The Conclusion explores narrative depictions of the Gordon Riots of 1780, in which many of the prisons outlined in this study were sacked. These narratives instance the four distinct prison types that this analysis has delineated, but they also demonstrate the prisons’ locus as a focal point for public unrest, nine years before the storming of the Bastille. This chapter summarises the reasons for the prison’s prevalence in the eighteenth-century novel, from the personal and biographical to wider philosophical imperatives, and argues that the prisons of the Georgian period overwhelmingly embodied the historical past. This was true architecturally, and it was true in terms of the law that these prisons enabled. It was fundamentally not the case with the New Model Prisons of the Victorian era, which, however malign or inefficient, were wholly contemporary cultural structures. The study ends by elaborating the causes of the novel’s move away from the prison as a fictional motif in later periods.