- ciety's manufacture and destruction of criminals; and of
Night and Morning to show the injustice and fallacy of its treatment respectively of vice and crime. In regard to the latter he says, in the Preface:
"Let a child steal an apple in sport, let a starvling steal a roll
in despair, and Law conducts them to the Prison, for evil
communications to mellow them for the gibbet. But let a
man spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice—let
him devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale demoralization
of his kind—and he may be surrounded with the
adulation of the so-called virtuous, and be served upon its knee
by that Lackey—the Modern World!"
Dickens starts his account with the English prison in
Pickwick, and closes it in Little Dorrit. But it is in David
Copperfield that he stops to point out the whole thing as
a stupid error. On the occasion of a visit to the "immense
and solid building, erected at a great expense," he reflects,—[1]
"I could not help thinking as we approached the gate, what
an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded
man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on
the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a home of
refuge for the deserving old."
Within, he finds the rêgime of solitary, unemployed confinement,
and the official bait for professions of penitence,
fine breeders of hypocrisy, six years before Reade makes
the same point in Never too Late to Mend. But he sees in
the exhibitions of No. 27 and No. 28—the Prize Show, the
Crowning Glory—Lattimer, and Uriah Heep, an opportunity
for his riotious caricature; while to Reade this de-*
- ↑ P. 430. "Yet no entering wedge of criticism was possible, in so impervious an object. Nobody appeared to have the least idea that there was any other system, but the system, to be considered."
