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nineteenth-and twentieth-century conceptions of the novel have been retrospectively projected onto earlier, incipient fields of fictional writing.1 In English, this projection has been especially apparent in studies of early eighteenth-century literature where the term "novel" has long been used with little concern over historical accuracy. Using the example of Daniel Defoe's Roxana (first published in 1724), recent studies by Nicholas Seager and Mary Poovey have shown such processes of reinterpretation were already at work by 1740 when the model of domestic fiction absorbed earlier works and the continuum between fact and fiction began to break apart.2 These realizations are crucial, but, as I

Drawing on legal and economic history and transatlantic debates about the behavior of transported convicts, this essay reads Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders as a key to the eighteenth-century colonial turn in criminal sentencing. This shift, wherein vestigial ecclesiastical privileges and reports of spiritual conversion legitimated the commutation of death sentences to servitude abroad, renders the narrative's concern with penitence newly legible. Not merely in Moll's spiritual condition, the text's religious language and narrative structures consolidate the terms of a penal system whose Atlantic reach was enabled by legal fictions and demonstrations of belief.

This essay examines an outpouring of printed poems and biographical publications in the 1780s and 1790s that sought to shape the public image of the celebrated prison reformer John Howard. These materials, we argue, reveal the ways in which reform, empiricism, and Christian charity reinforced each other in late eighteenth-century popular imagination, and how this conjunction provoked a new vision of Britain’s empire and a backlash against mixing the scientific and the miraculous. As we show, Howard used the language of temperature to turn empirical data into evidence for the necessity of prison reform. This same thermometric language underwrote panegyric poems that represented Howard as global emissary of British benevolence—the icon of a new kind of empire whose power was symbolized by nearly miraculous capacity to temper inhospitable climates. This body of exuberant poetry transmuted data-based reform and technological advances in ventilation into proselytical triumph, a conjunction that was met, after Howard’s dramatic, self-inflicted death, with charges of overheated religious enthusiasm. As a result, Howard’s medical acquaintance and collaborators posthumously defended the temperateness of Howard’s empirical methods while also labeling him an amateur data collector, the lowly helpmeet of the professional man of science. By tracing Howard’s appearance in printed poetry and periodical writing, this essay illuminates the uneasy yet potent imbrication of reform culture, colonialism, medicine, and discipline formation in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

This essay identifies a new source for the politicization of walking in the final decades of the eighteenth century, John Howard's The State of the Prisons (1777). Howard made a case for reforming prisons in Britain and across Europe based on evidence collected on his wide-ranging travels, during which he made a practice of stepping into spaces of incarceration where others – including jailors themselves – refused to tread. As we show, Howard was celebrated for the seemingly global reach of his humanitarian mission, but in the work of poets and biographers he also became an icon for the levelling potential of walking into spaces occupied by the legally, socially and economically disenfranchised. Howard's text, however, presents a tension between asserting common humanity with prisoners and exercising patrician benevolence. As we show in conclusion, this tension persists in early nineteenth-century literary representations of both prison reform and walking by Wordsworth and De Quincey, whose texts trouble the (by then established) assumption that walking constituted a politically radical act of social levelling.