SOURCE: Tambling, Jeremy. “Prison-Bound: Dickens and Foucault.” In Great Expectations, edited by Roger D. Sell, pp. 123-42. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994.

In the following essay, republished several times after its first appearance in 1986, Tambling applies French philosopher Michel Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon to Dickens's Great Expectations.

Great Expectations has been called an analysis of ‘Newgate London’,¹ suggesting that the prison is everywhere implicitly dominant in the book, and it has been a commonplace of Dickens criticism, since Edmund Wilson's essay in The Wound and the Bow and Lionel Trilling's introduction to Little Dorrit, to see the prison as a metaphor throughout the novels. Not just a metaphor, of course: the interest that Dickens had in prisons themselves was real and lasting, and the one kind of concern leads to the other, the literal to the metaphorical. Some earlier Dickens criticism, particularly that associated with the 1960s...