At the time of the Regency, the head of the family was a friend of
the Prince's and (perhaps as a result of such company) dissipated his
fortunes in riotous living and incurred various terms of imprisonment
for debt. From his debtors' prisons he wrote letters, and sixty years
later Mr. Edward Chesterton used to read them to his family: as also
those of another interesting relative, Captain George Laval
Chesterton, prison reformer and friend of Mrs. Fry and of Charles
Dickens. A relative recalls the sentence: "I cried, Dickens cried, we
all cried," which makes one rather long for the rest of the letter.
George Laval Chesterton left two books, one a kind of autobiography,
the other a work on prison reform. It was a moment of enthusiasm for
reform, of optimism and of energy. Dickens was stirring the minds of
Englishmen to discover the evils in their land and rush to their
overthrow. Darwin was writing his _Origin of Species_, which in some
curious way increased the hopeful energy of his countrymen: they
seemed to feel it much more satisfying to have been once animal and
have become human than to be fallen gods who could again be made
divine.
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