In 1836 the House of Commons published a series of reports of the new prison inspectors appointed under an Act of Parliament passed the year before. The 1835 Act, one of several interventionist initiatives of the whig government elected in 1832, was designed to drive up standards in the locally-run prison system. That the inspectors’ report was generally available, rather than hidden in decent obscurity, as the result of another praiseworthy new initiative – a decision by the House of Commons in 1835 to allow all of its publications to be sold to the public through agents. The inspectors’ remark concerning a book with explicit plates of human reproductive organs that was found in the possession of one of the prisoners in Newgate jail set off a chain of unintended consequences that led to a series of law suits that are collectively referred to as Stockdale v. Hansard, a…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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