Convict Voices: Women, Class, and Writing about Prison in Nineteenth-Century England by Anne Schwan (review)

In her 1912 prison diary from Holloway, the artist and suffragette Katie Gliddon documents an unnamed young prostitute calling to a friend from the confines of her cell in the night. Gliddon writes, "It is agony to us sometimes to look at the door and know that we cannot open it although we have the knowledge that it is for the sake of women like that little frightened one below that we are here" (qtd. in Schwan 175). Gliddon's brief recording of the cry of the oppressed woman encapsulates the themes of Anne Schwan's book, which explores the cross-class relationships and intersubjectivity between elite, print-literate women and the non-elite women who made up the majority of the female population in nineteenth-century English convict prisons. The voice and perspective of middle-class women—who appear in the book both as moral prison observers and as the criminal and contained—provided opportunities for women with less power to be heard, but often in a way that sentimentalized, sensationalized, and remarginalized them. Yet Gliddon's diary entry also gestures to solidarity between women by aligning the struggle for political representation with poor women's social existence. Acknowledging the general absence of non-elite women's voices from the historical record, Schwan is attentive to the risk of reducing textual representations to the containment-resistance dichotomy, arguing instead for the "complicated cultural work" (6) of the group of texts she investigates. One of the products of that cultural work, Schwan argues, was the emergence of an often-contradictory feminist consciousness.

The temporal and generic range of Schwan's investigation is expansive and, in my view, the book's greatest strength. In seven well-researched chapters, Schwan moves nimbly from early century execution broadsides and chapbooks to two mid-Victorian novels featuring working-class criminalized women, the memoir of convicted women in two high-profile late-century cases (those of Susan Willis Fletcher and Florence Maybrick), and the prison writing of the suffrage movement. Schwan handles this diverse group of texts and writers with ease, bringing lesser-known texts and genres into conversation with canonical novels and, in a brief postscript, with the neo-Victorian fiction of Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters. Schwan's works-cited list is an impressive document in and of itself—a gold mine of primary sources and contemporary literary and historical criticism.

While I feel that the readings of George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) add little that is new to the criticism of these novels, I appreciate Schwan's methodology of reading fictionalized and historical subjects together under the umbrella of "convict voices." The strongest illustration of this is chapter 2, which investigates the prison narratives of popular novelist Frederick William Robinson, who published under the anonym "A Prison Matron." Schwan calls his group of 1860s texts on prison life an "early social history" for middle-class readers that combined titillating exposé with sober reformist writing, proto-feminist leanings with Christian paternalism, sympathetic identification with moral condemnation, and fact with fiction (41). Both widely popular and highly respected by the penal reform community, Robinson's two-volume Female Life in Prison (1862) and the fictional Memoirs of Jane Cameron (1863) are among the few texts to explore the prison from the perspective of female prison staff—matrons, guards, and others. The "complicated cultural work" Schwan claims for the texts she investigates in the book is best exemplified here, and this research will, I suspect, become an important bridge to further scholarship on these under-read texts. My seminar students were fascinated by Robinson, and Schwan's chapter on his writing was a godsend.

Schwan's book joins a growing body of what I might call post-panoptic investigations of the literary discourse of the Victorian prison, including Sean Grass's The Self in the Cell...