Chapter 1 elaborates the narrative particularity and ideological function of the criminal prison in print, from the Accounts of the Ordinary of Newgate and unofficial criminal biographies to prison reform writing by Bernard Mandeville and others. It argues that the ‘criminal character’ that is framed in these writings is publicly legible and dialogic, constituting a literary or legal type rather than an autonomous individual with a unique interiority. The chapter sets out the narrative modes of strained satire and generic experimentation in which these prisons are depicted in Newgate biographies and in the early novel. Through an analysis of Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, it demonstrates the novel’s vital connection to prison reform discourse, and in analysing the prison novels of Defoe and Fielding, explores the ways in which earlier representations of criminal prisons imprinted themselves on the novel form.