Jane Austen’s Aunt Behind Bars

Historian Stephen Wade’s new book makes some footnotes of history fascinating.

This new book brings together Stephen Wade’s two areas of interest, focusing on the writers in the reigns of Anne to Victoria. The essays here recount and explore the prison experience of writers, both famous and obscure, who came to know the insides of Britain’s prisons.

The collected essays explore the lives of several writers in Georgian and Victorian Britain, in terms of their knowledge and experience of prison life. This book focuses on the lives of the writers themselves, or on the prison stretches endured by their relatives or acquaintances.  Some of these writers were locked up for debt, while others were deprived of liberty for sedition or treason. Here the reader will find, amongst many other stories, accounts of Dickens’s father in debtors’ prison, of Leigh Hunt living with his whole family in The Surrey House of Correction and of Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol.