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Reviewed by:
  • Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age
  • Simon Joyce (bio)
Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame: Narrating Imprisonment in the Victorian Age, edited by Jan Alber and Frank Lauterbach; pp. vi + 289. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2009, $65.00, £42.00.

In an economic downturn like the present, with cutbacks in library budgets and less disposable income for book-buying all round, it is hard sometimes to assess the value of edited collections like this one. Does it lie in the quality of individual essays that might reasonably be excerpted out of the collection and used for research and teaching purposes, or in the coherence of the collection as a whole and its capacity to impact our thinking on the topic? If it is the latter, I am not convinced that Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame would repay the investment; if it is the former criteria that matters, on the other hand, there is a fair amount to recommend it, though sadly not as much as I would have hoped.

As a collection, the book struggles to define its place in contemporary debate. Its introduction labors to position it as a post-Foucauldian intervention, trying to look past the rather knee-jerk highlighting of panoptic imagery and effects in nineteenth-century crime narratives, but this is also to date the volume. It hardly breaks new ground now to point out the historical and methodological problems that disable such an approach, most notably that it strains a metaphor that had little actual historical foundation (as we have long known, from Lauren Goodlad and others, few Panopticons were actually built), and seeks to apply it in unlikely ways to very different narrative forms (the least promising of all being omniscient or realist narration, as Dorrit Cohn has pointed out). The collection’s introduction promises a new approach, showing how [End Page 653] “prisons are emblematized and woven into the textual fabric of Victorian novels and reform tracts” in the form of a “discursive emblem or trope” by which considerations of the distance between hegemonic power and its others were addressed (12), but it is unclear to me how far the essays themselves follow through on this—admittedly nebulous—promise. The same goes for the suggestion that we might move beyond simplistic uses of Discipline and Punish (1975) by referencing Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality and governmentality instead (though there are gestures in this direction in essays by Jeremy Tambling and Rosario Arias respectively), an idea that instead highlights how much of this work remains locked into a Foucauldian paradigm; in total, there are substantive discussions—not all critical by any means, and definitely not with a collective aim in mind—of Foucault’s prison work in seven of the twelve essays in the volume.

After Foucault, the next most referenced figure here is Charles Dickens, who is the major focus of almost half of the essays (and three of the first four). This raises the possibility, presumably to be welcomed by this journal’s readers, that it might be the work of the English novelist and not the French theorist that gives the volume its coherence. Such a supposition would be right in one way, but more substantively wrong, as the Dickensian cluster feels like a symptom of the confusion of the whole. Essays by David Paroissien (a useful summary of the complexity of Dickens’s thinking about incarceration), Tambling (promising but not entirely delivering on a claim to think through the gender and sexual politics of his prison writings), Adam Hansen (on Dickensian “excarceration,” breaking out of or destroying prisons), Anna Schur (on the “Pet Prisoners” essay [Household Words 5 (1850)]), and Sean Grass (on Great Expectations [1861]) have much to say about the novelist’s work, though read as a group they belabor the material a little. “Pet Prisoners” and the differences between the silent and solitary systems of confinement, as witnessed by Dickens on his American tour, get extensively worked over at regular intervals throughout the volume (including in an additional essay on prison reform tracts by W. B. Carnochan). The proliferation of cross-reference, though...

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