s word deliberately; for it is impossible
to distinguish in these tales of the prison-house how far their vice and
gloom are thrown into their manufacture only to meet a vile demand, and
how far they are an integral condition of thought in the minds of men
trained from their youth up in the knowledge of Londinian and Parisian
misery. The speciality of the plague is a delight in the exposition of
the relations between guilt and decrepitude; and I call the results of
it literature 'of the prison-house,' because the thwarted habits of body
and mind, which are the punishment of reckless crowding in cities,
become, in the issue of that punishment, frightful subjects of exclusive
interest to themselves; and the art of fiction in which they finally
delight is only the more studied arrangement and illustration, by
coloured firelights, of the daily bulletins of their own wretchedness,
in the prison calendar, the police news, and the hospital report.

The reader will perhaps be surprised at my separating the greatest work
of Dickens, _Oliver Twist_, with honour, from the loathsome mass to
which it typically belongs. That book is an earnest and uncaricatured
record of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full
of the gravest instruction, nor destitute of pathetic studies of noble
passion. Even the _Mysteries of Paris_ and Gaboriau's _Crime d'Augival_
are raised, by their definiteness of historical intention and
forewarning anxiety, far above the level of their order, and may be
accepted as photographic evidence of an otherwise incredible
civilisation, corrupted in the infernal fact of it, down to the genesis
of such figures as the Vicomte d'Augival, the Stabber,[155] the
Skeleton, and the She-wolf. But the effectual head of the whole
cretinous school is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover
watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame; and
its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for
the general market, of novels like _Poor Miss Finch_, in which the
heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found
dead with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.[156]

This literature of the Prison-house, understanding by the word not only
the cell of Newgate, but also and even more definitely the cell of the
Hotel-Dieu, the Hopital des Fous, and the grated corridor with the
dripping slabs of the Morgue, having its central root thus in the