MCMLS Mitchell Fiction Book Club discussion
The Exiles
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Trials
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Maxine
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Jul 01, 2021 01:09PM
It was so hard to read Evangeline’s murder and Matthilda’s abandonment .
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I definitely feel that the prisoners were unfairly treated. The conditions were abominable and when they were sent out to worksheet some women were physically and emotionally abused.
This whole book was hard to read, just one devastating event after another. It was heartbreaking.
Newgate Prison was unfathomable facility opened in the 1188 was centuries old when Evangeline, Hazel, and Olive became incarcerated there. The vermin, filth, and overcrowding conditions led to early deaths of all that were sentenced. Many of the prisoners who lost their will to live succumbed to lack of potable water and thin gruel with intolerable environmental conditions. Perhaps what may have been a saving grace for our female convicts was when Elizabeth Fry, Quaker reformer of women's prisoners in Newgate London, went to visit and help the female prisoners to receive humane and and female protection from male prisoners or male prison guards. Elizabeth Fry gave clothing and Bibles to our female characters before they were placed on the Medea for Hobart Town, Australia.
This book has one example after another of man's inhumanity to man. It was a tough read.
Definitely just the far side of too tough for me. To have gone from the misery of Newgate to the transport ship to the prison and still no respite…. As I said earlier, elsewhere, part of it was having just read Orphan Trian and A Piece of the World, which were equally rough. I’ve been spoiled, I suppose, by books, films, television shows that would have begun the saving aspects earlier in the story line. In this case, the doctor could have reappeared sooner or the jobs in the nursery or private home would have offered respite, rather than simply continuing ongoing misery.
Reading this sort of great cruelty and extreme injustice, boggles the mind at the way humankind justifies inhumane behavior over and over throughout history. All in the name of "civilizing" or economic gain.
