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The experience from which fiction is built need not be the author's own: when using a character to crystallize a philosophic or aesthetic position, Waugh often based his creations on figures he did not know personally. The Bauhaus architect Otto Silenus appears in Waugh's sketch with short-clipped hair, neat bow tie, and rounded glasses - looking for all the world like contemporary photographs of Le Corbusier. In the same novel, the character paired with Otto as his philosophic opposite (as Prendergast is the opposite of Grimes) seems also to have a particular historical exemplar. Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery, "optimistic" Governor of Blackstone Gaol, may well be based on a famous figure from Waugh's youth, possessed of a similarly hyphenated name: Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise.
Though later critics have varied in their appreciation of the descriptions of prison life in Qsdmz and Fall, Arnold Bennett signaled them out for praise.1 Bennett no doubt warmed to their basis of detailed realism. Not "yet [having] been sent to prison" (as he assured readers in the "Author's Note" to first edition), Waugh must have had to do some rudimentary research to get right his details of numbered diets, "progressive stages" of punishment from cellular confinement to various communal activities, limits on conversation, exercise regimens, and the range of prison personnel. Waugh in fact captures all these details accurately. Having been tried over the years in various local prison systems, all were made national practice in the Penal Servitude Bill of 1 898, and Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise was the man eventually chosen to oversee their administration.
"Sir Wilfred Lucas-Dockery had not been intended by nature or education for the Governor of a prison; his appointment was the idea of a Labour Home Secretary"; "Up to that time Sir Wilfred had held the Chair of Sociology at a Midland university" (224). Ruggles-Brise was until 1921 Chairman of Prison Commissioners (reporting to the Home Secretary), the first university man to hold such a post, which he was well known to have gotten through the ambitious friendships he cultivated with Liberal politicians; like Sir Wilfred, he had stood for parliament. His credentials included invention in 1901 of the Borstal System of rehabilitation (actually copied from similar experiments in America, especially at the Elmire Reformatory). Behind...