[EDDY (Thomas).]

An Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House, in the City of New York: by one of the Inspectors of the Prison.

PRISON DESIGN AND REFORM IN NEW YORK

First edition. 2 folding plates, one a panoramic view of the building, the other a ground plan. Tall 8vo. Partially unopened & untrimmed in original paper boards, rubbed and with worn corners, expertly rebacked, interior very good. 97, [1]pp. New York, Isaac Collins, 1801.

£950.00

A very good copy of the first book on prison reform by an American.

The Quaker prison reformer, Thomas Eddy (1758-1827), was born and raised in Philadelphia by Irish parents. He received little education and was soon apprenticed to a local tanner. From such humble beginnings Eddy, became an importer of good from England and Ireland (then scarce following the American Revolution), a banker, and a shopkeeper. All this before relocating to New York aged thirty-three.

He met fellow Quaker John Murray there, became interested in education, and later prison reform. “Eddy was one among many English and American citizens lobbying for changes to the penal code at the end of the eighteenth century. These reformers of various persuasions argued that bodily punishments were barbaric, unfit for enlightened nations. The Americans among them added that bloody penalties were particularly unsuitable in a democratic republic. Many of these reformers, Eddy included, proposed incarceration as a humane alternative to the pillory and the gallows. In the 1790s, Pennsylvania and New York started building prisons” (Graber).

“In 1801 he published his Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House in the City of New York, a detailed examination of the prisons in New York, which asserted that the first and major goal of imprisonment was to prevent crime by reforming the offender. Gradually, after serving as inspector and agent for Newgate prison in Greenwich Village, he came to favor a solitary cell system and lobbied in Albany for building prisons with single cells measuring seven by nine feet” (ibid). The actual design of the building was done by Jean-François Mangin and his brother, Eddy includes all of his stipulations for the building and its appointments as well as a detailed summary of how the inmates were to be treated, fed and clothed.

This copy is complete with two folding plates, the first showing the “Elevation of New York State Prison” the other being a plan of the facility.

The last recorded copy at auction was at Swann in 1979.

Sabin, 54026; Graber, J., “‘When Friends Had the Management It Was Entirely Different’: Quakers and Calvinists in the Making of New York Prison Discipline” in Quaker History, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Fall 2008), p.19.

Stock No.
206304