Mr. Howard’s philanthropic labors for now nearly a twelve-month had of course made him an object of public attention, and it became obviously desirable to have such a man in parliament. Accordingly, at the election of 1774, he was requested by a number of the electors of Bedford to allow himself to be put in nomination for that town, in the independent interest, along with his friend Mr. Whitbread. Mr. Howard consented; but when the polling had taken place, the numbers stood thus—​Sir William Wake, 527 votes; Mr. Sparrow, 517; Mr. Whitbread, 429; and Mr. Howard, 402. A protest was taken by the supporters of Mr. Whitbread and Mr. Howard, most of whom were dissenters, against the election of the two former gentlemen, on the ground that the returning officers had acted unfairly in rejecting many legally good votes for Messrs. Whitbread and Howard, receiving many legally bad ones for the other two candidates. Petitions impeaching the return were also presented to the House of Commons by Mr. Whitbread and Mr. Howard.

Nothing, however, could divert our philanthropist from his own peculiar walk of charity, and the interval between the election and the hearing of the petitions against its validity was diligently employed by him in a tour through Scotland and Ireland, for the purpose of inspecting the prisons there, and comparing them with those of England and Wales. With the Scotch system of prison management he seems to have been, on the whole, much better pleased than with that of England; and he mentions, with particular approbation, that in Scotland ‘all criminals are tried out of irons; and when acquitted, they are immediately discharged in open court,’ and that ‘women are not put in irons.’ Still he found sufficient grounds for complaint in the state of the prisons themselves. ‘The prisons,’ he says, ‘that I saw in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Jedburgh, Haddington, Ayr, Kelso, Nairn, Banff, Inverness, etc., were old buildings, dirty and offensive, without courtyards, and also generally without water.’ ‘The tolbooth at Inverness,’ he afterwards observes, ‘has no fire place, and is the most dirty and offensive prison that I have seen in Scotland.’ In the Irish prisons he found, as might have been expected, abuses even more shocking than those he had generally met with in England.

In March 1775, Mr. Howard having by this time returned to England, his petition and that of Mr. Whitbread against the return of Sir William Wake and Mr. Sparrow were taken into consideration by a committee of the House of Commons. On a revision of the poll, the numbers, after adding the good votes which had been rejected, and striking off the bad ones which had been accepted, stood thus—​Mr. Whitbread, 568; Sir William Wake, 541; Mr. Howard, 537; Mr. Sparrow, 529. Thus, although by a small majority, Mr. Howard lost the election; his friend, Mr. Whitbread, who had formerly been in the same predicament, was now returned at the top of the poll in lieu of Mr. Sparrow.

It was perhaps a fortunate circumstance for the world that Mr. Howard did not succeed in being returned to parliament. He might no doubt have been of great service as a member of the legislature; but his true function was that which he had already chosen for himself—​a voluntary and unofficial inquirer into the latent miseries of human society. It was not so much as a propounder of schemes of social improvement that Mr. Howard appeared; it was rather as an explorer of unvisited scenes of wretchedness, who should drag into the public gaze all manner of grievances, in order that the general wisdom and benevolence of the country might be brought to bear upon them. In a complex state of society, where wealth and poverty, comfort and indigence, are naturally separated from each other as far as possible, so that the eyes and ears of the upper classes may not be offended and nauseated by the sights and sounds of wo, the interference of this class of persons—​inspectors, as they may be called, whose business it is to see and report—​is among the most necessary of all acts for social wellbeing.

Mr. Howard having completed his survey of the prisons of Great Britain, began to prepare his reports for publication. ‘I designed,’ says he, ‘to publish the account of our prisons in the spring of 1775, after I returned from Scotland and Ireland. But conjecturing that something useful to my purpose might be collected abroad, I laid aside my papers, and traveled into France, Flanders, Holland, and Germany.’ The precise route which he pursued during this, his fifth continental tour, is not known; he appears, however, to have gone to France first. He gives the following account of his attempt to gain admission to the famous Bastile of Paris. ‘I was desirous of examining it myself, and for that purpose knocked hard at the outer gate, and immediately went forward through the guard to the drawbridge before the entrance of the castle. But while I was contemplating this gloomy mansion, an officer came out much surprised, and I was forced to retreat through the mute guard, and thus regained that freedom which, for one locked up within those walls, it is next to impossible to obtain.’ On this singular adventure of Mr. Howard one of his biographers makes the following remark. ‘In the space of four centuries, from the foundation to the destruction of the Bastile, perhaps Mr. Howard was the only person that was ever compelled to quit it reluctantly.’ Although denied admission to the Bastile, Mr. Howard was able to obtain entrance into the other prisons of Paris. His first application, indeed, for admittance to the Grand Chatelet was unsuccessful; but happening to remark that, by the tenth article of the arrêt of 1717, jailers were authorized to admit persons desirous of bestowing charity on the prisoners, he pleaded it before the Commissaire de la Prison; and in this way gained admission not only to that prison, but to the others. Except for the horrible subterranean dungeons, in which he found that certain classes of prisoners were sometimes confined in France, he appears to have considered the prisons in that country better managed than those of England.

Mr. Howard’s proceedings in France, French Flanders, and the Netherlands, will be best gathered from the following letter to a friend:—​‘I came late last night to this city; the day I have employed in visiting the jails, and collecting all the criminal laws, as I have got those of France. However rigorous they may be, yet their great care and attention to their prisons is worthy of commendation: all fresh and clean; no jail distemper; no prisoners ironed. The bread allowance far exceeds that of any of our jails; for example, every prisoner here has two pounds of bread a-day; once a-day, soup; and on Sunday, one pound of meat. I write to you, my friend, for a relaxation from what so much engrosses my thoughts. And indeed I force myself to the public dinners and suppers for that purpose, though I show so little respect to a set of men who are so highly esteemed (the French cooks), that I have not tasted fish, flesh, or fowl since I have been this side the water. Through a kind Providence I am very well; calm, easy in spirits. The public voitures have not been crowded, and I have met, in general, agreeable company. I hope to be in Holland the beginning of next week.’

After visiting the principal prisons in Holland and part of Germany, most of which seem to have particularly pleased him, when contrasted with those at home, Mr. Howard returned to England in the end of July, 1775. Not to rest, however; for he immediately commenced a second survey of the English prisons. This was interrupted, in the beginning of the year 1776, when he made a trip to Switzerland to visit the Swiss jails, taking some of the French ones in his way. Returning to England, he resumed his second survey of the English and Welsh prisons; and when this was completed to his satisfaction in the beginning of 1777, he took up his residence for the spring at the town of Warrington, in Lancashire, where he had resolved to have his work on prisons printed. His reasons for printing the book there, rather than in London, were various; one of them was, that he wished to be near his friend Dr. (then Mr.) Aikin, employed as a surgeon in Warrington, whose literary talents were of assistance to him in fitting the work for publication. Dr. Aikin gives the following account of the process which Mr. Howard’s notes underwent, in order to qualify them for being sent to press—​his own composition, as our readers are already aware, being none of the most correct in a grammatical point of view. ‘On his return from his tours,’ says Dr. Aikin, ‘he took all his memorandum-books to an old, retired friend of his, who assisted him in methodising them, and copied out the whole matter in correct language. They were then put into the hands of Dr. Price, from whom they underwent a revision, and received occasionally considerable alterations. With his papers thus corrected, Mr. Howard came to the press at Warrington; and first he read them all over carefully to me, which perusal was repeated sheet by sheet, as they were printed. As new facts and observations were continually suggesting themselves to his mind, he put the matter of them upon paper as they occurred, and then requested me to clothe them in such expressions as I thought proper. On these occasions such was his diffidence, that I found it difficult to make him acquiesce in his own language, when, as frequently happened, it was unexceptionable. Of this additional matter, some was interwoven with the text, but the greater part was necessarily thrown into notes.’ So intent was he upon the publication of the work, that, ‘for the purpose,’ we are told by his biographer, Mr. Brown, ‘of being near the scene of his labors, he took lodgings in a house close to his printer’s shop; and during a very severe winter he was always called up by two in the morning, though he did not retire to rest till ten. His reason for this early rising was, that in the morning he was least disturbed in his work of revising the sheets as they came from the press. At seven he regularly dressed for the day, and had his breakfast; when, punctually at eight, he repaired to the printing-office, and remained there till the workmen went to dinner at one, when he returned to his lodgings, and putting some bread and raisins, or other dried fruit, in his pocket, generally took a walk in the outskirts of the town, eating, as he walked, his hermit fare, which, with a glass of water on his return, was the only dinner he took. When he had returned to the printing-office, he generally remained there until the men left work, and then repaired to Mr. Aikin’s house, to go through with him any sheets which might have been composed during the day; or, if there were nothing upon which he wished to consult him, he would either spend an hour with some friend, or return to his own lodgings, where he took his tea or coffee in lieu of supper, and at his usual hour retired to bed.’

In April 1777 appeared the work which had cost him so much labor. Its title was, ‘The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, with Preliminary Observations, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons. By John Howard, F.R.S.’ Although the work was very bulky, consisting of 520 quarto pages, with four large plates, yet ‘so zealous was he,’ says Dr Aikin, ‘to diffuse information, and so determined to obviate any idea that he meant to repay his expenses by the profitable trade of book-making, that he insisted on fixing the price of the volume so low, that, had every copy been sold, he would still have presented the public with all the plates and great part of the printing.’ Besides, he distributed copies profusely among all persons who possessed, or might possibly possess, influence in carrying his benevolent views into effect. ‘As soon as the book appeared,’ continues Dr. Aikin, ‘the world was astonished at the mass of valuable materials accumulated by a private unaided individual, through a course of prodigious labor, and at the constant hazard of life, in consequence of the infectious diseases prevalent in the scenes of his inquiries. The cool good sense and moderation of his narrative, contrasted with that enthusiastic ardor which must have impelled him to the undertaking, were not less admired; and he was immediately regarded as one of the extraordinary characters of the age, and as a leader in all plans of meliorating the condition of that wreched part of the community for whom he interested himself.’

To give an idea of the extent of the evils of the prison system in the time of Howard, and of the thorough manner in which these were taken cognizance of by him, we will present our readers with an abridgment of the introductory section of his work, in which, before passing to his special report on the state of the various prisons which he had visited, he gives a summary, or ‘General View of Distress in Prisons.’ The extracts will be found not only interesting in their connexion with Howard’s life, but also interesting in themselves.

‘There are prisons,’ he begins, ‘into which whoever looks will, at first sight of the people confined, be convinced that there is some great error in the management of them; their sallow, meagre countenances declare, without words, that they are very miserable. Many who went in healthy, are in a few months changed to emaciated, dejected objects. Some are seen pining under diseases, ‘sick and in prison,’ expiring on the floors, in loathsome cells, of pestilential fevers and confluent small-pox; victims, I must not say to the cruelty, but I will say to the inattention, of sheriffs and gentlemen in the commission of the peace. The cause of this distress is, that many prisons are scantily supplied, and some almost totally destitute, of the necessaries of life.