expressed by Charles Dickens. Adshead argued, influentially, that what Dickens had written in his American Notes (1842) on the "Pennsylvania system" was fiction, and could not be taken seriously as commentary. He also characterised the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the Boston Prison Discipline Society (1843) on the matters at issue as a "flagrant instance of trickery". A sequel was Our Present Gaol System Deeply Depraving to the Prisoner and a Positive Evil to the Community: Some Remedies Proposed (1847). In it Adshead commented favourably on the positive effect of the separate system on prisoners who were then to be transported to Port Phillip in Australia. On Juvenile Criminals, Reformatories, and the Means of Rendering the Perishing and Dangerous Classes serviceable to the State (1856), paper given to the Manchester Statistical Society. Adshead gave a further paper to the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science meeting in Liverpool in 1858 on "Reformatory and industrial schools, their comparative economy". He considered the finances of ten each of reformatories, ragged schools and industrial schools. Adshead was critical of Parkhurst, the prison for young offenders, though he did not take the same view of it as Mary Carpenter. Other works A Circumstantial Narrative of the Wreck of the Rothsay Castle Steampacket: On Her Passage from Liverpool to Beaumaris, 17 August 1831 (1834) The Rothsay Castle was shipwrecked at the east end of the Menai Straits. Distress in Manchester (1842). This work contained a contribution from Richard Baron Howard on contagious disease. Adshead made a connection between prostitution and social change driven by industrial development. Twenty-Four Illustrated Maps of the Township of Manchester (1851); available online. The Progress of Religious Sentiment (1852) Adshead wrote an introduction to George Catlin's Steam Raft: Suggested as a means of security to human life upon the ocean (1860). Notes External links 1800 births 1861 deaths English merchants English male writers People from Herefordshire 19th-century English businesspeople