Rights, responsibilities and religion in a mid-Victorian convict prison

Abstract

This article investigates the rights and responsibilities of both a prison governor and a prison chaplain in a Victorian Convict Prison. Major Hickey and Reverend Francis served respectively as Governor and Chaplain of HMP Dartmoor in the early 1870s and developed a mutual feeling of irreconcilable resentment following a clash of personalities and ideas regarding the management and punishment of male convicts in one of the most notorious of all Victorian English convict prisons. It details the causes and repercussions of the ensuing argument that led to Reverend Francis resigning his post and complaining directly to the Director of Convict Prisons about both his treatment and that of the convicts under his spiritual care. The paper relates this personal argument to the wider philosophical debates over late-Victorian penal policies that were becoming known to a larger audience thanks to both the publication of numerous prison enquiry reports and the published autobiographies of a number of erudite and well-educated middle-class convicts which proliferated during the period in question.