Ten Years in a Dungeon. Inferno of Infernos. By One Who Passed Eighteen Years of His Life in Prison.
[N.p., likely Kansas City or St. Louis: ca. 1900]. 15pp. Original printed wrappers, 5.5 x 3.75 inches, stapled. Moderate wear, scuffing, and soiling. Bottom corner of front wrapper and first three leaves chipped. Tanned to a somewhat fragile state. Overall good only. Item #13379
A lively, engaging, and apparently unrecorded account of John B. "Firebug" Johnson's eighteen years of mostly solitary confinement in the Missouri State Penitentiary, one of the worst prisons in the history of the United States. This short pamphlet, the cover title of which reads, The Horrors of Life in a Dungeon: Eighteen Years in the Missouri Penitentiary "by Solitary Johnson," contains an account of Johnson's penal service, during which time he served sixteen years and eight months of an eighteen-year sentence in solitary confinement.
The text opens with a post-release letter from the former Governor of Missouri, Charles Johnson, in which he acknowledges Firebug's suffering and encourages him to spend the rest of life as an "honest and upright citizen." The remainder of the text is Johnson's memoir, in which he brags about his survival of solitary confinement as "the most marvelous on record in point of resisting power to those forces of time and nature known to be fatal to ninety-nine men out of every one-hundred." He then recounts the tortures (whippings, "the weighing machine") and depravations (hunger, thirst, darkness, cold, silence) he experiences in the hole of the Missouri State Penitentiary, which led numerous inmates to escape by the only means necessary: suicide. None of these punishments, Johnson writes, "is so ravaging upon the constitution as perpetual solitary confinement."
To deal with the psychological torment, Johnson made a ball out of one of his socks so that he might bounce it against the wall for a little exercise. He also befriended a white rat who frequented his cell, naming it after the deputy warden, and he writes about getting letters out to newspapers through his network of fellow inmates, including passing notes in his sock-balls. Johnson's final words carry his message across:
"Beaten and cuffed up by the guards and driven into crime as there have been during the past four years, more men have died or have been killed, more desperate breaks for freedom have been made, more fights, cutting and killing among the convicts themselves, followed by more suicides, than was ever known in the history of the prison. These are facts which speak for themselves, and they tell the old, old story of man's inhumanity to man."
John B. "Firebug" Johnson, who likens himself to the Count of Monte Cristo in the present work, remains one of the most infamous inmates in the history of the Missouri prison system. Absent from the current narrative is any mention of the three fires he set while inside the prison or any one of his numerous escape attempts, all of which contributed to his solitary incarceration. One of his fires resulted in more than $500,000 in damage (in the 1890s) and the deaths of several inmates. When he was released from prison in 1900, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, in a long article on him (in which asserted that his actual name was "John B. Hunt") reported that he was the "most remarkable prisoner of the age," entering prison a twenty-six year old illiterate and leaving eighteen years later as an educated and well-read autodidact. Johnson's home for the time of his incarceration, the Missouri State Penitentiary, was a legendary prison. Decommissioned in 2004, the Missouri Pen was notorious for its dungeon-like lower level and for the amount of murders perpetrated by inmates over the course of its time. In 1967, Time magazine called the prison "the bloodiest 47 acres in America."
The present work is likely a precursor to the longer work on Johnson's experiences written by him and Charles E. Hoffman in 1903 entitled, Buried Alive; or, Eighteen Years in the Missouri Penitentiary. OCLC records only three digital copies of the later work, but no copies of any kind of the present pamphlet. This shorter, earlier work is also written largely from the first-person point of view, and is decidedly a production of Johnson himself, while the later work is not. Not in Suvak's bibliography of American prison memoirs, which includes several memoirs of the Missouri State Prison, including Johnson's later work. The only copy of the present work we can find anywhere.
Price: $1,000
Status: On Hold