Sterne’s Captive and the Prison: Double Vision

Abstract

This essay contextualises Sterne’s captive from A Sentimental Journey in the debates about the form and function of the prison as a penal instrument, which raged in Parliament in 1778. In the same months, and the same city, the captive was returned to public attention through a Royal Academy exhibition in Piccadilly, which featured a much-commented upon painting, Sterne’s Captive, by Joseph Wright of Derby. This essay asks what light the contemporary prison debate can shed on Sterne’s text, and conversely, how painterly renderings of ‘The Captive’ in the 1770s, by Wright of Derby, and by John Hamilton Mortimer, can elaborate the disconcerting bifocalism of Sterne’s prison scene. These artistic stagings of the captive’s imprisoned state insist on the involvement of the viewer in the suffering on display, in distinctly Christian modalities which challenge a contemporary critical framing of this scene as a mechanics of sentimentalist avoidance. It returns to Sterne’s original a host of penological allusions which would have been evident to its earliest readers but which have become opaque, and offers close readings of three of the most innovative and influential paintings of A Sentimental Journey, and the relationship of compassion to inaction.