In England in the 1770s, John Howard pioneered the creation of public knowledge about prison conditions. Access to prisons and jails in eighteenth-century England was relatively free. Howard’s innovation was to use that access not for personal communication but for creating public knowledge. That public knowledge consisted of Howard’s factual, written observations about prison conditions in a large number of prisons.

Howard began personally visiting prisons and jails in November, 1773. Echoing the Royal Society’s motto of ‘nullius in verba’ (follow no authority’s command), Jeremy Bentham described Howard’s prison visits:

He is set down at the door of a prison, makes enquiries under a certain number of heads which exhaust the subject, does his business and drives off again to another. His thoughts, his conversation, his writing are confined to this one object. …He is accurate to an extreme: takes nothing from report: and asserts nothing but what has come under the cognizance of his senses.^

Howard recorded names of prison administrators, their salaries or forms of income, the number and types of prisoners, fees imposed on prisoners, prison rules, sanitary conditions, access to alcoholic drinks, cell dimensions, conditions of darkness, dampness, and cold, religious teaching, and other prison facts. Despite the objective, descriptive, conceptually fragmented nature of his prison examinations, Howard, who preceded the development of social science, used the language of a criminal-court proceeding to describe his work:

The difficulty I found in searching out evidence of fraud and cruelty in various articles, together with other sources of distress, obliged me to repeat my visits, and travel over the kingdom more than once; after all, I suspect that many frauds have been concealed from me; and that sometimes the interest of my informants prevailed over their veracity.^

Howard pursued his work with the steadfast diligence of a government bureaucrat. He developed considerable expertise in prisons and prison administration. Howard’s technical expertise, as well as his theatrical skills, helped him to recognize and acquire true information:

Honest Gaolers receive him with open arms: dishonest (ones) tremble at his approach. He renders both sorts alike pliant to his purpose: the one by their hope, the other by their fear. … Practise has made him familiar with all their arts and all their ways: when he has addressed himself to any of them for the first time he has commonly been taken for a brother of the profession. He has at length acquired such a command over them, that in his last tour (for he has gone over England more than once) he has never been denied satisfaction in any single article.^

Howard did not visit prisons with an authoritative commission or for a particular, official purpose. The form of his knowledge-seeking was, however, authoritative and official in a new way. Prisons were his subject.

Country boundaries mattered little to Howard’s method. Just as he visited prisons in Britain, Howard also visited prisons in Belgium, Holland, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Turkey, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Howard by stealth broke into a prison in Lyon, France:

All access to this prison is strictly forbidden to strangers, the transgression of the order is punished with confinement in the gallies for life. … By dint of enquiries, {Howard} instructed himself in the several turnings and windings which led to the prison; and taking advantage from his personal appearance, which was well-calculated to assist the honest deception, dressed himself at all points like a Frenchman; and, with his hat under his arm, passed hastily by twenty-four officers, and penetrated into the very apartment where the English gentleman was confined, without impediment or suspicion.^

Like a scientist seeking to penetrate the mysteries of nature, Howard sought the truth about prison conditions. Country boundaries do not delimit truth. Howard embraced the ideal of universal knowledge in his practice of visiting prisons.

Howard was extraordinarily dedicated to his pioneering subject of study. Scholarship in Howard’s time mainly consisted of studying written texts and writing additional texts. Jeremy Bentham wistfully noted that Howard had done much more than verbal work:

My venerable friend was much better employed than in arranging words and sentences. Instead of doing what so many could do if they would, what he did for the service of mankind, was what scarce any man could have done, and no man would do, but himself. In the scale of moral deserts the labours of the legislator and the writer are as far below his as earth is below heaven.^

Howard did not directly serve prisoners. He wrote verbal records of his observations of prison conditions. To make these observations, Howard personally traveled perhaps 60,000 miles, spent ₤30,000 of his own money, endured horrible conditions, and subjected himself to great health risks. Howard died in 1790 while traveling in Russia to inspect hospitals. He was acclaimed world-wide as a philanthropist, social reformer, and friend of prisoners. He would be more accurately described as a theatrical proto-social scientist who helped to create a new book of public knowledge.

John Howard’s early work on extreme temperatures illustrates that his relations with influential persons and authoritative institutions were central to his success in creating public knowledge. Howard, a non-conformist, studied at the Congregational Fund Academy at Moorfields for a year or two about 1740. The universities at Oxford and Cambridge at that time did not admit students who were not members of the Church of England. The Fund Academy at Moorfields was established to provide for non-conformists the equivalent of Oxford or Cambridge . The Fund Academy’s director during Howard’s time there was John Eames, a close friend of Isaac Newton and widely recognized for his erudition. Howard apparently had little academic success, but at the Academy he established life-long friendships with John Densham, a tutor; with Richard Price, a classmate; and with others among the academy’s intellectually influential circles.

Howard’s election to the Royal Society in 1756 seems to have come not from any scholarly merit, but from the influence of his friends. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge was the premier learned society in Britain. Howard was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on May 13, 1756 at age twenty-nine. This was a relatively young age to become a Fellow. Howard’s nomination paper stated:

John Howard, Esqre, of Old Broad Street, London, having for some years pursued mathematical studies, and being desirous of the honour of being admitted into the Royal Society, we on our personal knowledge of him recommend him as a true lover of natural philosophy.
{Signed}
Macclesfield
Parker
John Canton
John Ellicott^

A leading nineteenth-century scientific authority stated in 1873 in a celebratory history of Howard and his work:

In the year 1756 just twenty names were added to the list of {Royal Society} members. Of these nine were foreign, and eleven English. Three out of the eleven (Benjamin Franklin being one of them) had the signatures of George, Earl of Macclesfield (then the president of the Society), and of his son and successor to the title, Thomas, Lord Parker, at the head of their nomination papers. The papers themselves are not printed forms, but written documents setting forth distinctly and with discrimination the respective claims of the nominees; and in no instance are these claims other than real and respectable. And, lastly, it is well worthy of remark that no event, as far as I can ascertain, had yet occurred in the eventful life of Howard to give him such public prestige as might take the place of scientific merit;^

This authority then quite implausibly argued that Howard “had done something or other” in mathematics or natural philosophy to merit his election to the Royal Society. No evidence exists that Howard had aptitude for mathematics or that his years pursing mathematical studies produced any accomplishments. One of Howard’s friends remarked about 1794:

This honor {membership in the Royal Society} was not, I presume, conferred upon him in consequence of any extraordinary proficiency in science which he had manifested; but rather in conformity to the laudable practice of that society, of attaching gentlemen of fortune and leisure to the interests of knowledge, by incorporating them into their body.^

Many gentlemen “of fortune and leisure” did not become members of the Royal Society. Desiring the honor and having influential friends undoubtedly also mattered greatly. Most probably, Howard was elected to the Royal Society in 1756 because he desired that honor and his influential friends favored him with it.

Being a member of the Royal Society provided Howard with an important resource for making knowledge. Well before his work on prison conditions, Howard published three articles in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Howard’s first article was based on temperature measurements he made at his home. The article consisted of two sentences read to the Royal Society and published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1764. The first sentence provided the substance of the work:

I would beg leave to acquaint you of a degree of cold that I observed at Cardington {Howard’s residence}, in Bedfordshire, the 22d of November last: just before Sun rise Farenheit’s scale by one of Bird’s thermometers being so low as 10 and ½.^

Howard’s second article presented twenty-eight temperature readings he made in the baths and springs at Bath, England in 1765.^ Howard’s third publication provided temperature measurements in even more daring circumstances.^ While in Italy in 1770, Howard measured the heat of the ground at various points on Mount Vesuvius, a volcano. Howard explained in a letter to a close friend:

as I ascended I found it 114º, 134, 149, 167, 185, at the top 220. After I had got the better of the smoak {smoke} by standing in it a quarter of an hour, I descended into the Mouth when I again took it 2 or 3 times, where it rais’d my Thermor {thermometer} to 240º and fired some paper I put into some holes. I would fain have went lower but my guides said they durst not. As I have not heard of any person going down even the little part I did since the great eruption of Oct. 6, nor of any person taking the heat, I thought it would afford you a little entertainment.^

In all three publications, which spanned seven years, Howard presented the same type of observations. These observations were made with the same instrument, required no particular skill for measurement, and had little relevance to any general theoretical or empirical project. Howard’s thermometer work documented extremes and took science to places others dared not go. Howard’s thermometer work is knowledge because of its publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Howard’s thermometer work shows a pattern of knowledge creation similar to Howard’s work on prison conditions. In both cases, Howard recorded information in extreme circumstances not attractive for comfortable, leisurely pursuit of knowledge. Another person who dared venture into those circumstances could have easily recorded the same information that Howard recorded. Unlike other such persons, Howard’s social position allowed him to create relatively widely accessible, authoritative information — public knowledge.

Sheriffs and magistrates in eighteenth-century England had authority to gather information about prison conditions, but little interest in doing so. Sheriffs and commissioners of the peace were typically gentlemen from the local elite appointed as a matter of patronage. Visiting jails as a duty of office did not offer an occasion for status-displaying public ceremony. “Gaol fever,” now called typhus, linked jails to contagion and death. Sheriffs’ interests generally did not favor their visiting prisons:

some sheriffs excuse themselves from attention to this part of their duty, on account of short duration, expense, and trouble of their office: and these gentlemen, as well as gentlemen in the commission of the peace, have no doubt been fearful of the consequences of looking into prisons. … {Some jailers} have said, “Those gentlemen think that if they came into my gaol, they should soon be in their graves.”^

Jailers who wanted to avoid supervision and interference in their administration of jails had an incentive to exaggerate the risks of visiting jails. Fear of jail fever did not stop wives and children from living with their husbands and fathers in jail. But in public officials’ weighing of interests, such fears had greater effect.

John Howard started to investigate prison conditions about the same time as parliamentary initiatives addressed prison conditions. On February 8, 1773, Howard was appointed High Sheriff of Bedfordshire. On February 18, 1773, the House of Commons ordered a bill to relieve acquitted prisoners from paying jailers’ fees. On March 19, 1773, the House of Commons went into committee to consider how to maintain clergy in jails and debtors’ prisons. Samuel Whitbread, a wealthy Bedfordshire brewer, and Robert Henley Ongley, son-in-law of the prosperous Bedfordshire linen merchant Samuel Ongley, were among the seven sponsors of the latter bill.

Howard’s appointment as High Sheriff of Bedfordshire probably occurred in large part through his personal connections to Samuel Whitbread. Howard was sent as a boy from London to Cardington, Bedfordshire, in the late 1720s. There he met Samuel Whitbread, who was born in Cardington and was about six years older than Howard. Whitbread and Howard became close friends. Whitbread subsequently became a wealthy brewer and major landholder in Bedfordshire. Whitbread built upon his business success and local influence to become a member of the House of Commons. Whitbread served as a member of the House of Commons for Bedfordshire from 1768 to 1790. From 1756 to 1758 and from 1762 to the end of Howard’s life, Howard resided in Cardington as a Samuel Whitbread’s friend and neighbor.

Howard was not a natural choice for High Sheriff of Bedfordshire. This office was the highest royal public office in the county. Howard had not previously served in any public office and had no noble or professional credentials. Moreover, under the Test Acts, the holder of this office was required to take the sacraments of the Church of England. Howard was member of a dissenting church. Dissenters would potentially be subject to significant penalties if they refused the declaration and sacraments required under the Test Acts. Howard’s appointment as High Sheriff involved political risks for Howard and his supporters.

Concern about prison conditions had particular local sympathy in Bedfordshire. In the seventeenth century, Samuel Whitbread’s family were lesser gentry in Bedfordshire and held minor public offices. Whitbread’s family probably knew John Bunyan, who also lived most of his life near and in Bedford. Whitbread’s grandfather left the Church of England to join the Independent Church that Bunyan started in Bedford.^ John Howard was also a member of this church until its split in 1772.^ Bunyan achieved great fame as the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan wrote this Christian allegory in Bedford jails where he was held for about twelve years for preaching without a license. The Bedford jails, including the ones in which Bunyan was held, were the first jails that Howard inspected. Religious liberty was a central value to the dissenting communities in which Whitbread and Howard were raised. Whitbread and Howard most likely knew the story of Bunyan’s life, sympathized with him, and valued the spiritual work he produced while imprisoned.

Howard’s interest in prison conditions was closely related to the House of Commons’ interest in prison conditions. As High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, Howard recognized the same problem that was the object of the parliamentary bill in early 1773:

the circumstance which excited me to activity in their {prisoners’} behalf was, the seeing, some – who by the verdict of Juries were declared not guilty; some – on whom the grand jury did not find such an appearance of guilt as subjected them to trial; and some – whose prosecutors did not appear against them; — after having been confined for months, dragged back to gaol, and locked up again till they should pay sundry fees to the gaoler, the clerk of assize, etc.

Howard wasn’t able to resolve this hardship within his office as sheriff:

In order to address this hardship, I applied to the justices of the county for a salary to the gaoler in lieu of his fees. The bench were properly affected with the grievance and willing to grant the relief desired: but they wanted a precedent for charging the county with the expense. I therefore rode into several neighboring counties in search of one; but I soon learned that the same injustice was practiced in them;^

The problem evidently wasn’t just lack of knowledge concerning circumstances of imprisonment, but also local material interests that resisted reform. Howard’s term as sheriff ended on Nov. 4, 1773. He was not appointed to another term. Most likely, Howard did not seek re-appointment because he perceived better opportunities for improving prison conditions through work at the national level.

Immediately after his term as Bedfordshire sheriff expired, Howard began collecting information on prison conditions throughout England and sharing that information with the House of Commons. From Nov. 4, 1773 to Mar. 4, 1774, Howard interspersed traveling to prisons with time spent in London. He collected information at seventeen prisons in eleven counties in mid-England from November 4 to November 27, 1773. He probably spent December and the first three weeks of January in London, except for a trip south of London where, from Dec. 9 to Dec. 17, he collected information at seven prisons in counties southwest of London. Howard may have spent time in December and January with his son, who was in school in London, and with his aunt, who lived in London. During this time, Howard also may have conferred with members of Parliament.^ On Jan. 23, 1774, Howard began another prison inspection tour. Between Feb. 10 and Feb. 17 he passed back through London, where he met with the Select Committee of the House of Commons formed to address prison conditions.^ Howard resumed jail inspections on Feb. 18, heading south, and returned to London by Mar. 1. On Mar. 4, 1774, Howard testified before the House of Commons on the state of prisons in England.

Howard’s prison/jail inspections were closely associated with legislative activity in the House of Commons. On February 17, 1774, a bill directed to relieving fees imposed on discharged prisoners and improving prisoners’ health was read to the House of Commons. This bill added to the similar 1773 bill additional provisions concerning prison sanitary conditions. Prison sanitary conditions and prisoners’ health were central concerns in Howard’s information collection effort. Samuel Whitbread and John St. John, who also may have been one of Howard’s friends, were among the bill’s sponsors. When Howard testified before the House on Mar. 4, 1774, he presented information that he almost surely had discussed with interested members of the House of Commons in previous months. The House greatly appreciated Howard’s testimony. It thanked him with a formal resolution acknowledging the “Humanity and Zeal which have led him to visit the several Gaols of this Kingdom.”

Howard’s collecting information about prisons has tended to be romanticized as the spontaneous initiative of a philanthropic individual who, with his extraordinary collection of information, spurred national reform. As a scholar of Howard’s work has noted, “Although no direct evidence has been adduced, it has been generally assumed that Howard instigated Popham’s action {in introducing in the House of Commons in 1773 and 1774 bills concerning prison conditions}.”^ In The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, first published in 1777, Howard is represented as stating:

Upon this subject {prison conditions} I was examined in the House of commons in March 1774…. Soon after that, Mr. Popham, member for Taunton, repeated the humane attempt which had miscarried a few years before; and brought in a bill for the relief of prisoners who should be acquitted – respecting their fees; and another bill for preserving the health of prisoners, and preventing the gaol-distemper.^

Howard’s chronology is not exactly accurate. Popham sponsored bills for the relief of prisoners in Feb. 1773 and in Feb. 1774. Thus Popham’s second attempt occurred before Howard’s testimony to the House, and Popham’s first attempt was a year before. More generally, the circumstances and dates of the House of Commons’ actions and those of Howard suggest that the possibility of national action to address prison conditions motivated Howard’s extraordinary effort to collect information.

Howard helped to disseminate the acts addressing prison conditions that Parliament passed in 1774. The act concerning the health of prisoners (14 Geo. III c. 59) included a clause authorizing Justices of the Peace “to order this Act to be painted in large and legible Characters upon a Board, and hung up in some conspicuous Part of each of the said Gaols and Prisons.” Howard contributed to furthering that legislative directive:

Acts of Parliament are usually printed on black letter; which from the difficulty of reading might contradict the humane intentions of the Legislature: To obviate this, Mr Howard had the two bills printed in Roman character at his own expense, and sent to the keeper of every county gaol in England.^

The difference between black letter and Roman characters was not merely instrumental; black letter had the weight of traditional legal authority, while Roman characters where associated with religious heresy. Howard did not let such concerns deter him from making the acts more legible (and perhaps also simpler). Such actions were in accordance with the House of Commons’ intention to communicate the law effectively to prisoners.

Just as for the prison acts of 1774, John Howard was associated with the Penitentiary Act of 1779. After The State of the Prisons had been published and after the second draft of the bill that became the Penitentiary Act had been introduced in the House of Commons, William Eden credited Howard with contributing extensively to drafting the Penitentiary Act. Careful historical review indicates that Howard contributed nothing to the first draft of the Penitentiary Act and probably little afterwards. Through the insistence of William Blackstone, Howard was appointed one of the three penitentiary supervisors after the bill was enacted.^ The Penitentiary Act of 1779, like the prison acts of 1774, had little effect on prison conditions. Howard’s association with these national legislative acts linked his information about prison conditions with national authority. Information with authority are central attributes of public knowledge.

While John Howard formally authored The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777), others largely drafted and edited this book. In 1771, John Aikin authored a book on hospital conditions. Aikin’s book apparently influenced Howard’s subsequent examination of prison conditions. In addition, Aikin helped to draft and edit The State of the Prisons. That book was printed in Warrington, where Aikin lived. In a celebratory, posthumous biography of Howard, Aikin explained:

{Howard} chose the press of Mr. Eyres at Warrington, induced by various elegant speciments which had issued from it, and by the opportunity a country press afforded, of having the work done under his own inspection, at his own time, and with all the minute accuracy of correction he determined to bestow on it. I may also say, that an opinion of the advantage he might there enjoy of some literary assistance in the revision and improvement of his papers, was a farther motive.^

Aikin added that Howard and he formed an “intimate personal acquaintance” when Howard came to Warrington for the printing of The State of the Prisons. Howard in early 1774 had traveled to Warrington to propose marriage to Aikin’s sister. Aikin and Howard surely knew each other before Howard came to Warrington for the printing of The State of the Prisons.

The State of the Prisons was printed at a key geographic node in Dissenting networks that closely connected Howard and Aikin. The Warrington press was founded at the same time as the Warrington Academy. Aikin’s father was a tutor at Warrington Academy. The Warrington press published works from Aikin and other leading Dissenting intellectuals associated with the Warrington Academy.^ Howard was religiously, educationally, and socially a part of the dissenting networks that included Aikin and the Warrington press and academy. The press at Warrington was a propitious place for Howard to draw upon the resources of those networks to produce, disseminate, and promote The State of the Prisons.

Richard Price, another important Dissenting intellectual, also helped to produce The State of the Prisons. Price was one of Howard’s classmates at the Fund Academy in the early 1740s and a close, life-long friend. In Price’s hands, a draft of The State of the Prisons “underwent a revision, and received occasionally considerable alterations.” Price himself may have written a portion of the published version of Howard’s book. In his personal journal, Price described editing Howard’s manuscript as “a burden upon me.”^ In letters to Price, Howard declared:

I am ashamed to think how much I have accumulated your labours, yet I glory in that assistance to which I owe so much credit in the work, and, under Providence, success in my endeavours.

It is from your kind aid and assistance, my dear friend, that I derive so much of my character and influence. I exult in declaring it, and shall carry a grateful sense of it to the last hour of my existence.^

As John Aikin noted in a posthumous edition incorporating Howard’s final prison visits, Price would have worked on that edition as well, if illness had not prevented him from doing so.^

Howard probably made only a nominal contribution to drafting and editing The State of the Prisons. In addition to the work of John Aiken and Richard Price, John Densham, one of Howard’s tutors at the Fund Academy, helped to create from Howard’s notebooks a first draft of The State of the Prisons. Howard’s weak literary skills apparently were well-known among his friends and associates. In his celebratory, posthumous biography of Howard, Aikin acknowledged Howard’s literary “diffidence” in the course of attempting to buttress Howard’s importance as author:

With his papers thus corrected {by John Densham and Richard Price}, Mr. Howard came to the press at Warrington; and first he read them all over carefully with me, which perusal was repeated, sheet by sheet, as they were printed. As new facts and observations were continually suggesting themselves to his mind, he put the matter of them upon paper as they occurred, and then requested me to clothe them in such expressions as I thought proper. On these occasions, such was his diffidence, that I found it difficult to make him acquiesce in his own language when, as frequently happened, it was unexceptionable.^

A thoroughly researched and insightful analysis of Howard’s literary skills concluded:

That such meagre writing skills would have allowed him {Howard} more than nominal participation in organizing and writing up his complex prison data seems to me very unlikely. Any manuscripts he himself may have produced (and only after painful struggle) would have required editing of a kind tantamount to rewriting.^

A Howard biography first published in 1818 mentioned, in addition to Densham, Aikin, and Price, four other persons who helped to draft and edit The State of the Prisons. All were members of Dissenting churches, as was Howard. Other biographers have recognized that Howard probably didn’t write The State of the Prisons. That book seems to have been a collective enterprise among Dissenting intellectuals.

Rather than being a book to be read, The State of the Prisons was an artifact that declared the state of prisons to be public knowledge and hence of public concern. The book had 489 quarto pages made with excellent paper and presswork.^ A full-page dedication at the beginning of the book thanked the members of the House of Commons for encouraging the work and for the honor that they had conferred on the author. On the title page, John Howard included after his name “F.R.S.” (Fellow of the Royal Society). That appended credential indicated Howard’s scientific authority and associated it with his authorship of this book. The State of the Prisons thus impressed physically and with its institutional connections.

Howard made prison conditions public knowledge by widely distributing The State of the Prisons. Howard’s distribution strategy explicitly differed from commercial bookselling:

so zealous was Mr. Howard to diffuse information, and so determined to obviate any idea that he meant to repay his expenses by the profitable trade of book-making, that, besides a profuse munificence in presenting copies to all the principal persons in the kingdom, and all his particular friends, he insisted on fixing the price of the volume so low, that, had every copy been sold, he would still have presented the public with all the plates, and great part of the printing. And this practice he followed in all his subsequent publications; so that, with literal propriety, he may be said to have GIVEN them to the world.^

An obituary for Howard similarly noted, “all his publications he gave away a vast number of copies among his acquaintances in the most liberal manner.”^ Howard had many influential friends. The State of the Prisons quickly became widely known in England and around the world.

Most of The State of the Prisons almost surely wasn’t widely read. The book is largely organized by prison, and for each prison, includes many facts not connected conceptually or narratively. A scholar of Howard’s work described reading The State of the Prisons as “arduous.”^ Howard explicitly noted:

the collections {in The State of the Prisons} are not published for general entertainment; but for the perusal of those who have it in their power to give redress to the sufferers.^

The State of the Prisons doesn’t provide entertaining reading. But it also isn’t a technical book addressed to experts. The State of the Prisons made prisoners’ sufferings a public concern. In eighteenth-century England, that was a significant “re-dressing.”