Charles Dickens

I felt like this was a very different story than I have ever read. I was not sure if this was just a story or is Charles Dickens really did go to this prison and write about what he saw. It is possible that he could have looked up all of this information but from the way that it was presented, I feel like he had to have gone to this place because I really felt like I was in the prison looking at these poor people.

The main goal of this story is to make all the people on the outside aware of the conditions of this people in this prison. However, Dickens did not want to show people this with statistical information but he wanted the people to feel the way that he did when he walked through.

The first prisoners that he encounters are the women prisoners. I did not know if I felt bad for these women are not because it is their own fault for being there. When he looked at one woman, he described her as being “yellow, haggard, decrepit old woman, in a tattered gown that had once been black” but he also described another young woman as being unmoved and unaffected by the prison. I personally feel like the reason for this is because the old woman may have been there for a lot longer than the old lady and with time a person’s sanity may be lost and they will age much faster. He feels like the young woman had very neglectful parents who did not love them, but I have to assume that most of the people that are found in prison probably came from these kinds of parents. Parents are the people that mold their children in what they are to become, and those parents who did not nurture these children helped them to grow up on the wrong path.

The part that really hit me the most and made me the saddest was when he was walking through the school section. The prisoners were all boys under the age of fourteen and they had been imprisoned for pocket picking. He recalls that these boys all looked dishonest and they seemed pleased to be in there. This made me upset because in essence it is not these boys fault for the way they are. Like I said before, they must have had a very bad life growing up in a family that was very poor and just did not care about them. These young boys are truly hopeless and will probably never change because it seems like they have been sort of brainwashed for their whole lives.

When he walked to the condemned ward, I felt like most of these men were very hypocritical. The ones waiting for their judgment did not seem to be anxious or have any mental suffering because they felt like they still had hope. The only reason I feel like they were hypocritical was because none of these men even opened the Testament that was left for them. If they really wanted to have a sense of hope they needed to turn to another power.

This chapter ended with the reaction of a man that awaited death the following day. It is at this point, the man seemed extremely desperate. He is freaking out with every chime of the clock and he is trying to be forgiven by reading the bible. I feel like this may have been too late to start reading the bible and those men may have had a better fate than this man if they had opened that Testament. When he falls asleep, I feel like he is trying to ease his mind because he tries to apologize to his wife for what has happened. I could not imagine being able to count down the hours till my death and I really do not know how I would react.