Not all supported penitentiaries; not all shared the humanitarian sentiment behind them; not all were as modulated as Sydney Smith in their critical reflections upon them. The times were a-changing. Expectations of extraordinary transformations had been roused but not realised. Doubt set in, and with doubt, distaste. One eminent Victorian went further than any other in voicing his contempt for the whole reformatory project. Nothing and no one would escape his viper's fangs.

In 1850 the so-called ‘Sage of Chelsea’, vastly influential social commentator, famed historian, and vitriolic polemicist, Thomas Carlyle, published his Latter-Day Pamphlets. These included an essay on ‘Model Prisons’, a brutal assault on what he called the ‘philanthropic movement’, members of which ‘embark in the sacred cause; resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water’.

Carlyle came from the Scottish Calvinist tradition, a ‘stern child of Ecclefechan’. He was Old Testament rather than New. He had long jettisoned the Christian God, but a rigid predestinarian pessimism and moral authoritarianism never deserted him. Although he knew no gospel, he could preach hell-fire. To be kinder to him than he was to others, the gastric ulcers that plagued him all his life may have contributed to his increasing irascibility. ‘Clay was in his blood, Calvinism in his head, dyspepsia in his stomach’ was one biographer's unkind but not unfair diagnosis. His nature was morose, and self-indulgent misery and hypochondria dogged his steps. The bitter tone of his work was a reflection of an unhappy life. Indeed life for him was a prison, but a prison of his own creation.