GREAT EXPECTATIONS has been called an analysis of'Newgate London', 1 suggesting that the prison is everywhere implicitly dominant in the book, and it has been a commonplace of Dickens criticism, since Edmund Wilson's essay in The Wound and the Bow and Lionel Trilling's introduction to Little Dorrit, to see the prison as a metaphor throughout the novels. Not just a metaphor, of course: the interest that Dickens had in prisons themselves was real and lasting, and the one kind of concern leads to the other, the literal to the metaphorical. Some earlier Dickens criticism, particularly that associated with the 1960s, and Trilling's' liberal imagination', stressed the second at the expense of the first, and Dickens became the novelist of the'mind forg'd manacles' of Blake, where Mrs Clennam can stand in the Marshalsea'looking down into this prison as it were out of her own different prison'—Little Dorrit pt. 2 ch. 31. This Romantic criticism became a way of attacking the historical critics who emphasised the reformist Dickens, interested in specific social questions: Humphry House and Philip Collins, the last in Dickens and Crime and Dickens and Education,(1962 and 1964). With Foucault's work on the'birth of the prison'-the subtitle of his book Discipline and Punish,(1976)-it may be possible to see how the physical growth of the modern prison is also the beginning of its entering into discourse and forming structures of thought, so that the literal and the metaphorical do indeed combine, and produce the Dickens whose interest is so clearly in both ways of thinking about the prison.