Formal Welcome to a House of Correction

You'll probably recognize the image above, as I've used it as a "tease" in another post.  There is, however, a slight difference since I modified the original drawing.  Challenge for you is to see whether you can find my modification. (To make this task easier, you should click on the drawing to view full size.)

  

Anyway, in this post I plan to talk about Formal Welcomes to a House of Correction.

 

Many years ago, I encountered this notion of a formal Welcome and Farewell to a House of Correction in "Nell in Bridewell". There could possibly be even older references to this idea, but it's my guess that it was Nell that introduced this idea to generations of CP writers (Little, Rawlings, etc.). (I'm also guilty of appropriating this idea in a couple of my stories.)

 

Anyhow, what I wanted to share is that this "appropriation" is almost always WRONG! (To be fair, I count myself amongst those who got it wrong.) In the typical story, our heroine arrives at the reformatory and then is subjected to the following:

 

1. Medical/Contraband inspection​

2. Shower​

3. Issued prison uniform​

4. All new arrivals are then taken to receive their formal "Welcome"​

 

(Sometimes the shower is first followed by the medical/contraband inspection. Then, while still wrapped in a towel, the Welcome could be administered and only after - perhaps first a "cooling down" period - their uniforms are issued.)

 

Getting back to my original point of an "incorrect appropriation", what's wrong is the timing. Here are the exact words in Nell from the taskmistress, Cunigund: 

 

… I at last ventured to ask her what was really meant by the “Welcome” I had heard so much talked about.​

​ 

“The Welcome, my girl?” she (Cunigund) replied, with a self-satisfied smile and laughing. “I will show you.”​

​ 

She opened a cupboard, took from it a 3½-foot stout bull's pizzle, and said: “With this we welcome new-comers to the House of Correction, but often only a long time after their arrival, so that they may know and feel where they are, and may have become sufficiently humbled and obedient. Stand up, my girl,” she added; and now she began to feel those parts of my body which by my erect position had become more specially open to her inspection.​

 

In Nell, our delinquent, Helen, learns about the “Welcome” long before she is subjected to it. Indeed, Helen actually observes one being dispensed. This is a HUGE difference to the way formal Welcomes are superficially treated in almost all of the other stories. Since Helen knows what is in her indeterminant future (in Nell no one knows when Welcomes will be scheduled), she anticipates it with extreme dread. She shares her feelings with readers, prison management, and other prisoners. She schemes any way she can to avoid; even going so far as to request a birching in the Governor's office. Now such a "birching" would be on the bare bottom usually by "a women's hand", and it would be a fairly private affair. Again, Nell would far prefer this “birching” to the formal Welcome, which is a public event, administered by a male overseer with a bull's pizzle  over the new, thin “whipping drawers”.

 

Indeed, what is intriguing in Nell in Bridewell is that (as windar wrote) “delicious sense of dread and anticipation that Nell conveys.” And she does this throughout - right up to the time of her being subjected to her formal Welcome.

 

I can't help mentioning that this "timing" issue also creates a problem for authorship of Nell's Farewell.  I know I've mentioned several times that we simply do NOT know who wrote this story. Nevertheless, Wilhelm Reinhard, the author of Lenchen im Zuchthause has been identified as one of the possible candidates. 

 

Problem, of course, is Lottie and her boyfriend violate the timing so carefully crafted by Reinhard in Nell in Bridewell. It's a little hard to believe that Wilhelm Reinhard would violate one of the tenets so fundamental to his story.