ABOUT BOOK

Based on the writer's personal knowledge as a visitor (a "voluntary" one, he takes care to say) to these houses of detention, supplemented by references to the records. The author seems to have acquired his taste for jail-hunting from Dickens, of whose novels he was an earnest student while they were appearing in serial form. Penology was a hobby with Dickens. Some of his most powerful and dramatic work deals with prison life and character, and Mr. Trumble quotes him freely.