Month: February 2017

Prisoners and Prison Staff at the Cold Bath Fields House of Correction

~ Rachel Weil ~ 1 Comment

by Kiran Mehta In The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France, published in 1982, Patricia O’Brien argued that the prison guard was ‘the most important person in the operation of the prison’ and that ‘the whole disciplinary regime of the nineteenth century [could] be reduced to the dealings of the guard with the prisoner’. … Continue reading Prisoners and Prison Staff at the Cold Bath Fields House of Correction

Imprisoned in print: John Lilburne and the (in)visibility of incarceration

~ Richard Bell ~ Leave a comment

On 11 June 1646, John Lilburne was imprisoned by the House of Lords following an altercation over a libel he’d printed against the Earl of Manchester. Although this marked the beginning of a period of recurrent imprisonment for Lilburne, it wasn’t the first time he'd ended up in prison. In 1637, he had been incarcerated … Continue reading Imprisoned in print: John Lilburne and the (in)visibility of incarceration