I think life in isolation would be worse than death

In the insert of Fairport's "Babbacombe Lee" is a reprint of the Lloyd's Weekly News article John Lee wrote. It ends like this:

It was some days before I learned what my future was to be [after hanging had failed]. The information was at last brought to me by the governor. He told me that Her Majesty had commuted my sentence to penal servitude for life. .... Had I relaised what a terrible drag those years were to be I would have gone down on my knees and prayed for Death.

I did not know that I had been saved from one tomb only to be consigned to another.

I did not know know that the the living Death I was about to endure was more terrible than anything the grave can offer.

I did not realise what it would be to mount slowly up though all those years, bearing on my shoulders a weary burden of heart-ache and shame.

I was a boy. I thought like a boy.

I thought only of life. And life was very sweet to me then.