ABSTRACT
Howard was one of those rare men whose private compulsions seem to capture the imagination of their class. The attempt to raise a statue in his honor in 1786, as well as the hagiographies and elegies published after his death indicate how deeply his private quest appealed to his contemporaries. […]
The veneration accorded Howard the man helps to explain the appeal of Howard the disciplinarian. He became the symbol of the philanthropic vocation, canonized by a middle class seeking representations of its best virtues. There is irony in Howard’s reputation, since he was lauded by the very gentlemen whose neglect was set out in page after page of ‘The State of the Prisons.’ Having demonstrated the emptiness of the magistracy’s reputation for solicitude, he found his own crusade taken up as a vindication of that reputation. The irony is superficial though, since Howard had no intention of embarrassing his own class. While his censure angered individual magistrates, it did not antagonize them collectively because he cast his campaign in terms of a confrontation with Evil in the abstract, rather than with particular groups of men. Hence, he was able to gain a reputation for disinterested, apolitical philanthropy, which vested his disciplinary ideas with particular authority.
