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.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the "Lives of Victorian Literary Figures" series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.