STREETS 199letters written during the month after the 8 March visit reveals the gradually
increasing horror with which Dickens remembered the prisoners he inter-
viewed there. Two days after the tour, in a letter to the American David
Colden, Dickens could say, “I fear that to a certain extent the system is a
good one” and that it is “mercifully and well intended,” but he felt it was
“dreadful to believe that it is ever necessary to impose such a torture of the
mind upon our fellow creatures.” Once he came to individual prisoners,
however, he sounded the theme of sensory deprivation, comparing the looks
on their faces to “the attentive and sorrowful expressions you see in the
blind” (3.110–11). When he wrote up his impressions in chapter 7 of Ameri-
can Notes, the prisoners were likened to the deaf as well as the blind; in fact
Dickens insisted that they grew literally deaf in their solitude, although they
did not realize it. When he wrote more freely and emphatically to Forster
five days after the visit, the fear of sensory deprivation became more extreme:
“I looked at some of them with the same awe as I should have looked at
men who had been buried alive, and dug up again” (3.124). Elaborated in
American Notes, the simile became fact: “he is a man buried alive; to be dug
out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything
but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.” Such outbursts lie side by side
with descriptions of particular prisoners’ ingenuity in decorating their cells
or working the little plots of land connected with the first-floor cells at the
Philadelphia Penitentiary.
Although it was well run, Dickens told Forster, the “dreadful, fearful place”
had filled him with impressions that were “written, beyond all power of erasure,
in my brain” (3.123–24). Three weeks later he wrote on board a steamboat
from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati, reporting on a visit to another solitary confine-
ment prison in Pittsburgh. “A horrible thought” had occurred to him:
What if ghosts be one of the terrors of these jails?... The utter solitude by
day and night; the many hours of darkness; the silence of death; the
mind for ever brooding on melancholy themes, and having no relief;
sometimes an evil conscience very busy; imagine a prisoner covering
up his head in the bedclothes and looking out from time to time, with
a ghastly dread of some inexplicable silent figure that always sits upon
his bed, or stands... in the same corner of his cell. The more I think of
it, the more certain I feel that not a few of these men (during a portion
of their imprisonment at least) are nightly visited by spectres. (3.181)The description perfectly evokes childhood fears of the dark; Dickens’s
“certainty” was based on personal memory, projected onto prisoners who had
stirred up his own worst nightmares.