The Introduction demonstrates the proliferation of prisons in eighteenth-century British culture, and in the novel in particular. It argues that by resituating novelistic prison scenes back within their original cultural contexts, their fourfold particularity as ideological and narrative spaces is made evident. Setting out the narrative distinctions between these four prison types – the criminal prison, debtors’ prison, the bridewell (or prisons for the working poor), and the state prison – this chapter stakes out the terms of the study and traces the relationship between fictional prisons and the prison reform movement that was steadily gaining traction in this period. It elaborates the contribution this analysis hopes to make to novel studies, stressing the sociality and interdependence of selfhood in eighteenth-century narratives, and the ramifications of this on claims that have been made for the novel’s role in the advent of modernity.