British Romanticism and Prison Reform

Jonas Cope (Author)

9781684485352

Paperback / softback, published 13 December 2024

242 pages, 1 B-W image
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.8 cm, 0.064 kg

“Jonas Cope’s critically acute and splendidly revelatory study traces-through a wealth of interrelated philosophical, religious, legal, literary, visual, and theoretical sources-the complex course of Romantic-era British penal reform: its origins, evolution, and afterlives in post-Romantic public culture. A must-read.” - Stephen Behrendt (author of British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community) “Consistently strong readings of seven major authors in the compelling and well-defined context of Romantic-era prison reform.” - Noah Heringman (author of Deep Time: A Literary History)

In eighteenth-century Britain, criminals were routinely whipped, branded, hanged, or transported to America. Only in the last quarter of the century-with the War of American Independence and legal and sociopolitical challenges to capital punishment-did the criminal justice system change, resulting in the reformed prison, or penitentiary, meant to educate, rehabilitate, and spiritualize even hardened felons. This volume is the first to explore the relationship between historical penal reform and Romantic-era literary texts by luminaries such as Godwin, Keats, Byron, and Austen. The works examined here treat incarceration as ambiguous: prison walls oppress and reinforce the arbitrary power of legal structures but can also heighten meditation, intensify the imagination, and awaken the conscience. Jonas Cope skillfully traces the important ideological work these texts attempt: to reconcile a culture devoted to freedom with the birth of the modern prison system that presents punishment as a form of rehabilitation.

List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1          Solitary Confinement: “
This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”

2          William Godwin, “
Mild Coercion,”
and the Happy Prison Tradition
3          The Descent of Liberty: Leigh Hunt in Surrey Gaol
4          Keats, Byron, and the Idea of Transformative Confinement
5          John Clare: The Romantic Ascent
6          Jane Austen and Penitential Space
Coda
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index