Charles Dickens, American Notes, Buried Alive (1842)

[Charles Dickens, American Notes, Philadelphia, Eastern Penitentiary, Buried Alive (1842)]

“[119] …. Standing at the central point, and looking down these dreary passages, the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful. Occassionally, there is a drowsy sound from some lone weaver’s shuttle, or shoemakers’s last, but it is stifled by the thick walls and heavy dungeon-door, and only serves to make the general stillness more profound. Over the head and fade of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house, a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth, until his whole term of imprisonment has expired.

 He never hears of wife and children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison-officers, but with that exception he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair. His name, and crime, and term of suffering, are unknown, even to the officer who delivers him his daily food. There is a number over his cell door, and in a book of which the [119] [120] governor of the prison has one copy, and the moral instructor another; this is the index of his history. Beyond these pages the prison has no record of his existence; and though he live to be in the same cell ten weary years, he has no means of knowing, down to the very last hour, in what part of the building it is situated …. [120] 

 [120] …. Every cell has double doors: the outer one of sturdy oak, the outer of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his food is handed …. [120] The first man I saw, was seated at his loom, at work. He had been there six years, and was to remain, I think, three more. He had been convicted as a receiver of stolen goods, but even after his long imprisonment, denied his guilt, and said he had been hardly dealt by. It was his second offence. He stopped his work when we went in, took off his spectacles, and answered freely to everything that was said to him, but always with a strange kind of pause first, and in a low, thoughtful voice. He wore a paper hat of his own making, and was pleased to have it noticed and commended.

He had very ingeniously manufactured a sort of Dutch clock from some disregarded odd and ends; and his vinegar-bottle served for the pendulum. Seeing me interested in this [121] contrivance, he looked up at it with a great deal of pride, and said that he had been thinking of improving it, and that he hoped the hammer and a little piece of broken glass beside it “would play music before long.”

He had extracted some colours from the yarn with which he worked, and painted a few poor figures on the wall. One, of a female, over the door, he called “The Lady of the Lake.” [121]