STREETS 201said to recover from the haunted stage, recalling it only at intervals, Dickens
cannot say what happens next; his narrative moves directly to the prisoner’s
anticipation of release.
Dickens was predictably sensitive to criticisms of this chapter of Ameri-
can Notes. In April 1844 he wrote to a Massachusetts educator he had met,
contesting all she had heard about his supposed “wonderful and unparal-
leled perversion of judgment,” and declaring his vision to be “the Truth”
(4.103–4). Six years later he returned to the subject of solitary confinement
in a long Household Words article called “Pet Prisoners” (Dent 2.212–27).
Although he made a big distinction between American prisons and the new
Pentonville Prison in England, which used solitary only for brief periods, he
could not help including a long footnote defending his American observa-
tions from criticisms published by the Rev. John Field in 1848. His obvious
anxiety that there might be truth in those criticisms manifested itself in the
effort to write “Pet Prisoners” in a hyper-rational way, as though he were
presenting statistical evidence in a court of law with his readers serving as
the jury. The abstractly reasoned argument breaks down into Dickensian
rhetoric when he gets to the heart of his case, an attack on what he calls
“pattern penitence.” Re-dramatized in chapter 71 of David Copperfield (“I am
shown two interesting Penitents”), “pattern penitence” refers to the hypo-
critical claims for internal reform fabricated by prisoners in response to the
brow-beatings of the chaplains and governors who visit them in the hope of
effecting a change of heart.
By 1850 Dickens was cannier about secret communications among pris-
oners in solitary confinement. He repeats the idea of “a fascination in the
desire to know something of the hidden presence beyond the blank wall
of the cell,” but acknowledges that prisoners always find ways of getting in
touch with another. What disturbs him now is not that solitary creates mad-
ness, but that it encourages a “strange absorbing selfishness—a spiritual ego-
ism and vanity, real or assumed” (Dent 2.219–20). The victim of the crime
is forgotten, and the prisoner thinks only of himself. If such a system were
to work, Dickens argues, it would force us to conclude that “Providence
was quite mistaken in making us gregarious, and that we had all better shut
ourselves up directly” (224). He urges his readers to prefer the silent system,
both because it is cheaper and because the prisoner “is still one of a society
of men, and not an isolated being, filling his whole sphere of view with a
diseased dilation of himself ” (226). Did Dickens harbor any suspicion that
his American Notes chapter had been a diseased dilation of himself? “Pet Pris-
oners,” with its rational tone, its highly moralized message, and its punitive
attitude to prisoners, is in many ways a reaction against that earlier fantasy.