Incarcerated Bodies: Interactions and Emotional Dynamics in an Early Victorian Prison

Admitted to Great Yarmouth House of Correction, three boys were quick to make their presence felt and, within forty-eight hours, were dispatched to the solitary cells "for fighting and making use of obscene language" ("Gaol Keeper's Journal" 30 Dec. 1839). As they served their thirty-day sentences with two other lads, the prison visitor Sarah Martin (1791–1843) laboured to convert them from "naughty and wicked boys" into good Christian children (Martin, "Everyday Book" 13–14 Jan. 1840). After twenty years' voluntary teaching in the jail, Martin knew that male juveniles were the least susceptible to reclamation and most likely to reoffend (Rogers, "Kindness and Reciprocity" 733). For throwing their weight around and asserting their place in the inmate pecking order—shouting and singing, climbing the walls to communicate with other prisoners, dawdling and behaving insolently at locking up times, and fighting each other—boys were disciplined far more than other classes of inmates (Rogers, "Making Their Mark").

Using the jail admissions register and disciplinary log, parish and census records, and Sarah Martin's surviving prison journals, my research explores the dynamics between inmates and their encounters with criminal justice and Christian philanthropy. How might these encounters challenge our conceptions of the workings and experiences of nineteenth-century correction? Since Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975), scholarship has focused on the discursive production of the incarcerated body. We know about the inmate's body as object of abstract knowledge: how it was viewed, measured, and dissected. We have interrogated panoptical techniques for transforming the delinquent body into a "docile body": "He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication" (Foucault 200). Reconstructing individual and group reactions through record-linkage, however, reveals inmates as active bodies.

The five boys, ranging from eleven to fifteen years old, were housed on a ward where they had lessons with Sarah Martin. None were in school and, between casual labouring jobs, they were used to having time on their hands. Four had been arrested in pairs, as rogues and vagabonds suspected of thieving; the only boy in employment was sentenced for being absent from his apprenticeship ("Gaol Register" 28 Dec. 1839, 2 Jan. 1840). They were typical of the "artful dodgers" (Shore) who troubled Victorians precisely because they were bodies out of place—on the streets and unsupervised—a nuisance not just to the authorities but to small traders, employers, and even parents who turned them over to the magistrates. They defied categorization, too: were they adults or children; innocent or hardened; vulnerable or dangerous? These ambivalences run through Martin's "observations" on the characters of young offenders, as individuals and as a class:

The greatest number of these boys are better fed than when out of prison; the cleanliness they are obliged to observe and regular hours for sleep, if annoying … soon promote comfort; so that, in the absence of occupation of a deterring kind, these boys may well be always full of spirits, just like school boys on a play-ground.

(Martin, Sarah Martin 107)

Yet, in her anxious comments on the five boys, the teacher's character evaluations were more rounded, noting their "idle and dishonest habits," "sly" and "open" demeanor, their "temper" yet "kindliness" and "diligence" ("Successive Names"). Examining her immediate personal responses to them alerts us to the ways in which discursive ideals, no matter how forcibly expressed, may have been modified in practice. The boys were "poor" and "neglected," Martin believed, only one having "careful" parents ("Successive Names"). Her compassion and fears show in her repeated use of the words "young boys" and "little boys" ("Everyday Book" 6 Jan. 1840, passim). These testify to her growing fondness for them: "A month for them is short indeed. I shall be sorry to resign them" ("Everyday Book" 12 Jan. 1840).

Consecutively reading Martin's accounts of the boys' lessons illuminates the changing emotional dynamics between teacher and scholars. Initially, they were reluctant learners. When asked why they had not memorized their lines, they retorted that they were...