSAcknowledgmentsxiNote on AbbreviationsxiiiIntroduction: Approaching Female Prisoners’ Voices11 “Shame, You Are Not Going to Hang Me!” Women’sVoices in Nineteenth-Century Street Literature202 The Lives of Which “There Are No Records Kept” Convicts and Matrons in the Prison Narratives ofFrederick William Robinson (“A Prison Matron”)413 The Limits of Female Reformation Hidden Stories inGeorge Eliot’s Adam Bede and Wilkie Collins’sThe Moonstone704 “A Clamorous Multitude and a Silent Prisoner” Women’sRights, Spiritualism, and Public Speech in SusanWillis Fletcher’s Twelve Months in an English Prison915 Adultery, Gender, and the Nation The FlorenceMaybrick Case and Mrs. Maybrick’s Own Story1216 Gender and Citizenship in Edwardian Writings fromPrison Katie Gliddon and the Suffragettes at Holloway1497 Postscript: Rewriting Women’s Prison History inHistorical Fiction Margaret Atwood’s AliasGrace and Sarah Waters’s Affinity184Coda 195Notes 199Works Cited 235Index 279
AC KNOW LEDG MENTSMany people and institutions have helped me on the path toward completion of this book. I am especially indebted to my former supervisor, the lateSally Ledger, whose intellectual curiosity, positive attitude, and sense ofhumor continue to inspire my research and work with my own students.Without her warm and generous support, I would not be who I am today.I also thank the following individuals who have assisted me professionally,through constructive feedback, words of encouragement, or acts of friendship, at different stages of my career: Jan Alber, Isobel Armstrong, MaurizioAscari, Philip Barnard, Joseph Bristow, Laura Coffey, Ella Dzelzainis,Carrie Etter, Edith Frampton, Hilary Fraser, Gill Frith, Holly Furneaux,Regenia Gagnier, Laurie Garrison, Michelle-Marie Gilkeson, MichaelGliddon, Walter Göbel, Jenny Hartley, Ann Heilmann, Tim Hitchcock, Marcelo Hoffman, Tobias Hug, Anne Humpherys, Susan Hyatt, Louise Jackson,Tobi Jacobi, Frank Lauterbach, Andrew Lawrence, Katherine Lebow, TaraMacDonald, Andrew Maunder, Josephine McDonagh, Rohan McWilliam,Ellen O’Brien, June Purvis, Amber Regis, Helen Rogers, Saskia Schabio,Joanne Shattock, Robert Shoemaker, Sarah Turvey, Ed Wiltse, Sue Wiseman, Joanne Woodman, and Heather Worthington. For inspiring conversations and good collaboration, I thank my colleagues at Edinburgh NapierUniversity; the participants of my conference “Reading and Writing inPrison” at Edinburgh Napier in June 2010; Fife College, hmp Edinburgh,and the Scottish Prison Ser vice; and my students on the option module“Crime in Text & Film” over the past three years.Thanks are due to the following libraries and their staff: Bodleian Library, British Library, Cambridge University Library, Edinburgh NapierUniversity Library, Edinburgh University Library, Library of the Societyof Friends in London, Museum of London, National Archives London, National Library of Scotland, Rochester University Library, San Diego StateUniversity Library, University of London Library at Senate House, Women’s Library London (now at the London School of Economics). I gratefullyacknowledge funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council(ahrc) in the form of an Early Career Research Fellowship ( January–August2011) and doctoral funding in the earliest stages of this project. I am similarly
indebted to the Heinrich Böll Stiftung for a doctoral scholarship. The University of London Central Research Fund and a travel grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland enabled me to visit specialistlibraries and archives at different moments of this research. A British Academy Overseas Conference Grant facilitated important networking opportunities at the 2006 College English Association (cea) Conference in SanAntonio, Texas, which were crucial for the further development of my work.A British Association for Victorian Studies (bavs) award for conference organization allowed for valuable networking at my “Reading and Writing inPrison” conference. My current and previous employers—Edinburgh NapierUniversity, Birkbeck College, Keble College, University of Hertfordshire,University of Warwick—and my host institution in autumn 2010, San DiegoState University, have given institutional support in various ways, which Iappreciate. I thank the University Press of New England—especially PhyllisDeutsch and the series editors—for their interest in this project, and the editorial team for efficient and thoughtful support during the final preparation ofthe manuscript.I am eternally grateful for the backing of my family: my parents, Rudolfand Brigitte Schwan, for their unflinching support, both moral and material, and for never suggesting, during the long years of postgraduate training, that I get a “proper” job; and Franziska Horn for taking an interest inacademic life during long phone conversations. Finally, I thank StephenShapiro for his love, companionship, and conversation over the years andfor sharing the ups and downs throughout this long process.xii Acknowledgments
N OTE ON ABBRE VIAT IO N SPPRCHLRDCPRIParliamentary PapersReports from Select Committees of the House of LordsReports of the Directors of Convict PrisonsReports of the Inspectors of PrisonsThe volumes of Parliamentary Papers used are those at the British Library.My citation format for Parliamentary Papers is as follows: title of paper,year of publication, report number in parentheses, volume number, printedpage number. If a handwritten page number is given, it is added in squarebrackets after the printed page number. The page reference provided in thelist of works cited refers to the handwritten start page of the document inquestion, within the bound volume.
IntroductionApproaching Female Prisoners’ VoicesWhat does the past tell us? In and of itself, it tells us nothing.We have to be listening first, before it will say a word; and evenso, listening means telling, and then retelling.Margaret Atwood, In Search of Alias GraceThis is a book about women’s voices in the penal sphere and the difficultyof uncovering them. In 1985, criminologist Pat Carlen published CriminalWomen: Autobiographical Accounts, a collection of female offender life narratives. Designed to give female (ex-)prisoners a sense of agency and thechance to “destroy the mythology which inseminates contemporary stereotypes of criminal women” (13), the pioneering work aimed to counter the ramifications of “monocausal and global” (9) models of female criminality bydrawing attention to the diversity and complexities of women prisoners’ experiences through their stories. Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writingabout Prison in Nineteenth-Century England pursues a similar agenda bytracing historically earlier efforts to give voice to female offenders. By demonstrating how such articulations covertly or explicitly intervened into debatesaround gender and class relations, I aim to complicate our understanding ofwomen’s imprisonment in the nineteenth century and, in turn, to providecritical strategies for approaching female prisoners’ voices at other historical moments, including the present day.In the broadest sense, I see this book as part of the unfinished interdisciplinary project of feminism, what Julia Swindells has described as “a widespread commitment within the women’s movement, commonly understoodin terms of the retrieval of absent or silent women’s ‘voices’ ” (“Conclusion”205–6). Despite being dedicated to such a feminist recovery project, ConvictVoices highlights that this “retrieval” can never be unproblematic, especiallywith a view to historical, nonelite prisoners’ perspectives, which are typicallysubject to multiple levels of submergence. This book explores the processes
of mediation at work in the representation and recovery of convict voices,while acknowledging that I, too—a white, middle-class academic with nopersonal experience of imprisonment—am inevitably implicated in thispractice of mediating.Encompassing different textual forms, the book’s methodology drawsinspiration from a range of academic disciplines—from feminist criminology,auto/biographical studies, the history from below, law, and literary studies—tooffer original insights for the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of prisonstudies and to contribute to Victorian studies’ renewed interest in the “hidden lives” of socially marginalized groups.1 I analyze a variety of mostly British primary sources, including gallows literature, prison narratives bymetropolitan journalist and popu lar fiction writer Frederick WilliamRobinson, mid-Victorian novels by George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, latenineteenth-century prison autobiography, and the secret diaries and lettersof incarcerated suff ragettes, before concluding with a postscript on two latetwentieth-century historical novels about women in prison. The study begins in the early nineteenth century, at a moment when female philanthropists such as the Quaker Elizabeth Fry were raising public awareness aroundwomen’s imprisonment; the historical part of my analysis ends with a chapter on the suffragettes’ writings right before the First World War, because itis here that many of the debates around female lawbreaking and its widersocial contexts culminated in particularly unequivocal and often selfconscious ways. To briefly interrogate historical differences and continuities, the book concludes with reflections on more contemporary attemptsat recovering or imagining female prisoners’ voices in the late twentieth andearly twenty-first centuries—a period in which there has been a steep increase in female prison populations in the West, which has made considerations around such women’s experiences and their representation moreurgent.2 While it is beyond the scope of this book to include a discussion ofmaterial from the intervening years, such as Joan Henry’s best-selling WhoLie in Gaol (1952), based on her time in English penal institutions, or herslightly later Yield to the Night (1954), a fictionalized fi rst-person accountof a woman awaiting execution, it is hoped that some of the insights fromConvict Voices will inspire further work on these, and other, writings aboutprison. 3The chapters’ roughly chronological order does not suggest a teleological development from a less to a more “advanced” understanding of women’s2 CONVICT VOICES
offending behavior and incarceration. Similarly, I am not contending thatinfluence is necessarily at work between these different sources, althoughI will establish such connections when they occur. In this book, I wish toopen up a conversation between what, on the surface, might seem likedisparate textual forms that would typically not be read together, to illustrate the presence of a cultural problematic across different discursive sitesand historical periods—namely, a sustained interest in women’s crime andpunishment and female prisoners’ perspectives as a platform for interrogating broader social concerns, such as gender and class relations. These diverse articulations evoke a contested, and often contradictory, (proto)feminist consciousness that emerges through the prism of nineteenth-centurypenal debates.While acknowledging the complex and contested nature of the term feminist, I use the concept loosely to denote an interest in gender equality andwomen’s right to a life of opportunity without fear of deprivation, oppression, stigma, and emotional or physical harm, within and outside prisonwalls. The texts, writers, and historical moments under scrutiny here do notoffer a uniform approach to matters of gender inequality or women’s rights,thus illustrating that feminism’s history, as much as its current manifestation, is diverse and contingent.4 Imprisoned suff ragettes, for example, unmistakably called for political rights and fuller civic involvement for women;others, such as the spiritualist and alleged fraudster Susan Willis Fletcherand Florence Maybrick, serving time for the supposed murder of her husband, bemoaned a sexist bias in the criminal justice system, while shyingaway from overtly formulated feminist demands. Yet their narratives, likemany of the other sources studied in this book, need to be situated within abroader cultural context that witnessed emerging debates around genderedexpectations and women’s changing roles in society in general and in thepenal system more particularly.5 Where a concern with gender-specific conditions is implicit rather than explicit—for instance, in execution broadsides hinting at the gendered contexts for women’s crimes—I employ theterm protofeminist to indicate that gender critiques may be contained butnot fully articulated. The concept of intersectionality implicitly motivatesmuch of my analysis, that is, an understanding that a prisoner’s genderidentity is to be considered in conjunction with other categories of identity,with a particular focus on class and its impact on female prisoners’ voicesand their mediation.6Introduction 3
Prisoners’ Voices and Life-Writing Critical Contexts after FoucaultNot least because of a surge in Western countries’ prison population overthe past three decades, recent years have seen a rise in critical concernswith prison narratives, prisoner life writing, and the perspectives of (ex-)prisoners more generally—inside and outside the Anglophone academy—if notalways necessarily with a gendered focus.7 Even criminology, traditionallya subject dedicated to the production of scientific models about offenders,has begun to accept the prisoner viewpoint as a necessary element for theoretical thinking about crime and punishment, partially thanks to the selfreflexive work of feminist criminologists such as Carlen, Carol Smart, andAnne Worrall.8 As Judith Scheffler suggests in her introduction to WallTappings: An International Anthology of Women’s Prison Writings, 200 to thePresent, though, “historical writing by imprisoned women is especially difficult to identify and locate, and this gap constitutes a cultural loss of undetermined scope” (xxii). I aim to begin redressing this cultural void, whileremaining conscious of the limitations of such recovery work.The knowledge and experiences of the vast majority of women innineteenth-century prisons remain unrecorded, owing to a number offactors—illiteracy and the generally low cultural capital among female offenders, who mainly came from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds,but also the cultural sanctioning of certain forms of knowledge over others.9My sources include what can be assumed to be genuine self-expressions—typically by middle- or upper-class women with the relevant literacy skills,access to writing material, and means of publication—as well as staged orfictionalized prisoners’ voices, such as those in execution broadsides’ “lastlamentations,” which purported to be written by the convict and predominantly featured the voices of nonelite women. I do not claim that these andother representations—no matter how “authentic”—offer us unproblematicor direct access to female prisoners’ experiences. While I am sensitive todifferences in textual form and publication history, my primary interesthere lies less in the question of the texts’ authenticity, factual accuracy, orrepresentativeness than in how their representational acts construct andauthorize the female convict’s perspective as a way of imagining and commemorating otherwise hidden or lost knowledge.10 My emphasis on “voices”acknowledges the fragile, ephemeral nature of this knowledge and serves as4 CONVICT VOICES
a reminder of prisoners’ limited literacy, which, in most cases, preventedthem from leaving a written record for posterity with their own pen.In literary and cultural studies, the lasting influence of what could betermed Michel Foucault’s disciplinary thesis as a theoretical paradigm hasmade it difficult to take notice of prisoners’ voices. The overemphasis on“discipline,” control, and silencing over prisoner agency and self-expressionis less Foucault’s fault than the result of a reductive reception of his work.Although, as Helen Rogers rightly notes, “inmates never speak in Disciplineand Punish” (75), Foucault’s project as a whole demonstrates personal andpolitical commitment to “the insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” thatis, “historical contents that have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations,” including the perspectives of offenders(“Society” 7).11 Post-Foucauldian readings have often risked perpetuatingrather than challenging such “formal systematizations” by highlighting particular forms of discourse or obliterating the complexity of voices in texts.12Responding to one-sided receptions of Foucault’s work, recent researchon the Frenchman’s role as founding member of the Groupe d’Informationsur les Prisons (gip), which provided French prisoners with a platform forcomplaints against prison conditions in the early 1970s, uncovers the interplay between Foucault’s theoretical work and his prison activism, ultimatelydedicated to bringing about change in the penal system and the entire socialstructure.13 Similarly, my own readings of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury attempts to give voice to female prisoners are interested in thesearticulati
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The original Veterano routine was developed by Paul Wade in his classic text; Convict Conditioning . Because Convict Conditioning focuses on “the big six” moves of push ups, pull ups, bridges, leg raises, handsta
a Convict Conditioning-based workout. It’s tough because all athletes are different, but also It’s tough because all athletes are different, but also because—in my experience—most ath
The Holy Spirit does not convict of sin. Jesus said the only sin the Holy Spirit will convict the world of is the sin of rejecting Jesus. It is your own spirit that knows the very moment you have done wrong. Going by Feelings Notice in Romans 8:16 Paul said, "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our
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