I repaired to the prison … an immense and solid building, erected at vast expense. I could not help thinking … what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old …

It being just dinner-time, we went first into the great kitchen, where every prisoner's dinner was in course of being set out separately … with the regularity and precision of clock-work … I wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest, working community, of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined half so well. But I learned that ‘the system’ required high living; and, in short, to dispose of the system, once for all, I found that on that head and on all others, ‘the system’ put an end to all doubt, and disposed of all anomalies. Nobody appeared to have the least idea that there was another system, but the system, to be considered.

I was given to follies, but now I am sensible of my follies. There's a deal of sin outside. There's a deal of sin in my mother. There's nothing but sin everywhere – except here.