Item #60 Prisons and Prisoners. George Cruikhank, ill.

Prisons and Prisoners

London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845. First Edition. First Edition of the important work on prison reform.

This work most famously contains a lengthy attack on the views of prisons expressed by Charles Dickens. Adshead argued, influentially, that what Dickens had written in his American Notes (1842) on the "Pennsylvania [prison] system" was fiction, and could not be taken seriously as commentary. Dickens scholar Phillip Collins even notes that Adshead criticism constituted "the basis for most of the subsequent attacks on American Notes during Dickens's lifetime". In all, a wide-ranging work with discussions fiction of Dickens, American prisons and the Pennsylvania (Eastern State) model, prison discipline, reform, and the architecture and construction of prisons. Additionally, the frontispiece is etched by George Cruikshank.

[5], [iii]-xvii, [13]-320pp. 8vo. Cohn 4.
Good plus with some faiding and tearing to the head and tail of spine; contents generally clean with some foxing and numerous unopened pages some of which opened by a prior owner. The large folding map is present. Item #60

Price: $80.00

See all items in Architecture, England, Politics
See all items by ,