Discipline Without Frontiers? Representations of the Mettray Reformatory Colony in Britain, 1840–1880

Abstract

Abstract The agricultural colony founded at Mettray, France, in 1839 rapidly acquired an international reputation as an exemplar of the ‘family system’ of moral training, in which inmates were dispersed into separate ‘houses’ rather than being concentrated in large buildings. Many foreign visitors portrayed Mettray as a place where the fruits of the new reformatory science had been realised in practice. The paper aims to show how the Mettray model came to play a critical role within debates over the treatment of criminal children and juvenile paupers in Britain between 1840 and 1880.