ABSTRACT
I wish it to be clearly understood that these are the honest reminiscences of one retired from Government service—that many years of prison experience enable me to offer my readers a fair statement of life and adventure at Brixton and Millbank prisons, and afford me the opportunity of attempting to convey some faint impression of the strange hearts that beat—perhaps break, a few of them—within the high walls between them and general society. I am anxious to set about this task earnestly, and in a good spirit—I will “nothing extenuate;” I have no reason to “set down aught in malice.” I have the party-feelings of no clique to satisfy, no personal wrongs to seek to vindicate, and I am confident that the relation of these prison incidents can do no harm, and may, by God’s help, effect some little good. For I am not alone in my conviction that these stories of erring and mistaken women—fallen sisters, but still sisters, whom we have no right to cast aside or shrink away from—do in many cases prove that there is no estate so low but that the elements of the better nature are existent, and still struggling for the light. […]
