This painting may have been inspired by an episode in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, first published in 1768. The narrator, Yorick, finds himself in Paris without a passport and is worried that he might be imprisoned. In a section entitled The Captive, Sterne imagines the "miseries of confinement":

"—I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in his dungeon, I then look’d through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture...

... He was sitting upon the ground upon a little straw, in the furthest corner of his dungeon, which was alternately his chair and bed: a little calendar of small sticks were laid at the head, notch’d all over with the dismal days and nights he had passed there;—he had one of these little sticks in his hand, and, with a rusty nail he was etching another day of misery to add to the heap. As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless eye towards the door, then cast it down,—shook his head, and went on with his work of affliction. I heard his chains upon his legs, as he turned his body to lay his little stick upon the bundle.—He gave a deep sigh.—I saw the iron enter into his soul!—I burst into tears.—I could not sustain the picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn."

Sterne's Captive provided the inspiration for many prints, drawings and paintings from the 1770s onwards. The artist has not been identified in this case, but the image is painted on a copper plate that includes the name of the suppliers, Whittow & Large, and the number 43. According to the British Museum website, the firm was based at 43 Shoe Lane, London from 1791 to around 1798.