Imprisoned by duty


The Excellent Mrs Fry: unlikely heroine Anne Isba


CONTINUUM, 256PP, £30 ■Tablet Bookshop price £27


t is hardly an enticing title for Anne Isba’s biography of the prison reformer, and the book is written in a style to match: a litany of events, a list of good works and the often complaisant-sounding comments of their performer.


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Although Elizabeth Fry did an enormous amount of good in bringing “private good works into the public domain”, as the jacket puts it, she sounds, in this account, distressingly dreary in herself and a hopeless mother, who left her large family (11 children, with babies arriving almost yearly) to pursue her public work: the reform of prisons in Britain, on the Continent, and finally on the convict ships to Australia.


Of course, the reforms she made were NOVEL OF THE WEEK Contagion of guilt


Nemesis Philip Roth JONATHAN CAPE, 283PP, £16.99 ■ Tablet Bookshop price £15.30


ou might at first be disappointed by how stark and pedestrian is the style of this book, how unstylish, in fact. Philip Roth is the opposite of Nabokov or Amis: he seems irritably to dispense with grace. His unadornment gives a sense of transparent actuality, as if he is urgently reporting on real people, while also grappling with vast metaphysical and moral issues. Even in such a short novella, he takes on the problem of evil, free will, original sin, and how far an individual’s debt to his fellows extends. The metaphor for these themes is the all too literal polio epidemic of 1944, which raged in the Jewish Weequahic section of Newark. In that mercilessly hot summer, Jewish mothers purge and sterilise, but are powerless to stop the spread of the disease. Nobody knows what causes it, so everybody is suspicious of everybody else: the Jews are scapegoated, as they scapegoat one another, as disease-carriers. The main protagonist, Bucky Cantor, a 23-year-old whose poor vision has exempted him from fighting in the war, is a PE teacher and playground director whose anguish over his young charges leads him to look beyond polio’s physical causes to God, its ultimate cause. Like Job, he rails against a God that can


Y 01420 592974


urgently needed: the state of prisons, especially for women prisoners, was appalling in the early years of the nineteenth century. Overcrowding, squalor, hopelessness and physical and moral filth produced the lowest possible level of self-esteem among the prisoners. All these needed tackling, and Mrs Fry spent her life


allow – or inflict – such punishment on the innocent. As the title suggests, Roth’s metaphysic also embraces the Greek system of impersonal Fate, in which humans who show hubris ineluctably incur nemesis. Yet how exactly is Bucky, so decent, unassuming and thoroughly good, hubristic? By being unable to recognise the limits of his responsibility for others. So the narrator says, but behind him Roth seems to be saying that the possibility for sin and guilt is indeed boundless. “No man is an island.” “Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun/Which is my sin, though it were done before?” Like Donne, Roth bewails the inexorable chains that link us, both vertically to our past: our genes, conditioning and circumstances, and horizontally: our impermeability to one another, our vulnerability to physical and moral contagion. Bucky thinks he is free to choose, but his life-changing decisions seem to be made for him, rather than by him, or rather not actually made at all, but pre-made, and all too fleetingly. He “startled himself … by what he’d just agreed to”. That he experiences his choices as happening to him, however, in no way mitigates his life-destroying sense of guilt. Roth does not have Donne’s optimistic belief in salvation; here, as elsewhere, he laments “the inevitably stained creatures that we are”. Yet the book ends with a wonderful evocation of man as noble, unbowed agent. Bucky, like a Greek hero, throws the javelin, and “through him, we boys had left the little story of the neighbourhood and entered the historical saga of our ancient gender”. Jane O’Grady


01420 592974


‘A heroine of sorts, but not a very attractive one’: Elizabeth Fry and friend Mary Sanderson entering Newgate women’s prison (after a painting by Henrietta Ward)


tackling them with enormous energy and bringing them to the notice of others who would carry on her work. She was indeed a heroine of sorts, but not a very attractive one. Perhaps a book as dully written as this simply does her a disservice: she may have had a hidden resource of likeableness, even humour, but the surface portrait is depressing. She sounds like the kind of do-gooder who gives doing good a bad name. Even her portraits make one’s spirits sink. But she was said to have a beautiful voice and, since much of her prison visiting consisted of Bible readings and pious tracts, read or distributed, that must have helped.


A Quaker, born into a big, influential and


very rich Quaker family, she married a fellow Quaker and carried on with her public work almost as if her own young family did not exist. Admittedly, she set up networks of helpers (committees of ladies who carried on with her reforms), but the everyday caring for her own family was something that seemed scarcely to touch or trouble her: she more or less ignored it. Excellent she may have been, but her excellence seems pretty intolerable. Perhaps my reaction is unfair since I find the culture she represents curious and alien; or perhaps it takes a few intolerable, courageous people to bring about basic social changes.


And changes there were. With physical conditions enormously improved for female prisoners, their morale and self-respect improved as well, and touching tributes from former prisoners show how what she did was valued and how things changed as the nineteenth century wore on. The country needed Mrs Fry’s ruthlessness, even her priggishness. The fact that we no longer put up with the terrible conditions she found shows how much she was needed and, if the externals of her life are irritating, even baffling, that does not take much away from her heroism.


Excellence comes in all sorts of guises and, to be effective, need not be instantly attractive. Isabel Quigly


5 February 2011 | THE TABLET | 21


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