"A Living Tomb"

Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, from a nineteenth-century lithograph. This world-famous centerpiece of the American prison system was designed by the architect John Haviland and opened its doors in 1829. It's now a "preserved ruin."

Inspired by the doctrines of Quaker reformers and of Enlightenment idealists such as Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin, Eastern State Penitentiary was intended to rehabilitate convicts through a discipline of solitary confinement, labor, and moral instruction. This experimental prison, according to the reformer Roberts Vaux, sought “to furnish the criminal with every opportunity which christian duty enjoins, for promoting his restoration to the path of virtue, because seclusion is believed to be an essential ingredient in moral treatment.”

To some who entered its cells, though, solitary confinement at Eastern State seemed to be a terrifying fate. Charles Dickens described the inmates as men and women buried alive:

“Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife or children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison officers, but, with that exception, he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.”

One of the inmates Dickens encountered at Eastern State was a poet who used the pen-name Harry Hawser. In a poem called “The Captive,” he also described imprisonment as a kind of living death:

Fated to a living tomb,
For years on years in woe to brood
Upon the past, the Captive’s doom
Is galling chains and solitude.