The rhetoric of imprisonment in Dickens

The Rhetoric of Imprisonment in Dickens traces a theme central to the works of Charles Dickens through four of his major novels: Barnaby Rudge, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities. Barnaby Rudge, an early work, and A Tale of Two Cities, one of Dickens\u27s later works, are both historical novels, serving to frame, situate, and put into context the more complex and contemporary statements Dickens makes in Bleak House and Little Dorrit. This structural arrangement allows Dickens\u27s view of the law and imprisonment in the eighteenth century to inform and illuminate his nineteenth-century conclusions. Viewed through the philosophy of Michel Foucault, as outlined primarily in his work Discipline and Punish, Dickens\u27s position can be seen as a reflection of a philosophical, historical, and finally, legal progression of thought regarding the concept of imprisonment. Contemporary illustrations of legal positions and problems regarding imprisonment, taken from contemporary newspapers and magazines, also point out the modernity of Dickens\u27s nineteenth-century views and his valid warnings of potential future developments. The historiographical aspects of the four novels show the nineteenth-century\u27s preoccupation with revolution and progress and the law\u27s need for growth and development so that the former can be averted and the latter promoted. Dickens\u27s attitudes toward and manipulations of imprisonment --whether actual or metaphorical--indicate his broadening concern with the extension of punishment from an arena of spectacle (in a Foucauldian sense) to a more far-reaching, more personal, arena of panopticism (a term Foucault borrows from legal historian Jeremy Bentham). This extension of observation-as-imprisonment lends an Orwellian dimension to Dickens\u27s appreciation for--and struggle with--the right of the legal representative to investigate, versus the right of the human being to keep his own secrets