Solitude, silence and Sydney Smith were not usually words found in conjunction. Indeed it would be hard to think of anyone who would suffer more under a regime of muffled seclusion than he. He was an irreverent and voluble Anglican clergyman, not a Trappist monk. He was also a delightful and amiable companion, effervescent, garrulous, gregarious, mischievous, a great gossip, an inveterate talker, a socialite and wide-ranging social commentator, animated in all by ‘a passionate love for common justice and common sense’, as he wrote in his Letters of Peter Plymely. As a magistrate he blithely disregarded legislation that he considered unjust, most especially the Game Laws which imposed harsh penalties on the poor who poached the pastime of the powerful so that ‘for every ten pheasants that fluttered in the wood, one English peasant was rotting in gaol’. Similarly he could not bear to commit young delinquents to custody. Instead he would give them a stern lecture and call for his private gallows, reducing them to tears. At that he would pardon them and ‘delay the arrival of his private gallows’.

Like so many others he had strong opinions about secondary punishments. He had visited prisons, he had thought about prisons, and finally, between 1821 and 1826, he had written extensively about prisons, not in pamphlets, tracts or reports but in several lengthy and well-researched articles published in the influential, Whig-supporting, Edinburgh Review. Smith wrote with wit and verve and what he wrote the public would eagerly devour. His was no voice crying in the wilderness, but one heard far and wide throughout the land and in the recesses of power.

He was much exercised by the fate of those in confinement, be it for their iniquities or their infirmities. But he drew a distinction between them, and advocated different ways of dealing with them: cruelty and kindness.