ABSTRACT
Between the conclusion of Barnaby Rudge and the inception of Chuzzlewit, the main event in Dickens's life had been, as we know, his visit to America, related in his book American Notes. Contemporary reviewers of that idiosyncratic travelogue had been struck, as modem readers are bound to be in their tum, by the considerable amount of space occupied in it by prisons. As a traveller, Dickens was in those days remarkably interested in the penal system of the countries he visited. Certainly one of the most powerful passages in the otherwise unsensational American Notes is that devoted to the description and discussion of the Tombs prison in New York, or to the Philadelphia gaol run on what was known as the solitary system. This fascination, which amounted at times to an additional, near-professional, speciality, may have had its origins in Dickens's childhood experiences . Not every notelist has at the age of 12 seen his father taken to prison
(again, it was to a debtors' prison that John Dickens went, but it was stilla prison), then seen the rest of the family join him there. Not every novelist has had to callupon his parents in prison, to share meals with them there - in short, to regard a prison as the temporary family centre, and as his home. For a novelist who was to become the apostle of the home and its values, this early experience must have been intensely traumatic.
