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.”

John Howard’s enormous exertions to create public knowledge about prison conditions contrast sharply with his lack of investment in ordinary communication with family and friends. Constraints of time and energy imply tradeoffs in human activities. Personal dispositions vary across persons. No one can do everything. For an individual to be different from others is normal. Howard, however, made extreme choices between creating public knowledge and engaging in ordinary communication. Howard, moreover, became a new type of public hero. Howard’s life illustrates, in the communicative circumstances of eighteenth-century England, important communicative choices and their effects.

Howard’s actions indicate that he valued relatively little ordinary communication with family and friends. For example, in March, 1765, Howard’s wife died four days after giving birth to their only child, a son.^ Howard cared deeply for his son. Yet he also traveled extensively while his son was young: two months in Bath in 1766, two months in the Netherlands in 1769, and most of 1770 in Europe. Beginning in November 1773 and ending only with his death in Russia in 1790, Howard spent many months inspecting prisons, lazarettos, and hospitals in places far from home. He visited prisons throughout England in 1773, 1774, 1776, 1779, 1782, and 1788. He traveled widely in Europe in 1775, 1778, 1781, 1783, 1786, and 1789, with some of the trips extending into Poland, Russia, Turkey, Malta, and Portugal. While traveling, Howard communicated with adult friends through letters. There is no evidence that Howard corresponded with his son. Howard traveled on his own initiative to collect information that he considered to be important. The work that he undertook surely constrained greatly his opportunities to communicate with his young son.

Howard limited his communication with his son even when he was physically near to him. Howard’s son “frequently declared that he was afraid of his father.”^ Regarding Howard’s relationship with his son, one of Howard’s friends stated:

That Mr. H’s idea of education led him (as it has done many other wise and good men) to regard implicit obedience in a child as an essential groundwork, I readily admit; and that he managed so as to attain this point completely, I likewise know to be true. …That Mr. H’s conduct, with respect to his child, was such as was more likely to excite fear than affection, I have admitted, in asserting that inculcating perfect and unlimited obedience was his primary object.^

“Perfect and unlimited obedience” is a highly unlikely feature of a close, day-to-day, personal relationship.^ Similarly, fear is not consistent with extensive, personal communication. Contemporaries perceived Howard to have loved his son.^ Howard’s friends insisted that Howard did not cause his son to be judged insane and confined to an asylum. That is probably true. Yet it is also true that Howard’s communication with his son was highly limited in scope and time.

Howard also extraordinarily limited his communication with friends and acquaintances. An obituary of Howard noted that he “never partook of the public or private repasts to which he was so frequently invited.”^ One of Howard’s friends explained:

{Mr. H.} declined every invitation to diner or supper; not so much because he could not be a partaker of the repast, but for the same reason which prevented his going to any place of public entertainment, or even so much as looking into a news paper, viz. that he would suffer nothing to interrupt, for a moment, the main object of his pursuit; and that he employed the whole of his time, not devoted to sleep, in arranging the minutes or observations he had been making through the day.^

Howard apparently was keenly aware of the value of time. He linked time closely to purpose:

The value he set upon his time was, indeed, most remarkable. Punctual to the minute in every engagement he made, he usually sat, when in conversation, with his watch in his hand, which he rested upon his knee, and though in the midst of an interesting anecdote or argument, so soon as the moment he had fixed for his departure arrived, he arose, took up his hat, and left the house.^

In 1778, after meeting Howard for the first time, Jeremy Bentham wrote with admiration about Howard’s concentration on acquiring information about prison conditions:

His thoughts, his conversation, his writings are confined to this one object. Prospects, palaces, and pictures he passes by with an indifference equal to that of the Cynic and much better grounded.^

One of Howard’s friends recalled:

He {Howard} mentioned being once prevailed upon in Italy to go and hear some extraordinary fine music; but, finding his thoughts too much occupied by it, he would never repeat the indulgence.^

Howard enjoyed conversing and socializing with women. He wrote letters directly to Samuel Whitbread’s wife.^ Howard’s communication with women was unlikely to be directly related to his prison examinations. Nonetheless, collecting and disseminating information about prisons apparently predominated among Howard’s practice of communication from November 1773 through to his death in 1790.

Howard understood truth to be separate from persons and more important than persons, including his friends and himself. According to one of Howard’s friends, Howard

would trust the report of no person, where he could examine himself, having, as he told me, often experienced how little dependence was to be placed on accounts or measurements given in the most celebrated books of travels, &c.^

Howard personally collected information about prison and hospital conditions. He had this information published in books. Howard wanted others to recognize this information, not as his account, but as truth independent from his person. Howard’s concern for first-person observation echoed a fundamental theme in eighteenth-century natural philosophy and subsequent science. Modern science seeks to separate truth from God, peer reviewers, personal and institutional prestige, and academic rankings.^

Emphasizing his devaluation of himself relative to truth, Howard subjected himself to grave risks in order to collect information. To learn about the conditions of quarantine, Howard in 1786 exposed himself to the plague on a ship traveling to Venice. He fell ill with fever, but recovered. In 1789, against the entreaties of his friends, Howard made arrangements for his death and set out to encounter the plague again on a planned three-year trip to Russia, Turkey, Egypt, the Barbary Coast, and other areas in the East. Howard explained his motives thus:

Should it please God to cut off my life in the prosecution of this design, let not my conduct be uncandidly imputed to rashness or enthusiasm, but to a serious, deliberate conviction that I am pursuing the path of duty, and to a sincere desire of being made an instrument of more extensive usefulness to my fellow-creatures than could be expected in the narrower circle of a retired life.^

One of Howard’s friends declared, “Of him, it might truly be said, ‘Amicus carus, sed carior Veritas’” (a friend is dear, but truth is dearer).^ Howard died on his trip through the East. But the information that he collected was preserved and published in an expanded version of The State of the Prisons. Few today who know of John Howard have read that information.

Public acclaim for Howard conflated creating public knowledge and communicating with friends. Howard was called “the prisoner’s friend” and “the philanthropist.”^ ^ Howard didn’t typically establish ongoing relationships with prisoners. Given the scope of his inspection tours, he couldn’t have spent much time with specific persons in prisons even if he had been interested in doing so. Howard made prison conditions public knowledge and hence a public concern. That action has little relation to the practice of ordinary communication among friends.

A monument erected in 1790 above Howard’s grave in Kherson, Ukraine, highlighted the extent to which Howard’s public image conflated different communicative practices. This monument, which included a bust of Howard, was inscribed with similar epitaphs in Russian and in Latin:

Хоч би хто ти був тут друг твій похований. {Whoever you may be, here your very close friend is buried.}

Ad Sepulcrum stas Quisquis es Amici. {In this tomb lies your friend, whoever you are.}^

The Russian inscription uses the familiar form of “you.” It also uses the word “друг,” a term for a very dear, personal friend, not merely one friend among many. Latin lacks these social inflections. Around the world, Howard was considered to be both a very dear, personal friend to prisoners and a philanthropist, a lover of everyone.

Ordinary communication with family and friends involves much different practice of communication than does creating public knowledge. A person might be a particular prisoner’s friend, and do nothing to address general problems of prison conditions. Moreover, even a person who caused great harms to humanity might be a good friend to some human. Public acclaim for Howard mistakenly encompassed within the good of public knowledge the good of ordinary communication with family and friends.