Doing Time: Temporality and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century British Prison Experience

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that carceral experience was a generative and organisational motif in a large number of influential early British novels, which are read as life writing. I deploy Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope in order to identify the increasing narratological centrality of the depiction of prison experience to these novels, and explain that his theory's unique insistence on the perceptual confluence of space and time is of particular significance in the context of the prison. I ask how a chronotopic analysis repositions existing theoretical understandings of time and the prison narrative. Concretely, my discussion of the prison chronotope in these narratives challenges Michel Foucault's understanding of the ‘prison revolution’ of 1779, John Bender's contention that the eighteenth-century novel bears a proleptic relationship to time, and Monika Fludernik's reading of the prison as essentially ahistorical and effectively timeless. Finally, this paper also identifies the frequent equivalence of the figure of the writer with that of the prisoner in the early novel, and argues that this meta- or supra-textual relationship in part accounts for the predominance of the motif in the fictional life writing of the period.

KEYWORDS:

• Eighteenth-century novel
• prison theme
• penal theory
• time and narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lucy Powell is a teaching fellow in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture at UCL where in 2015 she was awarded with her PhD. She is currently completing her monograph on fictional depictions of the prison in the eighteenth-century. Lucy has written for publications in The Guardian, The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Times, The Sunday Times, Opticon 1826, Time Out, and Vogue. She is a regular cultural commentator on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and was appointed a New Generation Thinker by the BBC and the AHRC in 2011. She has written and presented programmes on Shakespeare in Palestine, dreams and their literary history from Homer to Freud, and her most recent broadcast, Shhhh!, explored silence in art, music, meditation and science.

Notes

1. Curiously, Carnochan then fails to plot this history, either here or in his earlier, lengthy study, Confinement and Flight (1977), where he is less interested in prison spaces than in constrictive experience more broadly.

2. Though Clarissa begins with a letter to the eponymous heroine from ‘Anna Howe’ it nevertheless also opens with the pronoun ‘I’.

3. See Remarks on Clarissa, Eaves and Kimpel (Ch. 12), and Doody and Stuber.

4. Many eighteenth-century novels might be used to illustrate this point, but perhaps the first four Books of Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751), are the most comprehensive.

5. Captain Alexander Smith, the author of one of the most popular collections of criminal biographies in the early eighteenth-century, similarly prefaces his work with the reflection:

many of them [the inmates] would not acquaint the Ordinaries of Newgate with such particular circumstances, touching their lives and conversation, and private offences, because they wou'd not have their friends and relations expos'd by those papers which are disper'sd abroad under the title of, An Account of the Behaviour, last dying speeches, and confessions of the malefactors who were executed this day at Tyburn'. (iv–v).

6. See, for instance, H. D. The Life of Jonathan Wild.

7. The prison reformer John Howard began touring every gaol and Bridewell in England and Wales from 1773, and in 1777 published his findings in the first edition of The Sate of the Gaols of England and Wales. He complained of the widespread practise of ‘confining all sorts of prisoners together: debtors and felons; men and women; the young beginner and the old offender’ (15).

8. Smollett published a virulent attack on Admiral Knowles, who had commanded a militarily disastrous naval expedition off the coast of France, and then attempted to defend his conduct in a pamphlet, in The Critical Review in 1759.

9. This is also the case in Monika Fludernik, ‘Metaphorics of Carcerality’ and ‘Prison Metaphors’.