Mountjoy Prison, on the North Circular Road, opened its doors to prisoners on 27 March 1850. It had been designed, as so many gaols in England had been, on the Pentonville model, with a central tower and radial wings, surrounded by a cordon sanitaire and the outer walls and gate.
In the nineteenth century, its story was the same as so many others – a place for men, women and children, and a place alternately influenced by philosophies of retribution, punishment and rehabilitation. The regime of a prison is military and the men who ran them in the years from the beginnings to recent times were often men with military backgrounds. The crimes were the usual ones associated with poverty and dire straits – larceny, robbery, theft, assault, fraud and so on. The crimes against the person were punished with the lash for many years and physical punishment of various kinds was the order of the day in the Victorian period.