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From Sing Sing Prisoners in 1911

"The dame with the fancy name certainly delivers the goods"

August 8, 2018 

We stumbled upon an absolute gem of a twitter thread yesterday as editor and columnist at the New York Times Book Review Tina Jordan shared a cache of classic book reviews from a rather unusual source. Apparently, way back in 1911 (the same year J.M. Barrie published Peter Pan, for those of you interested in literary anniversaries), upon discovering that inmates at New York’s notorious Sing Sing Correctional Facility had been reviewing books for their prison newspaper, the New York Times decided to reprint a selection of the pieces, many of which consider the merits of some of the mid-to-late-19th Century’s most iconic novels—from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to The Three Musketeers. One reviewer praises Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables as “the richest thing that ever came down the pike…a lollapalooza,” while another considers Huck Finn “a cure for the blues if there ever was one.”

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Thanks to Tina for illuminating this little-known chapter in the history of American literary criticism.

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