200 KNOWING DICKENS
This letter was the germ of the extended fantasy in American Notes in
which Dickens invents with chilling certainty each stage of mental deteriora-
tion in a prisoner very like himself. It is a very “hot” piece of writing, poetic
and personal, and it was, of course, very controversial. Advocates of the sepa-
rate system accused Dickens of making fictions, and of undermining Ameri-
can penal reformers after he had praised them to their faces. His judgments
about particular prisoners were refuted in print. Opponents of the system
used his passionate representations as acts of imaginative sympathy that got
at truths beyond the reach of science and statistics. The representations may
well have done just that, but the chapter is hardly a professional judgment.
Dickens represents himself as one of the few men capable “of estimating the
immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, pro-
longed of years, inflicts upon the sufferers.” The “benevolent gentlemen” who
“carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing.” Dickens
knows: “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain,
to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” It creates “an anguish
so acute and so tremendous, that all imagination of it must fall far short of the
reality.” This is the voice of the autobiographical fragment, with its accusation
of those oblivious to the unspeakable intensity of silent suffering.
Not knowing is also a critical part of the torture: the prisoner in his cell
“has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the
building it is situated; what kind of men there are about him; whether in the
long winter nights there are people near.” When Dickens enters the mind of
an imaginary prisoner, it is intensely frustrated by having no visual access to
those near him: “Where is the nearest man—upon the right, or on the left? or
is there one in both directions? Where is he sitting now—with his face to the
light? Or is he walking to and fro? How is he dressed? Has he been here long?
Is he much worn away? Is he very white and spectre-like? Does he think of
his neighbor too?” The prisoner begins to conjure up the figures of these
hidden others, imagining an older man on the right, a younger one on the
left, “whose hidden features torture him to death, and have a mystery that
makes him tremble.” Dickens could not bear the idea that one might not see
others and be seen by them; it is as if he could not imagine his own existence
without its reflection back from another human figure. For the prisoner in
the cell, the absence of other real figures creates an approach to madness:
walls become threatening, the ceiling begins to look down upon him; then
a corner of the cell contains a ghost, a shadow, a phantom; even the Loom
on which he works becomes “a hideous figure, watching him till daybreak.”
Going mad means being watched by something inhuman; not being seen at
all is beyond the range of imagination. Although the prisoner he describes is