Genre:

Essay

Subjects:

Engineers, Architecture, Reading, Periodicals, Monographs, Popularization

    Reports that 'Captain Jebb [...] an officer in the Royal Engineers, distinguished for his mastery in military engineering' has, at the behest of the government, drawn up a single design to which every new prison in the country will conform, the 'first practical result' of which is 'the Model Prison at Pentonville [...] built somewhat after the main idea of Bentham's Panopticon' (710). Also notes that by a policy of allowing inmates access to more popular books and magazines their 'taste for reading [has] increased and improved'. Although the 'greater numbers still look to the Leisure Hour, Half Hours with the Best Authors, &c. [...] they rise through Chamber's Journal to popular works on history [...] to natural history and the Bridgewater Treatises, and even to books of a still more philosophic character, including some on difficult subjects of pure science'. (716)