The paper attempts to approach the sign of the ‘prison’ from a semiotic point of view in order to show the way in which a person/character’s identity is influenced throughout a process of becoming taking place within certain spaces.  Prisons are, first and foremost, a social fact of society. It is, therefore, quite natural that literature should include references to carceral institutions alongside references to factories, hotels, schools, parliaments, town halls. On the other hand, prisons belong to those marginal spaces and taboo subjects which inmates in fact come to represent, that which society ejects and rejects, and – in Kristevan terms – they come to symbolize the object, the human as ingeniously proposed, the prison serving as a locus of social discrimination (in this sense we may take into consideration the workhouse in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist).  Generally, prison metaphors focus on the notion of confinement as a basic connotation but they also diversify to embrace more specifically historical context. The ‘old prison’ system, with its image of dark dungeons and chains, persists in a number of metaphors that emphasize entombment and enclosure. The penitentiary is clearly responsible for associations of austerity, deprivation, bareness and inhumanity of carceral regimes. Books that deal with the subject of imprisonment imply that their choice of the topic is not haphazard, that the experience of imprisonment does not concern the writer and reader as a very specific personal life story and nothing but that. On the contrary, the choice seems to imply a general relevance, which readers and critics frequently interpret as implying that the prison is a metaphor of our lives, of our society, of our times. A third major line of connotations refers to the humiliation and shame of criminality, metonymically attaching to all arrest and imprisonment, but this attribution is also contested, allowing for the honor of those innocently accused or the virtue of those that voluntarily undergo imprisonment or repent of their crimes.  Charles Dickens deals with the idea of prison (both in its proper and metaphorical senses) in most of his novels. Underneath all kinds of social problems, Dickensian characters are continuously shadowed by a constant feeling of imprisonment. Imprisonment finds its causes in education, marriage, family life, self isolation and self denial, loneliness, solitude. The places turned into spaces of imprisonment are the prison, the workhouse, the city, the House as ‘cage’, the jail, the cell, the den, the dungeon, the school, the factory.  In Oliver Twist the prison is represented by the workhouse and the City: Oliver never identifies with the city, which remains a place of fear and wonder to him. Although most of the action in the First Book of Little Dorrit revolves around the Marshalsea Prison, Little Dorrit feels entrapped or rather excluded, not fitting in a world of conventionalities and of falseness: society. Pip in Great Expectations feels enclosed in a world where he struggles to find his roots, to find a sense of belonging through education. Dombey and Son also deals, apparently, only with money, the full title being Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Retail, Wholesale and for Exportation: marriage plays an important part in creating and suggesting this feeling of entrapment because it is here, inside a family that one finds various relationships, normal as to the degree of kindred, but unbelievably rotten underneath, since social conventionalities can submit a body but cannot submit a human heart.  Concerning the concept of prisoner, what is noticeable in Dickens is that characters are not necessarily locked up in cages and what Lovelace said (‘Stone walls do not a prison make/ Nor iron bars a cage’) is applicable to Dickens’ heroes and heroines; from this point of view, his characters are prisoners in the sense of what Colin Wilson defines as the Outsider: ‘the man who is not at home in the world, who cannot accept its values.’ (Colin Wilson, The Outsider, 1963, p.1)