Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/221

 *ciety's manufacture and destruction of criminals; and of Night and Morning to show the injustice and fallacy of its treatment respectively of vice and crime. In regard to the latter he says, in the Preface:

"Let a child steal an apple in sport, let a starvling steal a roll in despair, and Law conducts them to the Prison, for evil communications to mellow them for the gibbet. But let a man spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice—let him devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale demoralization of his kind—and he may be surrounded with the adulation of the so-called virtuous, and be served upon its knee by that Lackey—the Modern World!"

Dickens starts his account with the English prison in Pickwick, and closes it in Little Dorrit. But it is in ''David Copperfield'' that he stops to point out the whole thing as a stupid error. On the occasion of a visit to the "immense and solid building, erected at a great expense," he reflects,—

"I could not help thinking as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a home of refuge for the deserving old."

Within, he finds the rêgime of solitary, unemployed confinement, and the official bait for professions of penitence, fine breeders of hypocrisy, six years before Reade makes the same point in Never too Late to Mend. But he sees in the exhibitions of No. 27 and No. 28—the Prize Show, the Crowning Glory—Lattimer, and Uriah Heep, an opportunity for his riotious caricature; while to Reade this de-*