The Bars Of The Marshalsea

This is a Victorian Haunting short story (23 pages). The ghost of Charles Dickens is restless. Eternity is so long, and the world has changed in ways he finds hard to accept. His thoughts take him to his first real home on Doughty Street in London, where he encounters another spirit—a small boy with the unmistakable stamp of poverty upon him. A boy from his own time, and one who has clearly claimed the right to haunt the home where Dickens knew the first taste of success. But why? The answer to Dickens’ question is in the attic, and will confront the shade of one of the best-loved authors in the English language with a secret he’s kept all his life

The word "prison" immediately evokes stark images: forbidding walls spiked with watchtowers; inmates confined to cramped cells for hours on end; the suspicious eyes of armed guards. They seem to be the inevitable and permanent marks of confinement, as though prisons were a timeless institution stretching from medieval stone dungeons to the current era of steel boxes. But centuries of development and debate lie behind the prison as we now know it--a rich history that reveals how our ideas of crime and practices of punishment have changed over time. In The Oxford History of the Prison, a team of distinguished scholars offers a vivid account of the rise and development of this critical institution. Penalties other than incarceration were once much more common, from such bizarre death sentences as the Roman practice of drowning convicts in sacks filled with animals to a frequent reliance on the scaffold and on to forms of public shaming (such as the classic stocks of colonial America). The first decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the full-blown prison system--and along with it, the idea of prison reform. Alexis de Tocqueville originally came to America to write a report on its widely acclaimed prison system. The authors trace the persistent tension between the desire to punish and the hope for rehabilitation, recounting the institution's evolution from the rowdy and squalid English jails of the 1700s, in which prisoners and visitors ate and drank together; to the sober and stark nineteenth-century penitentiaries, whose inmates were forbidden to speak or even to see one another; and finally to the "big houses" of the current American prison system, in which prisoners are as overwhelmed by intense boredom as by the threat of violence. The text also provides a gripping and personal look at the social world of prisoners and their keepers over the centuries. In addition, thematic chapters explore in-depth a variety of special institutions and other important aspects of prison history, including the jail, the reform school, the women's prison, political imprisonment, and prison and literature. Fascinating, provocative, and authoritative, The Oxford History of the Prison offers a deep, informed perspective on the rise and development of one of the central features of modern society--capturing the debates that rage from generation to generation on the proper response to crime.

Allyson May chronicles the history of the English criminal trial and the development of a criminal bar in London between 1750 and 1850. She charts the transformation of the legal process and the evolution of professional standards of conduct for the criminal bar through an examination of the working lives of the Old Bailey barristers of the period. In describing the rise of adversarialism, May uncovers the motivations and interests of prosecutors, defendants, the bench, and the state, as well as the often-maligned "Old Bailey hacks" themselves. Traditionally, the English criminal trial consisted of a relatively unstructured altercation between the victim-prosecutor and the accused, who generally appeared without a lawyer. A criminal bar had emerged in London by the 1780s, and in 1836 the Prisoners' Counsel Act recognized the defendant's right to legal counsel in felony trials and lifted many restrictions on the activities of defense lawyers. May explores the role of barristers before and after the Prisoners' Counsel Act. She also details the careers of individual members of the bar--describing their civil practice in local, customary courts as well as their criminal practice--and the promotion of Old Bailey counsel to the bench of that court. A comprehensive biographical appendix augments this discussion.

Through innovative and controversial readings of Victorian Gothic and 'sensation' fiction, this book interrogates current feminist assumptions about the relation of women to the private sphere, and reveals the unexpectedly radical potential of this association. It is argued that this potential is an intrinsic aspect of the 'female' Gothic tradition traceable back to Ann Radcliffe. A new typology of 'male' and 'female' Gothic is shown to be relevant to contemporary French feminist debates about sexual difference.