Jane Austens Aunt Behind Bars
THAMES RIVER PRESS
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company Limited (WPC)
Another imprint of WPC is Anthem Press (www.anthempress.com)
First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by
THAMES RIVER PRESS
7576 Blackfriars Road
London SE1 8HA
www.thamesriverpress.com
Stephen Wade 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary
and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-85728-202-6
Cover design by Sylwia Palka
This title is also available as an eBook
CONTENTS
Introduction
Some Conclusions
Acknowledgements
Bibliography and Sources
In 2011, poet Ayat Al-Qurmezi was sentenced to a year in prison in Bahrain for taking part in illegal protests and for writing a poem which mocked the Sunni rulers. She was later pardoned, but the case illustrates the situation in cultures outside Britain in which literature gives offence in a political or ideological context. If we go back a few centuries, such cases were common in Britain, in the days when sedition was a dangerous act to indulge in, and a prison cell awaited the culprit. Nothing quite gives the impact of cultural differences with regard to freedom and tolerance as the use of prison in a society; the reasons we imprison people reflect our belief system, and a look into the past opens up not only ideologies, but also fears and even paranoia, in past societies.
Writers should, in theory, welcome a spell inside the prison walls: after all, a cell is an excellent place to write and work hard in order to meet a deadline. Distractions are few: a pause for food may be the only interruption in a writing day. In the modern prison, there are showers, daily papers, tea and coffee available, classes in the education department and the opportunity for interesting conversation if the cell-mate is articulate and has some sensitivity to a scribblers needs. Of course luck is involved. The writer may acquire the pad-mate from hell who blasts out his radio all day, has personal hygiene issues and suffers from verbal diarrhoea. However, every encouragement is given today to prisoners who show enterprise, creativity and panache in their apparent effort to be rehabilitated. There may even be a writer in residence, supplied by the Writers in Prison Network, to help with editing and supply feedback.
But in past times, the sensitive poet or the gentle literary essayist has looked upon the prison bars with horror. Prisons used to be workhouses with the treadmill and the crank; the lash was used, and the chaplain would be constantly bothering the individual with lectures on the unacceptable state of his or her soul. Any creative character would be exhausted by the end of a prison day, having spent hours picking oakum, lifting shot or winding the crank; there would be no energy left for writing, one might think. Yet in spite of these negative thoughts the records show that prisons and creative writing have a long and fruitful relationship in British culture. Even when writers themselves may never have stood in the dock and been sentenced to a period of time inside, they may have known jailbirds and crooks. Indeed, several great writers in Britain were inspired and sustained imaginatively by the experiences of friends and acquaintances who had served time, or done some bird. Dickens is the obvious example: his father John knew the inside of a debtors prison, and naturally his son took a profound interest in that unpleasant period of his family history.
Outside Britain, the literature of other parts of the world provides ample evidence of the place of prison experience in the richness of the canon of great writers. Novelists, dramatists and poets from Franois Villon to Dostoievski and from Chekhov to Gramsci have known prisons and been moved to write in them or about them. Many great classic works are concerned with prisons: For the Term of his Natural Life , The Count of Monte Cristo , A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , The Enormous Room , In Cold Blood , to name but a few. Jail diaries have been written by political prisoners from Michael Davitt to Nelson Mandela. Even Jeffrey Archer was moved to write his prison memories even though he was not thrown into solitary confinement or battered by bullies on the wing. Some writers led lives that related somewhat to that of a prisoner: Michel de Montaigne was arrested and put into the Bastille in 1588, destined to be a hostage, but was released the same day when Catherine de Medici intervened. Maybe he would not have minded a few months in there; after all, he chose a life of bookish leisure over a life embroiled in business affairs.
What follows is a contribution to the story of prison literature in England. I have limited my essays to the period c. 17001900 for reasons related to the ideological and political contexts, although the legal material will also be relevant. Also, there exists already a massive literature in-print concerning the penal sufferings of writers in the repressive Tudor period. Few of the people featuring in my book have actually committed criminal acts of a petty, everyday nature themselves: perhaps George Gissing is the best example of this. Most were either friends or relatives in such cases. However, some of the stories are concerned with the relationship between creativity, sensibility and the criminal justice system of the time. Obviously, in most cases, the imprisonment is harsh and includes little time to be creative. But at least for the writers in debtors prisons in the Georgian years there were facilities which allowed prisoners to have their families with them, as well as access to pen and ink. These were amongst other small luxuries, as they languished, in the hope that their creditors would one day agree to some kind of compromise or until finances came from some source such as a bequest. There were, despite the harshness of the time, a number of philanthropists who cared about the consequences of a world-view which saw prison simply as a place of oblivion.
In other words, prison as a version of purgatory, a period of waiting, suspension in a place one step out of normal life, does allow room for writing or other creative arts. The people chosen as my subjects have mostly had the possibility of doing something useful in their cells or rooms; many of them were not criminal in the sense of having committed an actual criminal offence. Some merely felt drawn to the lives of prisoners, such as Churton Collins, the scholar who took a profound interest in crime and visited criminals in their cells. Many, of course, committed offences which today would not be seen as crimes at all.
The first name that came to mind was Henry Fielding, novelist and magistrate. His criminal associates were too many to mention, as he was working at Bow Street in London, along with his blind brother John, and belongs largely to the mainstream of crime history than to any specific biographical examination of a criminal associate. And yet at the same time he is arguably the one writer in my designated period who knew criminals first-hand and possessed insights of professional knowledge which resulted in him being appointed a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex and Westminster in 1748. It was a post that few would have envied. As his Victorian biographer Frederick Lawrence explains,
