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Passage Realised

Scarcely venturing to breathe, and listening while he thinks, he conjures up a figure with his back towards him, and imagines it moving about in this next cell. He has no idea of the face, but he is certain of the dark form of a stooping man. In the cell upon the other side, he puts another figure, whose face is hidden from him also. Day after day, and often when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he thinks of these two men until he is almost distracted. He never changes them. There they are always as he first imagined them — an old man on the right; a younger man upon the left — whose hidden features torture him to death, and have a mystery that makes him tremble.

The weary days pass on with solemn pace, like mourners at a funeral; and slowly he begins to feel that the white walls of the cell have something dreadful in them: that their colour is horrible: that their smooth surface chills his blood: that there is one hateful corner which torments him. Every morning when he wakes, he hides his head beneath the coverlet, and shudders to see the ghastly ceiling looking down upon him. The blessed light of day itself peeps in, an ugly phantom face, through the unchangeable crevice which is his prison window.

By slow but sure degrees, the terrors of that hateful corner swell until they beset him at all times; invade his rest, make his dreams hideous, and his nights dreadful. At first, he took a strange dislike to it; feeling as though it gave birth in his brain to something of corresponding shape, which ought not to be there, and racked his head with pains. Then he began to fear it, then to dream of it, and of men whispering its name and pointing to it. Then he could not bear to look at it, nor yet to turn his back upon it. Now, it is every night the lurking-place of a ghost: a shadow: — a silent something, horrible to see, but whether bird, or beast, or muffled human shape, he cannot tell.

When he is in his cell by day, he fears the little yard without. When he is in the yard, he dreads to re-enter the cell. When night comes, there stands the phantom in the corner. If he have the courage to stand in its place, and drive it out (he had once: being desperate), it broods upon his bed. In the twilight, and always at the same hour, a voice calls to him by name; as the darkness thickens, his Loom begins to live; and even that, his comfort, is a hideous figure, watching him till daybreak.

        [Chapter 7, "Philadelphia and Its Solitary Prison," pages 123-4]

Comments

The picture is juxtaposed against a passage in which Dickens describes the psychological damage which the "solitary system," pioneered at Pentonville, north of London, inflicts upon penitentiary inmates. Stone has selected a single inmate as a metonymy for the many prisoners whom Dickens interviewed in order to underscore the suffering inmate of the Philadelphia Penitentiary. This second scene of the Illustrated Library Edition volume contrasts the inherent optimism of many on board the deck of the immigrant vessel in the frontispiece for American Notes for General Circulation, the 1842 travelogue that graphs his (and his wife, Catherine's) experiences in the eastern United States and Canada. Something of a celebrity, Dickens had cate blanche in his tour of eastern American cities, and so saw aspects of the penitentiary of which the general American public may well not have been aware. The chapter is something of a journalistic expose in the manner of some of the essays in Dickens's earlier Sketches by Boz.

The first cheap edition of American Notes, published by Chapman and Hall in 1850, was accompanied by a single (in all likelihood, author-sanctioned) illustration, marine painter Clarkson Stanfield's sketch of "The Britannia," aboard which Charles and Catherine Dickens sailed on 4 January 1842 for North American on the writer's first tour of the eastern United States and Canada. Although Marcus Stone's illustration of a far less sanguine subject was completed after Dickens's death, given young Stone's frequent discussions about illustration with the author in the final decade of Dickens's life, one may speculate that the picture of the mentally and emotionally overwrought solitary prisoner reflects Dickens's wishes for the volume of the Illustrated Library Edition, already on the drawing board at Chapman and Hall before Dickens's death, although its appearance coincided with the early volumes of the Household Edition. Like As he was drawn away, his wife released him, and stood looking after him with her hands touching one another in the attitude of prayer by 1870s illustrator Fred Barnard for the Household Edition of Dickens's 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities (volume 8, 1874), which involves the lengthy incarceration of a political prisoner, Charles Darnay, the Marcus Stone psychological study, upon which Harry Furniss modelled his 1910 frontispiece for his edition of American Notes, captures by its symbolic pose the deep depression of the prisoner (if one may judge by his clothing, middle-aged and middle-class) to the "modern," cost-effective solitary system of the Eastern Penitentiary, which Dickens toured on 8 March 1842.

Long before his trip to the United States to write yet another travelogue by an Englishman abroad directed to English travellers, Charles Dickens had had deep sympathies for those incarcerated without hope of release. Doubtless, his own childhood experiences in the blacking warehouse at Hungerfords Stairs, London, during his father's imprisonment in the Marshalsea for debt have contributed to his deep sympathy for the solitary system inmates at Philadelphia's Solitary Prison. Certainly, this would seem to be an unlikely spot for British tourists, even if Dickens were pursuing a sociological agenda akin to that of his predecessor, Mrs. Trollope, in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832).

References

Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy in Works. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall: 1874.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman & Hall, 1874.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 13.

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Last modified 25 January 2015