In Literature
Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations opens in 1812 with the escape of the convict Abel Magwitch from hulk moored in the Thames Estuary. In fact, the prison ships were largely moored in the neighboring River Medway, but Dickens combined real elements to create fictional locations for his work.
In the early stages of Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, Jean Valjean is a convict on the galleys at Toulon in France.
French artist and author Ambroise Louis Garneray depicted his life on a prison hulk at Portsmouth in the memoir Mes Pontons.
Read more about this topic: Prison Ship
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)