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• 1 2019-07-24T10:39:40+00:00 Maroney's Conversion Trajectory 2 Schorb Page 3 plain 2020-02-12T18:06:54+00:00 The text did not circulate widely in its day: no other editions or extant copies beyond the edition in Harvard-Andover Theological Library are yet known. Despite its limited circulation, Maroney’s choice of publisher was a good fit for the narrative’s blend of religious discourse and prison exposé. Charles Cushman began his career working for the New York Tract society, which pioneered the distribution of cheap evangelical tracts; he later moved to Newburgh and ran the local newspaper. Given Cushman’s background, it’s no surprise he took an interest in Maroney’s tale: prison discipline was a newsworthy topic in the early national era, and inmates could recast the conventional conversion plot from sin to redemption in compelling ways. By 1800, the conversion narrative was one of the most recognizable forms of life writing. Conversion narratives enabled authors from diverse backgrounds to shape the vicissitudes of their lives into a recognizable and marketable form: a journey from doubt, sin and hardship, through tests and trials, to faith and redemption. And while Maroney’s loosely structures his account on his religious conversion behind bars, ultimately, the text seems more interested in exposing the “sins” of early national penitentiaries—corruption, mismanagement, inhumanity, violence—than in documenting Maroney’s crisis of faith or lamenting the dangers of dissipated living. Instead, Maroney uses the conversion plot to explore more modern concerns fueled by scientific theories of the day: how environments shape or influence behavior, how the self, in a different environment, may become something different, better or worse.
  
  Each period of Maroney’s conversion trajectory is shaped by reading, from the dangerous reading that serves as evidence of his alleged dissipation in the early part of the narrative, to the clandestine reading that occupied his time at Newgate, to the attentive Bible reading that demonstrates his change of heart in the last section of the narrative. Maroney states at numerous times that wayward reading practices led him astray, citing his fondness for “popular sceptical” publications (6).1 This shoddy foundation, Maroney implies, inclined his heart to resist Newgate’s efforts to reform him. But, as his account makes clear, youthful reading practice was hardly the main reason for Newgate’s ineffective influence. Rev. John Stanford, the tireless Baptist crusader, promoter of cheap religious tracts, and chaplain of New York’s state prisons, is in Maroney’s text transformed into “Daddy Sanford,” a distant, ineffective (and somewhat creepy) moral instructor. The pioneering school that Stanford supervised in Newgate, whereby older convicts instructed the younger convicts in reading and writing, was, by Maroney’s account, too rudimentary to have any meaningful impact. By contrast, a single letter from Maroney’s wife informing him that one of his children has died prompts Maroney’s desire to reform far more than all of Newgate’s efforts to discipline and reform him (11). Despite the motivating influence of family letters, such correspondence would soon be banned altogether, fueled by belief that inmates families were part of the corrupting influence that led inmates to lives of crime in the first place.