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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 19/07/19, SPi
P R A I SE F O R M ETA PH OR S OF C ON F I N E M E N T
‘Metaphors of Confinement makes a significant contribution to current and ongoing debates

on the ethics of imprisonment, on the role of the prison in society and in the cultural
imaginary, and on the relations between law and literature from the early modern period
to the present. It is a formidable piece of scholarship, wide-ranging in the scope of its
research and innovative in its methodology; it is also passionate in its ethical and political
commitments, and subtle and learned in its readings of a rich array of fascinating texts.
Monika Fludernik’s magisterial study will make its mark as an essential point of reference
for any future discussion of prisons and prison literature.’
Professor Hal Gladfelder, University of Manchester
‘This book is the culmination of decades of work by one of the world’s top narratologists.
Fludernik takes the reader through a fascinating, enlightening, and often troubling jour-
ney through representations of literal, imagined, and metaphorical prisons in literatures in
English from the Middle Ages to the present day. Drawing eclectically from legal studies,
literary criticism, cultural and social theory, stylistics, and metaphor theory, the book
reveals the many facets of literature’s fascination with imprisonment over the centuries,
and addresses the ethical issues associated with both literary and real-world prisons. While
the book’s main contribution is to the study of metaphor, many different audiences will be
interested in it for different reasons, and all will marvel at the author’s unique combination
of towering intellect, theoretical versatility and vast scholarship. There is no doubt that this
book is destined to become a classic.’
Professor Elena Semino, Lancaster University
Metaphors of Confinement
L AW A N D L I T E R AT U R E
The Law and Literature series publishes work that connects legal ideas to literary
and cultural history, texts, and artefacts. The series encompasses a wide range of
historical periods, literary genres, legal fields and theories, and transnational subjects,
focusing on interdisciplinary books that engage with legal and literary forms,
methods, concepts, dispositions, and media. It seeks innovative studies of every kind,
including but not limited to work that examines race, ethnicity, gender, national
identity, criminal and civil law, legal institutions and actors, digital media,
intellectual property, economic markets, and corporate power, while also
foregrounding current interpretive methods in the humanities, using these
methods as dynamic tools that are themselves subject to scrutiny.
Series Editors
Robert Spoo, University of Tulsa
Simon Stern, University of Toronto
Metaphors of
Confinement
The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy
M O N I KA F LU D E R N I K
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© Monika Fludernik 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To my mother, Ingeborg Böhm, with gratitude and in memory

of her love and support
Preface
This is a book about carceral metaphors and the carceral in fact and fiction. The
prisons I deal with are mainly literary and imaginary ones, but also always ‘real’,
whether the texts deal with penal institutions or metaphorical prisons that affect
their protagonists’ minds. One of the prime theses of this book is that a distinc-
tion between the real (historical and contemporary sites of incarceration and dis-
courses about imprisonment) and the imaginary (representations of these in
literature and the arts as well as metaphorical references to prisons) fails to
explain the omnipresence of the carceral in literature but also in the world.
Prisons are (perceived to be) everywhere, in language, in texts, in images, in our
minds. Our carceral imaginary operates not merely inside jails but also outside
correctional institutions in our everyday world. We are concerned with prisons
not only when we engage in the politics of security and punishment, moulding
penal confinement through legislation and the implementation of these laws; our
experience of and fantasies about confinement also pervade social and societal
arenas that have no immediate connection with crime, punishment, the police or
the law. Politically, too, the past decade has pushed the issue of imprisonment to
the front of the news, whether in relation to the USA’s unparalleled rise of the
prison population (currently at over 2.3 million (Tonry 2016)), the incidences of
torture and abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, or the finan-
cial costs of full-scale incarceration. More generally, Western culture is steeped in
images of imprisonment, and this fact shapes my essential questions. What are
the function and uses of carcerality in our societies? What are its ideological
rewards and its psychological compensations?
More specifically, this book deals with a wide variety of recurrent topoi and
images that permeate literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present. These
include, among others, tropes such as the world as prison and prison as world topoi,
the metaphor of the prison-like home or of the prison as refuge and hermitage, of
the body as prison, and of the prison amoureuse, the prison of love. This inventory,
which comprises many more culturally fossilized figurations of the carceral, dis-
plays a great variety of textual manifestations. Historically, these were able to adapt
to political and institutional developments such as the invention of the penitentiary
in the late eighteenth century. The dialectic of familiar tropes and changing condi-
tions of application constitutes another important facet of the present study. The
present book is the first comprehensive study of carceral imagery. Despite some
initial work on the container metaphor by Mark Johnson (1987), neither linguistic
metaphor theory nor literary criticism have so far systematically focused on the
pervasive prison metaphors in literary and non-literary texts.
viii Preface
Finally, the book concerns not merely our emotional ambivalences regarding
the carceral, but also the question as to how literature wrestles with the personal
experience of confinement, with its horror and with the suffering and pain that it
entails. Like texts that deal with the overcoming of trauma or of other elementary
life experiences—death, searing pain, spiritual transcendence—the literature
about imprisonment is ultimately concerned with the ineffable, with that which
almost cannot be spoken about but nevertheless has to be represented in words.
The carceral eludes easy narratability not merely on account of its affinities with
personal trauma; it additionally thwarts tellability because prison life is banal,
repetitive, and lacks eventfulness. Life behind bars seems to freeze inmates’ lives;
it converts prisonized experience into unlimited stasis or an unceasing repetition
of sameness, causing an experiential void, a feeling of non-existence, or a lack of
identity. Imprisonment displays all the characteristics of liminality, of a threshold,
but undermines the transitional quality of this chronotope by extending the time
of this borderline space into a heterotopia of exile.
The verbal articulations in writings about the prison pertain to the realm of the
aesthetic; they are subject to the rules of art. An aesthetics of horror and suffering
offers palpable freedoms of expression, but it also raises ethical questions. Is it
legitimate for art to play with the ordeals of real people languishing in detention?
Does (some) literature thrive on the sensational aura of incarceration and, like
the Gothic novel, derive a thrill from the fate of those caught in the cruel grip of
an oppressive regime or in the clutch of penal punitivity? Does literature, instead
of making political statements against the dehumanizing conditions of the c arceral,
evade its ethical responsibilities and indulge in vicarious sadism (or masochism;
or both)? And yet it seems to be the case that only in the virtual scenarios of art
are we able to perceive some moral questions from a virtual perspective, or to
sidestep our ineluctable subjection to the ideologies and political influences of
our immediate environment.
Every day we are exposed to the appellative force of penal and judicial rhetoric
(of law and order, us vs. them, crime and punishment, right and wrong, freedom
vs. terrorism, and so on). These discourses are mostly exclusionary, aggressive,
retributive, and their main recipe is that of incarceration or exile—lock them up
or shut them out. Literature predominantly opposes this ethics of punishment
and eviction by looking at individuals acting on both sides of the locked door—
depicting those who shut others in and those who have been deprived of their
freedom. At the same time, one has to acknowledge that, by translating violence,
cruelty, and suffering into the realm of the aesthetic, literature runs the risk of
idealizing social protest and political rebellion, or of legitimating their repression.
Even more worryingly, literature may be accused of aestheticizing cruelty or
suffering, thereby reifying them as consumable vicarious experiences.
Most distressingly, it could be argued that literature ends up catering to the
unsavoury desires of irresponsible sensationalism, or turns the serious issues
Preface ix
treated in the text into mere accessories of its main concerns: style, emotional
affect or the thrill of exoticism and the perverse. From this perspective, art turns
into an object of consumption that no longer performs its speculative, contempla-
tive, and critical functions. Yet prisons are also a social fact whose many real-life
manifestations will hover on the borders of our awareness. The literary text
images a prison or metaphorically invokes a carceral scenario; it foregrounds its
fictionality, veiling or marginalizing the real-life import of the politics and ethics
of penal confinement. This veiling is both its strength and its weakness. The paradox
of carceral politics as aesthetics, and of carceral aesthetics as ideology, mirrors
that of the place of prison in society. It reflects on the inherent marginality of the
prison, its status as heterotopia, as that realm in, but also outside of, society which
remains alien to that larger segment of the population who have been lucky not to
have had direct experience of it. In fact, the carceral would cease to elicit so much
fascination and produce so many fantasies if it became as generally accessible as
the life of politicians or shopkeepers. It is the prison as a secret and therefore
exotic site in the midst of familiar everyday life which fascinates us. Such secret
places also define our lives as rooted in environments with heterotopic appendages.
These heterotopic sites may then come to function as Derridean supplements and
expose the normal world as, likewise, a prison.
A note is in order here regarding the types of prisons or kinds of confinement
that will be the topic of this study. The book takes a very broad historical sweep,
discussing representative works from English literature, or rather: literatures in
English, of all genres from the Middle Ages to postcolonialism, including texts
from Irish, North American, South Asian, and African provenance. A few non-
English works are considered where appropriate. Films were excluded since there
exists already a relatively extensive literature on the prison movie (Crowther 1989;
Rafter 2000; Wilson/O’Sullivan 2004; Alber 2007; Caster 2008). As a second over-
all strategy, I have reduced the mass of literature on captivity by concentrating on
penal (including political) imprisonment, covering both pre-trial custody and
penal detention proper. My book therefore largely excludes prisons and carceral
experiences that occur outside a penal context. It does not deal with prisoners of
war, juvenile delinquents (except in one case) or victims of gulags and concentra-
tion camps. Nor does it concern itself with slavery, North American captivity nar-
ratives, or tales of Barbary Coast captivity. The focus is on the individual prisoner
in a correctional facility, not in a camp. The decision to exclude these other forms
of imprisonment was mostly pragmatic—to have taken them on board as well
would have made the already very large corpus of texts unmanageable. Nevertheless,
though not discussed extensively in the text, some of these other types of confine-
ment are alluded to where relevant. Moreover, a number of the insights offered in
this work will also be applicable to gulags or captivity narratives. On the other
hand, these more collective forms of imprisonment, with their prominent aspect
of ethnic victimization and their emphasis on forced labour, suggest that they do
x Preface
indeed fall into a separate category and should not be conflated indiscriminately
with cases of individual penal sentencing and incarceration. Despite the funda-
mental difference between individual and collective practices of social exclusion,
in practice this distinction is of course frequently undermined, as when Catholics
under Elizabeth I were accused of treason, or dissenters under Charles II incar-
cerated for failing to toe the orthodoxic line. I therefore privilege the prototype
of individual and personal incarceration, but sometimes look across this self-
imposed fence to contiguous areas of interest.
To focus my very extensive material, two decisions have been made. No total-
izing narrative is presented; the book does not attempt an overall literary history
of the English prison, although historical contextualizations and insights into
literary developments play a key role in the study. Nor will this book put forward
an overarching thesis to be illustrated exhaustively in relation to all periods
and genres of English literature. Though deeply inspired by Michel Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish (1975/1979a) and John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary
(1987) with its theories about the anticipatory depiction of the new model of
incarceration in English fiction, this book deliberately avoids a similarly teleological
approach. My study does not rely on the assumption of a major paradigm shift, a
basic discontinuity between old and new prisons as proposed by Foucault and many
studies inspired by his work. On the contrary, this book underlines the textually
observable continuities between pre-Benthamite and post-Benthamite represen-
tational practices. Indeed, I have chosen to disperse and split the Foucauldian
master narrative into a series of tropological and thematic case studies that allow
for a multiplicity of concurrent and interweaving mini-narratives. This design
enables me to accommodate overall continuities as well as local discontinuities
and to illustrate the persistence of topoi and genres through selected stretches of
time. Such a focus on the (non-)simultaneity of various developments will also
help to highlight aspects in the literary representation of incarceration that are
complementary to the Foucauldian paradigm or which, at times, even contradict
it. Most importantly, my approach demonstrates the interlacing of many topoi
and tropes across genres and historical periods.
The choice of texts analysed in this study is based on two criteria. On the one
hand, I have tried to find particularly representative examples for the topoi that
I focus on, indicating at the same time that there is a wide range of such cases
both diachronically and generically. On the other hand, the selection of texts was
motivated by default. Since representations of carcerality (though not discussions
of carceral metaphor) have been a staple of literary criticism, with key studies by
Victor Brombert (The Romantic Prison, 1975), W. B. Carnochan (Confinement
and Flight, 1977), John Bender (Imagining the Penitentiary, 1987), Dennis Massey
(Doing Time in American Prisons, 1989), Hal Gladfelder (Criminality and Narrative,
2001), Jonathan Grossman (The Art of Alibi, 2002), Sean Grass (The Self in the
Cell, 2003) and Caleb Smith (The Prison and the American Imagination, 2009),
Preface xi
my attempt has been to introduce to readers’ attention works that have so far not
attracted intensive analysis from a carceral perspective.
This explains why the book contains relatively little discussion of eighteenth-
century texts, since there exists a great number of excellent contributions to the his-
tory of crime and its literary reflection. Let me only mention the work by Ignatieff
(1978), Spierenburg (1984, 1991), Sharpe (1985), Beattie (1986), Linebaugh (1991),
Gatrell (1994), or Gaskill (2000) on eighteenth-century crime as well as the inspir-
ing critical analyses of literary treatments provided by Hollingworth (1963), Arnold
(1985), Faller (1987, 1993), or Gladfelder (2001). I have not been able to avoid
discussing Charles Dickens entirely, despite the extensive literature on Dickens
and the prison (Collins 1994 [1962]; Tambling 1986; McKnight 1993; Alber 2007;
and Alber/Lauterbach 2009—to mention just a few). At times, I have selected a
work that so far has not figured in discourses on the prison, though the carceral in
other texts by the same author has received ample critical attention. (For instance,
Caleb Smith provides an insightful discussion of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter,
whereas I focus on The House of the Seven Gables.) Occasionally, I return to land
marks of the literary prison when my own analysis extends and complements that
of a previous critic, as is the case for Charles Reade’s It is Never Too Late to Mend,
already given an incisive treatment by Sean Grass (2003).
Methodologically, this study utilizes a spectrum of different approaches. The
interdisciplinary nature of the monograph arose from the diverse areas of research
with which my own work has been concerned during my career. Thus, though my
major research orientation, narratology, plays a comparatively minor role in this
book, my interest and expertise in stylistics, especially metaphor theory, and Law
and Literature studies, as well as in South Asian literature, postcolonial theory
and the eighteenth century, have significantly contributed to the unique approach
practised in this study, as did the fact that my teaching covers English literature
from the thirteenth century onwards. Such a variegated methodological and his-
torical background has provided me with a very special viewpoint on the topic of
the carceral in English literature, enabling me to combine a focus on the linguistic
surface structure of my sources—the metaphors—with issues of Law and Literature.
It has also allowed me to fuse a diachronic with a systematic or theoretical per-
spective. In my arguments, as outlined in the introduction, metaphor theory,
tropology, and topics (the study of topoi), in addition to theories of ideology play
an important role in defining the cultural work of prison narratives. In the book,
rhetorical and historical analysis as well as plain close reading are pervasive;
where appropriate, I also resort to feminist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial the-
ory. Thematically as well as theoretically, this study is therefore designed on the
model of bricolage, that is to say, on the pattern of creative juxtaposition.
The same is true of the structure of the text itself. Since my book does not set
out a single thesis which is followed through various stages of argument in indi-
vidual chapters, the arrangement of chapters focuses on a series of tropes and on
xii Preface
the complex network of cross-references between them. The selected topoi and
metaphors are traced in their subtle and often convoluted ramifications, slyly
inscribed in the web of literary texture. My presentation picks up on individual
threads and follows them through their historical and discursive meanderings,
noting how particular strands combine with others, merge, or separate again.
Some sections of the volume are concerned with specific theoretical issues (ideol-
ogy, fictionality, metaphor theory), but all analyse individual tropes or topoi and
explore their historical development, documenting the generic diversity of prison
writing, and comparing and contrasting representations of carcerality in poetry,
fiction, and drama. The broad spectrum of genres and periods on which this
study relies makes it possible to outline a variety of developments through the
centuries and to illustrate invariance as well as diversity of motifs and forms.
The book is also an indictment of carceral heterotopias from a humanitarian
and ethical perspective; an argument pioneered by literature from its inception.
Literal carcerality invokes serious social and ethical questions. Ultimately, beyond
the linguistic and literary manifestations of carcerality, one needs to confront the
real prisons which are often monuments of suffering and injustice.
Chapter Overview
The Introduction (‘Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral Imaginary’)

offers a theoretical overview of the topic of imprisonment and supplies an initial
conspectus of major models of (carceral) space. It discusses the study’s relation-
ship to Foucault’s seminal Discipline and Punish, elucidating key aspects of this
paradigm and explaining how I extend but also modify Foucault’s work. The
introduction also introduces readers to basic terminology in recent metaphor
theory, to literary topoi, and to the concept of the carceral imaginary.
Chapter 1 (‘The Prison as World—The World as Prison: Similitudes and
Homologies’) is the first in a series of chapters modelled on a chiastic formula.
Starting with the most general and all-encompassing chiastic prison metaphor,
the chapter deals with two types of metaphors: those that liken the prison to the
(or a) world, seeing the prison as a microcosm, and those that project an inverse
scenario, in which the world is metaphorically depicted as a prison. Discussing
how prison, as a heterotopia (like hell) is conceived both as lying outside
the world and as sharing numerous structural features with it, I move to a
consideration of early modern similitudes in the ‘character’ literature of Overbury,
Dekker, Mynshul, and Fennor. In these texts, prisons are figured, among other
source domains, as ships, universities and hospitals—metaphors that underline
their structural equivalences to the world in general. Since prisons during
the Renaissance and up to the early nineteenth century were run like hotels
(thus reflecting the social stratification of society at large), the chapter goes on to
Preface xiii
illustrate how precisely prisons were perceived to mirror early modern society,
focusing on two city comedies, Eastward Ho (1605) and The City Gallant (1614).
From these early modern instances of the prison as world metaphor, I turn to
the world as prison trope. (In this book, conceptual metaphors are printed in
small caps.) I move from The Beggar’s Opera to twentieth-century literary inflec-
tions of the topos in Samuel Beckett’s prose and Edward Bond’s play Olly’s Prison.
Though prisons no longer reflect society at large (at least in terms of their social
composition), perceptions of the carceral as being symbolic of the world continue
to have extensive currency, particularly in a postcolonial context (as Chapter 6
will demonstrate).
Chapters 2 and 3 (‘Poeta in Vinculis’) are devoted to the work of authors who
have themselves been imprisoned and who have written both autobiographically
and imaginatively about incarceration. Chapter 2 concentrates on the early mod-
ern period where autobiographical documents are not only rare but also suspect
as simple reflections of personal experience. Chapter 2 contrasts Thomas More
and John Bunyan as two authors who rose to the status of martyrs and confessors
for their faith and depicted imprisonment as a test that God made them undergo.
What I particularly foreground are the strategies of imaginative and psychological
coping that these authors employ in their autobiographical work. I consider how
they reflect the emotional, traumatic experience of incarceration in the imagina-
tive re-enactment of their fiction. Despite these communalities, More and Bunyan
could not be more different in many other respects, most basically of course in
the clash between their Catholic and Protestant affiliations. The chapter introduces
a number of prison tropes besides the world as prison/prison as world meta-
phor, most prominently in Bunyan the sin as prison trope. My analysis of the
texts focuses on the attempt to deduce experiential aspects from highly allegorical
and symbolic writings that do not easily allow a factoring of the discourse into
fictional and non-fictional passages or segments. In fact, as More’s Dialogue of
Comfort against Tribulation suggests in particular, the fictional scenario is
meant to discuss personal problems, just as the imaginative re-enactment of
Christ’s predicament in Gethsemane in his De Tristitia Christi reflects the very
sentiments and arguments More was facing while in prison. In a parallel manner,
in Bunyan’s case, what appear to be authentic autobiographical accounts can be
shown to incorporate the schemas and soteriological models of religious conver-
sion narratives to such an extent that the recognition of a unique personal experi-
ence, except in rare moments, becomes quite elusive. Bunyan’s work is moreover
notable for its communitarian perspective; he sees himself as part of a persecuted
religious group. A final section of the chapter links Bunyan’s poetry to the tradition
of late medieval and early modern prison verse.
Chapter 3, continuing the contrast between personal accounts of imprison
ment and fictional elaborations of carceralities, concentrates on the twentieth
century and on (post)colonial contexts. The three authors discussed at length are
xiv Preface
Brendan Behan, the Irish dramatist; Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian author and
ecological activist; and Breyten Breytenbach, the South African poet. Whereas
Behan’s and Saro-Wiwa’s autobiographical texts, at least on the surface, appear to
be quite reliable, factual accounts of their imprisonment, their literary work, just
like Breytenbach’s, is highly allusive, ironic, and allegorical; it models the carceral
experience through distortive lenses of comedy, farce, satire, or parable and
clearly magnifies its fictionality. It is precisely on account of the ostensive literari-
ness of his drama that Behan has been selected over authors like Jack London or
Malcolm Braly, whose, to some extent, overly realistic representations of the prison
experience tend to reduce the fictionality of their texts to the invention of vicari-
ous protagonists and a fictive setting. Here, and in Chapter 6, I also emphasize the
use of the prison and legal criminalization as major political strategies of discrim-
ination against (ethnic and other) minorities as well as political dissidents.
Chapter 4 (‘Prisons as Homes and Homes as Prisons: From the Happy Prison
to Strangulation by Domesticity’) returns to the chiasmic figure, this time in dis-
cussing the common home as prison/prison as home tropes. Since Victor
Brombert’s classic, The Romantic Prison (1975), the topos of the prison as a refuge
and haven of safety and happiness has been a critical commonplace. The chapter
first illustrates this paradox of the happy prison in a discussion of Dickens’s Little
Dorrit. I then turn to the negative trope of the home as prison, tracing its ramifi-
cations in Dombey and Son and, more extensively, Little Dorrit and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. The uncanny ambivalence of metaphoric
imprisonment is then illustrated in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Turning to
the much more mundane issue of marriage and domesticity, I next consider the
home as prison topos in its manifestation of the marriage as prison meta-
phor. I discuss examples of both male and female marital incarceration, focus-
ing on texts by Charles Johnson (Middle Passage) and George Eliot
(Middlemarch) for male bondage, and on Doris Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’ and
Fay Weldon’s ‘Weekend’ for women’s connubial imprisonment.
Chapter 5 (‘The Prison as Cage: Abjection and Transcendence’) provides a
counterpoint to the prison as enclosure, which was dominant in Chapter 4. It
focuses on the image of the cage, a metonymic prison lexeme. Starting with the
short story ‘The Cage’ by Bertram Chandler, my discussion moves from literal
cages and the treatment of captives as animals—an anticipation of Chapter 6—to
literary evocations of the cage. The cage metaphor captures the inherent ambiva-
lence of prison imagery in an especially clear manner. The chapter analyses
recurrent cage metaphors relating to caged animals, discussing how the metaphor
both evokes sympathy in the image of the unhappy bird in the cage as a victim
and supplies much more ambivalent scenarios in passages where the incarcerated
are compared to wild beasts. At the same time, the cage is not only a prison but
has associations with flight, since birds are prototypically kept in cages. One
section of the chapter discusses the golden cage metaphor, frequently applied to
Preface xv
marriage, and illustrates its ambivalences on the example of D. H. Lawrence’s

novella ‘The Captain’s Doll’. Eugene O’Neill’s Hairy Ape serves to delineate the
political and social ramifications of the beast in the cage metaphor. The second
half of the chapter looks to the possibility of transcending one’s state of imprison-
ment. It outlines tropes of transcendence in English poetry from the Renaissance
to the Romantic period and uses William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) to
mark an important turning point in that history.
Chapter 6 (‘The Cancer of Punitivity: Prisons of Slavery and Hell’) broadens
the so far predominantly literary approach to raise crucial ethical and political
questions. It discusses the central importance of power in the carceral environ
ment, namely the power that the system, including and especially warders, has
over inmates and that may lead to humanitarian abuse. After a reading of Oscar
Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ which foregrounds these issues, the chapter out-
lines G. B. Shaw’s and Karl Menninger’s theses about the criminality of imprison-
ment and goes on to present an analysis of punitivity in penal policy and public
discussions about crime. Building on Agozino (2003), who has described the
close affinities between penal punitivity and colonial oppression, I then elaborate
on the historical connection between present-day carceral abuse and disciplinary
practices current during slavery, extending historical work by C. Dayan (2007)
and others to illustrative literary analyses of this connection in a short story by
Rudyard Kipling. In my discussion of Robben Island memoirs I further elaborate
on this context in relation to the metaphors and tropes used in the analysed
texts. The chapter closes with topical and critical remarks regarding wholesale
incarceration and the inhumane treatment of political prisoners.
Chapter 7 (‘Industry and Idleness: Discipline and Punishment in the Capitalist
Prison’) turns to the nineteenth century and discusses discourses about labour in
the Victorian period and the comparison they draw by means of the slavery
metaphor between prisons and factories. Starting out from a consideration of
traditional ideas of work as punishing labour, and with the protestant work ethic
and the Victorian glorification of industry and thrift as a backdrop, two aspects of
the labour and prison analogy are outlined. First, the status of work in the new
penitentiaries, penal servitude establishments, and workhouses is scrutinized and
compared to factory work. The key text used to illustrate this alignment is Charles
Reade’s It is Never Too Late To Mend (1856). The second half of the chapter turns
to representations of factories as nota bene prisons and outlines the development
of this imagery during the nineteenth century. Starting with William Godwin’s
novel Fleetwood (1805), Elizabeth Charlotte Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (1841) and
Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), I trace the history of the prison-like factory to its American
incarnations at the end of the nineteenth century. My analysis includes brief
considerations of relevant passages in the poetry of Wordsworth, Hood, and
Barrett Browning. I conclude with two American texts, Melville’s ‘The Paradise of
Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The chapter
xvi Preface
stresses not only the important connection between work in prison and outside
it during the Victorian period; it also highlights the interrelation between the
market, general living standards, and prison conditions even today.
Chapter 8 (‘Enthralment and Bondage: Love as a Prison’) moves back into
the medieval and early modern periods to introduce the prison amoureuse topos
with the enslavement of the Petrarchan lover to his innamorata. The popular
love as prison trope recurs even in twentieth-century texts, where it acquires a
prominent masochistic undertone. Chapter 8 opens with a consideration of Mary
Cholmondeley’s Prisoners (1906) as an instance of a juxtaposition of literal and
metaphorical imprisonment, both based on a love triangle. The following section
introduces the medieval prison amoureuse trope and its Renaissance repercussions
in the work of Shakespeare and Spenser. This leads on to a consideration of maso-
chism and bondage, with Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an
illustrative example. John Dryden’s play All for Love, his rewrite of Antony and
Cleopatra, concludes the chapter. Like Cholmondeley’s novel, Dryden’s play juxta-
poses two concepts, in this case not two types of imprisonment but two types of
love which are variously perceived as imprisoning.
Chapter 9 (‘Prisons of Femininity’) attempts to compensate for the over-repre-
sentation of texts by male authors and especially of male protagonists in previous
chapters by focusing on female imprisonment and on women’s confinement in
patriarchy. The chapter starts with a consideration of real-life female imprison-
ment and its reflection in one literary example, a scene in Alice Walker’s The Color
Purple. I next turn to the panopticon metaphor in Angela Carter and Sarah
Waters, analysing these authors’ feminist and lesbian takes on Foucault. A third
section concentrates on domesticity and the body insofar as they are perceived as
metaphorically confining. My discussion of this aspect contrasts Susan Glaspell’s
play Trifles with Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers. A final section
returns to Emily Dickinson and Glaspell, focusing on the predicament of the
woman writer; I note how the female artist can escape from the straitjacket of
feminine decorum only by ending up in the role of another gynophobic stereo-
type: that of the hysteric or the madwoman.
Chapter 10 (‘Conclusions: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Carcerality’) provides a
summary to the volume, outlining what I see as the major insights gained from
the analyses. These are then supplemented by a discussion of the results from my
database researches into prison metaphors. I also return to the questions of why
and how the carceral can become a source of aesthetic pleasure: how do literary
sensationalism and empathy link with one another; and what is their political
relevance in representations of the carceral? By way of coda to the volume, the
chapter returns to the fundamental ethical issues raised by the institution of
imprisonment.
* * *
Preface xvii
General readers and scholars in English studies will find something to their taste
in all chapters, but may want to skip more linguistically oriented sections such as
0.5, 5.2, or 10.2. For metaphor specialists these sections will, by contrast, be of
prime interest, and they may also find the discussion of similitudes in Section 1.2
and the many deployments of animal imagery in a variety of texts useful, particu-
larly in Chapters 5 and 6, but also in the discussion of the slavery metaphor in
Chapter 7. For critical metaphor theorists most of the book will be relevant since
the political and social uses of prison imagery are in evidence throughout the
study. Finally, for law and literature scholars, this monograph will provide a
number of innovative angles on account of its focus on language and due to its
emphasis of the cognitive domain as central for the establishment of the carceral
imaginary. As for general readers interested in prisons in literature, they may
want to only dip into the introduction (possibly too academic and theoretical),
but should find much in the other chapters that could be stimulating and rewarding.
A recommended reading strategy might be browsing for authors, periods, or
themes of interest.
Acknowledgements
I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the help and support received
from a large number of colleagues, friends, and staff in the production of the
manuscript. This book has been germinating a long time. When I moved to
Freiburg in 1993, I started to work on saints’ legends and began to read Sir Thomas
More. It was at that time that the first ideas for this study were conceived. In 1995,
I taught two courses on the basis of the material I had by then collected. Due to
administrative duties and involvement in an interdisciplinary research group on
identity and alterity, of which I became the managing director in 2000, my inter-
ests shifted from narratology to postcolonial theory and South Asian literature. I
returned to the subject of prisons by participating in an interdisciplinary project
on ‘Norm, Law and Criminalization’, funded by the German Research Foundation,
which gave me the chance to conduct preliminary studies for this book. Having
started out by focusing on prison settings and the symbolizations of carceral
space, I found that my priorities had shifted towards a more extensive commit-
ment to historical and contemporary issues of imprisonment. At the same time,
the lacuna in research regarding prison metaphors led me to concentrate more
extensively on carceral imagery rather than on settings. After delving into meta-
phor theory and composing a series of articles on carceral metaphor, I finally
started to write this book during a sabbatical semester in Oxford in the autumn of
2003 funded with my prize money from the Landesforschungspreis Baden-
Württemberg. I continued working on the project during years of extensive
managerial and administrative commitments, eventually completing it in 2015.
My first thanks go to the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsge
mein schaft) for funding the project ‘Processes of Criminalization and the
Experience of Imprisonment: Spaces, Bodies, Identities, Topoi, Metaphors’
(Az. FL 283/3-1 ff., 2004–7), which enabled me to spend a sabbatical semester
(winter term 2006–7) in Oxford. It is also thanks to the German Research Foundation
(GRK 1767/1) that I was able to accept a senior fellowship at the Institut d’Études
Avancées in Paris in 2014–15, which gave me the chance to complete the study.
I am grateful to Gretty Mirdal and her équipe at the IEA for allowing me all
imaginable freedom for my research. I would also like to thank All Souls College
for awarding me a fellowship during Michaelmas term 2001 and the English
Faculty at Oxford University for hosting me during my stays in Oxford in the
winter semesters of 2003 and 2010. During the academic year 2009–10, the
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies welcomed me as an internal senior fellow.
I am particularly grateful to my companion fellows and résidents in Freiburg and
xx Acknowledgements
Paris who gave me feedback on my project. The completion of the manuscript

was significantly aided by the intellectual exchange at the IEA.
This book would not have been completed without the support of the research
group that stimulated its inception. I would like to extend my gratitude to Hans-
Joachim Gehrke, the (co-)director of the Sonderforschungsbereich 541 (‘Identities
and Alterities’) and to Hans-Helmuth Gander and Hans-Jörg Albrecht, my two
collaborators in the criminalization project. Thanks also go to my long-time dear
colleague and friend Paul Goetsch, recently deceased, for his unflagging support
and continued interest in my work. I would moreover like to thank Greta Olson
for her intellectual, moral, and emotional encouragement, friendship and sup-
port. In the context of the project ‘Processes of Criminalization’, I am grateful to
all the other members of the research group for our stimulating and lively
exchanges: Jan Alber, Martin Brandenstein, Thomas Dürr, Verena Krenberger,
and Thomas Lederer. Previous versions of individual chapters have been read and
commented on by Jan Alber, Katharina Boehm, Jean-Jacques Chardin, Margaret
Freeman, Terri Hennings, Ken Ireland, Benjamin Kohlmann, Michael McKeon,
Amit Marcus, Greta Olson, David Paroissien, and Lauren Shohet. I would like to
express my most grateful appreciation for their valuable feedback. The final ver-
sion of the manuscript was moreover meticulously studied by Eva von Contzen,
who provided insightful comments and suggestions, for which I am extremely
grateful. Help with final editing and indexing has come from Kerstin Fest. The
late Patricia Häusler-Greenfield provided numerous constructive suggestions on
phraseology, though the text as published is of course entirely my own responsi-
bility. I am as ever extremely grateful to Pat for her clear-headed and sympathetic
commentary and for the atmosphere of mutual appreciation and friendship that
has marked our collaboration. Help with phraseology has also come from Teresa
Woods and is gratefully acknowledged. Moreover, thanks are due to several gen-
erations of (former) research assistants: Hannah Blincko, Ramona Früh, Tanja
Haferkorn, Dorothee Klein, Carolin Krauße, Heidi Liedke, Lars Münzer, Caroline
Pirlet, Golnaz Shams, Andreas Wirag, and Charlotte Wolff. I am grateful for their
expert and fastidious formatting and source-checking of the manuscript at vari-
ous stages of its evolution. This book could not have been completed without the
support of my secretary Luise Lohmann, who with good grace put up with my
DOS-based NotaBene programme until I finally switched to the detested Word,
and who did not demur when faced with my many handwritten emendations,
which required extensive editing. To her I am, as always, deeply indebted. I would
also like to thank Simon Stern and Robert Spoo for including this manuscript in
their Law and Literature series and for their encouragement throughout the pub-
lication process. At Oxford University Press, I am grateful to Jacqueline Norton
and Aimée Wright for expediting the manuscript into print. My most cordial
thanks also go to Brian North, the copy editor of the book.
Parts of this monograph have appeared in articles, though the relevant sections
have been extensively revised and condensed (or, in some cases, expanded) for
Acknowledgements xxi
publication in this book. Section 0.3 of the Introduction is a shortened version of

‘Carceral Topo graphy: Spatiality, Liminality and Corporality in the Literary
Prison’, which appeared in Textual Practice 13.1 (1999: 43–77). It also incorporates
passages from ‘Metaphoric (Im)Prison(ment) and the Constitution of a Carceral
Imaginary’, Anglia 123 (2005: 1–25). Parts of Chapter 1 are based on ‘The Prison
as World—The World as Prison: Theoretical and Historical Aspects of Two
Recurrent Topoi’, Symbolism 3 (2003: 147–89). My discussion of Bunyan and of
Godwin’s Caleb Williams in Chapter 3 has been presented twice as a lecture, first
in Terre Haute, Indiana, on 14 April 2010 (as part of the Schick Lectures), and
again at the FRIAS colloquium in Freiburg on 23 June 2010. ‘The Cage Metaphor:
Extending Narratology into Corpus Studies and Opening it to the Analysis
of Imagery’, published in Narratology in the Age of Interdisciplinary Research,
ed. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer (Berlin: de Gruyter 2009, 109–28), has been
adapted and expanded for parts of Sections 5.2.1–2. A more extensive version of
Section 6.4.4 was previously published in Cycnos (‘The Prison as Colonial Space’,
Cycnos 19.2 (2002): 175–90) and adapted from a book chapter (‘Caliban Revisited:
Robben Island in the Autobiographical Record’ in In the Grip of the Law: Prisons,
Trials and the Space Between, edited by Monika Fludernik and Greta Olson
(Frankfurt: Lang, 2004, 271–88)). Sections 9.2.1–2, in condensed form, appeared
in ‘Panopticisms: From Fantasy to Metaphor and Reality’, Textual Practice 31.1
(2017: 1–26). I am grateful to Taylor & Francis and the editor of Textual Practice
(https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20) for allowing me to reprint these extracts;
to Klaus Stierstorfer and Rüdiger Ahrens (for Symbolism) for their permission to
use material from my essay; to de Gruyter for permission to reuse sections of my
essays in Anglia and Heinen/Sommer; as well as to Christian Gutleben (Cycnos)
and Peter Lang Publishers for being allowed to reprint sections of my earlier
publications.
Thanks are also due to the following individuals and institutions for allowing
me to reprint illustrations and images.
Front cover: Shinji Takama, Bambus 2005 (Cologne: DuMont Kalenderverlag,
2004). I am extremely grateful to Ms Kumiko Takama, the photographer’s daughter,
for allowing me to use this photograph as a title image.
Introduction: Figure 0.1. The Hague, MMW_10F1, fol. 214v, suffrage (Bruges,
c.1490). ‘St. Margaret of Antioch emerging from the dragon & holding a cross’.
Historiated initial. Book of Hours (use of Rome). The Hague, Museum Meermanno/
House of the Book (excerpt).
Chapter 4: Figure 4.1. ‘World's smallest handcuffs’ © Jeroen van de Wynckel
(https://www.zazzle.com/239499231876568232).
Chapter 8: Figure 8.1. ‘I am a prisoner of your heart’. Design by Steff
© SHEEPWORLD AG. Am Schafhügel 1, D-92289, Ursensollen, Germany.
https://www.sheepworld.de. All rights reserved.
I am also grateful for consent to publish extracts from the following works:
Penguin Random House for Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy (Chapter 3; London:
xxii Acknowledgements
Hutchinson, 1958); Bloomsbury Methuen Drama for Brendan Behan, The Quare
Fellow (1966) (Chapter 3); Bloomsbury Publishing plc Methuen Drama for
Edward Bond, Olly’s Prison (1993) © Edward Bond, 1993, Olly’s Prison, Methuen
Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (Chapter 1); Breyten Breytenbach,
The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (Chapters 3 and 6; New York: Harcourt,
Brace & Co.)—permission is gratefully acknowledged to the author; The Estate of
Dennis Brutus for Dennis Brutus, A Simple Lust and Stubborn Hope (Chapters 3
and 6; London: Heinemann); Jonathan Clowes Ltd, London, on behalf of the
Estate of Doris Lessing © 1953; World rights excluding UK/Commonwealth) and
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 1963, UK/Commonwealth) for Doris Lessing,
‘To Room Nineteen’ (Chapter 4); Pearson, UK for Jack Mapanje, The Chattering
Wagtails of Mikuju Prison (Chapter 3; London: Heinemann, 1993) and Skipping
Without Ropes (Chapter 3; permission to cite The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New
& Selected Poems, Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2004); and Penguin Random
House (for USA, Canada, and Philippines) for Sarah Waters, Affinity (Chapter 9;
© 1999 Sarah Waters. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC) as well as Little
Brown Book Group Ltd (for the rest of the world). The excerpt from Orientalism
by Edward W. Said, © 1978 Edward W. Said, is used by permission of Pantheon
Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved (epigraph to Section 6.4.1).
Contents
List of Figures xxvii

List of Tables xxix
List of Abbreviations xxxi
Typographical Conventions xxxiii
Introduction: Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral
Imaginary1
0.1 Confinement and Flight: Preliminaries 5
0.2 Prison—History and Theory: Beyond Foucault 11
0.3 Spatial Symbolism and Carceral Topography 23
0.3.1 Inside/Out: The Carceral Container Metaphor 25
0.4 Topology and Tropology: Some Definitions 38
0.5 Metaphorics: Metaphor Theory and the Carceral 42
0.6 Ideology and Metaphor: The Carceral Imaginary 52
1. The Prison as World—The World as Prison: Similitudes and
Homologies60
1.1 Prisons, Worlds, and Counterworlds 60
1.2 The Prison as World: Elizabethan and Jacobean Similitudes 64
1.3 Renaissance Comedy: The ‘Old’ Prison 72
1.4 The Prison as Microcosm of General Depravity: Counterworlds
and the Shift from Prison as World to World as Prison81
1.5 The World as Prison: From More to Beckett and Bond 92
1.5.1 Metaphor into Metonymy 92
1.5.2 Carceral Allegory and the Return to Social Criticism 98
1.6 Summary 105
2. Poeta in Vinculis I: Textualizations of the Carceral Experience 109
2.1 Writing and Confinement 109
2.2 Autobiographical vs. Fictional Representations of the Carceral 112
2.3 Sir Thomas More: The World as Prison 121
2.3.1 (Auto)biographical More 121
2.3.2 Why Imprisonment Need Not be Feared:
The World as Prison Trope 128
2.3.3 A Meditation on Christ’s Sacrifice 136
2.4 Bunyan’s Carceral Metaphorics 140
2.4.1 Bunyan in Jail 140
2.4.2 Bunyan’s Carceral Poetics 146
2.4.3 Bunyan and the Prison Experience in Poetry 153
xxiv Contents
3. Poeta in Vinculis II: The Twentieth Century 171

3.1 The Perspective from Below: Brendan Behan (1923–1964) 171
3.1.1 Farce and Farts: The Quare Fellow173
3.1.2 Irish Martyr and Borstal Scout 181
3.2 Ken Saro-Wiwa: Prison Satires in a Neocolonial Setting 190
3.3 Breyten Breytenbach: Parable and the Sublimation of the Prison
Experience in Language 207
3.4 Summary 219
4. Prisons as Homes and Homes as Prisons: From the Happy Prison to
Strangulation by Domesticity 225
4.1 Binary Oppositions and their Reversals 227
4.2 Homes and Prisons 233
4.2.1 Cocooning Oneself for Life: Emily Dickinson’s Poetics
of Confinement 233
4.2.2 Dickens’s Carceral Homes: Metaphor and Psychology 243
4.3 The Home as Tomb and Gothic Fantasies of Live Burial 256
4.3.1 Hawthorne’s Home as Prison: The House of the Seven Gables258
4.4 The Shackles of Marriage: The Home as Prison 267
4.5 Domestic Dungeons: Marital Confinement in the Home 271
4.5.1 The Domestic Tragedy of Marriage 272
4.5.2 ‘To Room Nineteen’: Choking on Freedom 274
4.5.3 Insidious Patriarchy and the Working Woman: ‘Weekend’ 277
4.6. Summary 281
5. The Prison as Cage: Abjection and Transcendence 283
5.1 Prisoners as Animals 283
5.2 Metaphoric Cages in Literature 289
5.2.1 ‘Like a Bird i’th’Cage’: The Golden Cage Trope 295
5.2.2 ‘Like wild beasts in a cage’: The Prowl of the Fierce and
the Despair of the Weak 300
5.3 Prison Cages in Breytenbach and O’Neill: The Cage-Like Prison
in Literature 305
5.3.1 The Prison as Abattoir 305
5.3.2 Eugene O’Neill’s Working Man as Caged Ape 306
5.4 Soaring on the Wings of the Spirit—Fantasies of Escape or
Transcendence316
5.4.1 Caleb Williams and the Subversion of Carceral Topoi 318
5.4.2 Romantic Inflections: Poetic Dungeons of Horror
and Transcendence 326
5.4.3 The Imagination as Avenue of Escape 340
6. The Cancer of Punitivity: Prisons of Slavery and Hell 344
6.1 Crimes of Justice: Penal Hell in ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ 346
6.2 From the Crime of Imprisonment to the Crime of Punishment:
Mead, Shaw, Menninger, and Wilson 352
6.3 Vindictive Justice: The Lure of Punitivity 362
Contents xxv
6.4 Colonialism as Carcerality 373

6.4.1 The Colonial Roots of Punitivity 373
6.4.2 Colonial Surveillance; or, Strickland among the Natives 375
6.4.3 Slavery and Carcerality 383
6.4.4 Colonial Imprisonment as Slavery on Robben Island 385
6.5 Real-Life Abjection in the Neocolonial Prison Archipelago 390
6.6 Summary 396
7. Industry and Idleness: Discipline and Punishment in the
Capitalist Prison 399
7.1 Work as Punishment 400
7.2 Work, Silence, and Solitude 406
7.3 The Victorian Convict Prison 414
7.4 Prison Work in British Literature: It is Never Too Late to Mend:
Work as Torture 423
7.5 The Factory as Prison in the Victorian Novel and its American
Equivalents up until Modernism 432
7.5.1 Romantic Anti-Industrialism and the Factories 432
7.5.2 Prison, Slavery, and Hell: Fleetwood as a Factory Novel 441
7.5.3 Factories, Slavery, and Prisons in the 1840s 445
7.5.4 Carceral Working Conditions: Melville and Sinclair 451
7.6 Summary 462
8. Enthralment and Bondage: Love as a Prison 466
8.1 ‘Fast Bound in Misery and Iron’: Mary Cholmondeley’s Prisoners469
8.2 Fettered by Love: The prison amoureuse Topos in English Literature 478
8.2.1 ‘Martyr I am and prisonere’ 480
8.2.2 Prisoners as Lovers in Renaissance Religious and Secular Verse 489
8.3 Love as Bondage: The Sadeian Tradition in English Literature 496
8.3.1 Cruel Ladies 496
8.3.2 Masochism in Literature 504
8.3.3 Angela Carter’s Poetics of Cruelty 512
8.4 Love versus Bondage: Dryden’s All for Love520
8.5 Summary 529
9. Prisons of Femininity 532
9.1 Women’s Double Confinement in the Penitentiary 533
9.2 Feminism and Queer Inflections of the Panopticon 542
9.2.1 Allegories of Femininity: Carceral Parables in Nights at the Circus542
9.2.2 Linking Criminality and Madness: Sarah Waters’s Affinity
and Fingersmith548
9.3 Domesticity and the Body 561
9.3.1 Communal Surveillance and Sexual Abuse: Maps for Lost Lovers562
9.3.2 Trifles: Domestic Confinement 567
9.4 Avenues of Escape: Transgressions into Madness 570
9.4.1 Driving You Mad: Confinement Breeds Insanity 572
xxvi Contents
9.4.2 Verging on the Insane: Female Creativity and the Prison of

Conventional Gender Roles 577
9.5 Women’s Prisons: A Summary 586
10. Conclusions: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Carcerality 592
10.1 Carceral Spaces 595
10.2 Carceral Metaphorics 597
10.2.1 The Historical Range of Carceral Metaphors 597
10.2.2 Prison is x Metaphors 606
10.2.3 The Mind in Chains: Prison-Houses of Language, Morality,
or Ideology 611
10.3 The Ambivalences of Carceral Topography and Metaphorics 620
10.4 The Aesthetics of Carcerality 625
10.4.1 Poetic Confinement 633
10.5 The Ethical Imperative: The Cultural Role of the Literary Prison
and the Politics of Incarceration 637
Appendix646
Works Cited 691

1. Texts 691
2. Criticism 713
3. Online Sources 771
Author Index 773
Subject Index 783
List of Figures
0.1 ‘St. Margaret of Antioch emerging from the dragon & holding a cross’ 2
0.2 Relationship of topoi, tropes, and metaphors 40
0.3 Blend for ‘My Job is a Jail’ (confinement reading) 45
4.1 ‘World’s smallest handcuffs’ 267
7.1 Detail from a treadwheel 417
7.2 Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’ 422
8.1 ‘I am a prisoner of your heart’ 466
10.1 Historical distribution of tokens 601
10.2a EAL Search Results (1) 602
10.2b EAL Search Results (2) 602
10.3 Source domain fields for prison is x metaphors 608
10.4 Interrelation between source domain fields 610
List of Tables
1.1 Prison metaphors and analogues 63

4.1 Contrasting HOME and PRISON 228
A.1 Historical distribution of tokens 649
A.2 Overall numbers of tokens EAL search (metaphors: x is prison)652
A.3 Guardian search results 655
A.4 BNC search results 658
A.5 x is prison metaphors for four lexemes (table form) 667
A.6 EAL similes 675
A.7 BNC similes 683
A.8 Guardian similes 688
List of Abbreviations
BNC British National Corpus. Brigham Young University. https://corpus.byu.

edu/bnc/
CMT cognitive metaphor theory
EAL English and American Literature from Shakespeare to Mark Twain. Ed. Mark
Lehmstedt. Berlin: DirectMedia, 2002. http://www-fr.redi-bw.de/db/start.
php?database=DBEALit
EBSCO https://www.ebscohost.com/
ECCO Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. http://gale.com/intl/primary-sources/
eighteenth-century collections-online
EEBO Early English Books Online. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home
ELH English Literary History
F R.W. Franklin, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Variorum Edition. Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
HO Home Office
ISA ideological state apparatuses
J Thomas H. Johnson, ed. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. London:
Faber & Faber, 1984.
l., ll. line(s)
LION (Literature Online). Chadwyck-Healey. https://literature.proquest.com/
LRB The London Review of Books
MLQ Modern Language Quarterly
NCF Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Ed. Danny Karlin and Tom Keymer. Oxford:
Chadwyck-Healey, 2002. (Database)
NLH New Literary History
NYRB The New York Review of Books
OED The Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com
PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association
PRO Public Record Office
st. stanza(s)
TLS Times Literary Supplement
Typographical Conventions
Small capitals: phrases in small capitals indicate that they refer to conceptual metaphors.
See Section 0.5.
Emphasis: all emphases in bold in quoted passages (and the text generally) are mine; italics
correspond to emphases in the original texts.
All deletions are put in square brackets [. . .]. Dots that are not bracketed are part of the
cited text.
For easier readability some Middle English texts have been simplified. This is noted in the
relevant contexts.
Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
Citation formats: all references to novels, if appropriate, cite book and chapter numbers to
facilitate readers’ checking of the quoted passages in their own editions. Thus, a reference
to a passage in Little Dorrit (Dickens, 1985) might look like this: (Little Dorrit I, iii, 67), i.e.
Book I, chapter iii, page 67.
Quotations of poetry likewise are provided with stanza and line references to facilitate
comparison with different editions. For drama, the traditional Act, scene, line format has
been used, e.g. V, iii, 66–72.
Dates: dates provided for literary texts are usually those of first publication, especially for
novels, with citation brackets giving the date of the edition used. However, with poems, if
available, date of composition is often indicated and for plays the date of performance is
provided if earlier than the date of publication.
Gender policy: although generally pronominal anaphora is handled in a gender-neutral
manner (he or she, s/he), at times repeated references to prisoners would make this formula
impracticable. I have therefore chosen generic he in contexts where the prototypical pris-
oner is overwhelmingly conceived of as male and opted for the he or she and s/he wherever
women inmates are to be included in the reference.
Introduction
Prisons, Images of Confinement,
and the Carceral Imaginary
Imprisonment (at least metaphorical imprisonment) is a fairly familiar experience.

We all, at times, feel confined in particular situations or relationships. Traditionally,
these intuitions translate into well-known prison metaphors like those of life as
a prison, the body as a prison, or thought patterns or ideologies as confining
structures. As O’Riordan muses in Joseph O’Conor’s The Iron Harp (1959), “It’s a
terrible incarcerated existence!” (111). In fact, our prison extends to the afterlife:
“And if we escape from life itself, there we are behind the tall bars eternity. [. . .]
Still, so long as we can sing in our cages we shall be happy enough, I daresay” (111).
My friends have been asking me for years, why write about confinement? What
makes the subject so fascinating and so important both theoretically and emo-
tionally? Although 9/11 and its aftermath gave a distinct boost to the topic, prisons
had cropped up in my reading before that time and had already launched me on a
voyage of discovery.
It all started with my research into Middle English narrative structure and my
analysis of English versions of the saints’ lives: the Katherine Group from the
late twelfth century; the popular tales collected by Carl Horstmann from around
the same period up until the early thirteenth century; the Early South English
Legendary and the South English Legendary proper; the Northern Homily Cycle;
the Scottish Legendary. Martyrs in hagiography progress along a recognizable route:
confrontation with the pagan secular powers, imprisonment alternating with scenes
of interrogation and torture, and eventual martyrdom (mostly through behead-
ing). In some of these legends, the prison scenes are quite important. Often the
saint (e.g. St Catherine) is solaced and fed by angels and cured of her/his wounds;
at other times, the dungeon cell becomes the site of conversion—as in St Margaret’s
story, where the saint manages to make both the emperor’s wife and the king’s
trusty councillor convert to Christianity (whereupon they are both martyred). In
St Margaret’s legend, the prison cell even provides the backdrop to the sensational
battle between the saint and the devil in the shape of a dragon—variously portrayed
by painters (Figure 0.1).
Besides a couple of paintings that show Margaret standing over the dragon in
open space, with the prison represented as a dungeon tower in the background
(e.g. ‘St Margaret of Antioch’ from the fifteenth-century Use of Sarum Book of
2 Metaphors of Confinement
Figure 0.1 ‘St. Margaret of Antioch emerging from the dragon & holding a cross’.
Source: The Hague, Museum Meermanno, MMW_10F1, fol. 214v, suffrage (Bruges, c.1490). Historiated
initial. National Library of the Netherlands. Book of Hours (use of Rome). http://manuscripts.kb.nl/
zoom/BYVANCKB%3Amimi_mmw_10f1%3A214v.
Hours)1 or standing free without any representational space around her (e.g. in a
painting by Felice Riccio or Brusasorci (1542–1605) or in one by Antoine Auguste
Ernest Hébert (1817–1908), ‘Saint Margaret Slaying the Dragon’2), most of the
paintings featuring St Margaret depict the saint in her dungeon. However, that
dungeon looks very different in the various canvasses. Many panels merely hint
at the prison, or stylize it;3 some give us neoclassical-style architecture which is
clearly inappropriate as a historical representation of third-century prisons.4
A much more convincing representation can be found in MMW_10F1, Bruges,
1490 (Figure 0.1), where the narrowness of the prison cell and its one window
shedding light on the saint present a more ‘realistic’ perspective on imprison-
ment, though again the symbolism of the light falling on the saint’s raised cross is
importantly stylized. Obviously, the saints themselves in their flowing garments
1 See http://www.danielmitsui.com.
2 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Margaret_of_Antioch_-_Felice_Brusasorci.jpg and
http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_295365/Antoine-Auguste-Ernest-Herbert/St-Margaret-
Slaying-the-Dragon.
3 The Hague, KB, 76F14, suffrage. ‘St. Margaret of Antioch with the dragon, holding a cross’.
National Library of the Netherlands, Koninklijke Bibliotheck. Book of Hours (use of Rome). Paris (?),
c.1490–1500.
4 This is true of The Hague, MMW_10F17, fol. 104r (France, central part, c.1490), where the prison
looks like a room in a palace, though with barred windows: in Rhimed Life of St. Margaret. ‘St. Margaret
of Antioch emerging from the dragon & holding a cross’. National Library of the Netherlands. Book of
Hours (use of Rheims).
Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral Imaginary 3
cannot be taken as either realistic or historically accurate images. Figure 0.1 at

least renders a scenario that is recognizably medieval, even if stylized. Other
painters, like Moreau, for instance, are inspired by sublime carceral spaces.5
The imprisonment of saints fulfils a theological function in a typological
reading of the saint’s story. The saint’s life mirrors that of Christ, who was himself
imprisoned, if only briefly, and whose narrative in the Gospels traces a similar
path of confrontation with the secular authorities: arrest—interrogation—impris-
onment—scourging (equivalent to the tortures suffered by martyrs)—execution.
The martyr in his or her suffering re-enacts the passion of Christ and therefore
imitates and reproduces that divine model:
Interpreting the prison as a place and imprisonment as an experience was part
of the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose scriptures abound with prisoners and
prison scenes: from Joseph’s captivity, to the incarcerations of the prophets Hanani,
Michaiah, and Jeremiah, to the prison execution of John the Baptist and the
appearance of angels before the jailed apostles. (Geltner 2008: 83)
Analogously, the saint’s narrative provides a model for the auditors’ lives as jour-
neys towards God and salvation (Delehaye 1961), and therefore implies that not
only could the listeners become martyrs in their turn, but also that in their nor-
mal lives people might travel down a similar road in their search for spiritual
enlightenment. Thus, the literal imprisonment of Christ (or that of the martyrs in
the legendaries) comes to stand metaphorically for the ‘imprisonment’ of the
believer in this world, his or her fight against sin, and his/her eventual conquest
over it at death: “The martyrological literature conveying the experiences of
Christian confessors presents the prison as a place of personal trial and eschato-
logical triumph, and incarceration as a process of spiritual growth, potentially
culminating in revelation’ (Geltner 2008: 84). Based on Platonic ideas (see Section
1.5.1), the notion of imprisonment in this world and of the soul in the body
expanded over time and was significantly elaborated. It affected a wide range of
medieval contexts such as rites performed on the entry of nuns into convents or
anchoresses into their cells, rites that underlined the parallels between religious
self-confinement and death.6 My initial contact with the topic of imprisonment
5 See Gustave Moreau’s ‘St. Margaret’, https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-moreau/saint-margaret-

1873.
6 See Mulder-Bakker (2005: 69–70, 230–1 fn. 79) as well as Clay (1914/1968), Warren (1980; 1984:
203–4; 1985), Schulenburg (1984), Bauerschmidt (1999: 78), and Wogan-Browne (2001). See also the
following text from http://www.medieval-life-and-times.info/medieval-religion/anchoress.htm: “The
incarceration of an anchoress was accompanied with due ceremony. This was called the Enclosure
ceremony in which an anchorite, or anchoress, was incarcerated, or enclosed, in a cell. Her living
entombment, and ritual burial, was an act of binding her body and her material surroundings to the
body of Christ. The Anchoress was essentially dead to the World. [. . .] Sometimes her grave would be
made ready at the time of her enclosure and kept open in the cell as a ‘memento mori’. In these
instances there was a complete burial ceremony. The anchoress would be laid out on a funeral bier and
given the last rites.” Bauerschmidt mentions extreme unction and a reading of the mass for the dead.
More generally, on the status of the prison in Christian iconography and on monastic and lay spiritu-
ality using incarceration as a penitential model, see Geltner (2008: 84–6).
therefore already combined literal and metaphorical confinement in various

interesting constellations.
A second source of inspiration lay in the literature of the British Renaissance
and Reformation, where one could encounter real saints and their imprisonment
and often martyrdom. Early on, I became very interested in Sir Thomas More and
in the religious issues surrounding the British Catholic and Protestant saints
(see Sections 2.3 and 2.4). Increasingly, this sparked my interest in the historical
background and led to a fascination with prison conditions not only in the
Renaissance and eighteenth century, but also in present times. It was in this com-
parison between literary depictions of imprisonment and contemporary penal
practice that the germ of the present book originated.
My original plans for a book on the prison in English literature touched on
three questions or theses. The focus was on the representation of the prison,
and the first issue concerned the comparison between ‘real’ conditions of impris-
onment and those depicted in the literary texts. My second question targeted
the difference between autobiographical or historical accounts on the one hand
and literary/fictional prison narratives on the other. In particular, I became
interested in authors who had suffered confinement and then written about
their prison experience both in an autobiographic and a fictional mode. This
issue provided the first inspiration for Chapters 2 and 3 of this study. Finally,
I also started to focus on prison metaphors and their truth value. Do prison
metaphors provide a picture of incarceration, of carcerality, that is different
from that of the represented settings? Are the metaphors inspired by real-life
prison conditions?
It was in the wake of these three lines of enquiry that my research began to veer
towards prison metaphors. It emerged early on that literary prisons mostly did
not reflect contemporary conditions of incarceration but often reproduced and
elaborated on literary models which have been in use since antiquity. Only the
more recent texts sometimes depicted a recognizable extra-literary ‘reality’. A sec-
ond insight concerned the comparative rarity of autobiographical and fictional
texts by the same author, especially before the eighteenth century. This rendered
the second question as moot as the first with regard to providing me with a major
structuring principle for the book, although it has left its mark on the volume.
Even the third line of enquiry turned out to be a red herring. It emerged that
prison metaphors were in no way significantly different from prison settings
since the same carceral topoi and tropes that had characterized the depiction of
prison spaces in literary texts were also found to dominate the choice of prison
metaphors. However, in analysing the various metaphors, it soon became apparent
that these were even more fascinating than the settings and—more importantly—
that they opened up entirely new perspectives on carcerality and its status in our
culture. Better still, it also emerged that prison metaphors had received compara-
tively little attention in both literary and linguistic research and therefore offered
me a huge unploughed field whose buried treasures were waiting to be excavated,

analysed and displayed to the reader.
From these beginnings, the present study took shape as a book that deals with
the prevalence and functions of carceral images in our culture and their complex
dependence, both materially and discursively, on ‘real life’. In particular, the book
takes into account questions of ideology and discursive traditions while focusing
on a number of key topoi and tropes that mediate between settings, metaphors,
and textual deployments.
In the following pages I want to introduce readers to several background issues
and to the ruling theoretical paradigms that underpin my analyses in subsequent
chapters. After an initial terminological exercise (What is confinement? What is
freedom?) in Section 0.1, I turn to the prison in its historical reality and outline
my stance towards the Foucauldian framework (Section 0.2). Subsequently, I specify
in more detail what I mean by the term topos or topoi (Section 0.3). Section 0.4
outlines some preliminary aspects of carceral topography. Next, I provide a delin-
eation of metaphor theory and of my leading distinctions and theses in relation
to it (Section 0.5). Specifically, my approach to metaphor involves looking more
closely at ideology and the carceral imaginary (Section 0.6). This final section
is devoted to the link between the factual and the imaginary, thus relating to the
key concepts in the subtitle of the book: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy.
0.1 Confinement and Flight: Preliminaries
Echoing the title of W. B. Carnochan’s fine study of eighteenth-century literature,

I would like to start by way of a systematic analysis of types of imprisonment and
the question of escape from the real or metaphoric prison.7
Imprisonment is synonymous with several aspects of constraint and confine-
ment that often occur in tandem. In characterizing imprisonment, it is therefore
important to ask what exactly I mean by this term and to what extent the literary
carceral foregrounds or emphasizes some of these aspects over others. What we
are dealing with in this book is imprisonment in a state-run facility (following
legal arrest), which consists in being shut up for safekeeping and as punishment.8
7 My special thanks go to the discussants at a FRIAS Wednesday morning colloquium in the spring
of 2010. Some of the issues treated in this section were directly inspired by the discussion and comments
on this occasion.
8 Lawn (1977: 7) cites a definition of imprisonment which foregrounds enclosure, safekeeping, forced
legal arrest, and deprivation of the basic human right to personal freedom: “Gefängnis, ursprünglich
die abstrakte Gefangenschaft bezeichnend, ist konkret und rechtsbegrifflich ein umschlossener,
gesicherter Raum, wo Personen auf Grund obrigkeitlicher Anordnung zwangsweise festgehalten und
damit des Grundrechts der persönlichen Freiheit beraubt werden” (qtd from Galling 1958: 1246).
English translation: “Prison, originally in reference to abstract confinement, in material and legal terms,
is a secured enclosed space in which persons are kept by force on the basis of authoritative orders and
The most basic semantic feature associated with confinement touches on

restraint, or the curtailment of autonomous physical movement: the subject
is restrained by having his/her motor skills impaired, usually by tying him/her
down, impeding arm and/or leg movement.9 Although such binding or tying
(by means of ropes, fetters, shackles, gyves, etc.) is a measure of restraint that will
prevent the subject from aggressive behaviour but may also render him/her
incapable of acting in self-defence, traditionally such fettering was crucial to
imprisonment, i.e. to constraint, because it prevented the subject from running
away and helped to keep him/her in a specific location. A captive will usually be
bound, even if not confined in a prison. This first category is therefore historically
important, and it also underlines the cline between captivity and imprisonment.
In terms of literary texts, restraint plays a huge role in the associations with
the dungeon setting, in which imprisoned subjects are almost invariably depicted
as chained; restraint also features prominently in many metaphors, where the
lexemes tied, gyves, shackled, or fettered figure with great frequency as source
terms metonymically related to the dungeon scenario. This first semantic sub-
category of confinement moreover appears as a disciplinary measure even before
the invention of the penitentiary, but also in the new post-Benthamite prison
regime. Refractory prisoners could always be clapped in irons, and gyving was
also common as an additional punishment for particularly dangerous offenders
or as a mark of the jailer’s personal pique or displeasure. (The tyranny and cruelty
of jailers is a theme that runs through prison literature.) In more enlightened
carceral regimes, especially since the mid-nineteenth century, in-prison punish-
ment is in principle regulated by a hearing of the offender before a review panel
and then imposed as a disciplinary measure; however, these rules are not always
observed, and in some countries restraints are still applied in a haphazard and
indiscriminate manner.10
Besides physical restraint (often superimposed on enclosure), there is, secondly,
the central aspect of imprisonment, that of the curtailment of freedom of move-
ment by means of containment in enclosed space.11 The subject (if not fettered)
could in principle run away, i.e. his/her limbs are left free, but is prevented from
escape by an enclosure that cannot be breached. Most often the prison in which
the captive finds him/herself is a cell, a room whose only exit is the door, which is
locked. However, although gates of steel or iron bars are the norm, people can be
locked up in closets by means of a simple door or—a medieval practice—lowered
whose basic right to liberty is thereby infringed.” Since the term ‘personal liberty’ is rather vague,
I am keen to establish what the most basic aspects of confinement are.
9 In cognitive metaphor theory, this corresponds to the notion of “Blockage” (M. Johnson
1987: 45).
10 See, for instance, USA. Hüter der Menschenrechte? (1998).
11 In cognitive metaphor theory, this corresponds to the notion of “Compulsion” (M. Johnson
1987: 45).
into well-like cavities that cannot be scaled from below (Lawn 1977: 127–8).
Barred windows and doors, and locks and keys tend to acquire symbolic signifi-
cance as possible access or exit points from prototypical carceral enclosure (see
Section 0.3).
Both the first and the second constituent of imprisonment curb the prisoner’s
physical locomotion: in the first case by curtailing physical movement of the
limbs; in the second by keeping the captive within a small space and preventing
relocation, especially escape from his/her captors. Here, the common d enominator
is deprivation of self-determined movement and action; therefore: a loss of inde-
pendence. Besides forfeiting their physical autonomy, prisoners additionally
become dependent on their captors, who decide what they can or cannot do. The
third aspect of imprisonment is therefore that of the captive’s subjection to the
rules of the institution: the prisoner loses his or her volitional independence.12
Not only are the incarcerated hindered from moving elsewhere; they moreover
find themselves severely circumscribed in everything they may do and consist-
ently thwarted in acting as they would like. The jailer and the whole penal system
in fact coerce the inmate to act in certain ways, and impose behaviours and rou-
tines on the prisoners. As Margaret Atwood (2015) puts it, “A prison might be
defined as any place you’ve been put into against your will and can’t get out of,
and where you are entirely at the mercy of the authorities”.
Whereas, before the invention of the penitentiary, offenders still had consider-
able freedom within prisons and jails, constrained more by carceral space than by
imposed schedules, the penitentiary regime began to order the life of inmates in
accordance with contemporary penal policies. Not only is an inmate normally
unable to choose when to get up and when to eat, but also what to eat, when to
shower, what to wear, when to take a walk, when to receive visitors—and so on.
Whereas ordinary life is full of everyday decisions (shall I take the blue or the
yellow cardigan? Should I go to the bank first and then to the cobbler or the other
way around? Do I have a snack now and have my cutlet for dinner instead of
lunch?), opting for such personal preferences is taken out of the hands of a pris-
oner, whose pockets of freedom to do as s/he pleases thereby shrink to minimal
size: Do I keep my comb on top of the shelf or on the side of the washbasin? Shall
I read the newspaper or a book before the light is switched off? Part of the debili-
tating influence of imprisonment on inmates (in criminology referred to as pris-
onization (Naderi 2014)) stems precisely from this over-regimentation of inmates’
lives to the point where, on release, they are overwhelmed by the myriad choices
they have to make. The institutional manipulation of prisoners’ everyday routines
undermines a particularly basic aspect of human agency, namely deliberate
action. Natural behaviour consists in, say, seeing a radio in a shop, planning to
save up for it, buying it, transporting it home, and enjoying it. The human subject
12 In cognitive metaphor theory, this corresponds to the notion of ‘Enablement’ (M. Johnson 1987: 47).
desires an object and (if at all possible) succeeds in fulfilling this desire. In bringing
this goal-directed action to its completion, subjects act independently, and the
mere possibility of engaging in activity that is geared towards the attainment of a
goal therefore connotes freedom of action. Nearly all such freedom has been
taken away from prisoners.
Another contributory factor to volitional curtailment consists in the abolish-
ment of inmates’ freedom of association—it is in the interest of authorities to
isolate prisoners or severely restrict their communication with other offenders.
Again, the penitentiary was the founding model for associational deprivation
under the aegis of combating corruption and moral depravity among inmates.
However, the curtailment of association strikes at another basic human need,
that for communication and self-assurance by making contact with others. (In
Lacanian terms, the ego is only created by the eye of the other.) In extreme forms
of penal isolation, the prisoner is therefore ultimately deprived of the freedom to
be him/herself, to establish and maintain their personal identity.
The three aspects that characterize imprisonment discussed so far impinge on
the prisoner in a passive manner: he or she is prevented from moving, relocating
or following his/her wishes, making his/her choices, or from communicating.
The fourth and final aspect of penal incarceration that I wish to note, coercion,
takes subjection to the will of the jailer or penal establishment a step further by not
merely keeping inmates from following their natural inclinations, but, instead,
forcing them to act against their wishes, for instance by making him/her work,
circle around the yard, or walk in lockstep. The third and fourth categories, like the
first and second, are similarly co-dependent. The prisoner cannot sleep until 10 a.m.
(volitional deprivation) and is made to get up at 5 a.m. and driven to work in the
mines until after dark (coercion). Seeing that the penitentiary system was mod-
elled both on the monastery (see Section 7.2) and on slavery (see Sections 6.4.3
and 7.5.3), the combination of curtailing volition and regulating all actions of the
captive subject down to the most minor movements inevitably morphs into
coercion.13 While the other categories of dependence had foregrounded the
thwarting of prisoners’ exercise of freedom, this category is based on the d eprivation
of their right to say no, to refuse compliance, to “prefer not to” (in Bartleby’s
words).14 Category four therefore primarily relates to slavery, work camps, gulags,
and concentration camps, but owing to the systematic ingredient of forced labour
in the penitentiary system, it also plays an important role in many modern prisons
both real and fictional.
Having established the preceding four categories—restraint; confinement;
subjection; coercion—to describe what imprisonment may connote, we can now
go on to characterize what freedom might mean in relation to them. The reader
13 On the prison as a coercive institution, see also Patton (1979: 124) and Léonard (1980: 124).
14 For a superb reading of Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ from a carceral perspective, see Caleb Smith
(2009: 65–72, 76–7).
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would betray him. Farmer stood upon the after-gun on the starboard
side, one elbow resting on the hammock-rail and his head reclined
upon his hand; the flush of intemperance was on his cheeks, and his
restless eye wandered hither and thither, as if tracking the crimson
stains of carnage that his villany had caused. The horizon was now
one flood of clear transparent light, the blue waters marking the line
between the dark ocean and crystal sky. The gallant frigate danced
merrily before the breeze, but excepting the squaring of the yards,
no additional canvass had been spread to accelerate her way.
“Suddenly a man on the fokstle exclaimed ‘Sail, O!’ Farmer
started from his reverie, and every limb of his body was for an instant
palsied; whilst the seamen, as if struck by an enchanter’s wand,
stood motionless and still. ‘Sail, O!’ repeated the man. It aroused
them from their stupor; a thousand sickly apprehensions rushed
upon their minds, and all was instantly bustle and alarm. Farmer
walked forward, and then hailed one of the quarter-masters to bring
him the glass out of the cabin. The glass was brought,—it was the
captain’s; and as he took it in his hand, it was plainly seen by the
quick changes of his countenance, that there was a tempest in his
soul.
“The sail was now distinctly visible about two points on the
larboard beam, her hull rising from the water, and her masts showing
she was a ship, whilst their position indicated she was crossing the
frigate’s track. Farmer raised the glass to his eye; there was a
breathless silence fore-and-aft. His look was long and earnest; not a
muscle of his features moved, his very pulsation seemed to be
suspended: at last, he gave a shivering gasp, and drew his breath
convulsively. The coxswain approached, and took his spell at the
glass, but his glance was only momentary; he returned it to Farmer.
They looked in each other’s face, but neither spoke his thoughts.
“‘Bring Mr. Southcott on deck,’ exclaimed Farmer, ‘and see that
he is well guarded.’
“In a few minutes Mr. Southcott, the master, was brought on to
the fokstle, between two seamen with naked cutlasses and loaded
pistols. The undaunted officer, expecting that the hour of his death
had arrived, stood firm and erect in front of the mutineer, and his
steady gaze fixed so intently upon him, that Farmer shrunk from
before it. At length the latter said, ‘No harm is meant you, Mr.
Southcott; but have the goodness to take the glass, and tell me what
you make out yon ship to be,’ pointing towards it.
“‘Is there a sail?’ exclaimed the master. ‘Ay, I see it;—thank
Heaven!’ and he took the glass.
“‘Her yards show square,’ said Farmer.
“‘They do,’ replied the master; ‘but the merchantmen now spread
a broad cloth in these seas.’
“‘She has a middle and a royal stay-sail set,’ continued Farmer.
The master assented.
“‘She is carrying every thing that can draw a cap-full of wind,’ said
Farmer.
“‘She is so,’ replied the master; ‘but West-Indiamen have many
flying kites nowadays.’
“‘Mr. Southcott,’ exclaimed Farmer in his harsh hoarse voice, ‘you
know that yon hooker is no West-Indiaman. You would deceive me,
sir—That new cloth in the main-top-sail, that milk-white flying jib, and
the cloud of canvass that flutters from the main-yard tell me that it is
the——’
“‘What?’ exclaimed the master, suddenly starting from the
recumbent posture in which he had been looking at the ship, and
again fixing his eyes upon his traitorous mate.
“‘Sail, O!’ shouted a man from the starboard cat-head; ‘a brig
under the land, and a ship in-shore of her.’
“‘Yes, yes,’ said Farmer, ‘’tis the Favourite and the Drake; but
their legs were never made to catch us. Come, Mr. Southcott, the
name of the stranger yonder,’ pointing to the vessel first seen. ‘I wish
the men to hear it from your lips, that they may think of running
gantlines and hangman’s knots, and know their doom if they
surrender.’ He again applied the glass to his eye; ‘she has bore up a
couple of points, and is setting her studding-sails. Speak, sir! is it not
the Mermaid?—You are silent, but it matters not. Take him below.’
“‘Yes, Farmer,’ said the master, ‘thank God, it is the Mermaid, and
therefore you cannot hope to escape. Your captain and officers are
murdered by your orders—’
“‘Nay, nay, not by my orders, Mr. Southcott,’ said Farmer. ‘We
have all been tarred with the same brush; but what would you
propose?’
“‘Resign the command you have assumed to me,’ replied the
master; ‘and men!’ he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘mistaken men,
return to your—’
“‘Silence, sir!’ thundered Farmer, clapping his hand to the
master’s mouth; and then turning to the men who had crowded up
from below and filled the fokstle and gangways, he said, ‘Shipmates,
yon sail is our old consort, the Mermaid. Mr. Southcott proposes you
should surrender, and of course all of us know our doom. But
though, mayhap, some may be spared by royal mercy—such mercy
as you have already had, which of you can point out the men? No,
no, my lads, we’ve gone too far to retract; and for my part, I would
rather flash a pistol in the magazine than again serve under British
bunting, even if my life were sure. What do you say, men?’
“The seamen crowded together, irresolute; the petty officers
gathered round Farmer, whilst those who had been least active in
the mutiny seemed half inclined to follow the counsel of the master.
‘Shipmates!’ said Farmer, ‘I wish to try your mettle. Think of a public
execution! The yard-rope rove, the signal gun, and a death of
infamy! Most of you have had your noble bravery and gallant daring
already rewarded with the cat; but what is a dozen or two at the
gang-way, compared with flogging through the fleet! and with left-
handed boatswains’ mates to cross the lashes! But our case is far
from desperate; we have handled the gun-tackles before to-day,
even if it should come to the worst.’
“‘You will not dare to fight,’ said the master; ‘or if you do, where
are those intrepid men who directed all your movements? Farmer, I
am told it was your hand that struck-down my poor messmate,
Douglas; it was a damnable deed, for you must have remembered
that he saved your life last April, when cutting out at Jean Rabel—’
“‘Take him below!’ roared Farmer. ‘This is no time to think or talk
of the past; and d’ye mind me, Mr. Southcott, clap a stopper on your
tongue, or else—; you understand me, sir.’
“‘I do,’ replied the master, ‘and defy you. What! have I been
playing at ducks and drakes with death so many years, and fear to
meet him now? My king, my country demand my services, and when
I disgrace my colours, then brand me traitor, and—’
“‘Away with him!’ again shouted Farmer, ‘and if he offers to
speak, gag him with a wet nipper. Away with him! I say,’ and the
master was dragged off the deck. Farmer then turned to the petty
officers, ‘Shipmates, we must speedily decide. What say you,
Oates?’
“‘She is yet four or five miles off; let us crack on studding-sails
alow and aloft, and my life for it we run her hull down by dark.’
“‘The Mermaid has the heels of us, going free,’ replied Farmer,
‘and could spare us the t’galln’t-sails. Should we make sail, ’twill only
arouse suspicion. Your advice, Jennings.’
“‘We could always fore-reach and weather upon the Mermaid on
a bow-line,’ answered the man addressed; ‘so why not haul to the
wind on the starboard tack, go between the islands, and make for
the first port?’
“‘Yes,’ said Farmer with a sneer, ‘and there are two cruisers now
in sight in-shore of us; we know the Magician and the Zephyr are
somewhere in the neighbourhood; it certainly would be wise to run
into their jaws. Speak, shipmate,’ turning to the coxswain, ‘what’s to
be done?’
“‘We might get close in-shore, abandon the frigate, and take to
the boats,’ replied the coxswain.
“‘And going without compensation in our hands,’ rejoined Farmer,
‘be delivered up as mutineers, or confined in dungeons as prisoners
of war! We have no further time for argument; men, will you obey my
orders, or shall I here abandon you to your fate?’
“‘Every man will obey,’ was shouted by the crew, ‘either to fight or
fly!’
“‘’Tis well,’ replied Farmer. ‘Brace the yards up, and let her come
to the wind on the larboard tack; afterguard, rig the whip and wash
the decks down. Topmen, away aloft; keep snugly to leeward,—see
that all your studding-sail gear is properly rove, and have every thing
ready for shaking out a reef and setting the royals. Boatswain’s
mates, send a gang below to bring the hammocks up; and, quarter-
masters, to your stations in stowing them. Call the gunner’s crew,
and tell them to go round the quarters and see everything in its
place. Signal-man! bend the colours at the peak, and have our
number ready to show at the main. Main-top there!—stand by to
hoist the pennant, and mind it blows out clear. Be smart, my lads:
one lubberly act would make them suspect that Captain P—— was
not on board, or that his cat had lost its tails.’
“In a few minutes every man was at his appointed station, and
the duty was carrying on with as much alacrity and attention as if
nothing had happened. The Mermaid, a two-and-thirty gun frigate,
was nearing them fast, and the cruisers in-shore were stretching out
from the land to join her.
“‘The frigate is speaking to us with his bunting, sir,’ exclaimed the
signal-man; ‘she is showing her distinguishing pennants.’
“Farmer clapped his hands in ecstacy. ‘By Heaven! it never struck
me Captain P—— was the senior captain. Hoist the ensign and
pennant;—bear a hand with the number, and see that the flags blow
clear!’ He directed his glass to the Mermaid, and looked intently for a
minute or two. ‘She sees it:—haul down! And now, my lad, make the
Mermaid’s signal to make all sail in chase to the north-east: bend on
the preparatory flag at the main and her pennants at the mizen, and
have all ready abaft to telegraph;—it will amuse the fools and keep
them from being too familiar. Is the signal hoisted?’
“‘Ay, ay, sir,’ replied the signal-man, ‘there it flies in as many
colours as a dying dolphin;—and there goes the answering pennant
at the frigate’s main; haul down, my boys.’
“The moody gloom left Farmer’s brow, as he saw by the
Mermaid’s manœuvring that his signal had been obeyed. He then
bore up again to the westward, telegraphed that he was going in
chase, crowded his canvass on every spar that would spread a cloth,
and soon had a clear horizon all around him.
“But though Farmer had determined to run for the Spanish main,
yet he was not sufficiently acquainted with the coast to know the
appearance of the land. Mr. Southcott, therefore, was brought on
deck, and partly through compulsion and partly through a desire of
getting clear of the mutineers, he carried the ship off La Guayra,
where she was ultimately surrendered to the Spanish authorities,
Farmer declaring that they had turned their officers adrift in the jolly-
boat, though the real fact was very soon afterwards explained to the
Spaniards. The master, the gunner, the carpenter and two
midshipmen of those saved were sent to prison; but the mutineers
received twenty-five dollars a man, a great many of them became
double traitors by entering for the frigate under the Spanish flag, and
Farmer was appointed second captain. The first captain’s name, I’m
told, was Gallows,[1] so that his junior must have been pretty often
reminded of it.
“Admiral Harvey, on hearing of all the circumstances, sent a flag
of truce to demand the frigate and the mutineers; but though the
Spaniards were made acquainted with the horrible murders that had
been committed when the ship was taken possession of, yet they not
only refused to deliver her up, but actually put six more guns aboard
of her, making altogether forty-four, and with a crew of nearly four
hundred men, she was fitted out and made a voyage to San
Domingo, very narrowly escaping the British cruisers who were all on
the alert to pick her up.”
“And this, your honour,” said my chaperon, “is old Hughes’s story,
and that’s the ship there it’s all about.”
I had been deeply interested in his narrative, which he related
with peculiar feeling, and some parts were almost dramatised by his
singular gestures and manner. “And what became of the boatswain’s
wife?” I inquired.
“Fanny Martin, sir?” he replied; “why I think she left La Guayra in
a neutral, and so got to Halifax, but I arn’t quite sure.”
“And now, then,” said I, “for some account of her recapture. Can
you tell me how it happened, and what the picture before us is
actually designed to represent?”
“Why no, your honour, I can’t do that exactly,” rejoined he,
“seeing as I knows but little about it; but there’s a messmate of mine
yonder who was on that station at the time, and can give you the
particulars; but he’s a dry soul, your honour, and mayhap would like
a taste of the spirit-room, if your honour has no objections; ’twill
loose his tongue a bit, and give it freer play.”
“One word for my friend and two for myself,” thought I; but
sensible that “freshening the nip” would prevent too much chafing, I
readily consented, and the old blades piped to grog with a gusto that
can only be acquired by long habit.
We were soon seated in a comfortable room overlooking the
Thames. It was nearly high-water, and the middle of summer; a
delightful breeze tempered the heat, the green fields looked
beautifully below and opposite to us, whilst the vessels were rapidly
passing and chequering the scene with their white sails. The
steamers, too, were swiftly cutting through the yielding element, and
the whole presented a spectacle of commercial wealth that can be
witnessed on no other river in the world. I own I feel a very great
pride in contemplating the glory and the gratitude of my country; and
when I see her gallant tars who have braved the war of elements
and battled the enemies of England, snugly enjoying their old age in
their berths, chewing their pigtail with a knowing quid pro quo, and
occasionally cheering the heart with the balsam that maketh it glad, I
cannot help exclaiming, “nobly should a grateful country be served,
and thus be rewarded her brave defenders!” Besides, within the
small compass of this beautiful place, we can meet with practical
information from every part of the globe. Talk of your geographies!
here are the living pages that wait on Time,—men that have
breakfasted on a whale with the Esquimaux, dined on an elephant
with the Hottentots, and supped upon a snake sixty feet long with the
Red Indians;—men who have bearded the lions, shook paws with
the tiger, and rode races on alligators. They have seen the holy city,
visited the ancient capitol of the world, and have passed over the
identical spot where Jonah was swallowed by the whale. Greenwich
Hospital is a very storehouse for knowledge,—a perfect College, in
which the old tars take their degrees as natural as when running
down a trade-wind,—have their senior wranglers, their M.A. for
master-at-arms, their B.A. for boatswain’s-assistant, enjoy good
fellowship over a glass of grog, and are staunch supporters of
cannon law.
We found several of these well filled volumes—damme-quart-hos
—already ranged in the room before our arrival, and, like our old
friend Colburn, they were mighty busy in puffing off their works, as if
trying to hide the authors under a cloud of smoke.
“Ay, ay,” exclaimed a crojack-eyed old blade, “them there pursers’
accounts of prize-money showed but a poor figure in the foremast-
man’s log, whatever they did in the skipper’s journal. They used to
sift it through a hatchway grating,—all that went down was for the
officers, and all that stayed above came to the tarry jackets.”
“You’re right there, Jem,” said a veteran boatswain’s-mate, whose
voice was not unlike a gale of wind sighing to a kitchen fire through
the hollow of a chimney-pot, “perfectly right; and then they make out
the prize-list much in the same way as the nigger accounted for his
pig. D’ye see, his master gave him three dollars to go to market and
buy a pig; but the black rascal came back drunk, without his money
and without his cargo. ‘Holla!’ said his master, ‘how came you drunk,
sir? and where’s the pig?’ ‘Ah, massa,’ says the nigger, ‘me nebber
drunk, but giddy wid long chase.’ ‘Where’s the dollars I gave you?’
asked the master. ‘Me gie ’em to buy pig,’ said the black. ‘What,
three dollars?’ cried the master. ‘Tan littly bit, massa, me telle you.
First me gib dollar for pig’ ‘Well, that’s only one dollar,’ said the
master. ‘Tan littly bit,’ puzzled the nigger; ‘den me hab pig for dollar,
—dat two dollar, massa; den de pig run away, and gib dollar for
catch a pig—dat tree dollar, massa. Den him dam pig run in a bush
like a debbil, and nebber see him no more noder time.’ So it was with
the prize-money; there was dollar for Jack, and Jack for dollar; and if
Jack ran away, he lost all, and was made to look dolor-ous into the
bargain, if ever they cocht him again. My best sarvice to your honour,
and hope no offence.” He lifted his pewter to his lips, and took a
most persevering draught to qualify the toast.
“Jack Maberly,” said my worthy conductor, addressing the last
speaker, “the gentleman wants to hear a little about the recapture of
the Harmoine, and Bill Jennings is just agoing to tell his honour the
long and the short of it, if you’ll be good enough to keep silence fore-
and-aft.”
“I wull, I wull, messmate,” replied the old boatswain’s-mate.
Bill Jennings, the very beau ideal of a main-topman in long togs,
applied his muzzle to the grog, as he said, “to clear his throat of
scupper-nails;” and having swallowed almost enough to float a jolly-
boat, after sundry hems and divers sluings to make sure of his
stowage, gave the following account of
The Recapture of the Hermione.
“As for them there cutting outs, (he began) why I’ve had a pretty
good share on ’em in my time, seeing as how I’ve been with some of
them there fire-eating chaps as would cut out the devil himself from
under a heavy fire, if so be as his reverence warn’t moored with
chains. To my thinking, there’s more to rouse the nat-ral spirit of man
in boarding than in laying at long shots and hitting each other
spitefully; for if a fellow does work an eyelet hole in your canvass
where it arn’t wanted, you have the chance of damaging some of his
spars in return, and that’s what I calls fair play. Bekase, messmates,
setting a case as this here—it’s cut for cut, and damn all favours.
Now at long shot you never can tell who hits you, and that’s what I
call a sort of incendiary act; but at close quarters you can always tell
who lends you a rap, and you can pay him agin; and if he falls, then
you can stand his friend and take care of him. But nevertheless,
messmates,—as many on you knows,—that same cutting out is
sharp work for the eyes, as the monkey said when he hugged the
cat, particularly where the boarding-nettings are triced up and the
enemy is prepared for you; but there warn’t a ship on the West Ingee
station but would have gladly undertaken the recapture of the
Harmoine, bekase the whole affair had been a disgraceful consarn,
and had placed the cha-rackter of a British tar like a yankee
schooner jammed betwixt two winds,—nobody knew which way
she’d tend. Well, messmates, the job fell to the Surprise, 28, an old
French 24, called the Unity when she was taken by the Inconstant, in
the beginning of the year 96. Howsomever, messmates, she kept up
both names, as it were; for never was there a ship with more unity
among the men, and she surprised the Spaniards by the daring
impudence they displayed. The Harmoine had made a run or two
from San Domingo, and in September, 99, our admiral, ould Sir Hyde
Parker, received intelligence that she was going to make another trip
to Havana, and the Surprise was sent to cruise off Cape Saint
Romar to intercept her. The whole of the little frigate’s complement
was 197, men and boys, but there warn’t so many as that on board,
and with this force Captain Hamilton was to attack a ship carrying 44
guns, and having nearly 400 men;—but they didn’t calculate odds in
them days. Well, d’ye see, she got upon her station about the middle
of October, and kept a sharp look-out, dodging off and on, but
keeping at a fair distance, so that the prize might not be afraid of
leaving port. Well, day after day they watched, but nothing hove in
sight bigger than a land-crab; so what does the captain do, but being
tired of waiting, he cuts out some vessels from under the island of
Amber, to keep the men from getting idle, and then runs off of Porto
Cabello, and there sure enough lay the Harmoine all ataunt-o, every
stick on end, sails bent, t’-gallant yards crossed, and a whacking
large Spanish ensign and pennant flying;—but mark me,
messmates, she was moored head and starn betwixt two heavy
batteries, the smallest of which could have blowed the little frigate
out of the water, and cut her up like junk.
“It was a beautiful evening, when the saucy Surprise stood close
in to reckoniter;—there was a fine breeze and smooth water, and the
craft worked like a top. They could see the sodgers at the batteries
and the men on board the enemy all at their quarters, and the gun-
boats were pulling out to take up convenient positions; though there
warn’t a man among ’em believed the ship could be taken, yet they
knew damned well the Englishmen would try.
“Well, next day Captain Hamilton hove-to, just without range of
shot, and challenged the Harmoine to come out; but she took no
notice of it, and so the Surprise made sail, stood into the mouth of
the harbour, and fired at her. The batteries opened their palaver; but
the little ship hauled off without a shot touching her, and the lazy
lubberly Spaniards, more than two to one in men and metal, didn’t
dare to show their yellow rag outside the port. So the ship’s
company, fore-and-aft, wondered what the captain would be at, and
they grinned like so many cat-heads to think they couldn’t get a fair
slap at her. But the captain was up in the main-top with a round
jacket on,—stretched out at full length with his glass resting on the
top-brim, and most earnestly overhauling their consarns in-shore, so
that an old woman couldn’t stir out of doors, nor a rat move on the
Harmoine’s decks without his seeing it. The master was up in the
fore-top upon the same lay, and they kept hailing each other about
different consarns till they made every thing out as plain as the grog-
blossoms on Darby’s nose there. [The individual alluded to gave a
chuckle something between a grunt and a laugh, and applied his
fingers to an enormous red proboscis, that certainly seemed the tell-
tale of a besetting sin.] Well, d’ye mind, they kept at this all day long,
dodging about and in-and-out, like a dog in a fair, till the men got
quite tantalized and jaundiced at seeing so much of the yellow
bunting,—for the enemy had hoisted it every where out of bravado.
“Now, messmates, when I was a youngster, I used to—could read
a bit, and I remembers reading some’ut about the conginuality of
minds;—that is, suppose setting a case, messmates, just this here.
Darby there and I, without speaking to each other, both lifts the quart
pots to drink his honour’s health for sarving out the stuff,—[he raised
the quart pot, which by the by was empty, and looking into it,
conveyed a hint that it required replenishing]—why then,
messmates, (he continued) we should both have the same thoughts
arising from the same feelings. [Darby’s mug was empty too, so I
ordered them to be filled again.] So, d’ye see, messmates, the crews
of the boats got busy about their gear and placed the oars and boat-
hooks, the rudders and tillers all in their proper places, ready for a
moment’s sarvice. The captain twigged ’em at it, but he never said
nothing till the next day but one, when he orders the hammocks to
be opened to air and spread out over the boats, and he stands off-
and-on till about noon, when he makes a long stretch out from the
land, and the men thought he was going to give it up. So, d’ye see,
they pipes to dinner, and after that they sarves the grog out, of
course;—your honour’s health; and, messmates, yours, all of you,—
[he took a long draught];—but at two bells, instead of calling the
watch, the hands were turned up and all ordered aft on to the
quarter-deck, where the captain was standing as upright as a fathom
of smoke in a calm, and the master was bent down like a yard of
pump-water measured from the spout, and looking over a chart of
the harbour, as busy as the devil in a gale of wind.
“Well, every soul fore-and-aft mustered in the twinkling of a hand-
spike, and they all crowded together as if they’d been stowed with a
jack-screw for a long voyage; and then the captain up and tells ’em
that he meant to head the boats himself and cut the Harmoine out, if
they would do their duty like men and back him. My eyes, if there
warn’t a cheer then, there never was one before nor since; and the
lads, to seal the bargain, gived one another a grip of the fist that
would have squeezed a lemon as dry as a biscuit.
“So, you see, the murder was out, and every man betwixt the
cabin windows and the figure-head volunteered to the duty; but the
captain said he wouldn’t take more than one hundred, including
officers and marines; he was sorry to leave any behind, as he
believed them to be all brave fellows, but some must stay to work the
ship, and, if necessary, bring her into action.
“Well, the men were picked out, the muskets, pistols,
tommyhawks, and cutlashes got ready, and long hook-ropes coiled
away in the starn-sheets of each boat, and clinched to the ring in the
bottom; the oars and rullocks were muffled and well greased, so that
not a sound might be heard louder than the sigh of a periwinkle.
“The sun set soon after six o’clock, and as soon as twilight came
on,—which in them latitudes, when the sun is on the equator, and it
was very near it then, comes on in a few minutes,—the ship was
hove in stays and stood in-shore, with a pleasant breeze and a
stern-swell setting after her. About eight o’clock the wind died away,
the yards were laid square, and the boats hoisted out, whilst those
on the quarters were lowered, and all were soon manned for the
expedition and shoved off. Whilst they’re pulling in-shore,
messmates, I’ll just elucidate Captain Hamilton’s plan of attack.
“Now, mind me, this here paper of ’bacca shall be one battery,
and this here ’bacca-box shall be the other battery, and this here
shut-knife shall be the Harmoine,—the laniard sarving for one cable
out of the hawse-hole, and this piece of marline for the other cable
out of the gun-room port;—[he arranged the articles on the table.]
Now the boats were to pull in, and the boarding parties had each a
different place to board at. As soon as they got upon deck, the boats
with their respective crews were to cut the cables and then go a-
head to tow; whilst four of the boarders were instantly to shin aloft to
loose the fore-topsail and two to loose the mizen-topsail, which, if
possible, were to be sheeted home to catch the breeze coming off
the land. The Surprise was to come in close to the harbour’s mouth
to act as circumstances required.
“The boats kept close together, but didn’t make any quick head-
way, as the captain meant to get in about midnight, when he
expected the Spaniards would have their eyes buttoned up, and their
ears plugged with their nightcaps, like the hawse-holes in blue water.
“Well, d’ye see, it was just about eight bells when the mast-heads
of the Harmoine showed above the dark mass of land, and the light
rigging looked like a fine spider’s web traced on the silvery sky; and
there too fluttered the yellow rag, that was soon to be humbled under
the saucy pennant of St. George. On pulled the boats, and except
the ripple of the oars and the hissing of the foam in their wakes,
silence slept deep and still, disturbed only by the moan of the sea as
it broke upon the rocky shore.
“Suddenly there was a flash, and before the report could be
heard, grape-shot were jumping about the boats and splashing up
the water like a shoal of flying-fish at play. This firing was from a
couple of guard-boats, each mounting a twelve-pounder; and if it did
no other mischief, it aroused Jack Spaniard, who it appears was up
and rigged like a sentry-box; and before a cat could lick her ear,
flames of fire seemed to be bursting from the dark rocks, like
lightning from a black thunder-cloud: it was the frigate, speaking with
her main-deck and fokstle guns.
“Finding that the enemy were prepared, the captain had less
delicacy in alarming them out of their sleep, and so the boats’ crews
gave three tremendous cheers. Mayhap, your honour never heard
the cheers on going into action, when the voice of man goes from
heart to heart and stirs up all that is brave and noble in the human
breast; it invigorates and strengthens every timber in a fellow’s
frame, and is to the weak or mild, what mother’s milk is to the infant.
“Well, they gave three British cheers as would have stirred up the
blood of an anchor-stock, if it had any, and on they dashed,
stretching to their oars with a good-will and making the water brilliant
with their track as they pulled for the devoted frigate, then about
three-quarters of a mile distant, which kept sending forth the red
flames from the muzzles of her guns as the boats gallantly
approached.
“Captain Hamilton boarded on the starboard bow, and with the
gunner and eight or ten men cleared the fokstle. The doctor boarded
on the larboard bow, and with his party joined the captain; and the
other boats having discharged their men, the whole of the boarders
attacked the quarter-deck, where the Spanish officers had collected
and fought with desperation. And now mind the downright
impudence of the thing; for whilst they were fighting for possession
on deck, the sails were loosed aloft, the cables were cut, and the
boats were towing the ship out of the harbour; and the craft, as if she
knew she warn’t honestly come by, was walking off from the land like
seven bells half-struck;—if that warn’t going the rig, then blow me if I
know what is.
“When the Spaniards saw that the ship was actually under way
with sail on her, and the boarding parties cutting down all afore ’em,
a great number jumped overboard and some ran below, whilst the
killed and wounded lay in all directions. About this time Captain
Hamilton received such a tremendous crack on the head from the
butt end of a musket, as brought a general illumination into his eyes
and stretched him senseless on the deck. A Spaniard, who had
fallen near him, raised his dagger to stab him to the heart; but the
tide of existence was ebbing like a torrent, his brain was giddy, his
aim faltered, and the point descended in the captain’s right thigh.
Dragging away the blade with the last convulsive energy of a death-
struggle, he lacerated the wound. Again the reeking steel was
upheld, and the Spaniard placed his left hand near the captain’s
heart to mark his aim more sure: again the dizziness of dissolution
spread over his sight, down came the dagger into the captain’s left
thigh, and the Spaniard was a corpse.
“The upper deck was cleared, and the boarders rushed below on
the main-deck to complete their conquest. Here the slaughter was
dreadful, till the Spaniards called out for quarter and the carnage
ceased; but no sooner was the firing on board at an end, when the
sodgers at the batteries—who had been wondering at the frigate
moving away as if by magic, and had been calling a whole reg’ment
of saints to help ’em,—let fly from nearly two hundred pieces of
cannon, as if they were saying their prayers and wanted the British
tars to count the beads. Howsomever the wind was very light close
in-shore, and the smoke mantled thick and heavy on the waters, so
as to mask the ship from view; but a chance twenty-four-pounder
hulled her below the water-mark, and they were obliged to rig the
pumps. The main-mast, too, at one time was in danger from the stay
and spring-stay being shot away, and the head swell tumbling in
made the frigate roll heavily; but about two in the morning they got
out of gun shot, the towing boats were called alongside, and every
thing made snug. Thus in an hour and three-quarters the frigate was
boarded, carried, and clear from the batteries; but, to be sure,
considering the little wind there was, and the head swell setting in,
she did stretch her legs as if glad to be out of bad company, and the
quarantine flag;[2]—for you know, Darby, none in our sarvice likes to
be yellowed,—[Darby gave another chuckle, and then took a good
pull at his mug to drown remembrances,]—it looks so like a land-
crab.
“Well, messmates, sail was soon made on the Harmoine, the
shot-hole was plugged up, and the party mustered; when there were
found to be only twelve men wounded, amongst whom were the
captain and the gunner, Mr. Maxwell. There was not one man killed
on the British side, but the Spaniards had 119 killed and 97
wounded, most of them dangerously, and the decks were again
stained with human blood, some of which was no doubt shed by
those murderers and traitors who had mutinied.
“At day-light next morning the Spaniards were indulged with the
sight of both ships standing off shore, and the Harmoine with a
British ensign and pennant over the Spanish colours. The prisoners
were put on board of a schooner, that was captured during the day,
and sent ashore; and the Surprise, with her prize, stood for Jamaica,
where she arrived seven days afterwards, and brought up at Port
Royal.
“You may be sure, messmates, Captain Hamilton was well
received; the Parliament-men at the island gave him a beautiful
sword that cost three hundred guineas; he was made a knight on,
and the Harmoine was called the Retaliation, and she was
immediately put in commission as an English frigate; though in
logging her name in the navy list, the Lords of the Admiralty changed
it to the Retribution, and I had the honour to be drafted on board her
as captain of the main-top.
“Captain Hamilton was invalided home on account of his wounds;
but the packet was taken by a French privateer, and he went to see
Boneypart, who treated him like a messmate for his bravery, and
allowed him to be exchanged for six French middies; and now, my
lads, I’ve told you all I know about the recapture of the Harmoine.”
Of course, I expressed my acknowledgments for the obligations I
was under to him for his narrative, but this seemed to nettle the old
tar very much. How far his account is correct I must leave others to
determine, and only regret that I have not been able to do the worthy
soul more justice, but it would be impossible for any written
description to give an adequate idea of his mode of recital. Our
glasses were replenished, for I saw that the old blades, like cutters
on a wind, were determined to have a taut leech to their jibs by
taking a long and strong pull at the purchase; and expecting to
gather a fund of anecdote, I e’en made the most of it, and
determined to gladden their hearts.
“Well, it’s of no manner of use to go to argufy the matter,” said the
old boatswain’s-mate, “and all I’ve got to say is this here. Bill has
spun that yarn like a patent winch, and I’m sartin, sooner or later,
murder will always meet with its punishment. Many of them
mutineers were hung, and I’m thinking that there was one or two
jewel-block’d that never set foot on the Harmoine’s deck in their born
days; but their lives were sworn away, and arter that they went aloft
without touching a rattlin. I knew one on ’em, but I’ll not rip up old
grievances like a piece of tarred parcelling. I was at Port Royal when
the ships came in, and well remember seeing ’em both. There’s one
thing however, messmate, you forgot to tell us, and in the regard of a
generous spirit, which I take to be consort with bravery, it ought not
to go untold; and that is this here, that Sir Edward divided £500 of his
own prize-money amongst the bold fellows who shared the victory
with him.”
“That was nobly and generously done,” said I; “such a man
deserves to be immortalized.”
“Well, your honour, he was mortalized,” replied the old man; “for
on that station of musketoes and grog-blossoms, there warn’t a blue
jacket nor yet a jolly but would have followed him into the devil’s
kitchen at cooking time. And it’s a rum place that West Ingees, too. I
remembers being ashore at one of the resurrections among the
niggers, and the ship’s corporal stuck his spoon in the wall; because,
I’m thinking, it warn’t very likely that a fellow would ever sup burgoo
again, when his head and his body had parted company. Well, we
buried him in a wild kind of a spot, where there was a few grave-
stones with names chiselled on ’em, and some were cut with a knife,
showing a foul anchor or a rammer and sponge, and the trees grew
all over the ground, and the rank grass and weeds run up the tombs;
it was a wilderness sort of a place, and here it was that Corporal
Jack was laid up in ordinary. The party to which I belonged was
commanded by Mr. Quinton, a master’s mate, and our bounds lay
within a short distance of this here burying-ground; and so, d’ye
mind, the morning after they’d lowered the corporal down the
hatchway of t’other world, I was posted at the point next the
corporal’s berth, and a shipmate was with me by way of companion
like,—not that I was afeard of any thing living or dead, but I had
always a sort of nat’ral antipathy to being left alone on shore,
particularly in the dark. There was also a nigger belonging to the
plantation, who we allowed to join us just by way of being civil to him,
as he was a kind of steward’s mate in the house, and used to splice
the main brace for us occasionally. Well, messmates, we got knotting
our yarns to keep us from getting drowsy; and to cheer our spirits,
we overhauled a goodish deal about ghosts, and atomies, and
hobblegoblins, and all such like justices of the peace, till the nigger—
they called him Hannibal, arter the line-of-battle ship, I suppose;—I
say, till the nigger declared that every hair on his head stood as stiff
as a crow-bar.”
“Avast there!” exclaimed Bill Jennings, “tell that to the marines an
you will; why the black fellow’s head was woolly and curled like a
Flemish fake, and yet you say it was as stiff as a crow-bar.”
“And so it was,—the more the wonder, and be d—— to you;”
growled the boatswain’s-mate. “Would you have his honour there
think I keep a false reckoning? Well, as I was a saying, his head
looked like a black porcupine with his quills up. All at once we heard
a tremendous rattling amongst the dry leaves of a plantain-ground;
but the trees were too thick to see what it was even if there had been
light enough, which there warn’t, as the sun hadn’t brought his
hammock up, but was only just turning out.
“‘Dere him debbil come agin,’ cried the nigger; and away he
started, as if a nor-wester had kicked him end-ways.
“‘What the black rascal arter,’ said my messmate.
“‘Nay,’ says I, ‘that’s more nor I can tell; but not being a Christian
and only a poor ignoramus of a nigger, I suppose he’s afeard that the
noise yonder is Davy Jones playing at single stick, and mayhap he
may think the ould gemman is hauling his wind upon this tack, and
may take his black muzzle for one of his imps. But that’s a pretty
bobbery they’re kicking up, at all events, and now it’s going in the
direction of the burying-ground.’
“‘I tell you what it is, Jack,’ says my messmate, who looked very
cautiously round him, as if he was rowing guard in an enemy’s port,
‘I tell you what it is; I never thinks they give the devil his due, for
between you and me I don’t know as he’s half so bad as many
people makes him out. Our parson say he’s black, but the niggers
paints him white; but for my part, I’m thinking that the colour of a
ship’s paint goes for nothing. Then as for his horns, why they’re ugly
looking to be sure;—[here the noise was right away in the burying-
ground, and my messmate laid me fairly along side,]—but though
they are ugly looking, I never heard of his doing any mischief by
running stem on with them. And arter all, shipmate,’ he continued,
‘you must own there’s a great deal in fancy. Look at your Ingee grab-
vessels, that run their noses out to the heel of the jib-boom, and
carry all their bowsprit in-board! Now I call that sort o’rig neither ship-
shape nor Bristol fashion, for a ship’s head is a ship’s head, and a
ship’s bowsprit is a ship’s bowsprit; but if they go for to make a
standing bowsprit of a ship’s head, then, I’m thinking, they are but
lubberly rigged.’
“Now, messmates, you must own that his arguments was a bit of
a poser; but I warn’t altogether satisfied with his backing and filling
like a grenadier in a squall; and so, says I, ‘But what do you think of
his tail, eh?’
“‘Why as for the matter of his tail,’ says he, ‘I’m thinking it’s a
fundamental mistake altogether. The parsons say—and mayhap
they’re right—that he cruises about privateering, because he’s got a
roving commission, and every now and then he falls in with a
heavenly convoy, and nips off with a prize, which he carries to his
own dark place. Now as some of the craft are, no doubt, dull sailers,
why, I suppose, he carries a hawser over his quarter to drag ’em out
of the body of the fleet, and I’m thinking that in some dismal hour he
has been seen with the fag-end towing astarn, and the fear of the
beholder has convarted it into a tail.’
“Well, messmates, I own I was a bit staggered at the likelihoods
of the thing, because, d’ye mind, I never could make out the use of
the tail; but the tow-rope spoke for itself, so says I, ‘I tell you what it
is, shipmate, you’ve just hove my thoughts slap aback and got my
ideas in irons—but holloa, there’s a precious row.’
“‘Precious row, indeed,’ says my companion; ‘why Jack—why I’m
blessed—look there—if that arn’t the skeleton of Corporal Jack
walking off with his own head under his arm; then I’m ——, but here
comes Mr. Quinton and the nigger.’
“I did look, messmates, towards the burying-ground, and there I
saw a sort of long-legged skeleton straddling over the graves like an
albatross topping a ground swell; and, sure enough, the corporal’s
head was under his long spider-like arms.
“‘Dere, Massa Quinckem,’ said the black fellow, ‘now he see ’em
for he-self.’
“‘By Jove, and so it is, boy,’ cried the officer.
“‘Ay, ay sir,’ says my messmate, ‘it’s the corporal—there’s no
mistaking his cutwater; but he must have fallen away mightily during
the night, to be so scantily provided with flesh this morning;
howsomever, mayhap the climate has melted him down.’
“‘He no melt ’em,’ cried the nigger, ‘he eat ’em for true.’
“‘What! eat his own head,’ says I, ‘he must be in dreadful want of
a meal. Come, come, ould chap, that’s too heavy to be hoisted in.’
“Well, all this while the skeleton was walking off with his head in
his arms, just as a nurse would carry a baby; but the officer raises
his rifle to his shoulder, and it made me laugh to think he was going
to shoot a skeleton without a head, and that was as dead as Adam’s
grandmother.
“‘For God’s sake, sir,’ says my messmate, ‘don’t go for to fire, for
it would be downright blasphemy to kill a dead body; and what
makes the fellow turn out of his hammock after being lashed up for a
full due, I can’t tell.’
“Bang went the rifle, and down dropped the corporal’s atomy; but
up it got again almost directly and made sail for the bush, leaving his
head behind to lighten ship. Off starts the black fellow after him, and
away went the officer close to his heels. ‘My eyes, shipmate,’ says I,
‘there must be some sport in chasing a skeleton; so e’en let’s keep in
their wakes and see it out.’ So off we set, and presently bang went
the rifle again, and away flew the corporal’s splinters; so the skeleton
gathers himself up, and then laid down on the ground, kicking and
sprawling like a bull-whale in his flurry. Well, we ran up and there we
found—now what do you think, messmates? Why, it was nothing
more nor less than a large land-crab, that was walking away with the
corporal’s head as easy as I’d carry a cocoa-nut.”
The old tar ceased, and I naturally expected that some part of his
story would be contradicted; but no one seemed to raise a doubt as
to the veracity of his statement, and of course politeness would not
allow me to differ from the rest.
“Them land-crabs have a power of strength,” said old Darby. “I
recollects one night being beached high and dry in the small cutter,
and I boat-keeper; so I catches one of these beasts, and claps him
under the bows of the boat, whilst I made fast the painter to his hind
leg, and then away he stretched out for the water, dragging the cutter
with him as if it had been no more than a mouldy biscuit, and if I
hadn’t cut the painter pretty smartly, he’d have towed us out to sea in
no time.”
“The legs of these crabs must be very long,” said I; “are their
bodies in proportion?”
“Why no, your honour,” replied the boatswain’s-mate; “their
bodies are but small, seeing that they are all ribs and trucks; but their
claws are tremendous. What d’ye think of their reaching up to the top
of a gibbet, and having unhooked a pirate that was hung in chains,
walked off with him, hoops and all, so that he never was found
again!”
“If it really happened,” I replied, “it is truly astonishing.”
“Really happened!” cried the veteran somewhat scornfully. “Ax
them as was watching down at Cabrita-point that night, and see if
they won’t swear to it.”
“Perhaps it was some of the friends of the pirate who removed
the body,” I ventured to suggest.
“Now that comes of your honour’s not knowing nothing of the
country,” he rejoined; “for, d’ye mind, all the rogue’s friends were
thieves, and if it had been any of them, they’d not only have carried

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Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison

in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy Monika

A History of Confinement in Palestine: The Prison Web

A History of Confinement in Palestine: The Prison Web

Science Fiction, Fantasy und Horror schreiben für

Prisons in Ancient Mesopotamia: Confinement and Control

The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and

The Universe Builders: Bernie and the Game Master:

The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition (Oxford

Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in

‘Metaphors of Confinement makes a significant contribution to current and ongoing debates

To my mother, Ingeborg Böhm, with gratitude and in memory

The Introduction (‘Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral Imaginary’)

marriage, and illustrates its ambivalences on the example of D. H. Lawrence’s

Paris who gave me feedback on my project. The completion of the manuscript

publica­tion in this book. Section 0.3 of the Intro­duction is a shortened version of

List of Figures xxvii

3. Poeta in Vinculis II: The Twentieth Century 171

6.4 Colonialism as Carcerality 373

9.4.2 Verging on the Insane: Female Creativity and the Prison of

Works Cited 691

1.1 Prison metaphors and analogues 63

BNC British National Corpus. Brigham Young University. https://corpus.byu.

Imprisonment (at least metaphorical imprisonment) is a fairly familiar experience.

Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral Imaginary 3

cannot be taken as either realistic or historically accurate images. Figure 0.1 at

5 See Gustave Moreau’s ‘St. Margaret’, https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-moreau/saint-margaret-

therefore already combined literal and metaphorical confinement in various

Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral Imaginary 5

me a huge unploughed field whose buried treasures were waiting to be excavated,

0.1 Confinement and Flight: Preliminaries

Echoing the title of W. B. Carnochan’s fine study of eighteenth-century literature,

The most basic semantic feature associated with confinement touches on

Prisons, Images of Confinement, and the Carceral Imaginary 7

The Recapture of the Hermione.

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publication in this book. Section 0.3 of the Introduction is a shortened version of

List of Figures xxvii

3. Poeta in Vinculis II: The Twentieth Century 171

6.4 Colonialism as Carcerality 373

Works Cited 691

1.1 Prison metaphors and analogues 63