BOTH THE Autobiography and Prison Life of George Laval Chesterton are worth reading. There is conscious humour: we feel it might be our own Chesterton when we hear the Captain describing himself as "laughing immoderately" because he had made a fool of himself and others were laughing at him. There is unconscious humour, especially in the astonishing style, full of such phrases as "I was the most obnoxious to peril," or "something not far removed from impunity stalked abroad."

Captain Chesterton started life as a soldier. During the Peninsular War his regiment was stationed at Cartagena. "It was a subject of deep mortification to most of us to be thus supinely occupied in this lone garrison, thereby being debarred from the Peninsular medal, and hence a widespread disaffection on that most tender subject which no reasoning has been equal to dispel." However, later he saw a good deal of active service, being in the War of 1812, in the course of which the battle of Bladensburg was fought and Washington fell to the British arms. "The astonished slaves," he says, describing the advance on Washington, "rested from their work in the fields contiguous; and the awe-struck peasants and yeomen of this portion of America beheld with perturbation the tremendous preparations to devastate their blooming country."

To the smaller professional armies of that day peace was a misfortune, and in his quaint style Captain Chesterton describes the demonstrations of joy on the part of himself and his fellow officers at the escape of Napoleon from Elba, foreseeing, as he frankly observes, "a scope for further adventure and hope of personal advancement." This hope was short-lived and we next see him fighting in the British Legion of a rebel South American army against Spain. The general mismanagement of this expedition, and the fact that the Republicans killed all their prisoners "was a death blow to all my past enthusiasm in the Republican cause." Many British officers "participating with me in the detestation for cold-blooded butchery, conspired from that moment to elude this detested service. . . . Mark ye who delight in transcendant Liberalism . . . the cruel exigencies of such a warfare."

In his acceptance of "transcendant Liberalism," yet his determination to see truly what passed before his eyes and when needful to change his standpoint, this earlier Chesterton was much like the later. He had not the genius of Gilbert, he could not see so far, but he shared his refusal to be blinded by custom, theory or even patriotism. In his accounts of army life he had commented fearlessly on the cruelty of the punishments and described his fellow officers as made ill by seeing a private receive five hundred lashes. He had noted corruption in the "Train Service" which "was consequently divested of its genuine claim to honour." FÊted by the planters of Jamaica, he had yet spoken with horror of their slave ownership.

Now he was appointed governor of a prison in England and here began the great work of his life in a frontal attack on the corruptions he discovered. The yardsmen did a secret traffic in all the goods forbidden in the prison, there were caches of tobacco, spirits and such things under the pavements, the weaker prisoners were robbed by the stronger. The women's and men's quarters were so arranged that by connivance of the jailors frequent meetings took place. On one of these occasions Captain Chesterton himself appeared:

My hands were seized with tender empressement, and I was addressed as "my love," "My darling," "my dear creature:" and all the conventional endearments of the pavÉ were showered upon me. I had to struggle for enlargement, and beat a hasty retreat, quite confounded by my initiation into "prison discipline." And the consternation occasioned by this discovery became perfectly electric.*

[* Revelations of Prison Life, pp. 84-85.]

Attempts to bribe him were followed by attempts to kill him, but he stood firm. Mrs. Fry invoked his aid to improve the home conditions to which the prisoners had to return. Chesterton turned to Dickens and to Dickens's friend, Miss Coutts, in defiance of a narrow-minded magistrate

who perversely insisted (as was by cynical interpretation literally too true) that Miss Coutts had no right to confer with prisoners within those walls, nor was it "to be tolerated that Mr. Charles Dickens should walk into the prison whenever he pleased."*

[* Ibid., p. 186.]

From Cold Bath Fields the reforms begun by Captain Chesterton and warmly seconded by Dickens spread to other prisons, "Although (he declares) I consented to forego pecuniary advantage, I cling the more tenaciously to the credit of my past exertions; when, beset with fraud, ferocity, and moral pollution, I achieved a triumph fraught with civilizing influences."*

[* Ibid., p. v.]