Becoming a gaoler II: marriages and mothers-in-law
When it came to his love life, George Reynell had a type: women connected to prison offices. His first wife was the widow of a prison warden, his second the daughter of one. As a result, Reynell spent...
View ArticleLooking for Women in 18th-Century Newgate
We tend to think of prisons as male spaces. So I'm trying an experiment. I will return to material I wrote about in my previous post, When Prisoners Complain, but I'll focus on the women this time. As...
View ArticleGrates and Keys: Violence in Early Modern Prisons, Part II
Richard Bell's recent post showed how a humble garden billhook could a potential tool of violence against prisoners. Keys, doors, locks, and grates could wreak a subtler kind of violence. Barring...
View ArticleRape and Infanticide at the Halstead House of Correction
George Dewing, the keeper of the Halstead House of Correction, was a monster who raped an inmate and murdered her child. Or he was framed. The version of the story in which he was a monster...
View ArticleReading Megan Comfort’s Doing Time Together as an Early Modernist.
Sometimes I try to lift my head out of the archives and read around in the growing and really awesome new literature on prisons in more recent times. This is the first of what I hope will be a series...
View ArticleThe persistent presence of the eighteenth century female debtor
We're pleased to present the following guest post by Alex Wakelam, a doctoral student in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure studying eighteenth-century female...
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