Yet the first third of our list,--Peacock, Lytton, Disraeli, and Dickens,--with the addition of Reade, Trollope, and Butler, did not shrink from contact with red tape. Dickens and Reade have the monopoly of the department of Charities and Corrections, though Lytton asserted the purpose of _Paul Clifford_ to be an indictment against society’s manufacture and destruction of criminals; and of _Night and Morning_ to show the injustice and fallacy of its treatment respectively of vice and crime. In regard to the latter he says, in the Preface: “Let a child steal an apple in sport, let a starvling steal a roll in despair, and Law conducts them to the Prison, for evil communications to mellow them for the gibbet. But let a man spend one apprenticeship from youth to old age in vice--let him devote a fortune, perhaps colossal, to the wholesale demoralization of his kind--and he may be surrounded with the adulation of the so-called virtuous, and be served upon its knee by that Lackey--the Modern World!” Dickens starts his account with the English prison in _Pickwick_, and closes it in _Little Dorrit_. But it is in _David Copperfield_ that he stops to point out the whole thing as a stupid error. On the occasion of a visit to the “immense and solid building, erected at a great expense,” he reflects,--[301] “I could not help thinking as we approached the gate, 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 home of refuge for the deserving old.” Within, he finds the rêgime of solitary, unemployed confinement, and the official bait for professions of penitence, fine breeders of hypocrisy, six years before Reade makes the same point in _Never too Late to Mend_. But he sees in the exhibitions of No. 27 and No. 28--the Prize Show, the Crowning Glory--Lattimer, and Uriah Heep, an opportunity for his riotous caricature; while to Reade this degeneration of character is a wholly serious matter. Indeed, Reade waxes so wroth over the cruelty, mental and physical, practiced upon the hopeless victims that the satire itself is as scorching as Swift’s, though of course of less clear a flame. Yet the warden Hawes, chief culprit through main responsibility, is analyzed as after all irresponsible, on psychological and social grounds:[302]