This eBook was produced by Bryan Sherman
and David Widger
This novel so far differs from the other fictions by the same author thatit seeks to draw its interest rather from practical than ideal sources.Out of some twelve Novels or Romances, embracing, however inadequately, agreat variety of scene and character,—from "Pelham" to the "Pilgrims ofthe Rhine," from "Rienzi" to the "Last Days of Pompeii,"—"Paul Clifford"is the only one in which a robber has been made the hero, or thepeculiar phases of life which he illustrates have been brought into anyprominent description.
Without pausing to inquire what realm of manners or what order of crimeand sorrow is open to art, and capable of administering to the properends of fiction, I may be permitted to observe that the present subjectwas selected, and the Novel written, with a twofold object: First, todraw attention to two errors in our penal institutions; namely, a viciousprison-discipline, and a sanguinary criminal code,—the habit ofcorrupting the boy by the very punishment that ought to redeem him, andthen hanging the man at the first occasion, as the easiest way of gettingrid of our own blunders. Between the example of crime which the tyrolearns from the felons in the prison-yard, and the horrible levity withwhich the mob gather round the drop at Newgate, there is a connectionwhich a writer may be pardoned for quitting loftier regions ofimagination to trace and to detect. So far this book is less a pictureof the king's highway than the law's royal road to the gallows,—a satireon the short cut established between the House of Correction and theCondemned Cell. A second and a lighter object in the novel of "PaulClifford" (and hence the introduction of a semi-burlesque or travesty inthe earlier chapters) was to show that there is nothing essentiallydifferent between vulgar vice and fashionable vice, and that the slang ofthe one circle is but an easy paraphrase of the cant of the other.
The Supplementary Essays, entitled "Tomlinsoniana," which contain thecorollaries to various problems suggested in the Novel, have beenrestored to the present edition.
CLIFTON, July 25, 1840.
Most men who with some earnestness of mind examine into the mysteries ofour social state will perhaps pass through that stage of self-educationin which this Novel was composed. The contrast between conventionalfrauds, received as component parts of the great system of civilization,and the less deceptive invasions of the laws which discriminate themeum from the tuum, is tempting to a satire that is not without itsjustice. The tragic truths which lie hid in what I may call thePhilosophy of Circumstance strike through our philanthropy upon ourimagination. We see masses of our fellow-creatures the victims ofcircumstances over which they had no control,—contaminated in infancy bythe example of parents, their intelligence either extinguished or turnedagainst them, according as the conscience is stifled in ignorance orperverted to apologies for vice. A child who is cradled in ignominy,whose schoolmaster is the felon, whose academy is the House ofCorrection,—who breathes an atmosphere in which virtue is poisoned, towhich religion does not pierce,—becomes less a responsible and reasoninghuman being than a wild beast which we suffer to range in the wilderness,till it prowls near our homes, and we kill it in self-defence.
In this respect the Novel of "Paul Clifford" is a loud cry to society toamend the circumstance,—to redeem the victim.