Book Description

Excerpt from The Purgatory of Suicides: A Prison-Rhyme Th following 'Prison-Rhyme' part of an historical romance, a series of simple tales, and a small Hebrew guide, were the fruits of two years and eleven weeks' confinement in Stafford Gaol. The first idea of creating a poem, in which the spirits of suicides should be the actors or conversers, arose in my mind ten years ago ; but a line might never have been composed except for my imprisonment ; and the political strife in which I have been engaged has certainly given a form and colour to my thoughts which they could not have worn had my conceptions been realized at an earlier period. An individual who bent over the last and wielded the awl till three and twenty, - struggling, amidst weak health and deprivation to acquire a knowledge of languages, - and whose experience in afterlife was, at first, limited to the humble sphere of a schoolmaster, and never enlarged beyond that of a laborious worker on a newspaper, could scarcely have constructed a fabric of verse embodying more than a few poetical generalities. My persecutors have, at least, the merit of assisting to give a more robust character to my verse ; though I most assuredly owe them no love for the days and nights of agony I endured from neuralgia, rheumatism, and I know not what other torments, occasioned by a damp sleeping cell, added to the generally injurious influences of imprisonment. I have not the slightest wish to enlarge on the circumstances of suffering under which my verses have been strung together: and only deprecate that severity of criticism which a Chartist rhymer must expect to encounter, by observing that I am painfully conscious my book contains many passages correspondingly feeble with the debilitated state in which I often strove to urge on the completion of my design. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.