“PATTERN PENITENCE”: PENITENTIAL NARRATIVE AND MORAL REFORM DISCOURSE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(03)30001-8
• Pages: 3-31
• Published date: 09 December 2003
• Date: 09 December 2003
• Author: Anna Kaladiouk

“PATTERN PENITENCE”: PENITENTIAL

NARRATIVE AND MORAL REFORM

DISCOURSE IN NINETEENTH-

CENTURY BRITAIN

Anna Kaladiouk

ABSTRACT

The accounts of moral reform that nineteenth-century convicts offered the

officials in charge were frequently characterized by such uniformity that it

caused Dickens to mistrust their sincerity and to brand them scornfully as

“pattern penitence.” Unlike Dickens, however, prison officials were more

willing to credit the questionable authenticity of “patterned” repentance.

The paper argues that rather than an effect of personal gullibility, reformers’

attitudes can be seen as an outcome of specific interpretative strategieswhich,

in turn, constituted a response to several institutional challenges facing the

nineteenth-century Penitentiary.

It is a sad misunderstanding, the legacy of rationalism, that truth can only be that sort of truth

that is put together out of general moments, that the truth of a proposition is precisely what is

repeatable and constant in it. M. Bakhtin1

Punishment, Politics, and Culture

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society,Volume 30, 3–31

Copyright © 2004 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(03)30001-8

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4 ANNA KALADIOUK

INTRODUCTION

In Imagining the Penitentiary, a study of eighteenth-century fiction, John Bender

(1987) investigates the nature and the extent of the novel’s contribution to the

transformation of the old gaol into the modern prison. According to Bender, it was

thenovel’spersistent representation of the power of confinement to effectimportant

changes in subjectivity that enabled a new conception of penal order which in the

late eighteenth century became embodied in the institution of the Penitentiary.

Bender’s move to locate the origins of the Penitentiary in the depth of novelistic

discourse reflects his larger project to challenge the common understanding of art

and literature as a mere mirror of social reality and to reconceptualize them as

major forces behind institutional formation.

While my concerns in this paper are more local, I share Bender’s preoccupation

with the role of language and narrative in the life of institutions. Shifting attention

from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and from the novel to the works of

social journalism, the writings of prison officials and convicts’ narratives, I draw

on these texts to explore two different butinterrelated issues. I examine what these

texts reveal about prison reformers’ (often but not always intuitive) perceptions of

the function of language and narrative in the project of remaking individual moral

character,and Iexplorethe role that language played in measuring the effectiveness

of disciplinary strategies directed towards that goal.

My account spans about a quarter of the nineteenth century, beginning in the

early 1820s, when the 1823 Gaol Act officially endorsed the principle of classifica-

tion, and ends in the late 1850s, when the influence of the Separate system of prison

discipline, the system that most energetically and most vocally proclaimed its

commitment to the objective of moral reformation, began to dwindle. By no means

do I intend this account to serve as a comprehensive history of these three decades

of the prison reform movement in Britain, or even as an exhaustive discussion

of what moral reformation meant to various interested constituencies. Instead, I

focus on just one strain of the reformative discourse which I believe lends itself

to a further investigation into the role of language and narrative in institutional

development.

I suggest that the reformers’ anxieties about criminal slang, coupled with their

peculiar investment in the language of moral reform, reflect their belief in the cen-

trality of language to the reformative process. In the argument I offer, the project

of restructuring criminal character appears to be inseparable from the task of

training the criminal to tell his story in the appropriate language and in a particular

sort of way. He was taught, in short, to abide by the representational conventions

of what Dickens (1995) reviled, both in his fiction and journalism, as the genre of

“pattern penitence” (p. 223). But while Dickens explains the reformers’ readiness