nside the cracked, leather binding, the handwriting strides over yellowing pages, with fluid but orderly loops of the pen. Each entry bears the date and the name of a man—a man who had battled his demons and lost.

When Philip Gura, professor of American literature and culture, opened the pair of old notebooks, they poured out the stories of hundreds of lives. "This was a kind of document I had never seen before—in any form," he remembers. "The entries were biographical portraits—not written by the individuals but by someone else."

That someone else turned out to be the Reverend Jared Curtis, chaplain of the Massachusetts State Prison. From 1829 through 1831, Curtis interviewed each prisoner who would be housed in the prison’s new facility at Charlestown, two miles upriver from Boston. Curtis recorded his accounts of these interviews in his notebooks—notebooks that survived intact, possibly handed down through the Curtis family, finding their way at last to Doug and Maureen O’Dell, owners of Chapel Hill Rare Books. Doug O’Dell called his friend Philip Gura, to see if the notebooks might interest him. They did.

"When an historian finds documents like this, it really is the biggest thrill, the biggest reward one can have," Gura says. "The excitement of this kind of original source is phenomenal." Gura eventually sent the notebooks to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which purchased them from the O’Dells. The Society, one of the few remaining publishers of historical sources, this winter issued the notebooks, along with Gura’s 72-page introduction, as Buried from the World: Inside the Massachusetts State Prison, 1829-1831.

For Gura, Curtis’s snapshot-like biographies capture the lives of prisoners at a turning point in American history. The Industrial Revolution and a new market economy were creating wealth and leisure for some, misery for others. Young men without strong families, education, or skills for employment were drifting into cities and seaports awash with alcohol, prostitution, and crime. At the same moment, reformers were advancing the notion that criminals could be redeemed, that training and moral instruction would accomplish what punishment could not.

"The prison-reform movement in that period was based on the belief that these prisoners were people who had lacked something," Gura says, "especially a lack of family structure, education, or religious training. So the prison system was meant to provide, in a very sustained, very concentrated form, the kinds of things they had been missing."

harlestown imposed a strict and unyielding routine that included hard labor in the prison’s stone-cutting shop, prayers and religious instruction, and long periods of silence in which to reflect and repent. The goal was to recast the characters of these men, many of them wildly undisciplined in an exotic variety of vices, into the disciplined, orderly workers valued by a society retooling itself for the age of machines.

"This was at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before people like Thoreau and Melville began to criticize the machine," Gura says. "Conformity really was a value in this new kind of economy—that is, an economy that revolved around the principles of timeliness, of order. So the whole point in rehabilitation was to make a person who could reenter that new kind of world, a world that demanded a certain kind of order."

As Curtis began his interviews, talking individually with several prisoners a day, several days a week, he probably had more than one purpose in mind, Gura says. Curtis wanted to know how these prisoners would fit into the new system the authorities were establishing at Charlestown. But he also wanted to engage in some elementary sociology, to collect the numbers he would use to chart the success of the system. Just as progressives of the day believed in the power of machines to liberate people from brute labor, they also believed in the power of science and statistics to reveal the truth.

"These notebooks illustrate the birth of that statistical mind," Gura says, "the notion that if you martial your figures you’ll make your argument stronger."

But the entries yield far more than numbers. Each is a snapshot recording the life of a man in specific, often painfully candid detail. Why did these prisoners—of various races and ages and backgrounds—open up their lives to Curtis this way? Evidence from the notebooks suggests that Curtis knew how to listen, that the prisoners respected and trusted him. But he was also the only person with whom a prisoner was allowed to speak. It is difficult to imagine the burden of absolute silence the inmates endured at the prison, Gura says. The silence must have seemed as heavy as the enormous slabs of stone they were cutting each day in the shop.