Half a century ago, a stroller about the London streets whose loiterings carried him to the Fleet Market, could not but notice in the brick wall that extended along what is now entitled Farringdon street, facing the market, a wide-grated window, set in a framework of granite blocks. Under the arched top of the framework, between it and the grating, a stone slab or panel bore the carved inscription: “Please Remember Poor Debtors, Having No Allowance.” Through the grating one might look into a squalid, dark room, with a rough wooden bench fastened to one wall, and during the hours of daylight some miserable human creature, like a caged and starved beast, always glared from behind the bars upon the street, repeating, in the voice of wheedling mendicancy, the appeal cut in the stone above his head. There was a broad sill to the window, and an opening in the bars, like those of the 74 counter windows in a modern bank, through which the jailed beggar could pass out and draw in a wooden box, in which the charitably inclined might drop an obolus as they passed by.

This was what was called “the grate” of the Fleet Prison, one of the wickedest and most pestilential gaols that ever cursed the earth; and the grimmest satire upon this jail into which men were thrust for not paying money which they owed, was that among these debtors there were many whose absolute inability to pay was demonstrated by the fact that they would, literally, have starved there but for the chance charity of the public. Apropos of this point Dickens, in chapter xiv, volume II, of “Pickwick,” says:

“The poor side of the debtors’ prison is, as its name imports, that in which the most miserable and abject class of debtors are confined. A prisoner, having declared upon the poor, pays neither rent nor chummage. His fees upon entering and leaving the gaol are reduced in amount, and he becomes entitled to a share of some small quantities of food—to provide which a few charitable persons have, from time to time, left trifling legacies in their wills. Most of our readers will remember that, until a very 75 few years past, there was a kind of iron cage in the wall of the Fleet Prison, within which was posted some man who, from time to time, rattled a money box, and exclaimed in a mournful voice: ‘Pray remember the poor debtors.’ The receipts of this box, when there were any, were divided among the poor prisoners, and the men on the poor side relieved each other in this degrading office.

“Although this custom has been abolished and the cage is now boarded up, the miserable and destitute condition of these unhappy persons remains the same. We no longer suffer them to appeal at the prison gates to the charity and compassion of the passers-by; but we still have unblotted on leaves of our statute-book, for the reverence and admiration of the succeeding ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die in starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction. Not a week passes over our heads but, in every one of our prisons for debt, some of these men must inevitably expire in the slow agonies of want, if they were not relieved by their fellow prisoners.”

The custom of beggary at the prison gate, it may as well be remarked here, was a relic of the ancient prison of the Fleet, to which allusion is made in several of the old English comedies. 76 Leigh Hunt, in his pleasant divagations upon London called “The Town,” remarks upon the practice in connection with Ludgate Prison, and, indeed, it was common to all the town jails in which debtors were incarcerated, without municipal provisions for their support. In the last century, as John Timbs tells us, there was additional provision for the relief of the paupers of the prison, in what was known as the “Running Box.” In this case a man ran to and fro in the neighboring streets to the prison, shaking a box, and begging passengers to put money into it for the poor prisoners in the Fleet, while on his back he carried a capacious covered basket, to hold such broken victuals as the charitable might choose to spare for him.

Hard by the paupers’ grating of the Fleet was a grimy and gloomy doorway, heavily framed in stone, which, like the brick of the prison wall, sweated a sort of fungoid scum, originally a rank, unhealthy green in color, but, thanks to London fogs and soft-coal smoke, soon converted into the semblance of a thin glaze or varnish of liquid soot. The door stone was worn as smooth as glass, and even in the fairest weather 77 was perilously greased with street slime. On either panel of the doorway was carved a huge numerical figure. The rude wit of the town called this the “Fleet Halter,” which, once it was about a man’s neck, held him almost as tight and fast as its rival noose at Tyburn. Fastidious debtors who preferred to preserve a fiction of respectability in their correspondence, were wont to have their letters addressed to them at 9 Fleet Market, for 9 was the halter-hinting number of the gateway to the gaol.

It was through this gateway that the tipstaff preceded Mr. Pickwick, as you may read in chapter xii. of the second volume which chronicles that immortal gentleman’s adventures, “looking over his shoulder to see that his charge was following close at his heels;” and in the gate-lodge, which they entered through a door at the left, Mr. Pickwick sat for his portrait to the assembled turnkeys, so that he might be remembered should he take the fancy to stroll out of the doors without a license. There was in this lodge “a heavy gate guarded by a stout turnkey with the key in his hand,” and when Mr. Pickwick’s likeness was completed, he passed through this inner gate, and 78 down a short flight of steps, and “found himself, for the first time in his life, within the walls of a debtor’s prison.”

The Fleet in those days consisted principally of one long brick pile, which ran parallel with the Fleet Market, now Farringdon street, with an open court around it, bounded by a lofty wall, over which, here and there, one could see the sooty chimney-tops and the smoky sky. The buildings were four stories in height above the ground, with a story half under ground among the foundations. No architectural art had been wasted on the exterior of the structure, and no sanitary ingenuity or sentimental seeking after the comfort of the inmates had been expended upon the interior. The one aim of the constructors had been to so divide the space as to cram within it the greatest possible number of persons. To this end, each floor was traversed by a single hallway or passage, “a long narrow gallery, dirty and low, and very dimly lighted by a window at each remote end,” on either hand of which opened doors of innumerable single rooms, which rarely, however, failed to do duty as lodgings for less than several tenants. The floors, as Mr. Tom Roker explained to Mr. 79 Pickwick when he inducted him into the prison, were distinguished as the hall flight, the coffee-room flight, the third flight and the top flight. All the rooms on these floors were let by the week, at prices adjusted to their presumed desirability and the capacity of the lessee’s purse, and governed by the number of tenants who entered upon them.

The basement rooms, even, formed a source of revenue to the warden. This sunken story, which received its light from the low-browed windows whose sills were level with the slabs of the prison yard, was known as Bartholomew Fair. Here misery might welter in its offal at the fee of one-and-threepence a week if it still held itself above the abject degradation of the Common Side, whose inmates took their turn at begging at the grate. The Common Side was a building apart from the main range, which latter was known as the Warden Side. Here there was no rent to pay. The prisoners bunked in gangs, like emigrants on an ocean passage. As to Bartholomew Fair, let Dickens describe it himself (vide “Pickwick,” chapter xiii, volume II):

“‘Oh!’ replied Mr. Pickwick, looking down 80 a dark and filthy staircase which appeared to lead to a range of damp and gloomy stone vaults beneath the ground, ‘And these, I suppose, are the little cellars where the prisoners keep their small quantities of coals? Unpleasant places to have to go down to, but very convenient, I daresay.’ ‘Yes, I shouldn’t wonder if they was convenient,’ replied Mr. Roker, ‘seeing that a few people live there pretty snug. That’s the Fair, that is!’ ‘My friend,’ said Mr. Pickwick, ‘you don’t really mean to say that human beings live down these wretched dungeons?’ ‘Don’t?’ replied Mr. Roker, with indignant astonishment; ‘why shouldn’t I?’ ‘Live down there?’ exclaimed Mr. Pickwick. ‘Live down there? Yes, and die down there, too, wery often.’”

Nominally, each prisoner in the Fleet on the Warden Side was entitled to a room at the charge of 1s. 3d. a week. Actually, however, he never got one on any floor above the level of Bartholomew Fair. Each room was made to quarter from two to four tenants in the space designed for one, so that it, at full seasons, actually produced at least a crown a week rental. This system, which was excused on the plea of overcrowding of the jail by commitments of the courts, was called “chummage,” and the system produced another curious practice of prison 81 life. If one or more prisoners occupied a room and another was “chummed” on them, they could buy him off by paying him a few shillings a week, and so keep the room to themselves. He, out of the money they paid him, paid in his turn for inferior quarters elsewhere. Thus, a prisoner who was willing to pay full rent for a room to the warden, and buy off anyone who might be chummed upon him, could have a dirty box of a chamber to himself, at the average cost of a first-class parlor and bedroom outside the walls. Prisoners who had been a certain number of years in the jail had a prescriptive right to a room to themselves, and most of these rented their apartments at good rates to new comers, and took beds for themselves in the common lodgings.

When Mr. Pickwick entered the Fleet as a resident (vide volume II, chapter xiv) he was chummed on “27 in the third,” whose door was to be distinguished by the likeness of a man being hung and smoking a pipe the while, done in chalk upon the panel. Not liking his company of three here he, as may be recalled, rented the room of a chancery prisoner, in which he settled down. For the use of this room he 82 paid £1 a week, and for the furniture, which he hired from a keeper, £1 3s. more. These figures may serve as an indication of the rates prevailing in the Fleet fifteen years before it was demolished. The episode of Mr. Pickwick’s investigatory experiences in this connection is worth quoting, as a part of the panorama of prison life. There was only one man in the room upon which he was chummed, and he “was leaning out of the window as far as he could without overbalancing himself, endeavoring, with great perseverance, to spit upon the crown of the hat of a personal friend upon the parade below.” He expressed his disgust at having had the newcomer chummed upon him, and summoned his two room-mates, who were a bankrupt butcher and a drunken chaplain out of orders, the expectoratory gentleman himself being a professional blackleg.

“‘It’s an aggravating thing, just as we got the beds so snug,’ said the chaplain, looking at the dirty mattresses, each rolled up in a blanket, which occupied one corner of the room during the day, and formed a kind of slab on which were placed an old cracked basin, ewer and soap-dish of common yellow earthenware with a blue flower; ‘very aggravating.’

83

“Mr. Martin (the butcher) expressed the same opinion, in rather stronger terms.

“Mr. Simpson (the ’leg) after having let a variety of expletive adjectives loose upon society, without any substantive to accompany them, tucked up his sleeves and began to wash greens for dinner.

“While this was going on Mr. Pickwick had been eyeing the room, which was filthily dirty and smelt intolerably close. There was no vestige of either carpet, curtain or blind. There was not even a closet in it. Unquestionably, there were but few things to put away if there had been one, but, however few in number, or small in individual amount, still, remnants of loaves, and pieces of cheese, and damp towels, and scraps of meat, and articles of wearing apparel, mutilated crockery, and bellows without nozzles, and toasting-forks without prongs, do present somewhat of an uncomfortable appearance when they are scattered about the floor of a small apartment, which is the common sitting and sleeping room of three idle men.

“‘I suppose that this can be managed somehow,’ said the butcher, after a pretty long silence. ‘What will you take to go out?’

“‘I beg your pardon,’ replied Mr. Pickwick, ‘what did you say? I hardly understood you.’

“‘What will you take to be paid out?’ said the butcher. ‘The regular chummage is two-and-six; will you take three bob?’

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“‘And a bender,’ suggested the clerical gentleman.

“‘Well, I don’t mind that; it’s only a twopence apiece more,’ said Mr. Martin; ‘What do you say now? We’ll pay you out for three-and-sixpence a week; come!’

“‘And stand a gallon of beer down,’ chimed in Mr. Simpson. ‘There!’

“‘And drink it on the spot,’ said the chaplain; ‘NOW!’

“After this introductory preface the three chums informed Mr. Pickwick, in a breath, that money was in the Fleet just what money was out of it; that it would instantly procure him almost anything he desired; and that supposing he had it, and had no objection to spend it; if he only signified his wish to have a room to himself, he might take possession of one, furnished and fitted to boot, in half an hour’s time.

“With this the parties separated, very much to their mutual satisfaction, Mr. Pickwick once more retracing his steps to the lodge, and the three companions adjourned to the coffee-room, there to expend the five shillings which the clerical gentleman, with admirable prudence and foresight, had borrowed of him for the purpose.

“‘I knowed it,’ said Mr. Roker with a chuckle, when Mr. Pickwick stated the object with which he had returned. ‘Lord, why didn’t you 85 say at first that you was willing to come down handsome?’”

Those who could afford to sleep well in the Fleet, as sleeping went in such places, might feed well enough, too. They could be served in the coffee-room, and if they preferred to eat in privacy, there was a cookshop in the prison; and there were, besides, messengers who could be sent on errands of purchase outside the walls. In every case the charges were extortionate, for the one object of the prison was to squeeze the debtor dry by fair means or foul. But when the law sanctions such outrages as the Fleet itself, the minor offenses by which the greater burden is mitigated to its victims may be condoned. There was a taproom in the prison where beer and wine were to be had, but the traffic in spirits was forbidden, and even the conveyance of them to the prisoners from without prohibited under heavy penalties; “and such commodities being highly prized by the ladies and gentlemen confined therein” (“Pickwick” volume II, chapter xvii), “it had occurred to some speculative turnkey to connive, for certain remunerative considerations, at two or three prisoners retailing the favorite 86 articles of gin for their own profit and advantage.” The spirit dispensaries were known in the jargon of the jail as “whistling-shops,” and what with the strong waters they provided, and the malt liquors of the taproom, it was safe to assume that the bulk of such prisoners in the Fleet as were not dying for the want of sufficient food were perishing of a superfluity of drink.

The poor debtors who still had the price of “a chamber-pot of coals” and a scrag of mutton, could have it in from the market and cook it for themselves in their rooms or, for a penny or two, at the common kitchen in the prison-yard. In default of sufficient capital to this end they must live off bread and cheese, or cold meat, or hope, or, as many doubtless did, on the porter from the taproom. To secure the means of subsistence and indulgence they begged from the visitors. The sharper old residents borrowed from the shallower newcomers, and, as a matter of course, theft went hand in hand with mendicancy. Of this shadowy side of a picture, dark enough, in all conscience, in its lightest spots, Dickens gives us a glimpse in chapter xiv of volume II, where Mr. Pickwick 87 encounters Mr. Alfred Jingle on the Common Side, and Mr. Jeb Trotter, returning from pawning his master’s last coat, with a scrap of meat for his dinner. And Mr. Jingle’s own summary of the prevailing state of things at that period and place may serve as a description of the condition and prospects of his neighbors.

“‘Lived on a pair of boots—whole fortnight. Silk umbrella—ivory handle—week. Nothing soon—lie in bed—starve—die—inquest—little bone-house—poor prisoner—common necessaries—hush it up—gentlemen of jury—warden’s tradesmen—keep it snug—natural death—coroner’s order—workhouse funeral—serve him right—all over—drop the curtain.’”

In 1749 the son of the architect, Dance, who built old Buckingham House and Guy’s Hospital, was imprisoned in the Fleet for debt. He wrote and published a poem called “The Humors of the Fleet,” which has an interest for comparison with what the prison became later. The book had a frontispiece showing the prison-yard, a newcomer treating the jailer and cook and others to drink; racket-players at their game; and in one corner of the yard a pump and a tree. When the Fleet was rebuilt after 88 the riots, there were two exercise grounds within the walls. One, the smaller, was on the side toward Farringdon street, denominated and called “The Painted Ground,” from the fact of its walls having once displayed the “semblances of various men-of-war in full sail, and other artistical effects, produced, in bygone days, by some imprisoned draughtsman in his leisure hours.” On the other side of the prison was the larger yard where racket was played and games of skittles bowled beneath a shed. Here might be seen the characterless “characters” of the place, in which every prison is sure to abound. Smokers and other idlers loitered about the steps leading to the racket ground, draining their pots as they watched the game. Here Mr. Smangle “made a light and wholesome breakfast on a couple of cigars” Mr. Pickwick had paid for, and here Mr. Weller, with a pint of beer and the day before yesterday’s paper, divided his time between dipping into the news and the noggin, the skittle game and the affections of a young lady who was peeling potatoes at one of the jail windows, on that memorable morning when Mr. Stiggins called upon him and sampled the port wine 89 in the coffee-room snuggery. Here you might hear the roar of the great babel without; and from the same point see one or two of its churches aspiring above the ‘chevaux-de-frise’ of the prison walls. There was a torrent-like fury about the busy hum of the town in contrast with the stagnant life within the brick walls; and, as if to keep up the mockery, they verged upon the yard of the Belle Sauvage Inn, where travelers constantly came and went on their journeys, free, if they chose, to roam around the world. In chapter xvii of volume II, Dickens sketches a vivid picture of the daily scene in the jail-yard.

“Sauntering or sitting about, in every possible attitude of listless idleness, were a number of debtors, the major part of whom were waiting in prison until their day of ‘going up’ before the Insolvent Court should arrive, while others had been remanded for various terms, which they were idling away as they best could. Some were shabby, some were smart, many dirty, a few clean; but there they all lounged, and loitered, and slunk about, with as little spirit or purpose as the beasts in the menagerie. Lolling from the windows which commanded a view of this promenade were a number of persons, some in noisy conversation 90 with their acquaintances below, and others playing bat all with some adventurous throwers outside, and others looking on at the racket players, or watching the boys as they cried the game. Dirty, slipshod women passed and repassed on their way to the cooking house in one corner of the yard; children screamed, and fought, and played together in another; the tumbling of the skittles and the shouts of the players mingled perpetually with these and a hundred other sounds, and all was noise and tumult.”

To this picture of the Fleet by day, it is worth while to add one of the after dark, from chapter xii, of volume II.

“It was getting dark; that is to say, a few gas jets were kindled in this place, which was never light, by way of compliment to the evening which had set in outside. As it was rather warm some of the tenants of the numerous little rooms which opened into the gallery on either hand set their doors ajar. Mr. Pickwick peeped into them, as he passed along, with curiosity and interest. Here, four or five great hulking fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco smoke, were engaged in noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of beer, or playing at all fours with a very greasy pack of cards. In the adjourning room some solitary tenant might be seen poring, by the 91 light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers, yellow with dust, and dropping with age, writing, for the hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances for the perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose heart it would never touch. In a third a man and his wife and a whole crowd of children might be seen making up a scanty bed on the ground, or upon a few chairs for the younger ones to pass the night in. And in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh the noise, and the beer, and the tobacco smoke, and the cards all came over again in greater force than before. In the galleries themselves, and more especially on the staircases, there lingered a great number of people who came there, some because their rooms were foul and hot, and the greater part because they were restless and uncomfortable and not possessed with the secret of knowing exactly what to do with themselves. There were many classes of people here, from the laboring man and his fustian jacket to the broken-down spendthrift in his shawl dressing-gown, most appropriately out at the elbows; but there was the same air about them all—a sort of listless, gaol-bird, careless swagger; a vagabondish, who’s-afraid sort of bearing which is wholly indescribable in words, but which any man can understand in a moment, if he wish, by setting foot in the 92 nearest debtors’ prison, and looking at the very first group of people he sees there.”

The Fleet Prison was staggering along on its last legs, like some gouty monster whose swollen joints were rotting asunder of internal corruption, when Dickens gave it a place in the fiction of picturesque fact. But it had a long history behind it, a history dating from the time when the Fleet creek, now a noisome sewer under the foundations of the jail, was a pretty little river, winding down from a verdant and fertile country. When the town had grown toward and around it, the Fleet river had become silted and clogged up into a foul and sluggish stream, and was such a nuisance that it was arched over, and a market built upon the arches. But below the market it still remained an open stream, where colliers’ barges unloaded their cargoes at Sea-Coal lane, and what is now Bridge street was a sluggish, polluted canal, whose reek infected the air. The gaol took its name from the stream upon whose banks it was built. The exact date of its foundation is unknown, but by various records it was formerly held in conjunction with the Manor of Leveland, in Kent, and with “the King’s House at 93 Westminster,” the whole being a part of the ancient possessions of the See of Canterbury, traceable in a grant from the Archbishop Lanfranc, soon after the accession of William the Conqueror. The wardenship or sergeantcy of the prison was anciently held by several eminent personages, who also had custody of the king’s palace at Westminster. It was “a place,” in the worst sense of the phrase, for, as long ago as 1586, the persons to whom the warden had underlet it were guilty of cruelty and extortion, crimes, however, quite characteristic of the Court of Star Chamber, of which the Fleet was at this time the prison. Up to this period its history is little better than a sealed book, the burning of the prison by the followers of Wat Tyler seeming to have been the only very noticeable event during the above interval. In the reigns of Edward VI and of Mary, the Fleet was tenanted by several victims of religious bigotry. One of the most venerated of British martyrs, Bishop Hopper, was twice committed to the Fleet, which he only quitted in 1555 for the stake and the fire, in the chief town in his diocese, Gloucester. His captivity was truly wretched; he slept upon “a 94 little pad of straw” with a rotten covering; “his chamber was vile and stinking,” just as it might have been had he been a poor debtor in 1825.

The fees belonging to the warden of the Fleet and his officers, in the reign of Elizabeth, were very heavy. An archbishop, duke or duchess had to pay for a commitment fee and the first week’s “dyett,” £21 10s.; a lord, spiritual or temporal, £10 5s. 10d.; a knight, £5; an esquire, £3 6s. 8d.; and even a poor man in the wards, “that hath a part at the box, to pay for his fee, having no dyett, 7s. 4d.” The warden’s charge for lawful license “to go abroad” was 20d. per diem. Thus, as may be seen, the fleecing and flayings, the inhumanities and the injustices which characterized the later years of the prison were hereditary to it.

From the reign of Elizabeth to the sixteenth year of King Charles I, 1641, the Star Chamber Court was in full activity, and several bishops and other persons of distinction were imprisoned in the Fleet for their religious opinions. Thither, too, were consigned political victims of the Star Chamber, two of the most interesting cases of this period being those of 95 Prynne and Lilburne. Prynne was taken out of the prison, and, after suffering pillory, branding, and mutilation of the nose and ears, was remanded to the Fleet. Lilburne—“Freeborn John”—and his printer were committed to the Fleet for libel and sedition; and the former was “smartly whipped” at the cart’s tail, from the prison to the pillory place between Westminster Hall and the Star Chamber; and he was subsequently “doubled ironed” in the prison wards. Another tenant of the Fleet at this period was James Howel, the author of the “Familiar Letters,” several of which are dated from the prison. From a letter “To the Earl of B——,” from the Fleet, Nov. 20, 1643, we gather that Howel was arrested “one morning betimes” by five men armed with “swords, pistols and bils,” and some days after committed to the Fleet; and he says, “as far as I see, I must lie at anchor in this Fleet a long time, unless some gentle gale blow thence to make me launch out.” Then we find him consoling himself in the reflection that the English “people” are in effect but prisoners, as all other islanders are. There are other letters by Howel, dated from the Fleet in 1645–1646 and 1647.

The prison was burnt on September 4, 1666, during the Great Fire, when the prisoners were removed to Carom or Caroon House, in South Lambeth, until the Fleet was rebuilt on the original site. After the abolition of the Star Chamber, in 1641, the Fleet had become a prison for debtors only, and for contempt of the Court of Chancery, Common Pleas and Exchequer. It appears that the prison had been used for the confinement of debtors from the 13th century, at least, a petition from John Trauncy, a debtor in the Fleet, A. D. 1290, being still preserved. When the Star Chamber was abolished, the warden’s power of exacting enormous fees by putting in irons does not appear to have ceased also, for the wardens continued to exercise their tyranny, “not only in extorting exorbitant fees, but in oppressing prisoners for debt, by loading them with irons, worse than if the Star Chamber were still existing.” In 1696 the cruelties and the extortions of the wardens were made public, but it was not until 1727 that the enormity of the system of mismanagement came fully before the public, and indescribable was the excitement and horror it caused. A Parliamentary 97 committee was then appointed, and the result of their labors was the committal of Wardens Bambridge and Huggins, and some of their servants, to Newgate. They were tried for different murders, yet all escaped by the verdict of “Not Guilty.” Hogarth has, however, made them immortal in their infamy, in his picture of Bambridge under examination, whilst a prisoner is explaining how he has been tortured. Twenty years after, it is said, Bambridge cut his throat. In consequence of these proceedings the Court of Common Pleas, January 17, 1729, established a new list of fees to be taken, and modified the rules and orders for the government of the Fleet. The rents, perquisites, and profits of the office at the above period were £4,632 18s. 8d. per annum. James Gambier succeeded Bambridge in the wardenship, was succeeded by John Garth, and to him followed John Eyles, and in 1758 Eyles’s son succeeded him in the office, which he held for sixty-two years. He was succeeded in 1821 by his deputy, Nixon, who died in 1822. The next appointed was W. R. H. Brown, he being the last of the wardens of the prison.

In the riots of 1780 the Fleet was destroyed 98 by fire, and the prisoners liberated by the mob; consequently a great part of the papers and prison records were lost, though there remain scattered books and documents of several centuries back. Although he does not deal specifically with the attack on the prison at this period, Dickens in “Barnaby Rudge” (volume II, chapter ii) gives a brief but picturesque description of the surroundings of the gaol as they were at the time of the Gordon riots.

“Fleet Market at that time was a long, irregular row of wooden sheds and pent houses occupying the centre of what is now called Farringdon street. They were jumbled together in a most unsightly fashion in the middle of the road to the great obstruction of the thoroughfare and the annoyance of passengers who were fain to make their way as best they could among the carts, barrows, baskets, trucks, casks, hulks, and benches, and to jostle with porters, hucksters, wagoners and a motley crowd of buyers, sellers, pickpockets, vagrants and idlers. The air was perfumed with the stench of rotten leaves and faded fruit, the refuse of the butchers’ stalls, and offal and garbage of a hundred kinds. It was indispensable to most public conveniences in those days that they should be public nuisances likewise, and Fleet Market maintained the principle to admiration.”

Further on, in chapter ix of the same work, he summarizes a peculiar episode in the history of the gaol at the same period.

“The gates of the King’s Bench and the Fleet Prison, being opened at the usual hour, were found to have notices affixed to them announcing that the rioters would come that night to burn them down. The wardens, too well knowing the likelihood there was of this promise being fulfilled, were fain to set their prisoners at liberty, and gave them leave to move their goods; so all day such of them as had any furniture were occupied in conveying it, some to this place, some to that, and not a few to the brokers’ shops, where they gladly sold it for any wretched price those gentry chose to give. There were some broken men among these debtors who had been in gaol so long, and were so miserable and destitute of friends, so dead to the world, and utterly forgotten and uncared for, that they implored their gaolers not to set them free, and to send them, if need were to some other place of custody. But they refusing to comply, lest they should incur the anger of the mob, turned them into the streets where they wandered up and down, hardly remembering the ways untrodden by their feet so long, and crying—such abject things those rotten-hearted gaols had made them—as they slunk off in their rags and dragged their slipshod feet along the pavement.”

In spite of the concession of the Warden, the mob, as has been stated, burned the Fleet down, and it was in the successor to the den which had risen on the ruins left by the great fire of 1666 that Mr. Pickwick prosecuted his studies of prison life and character.

Among the curiosities of the London Archives are over a ton of books registering the Fleet Marriages between 1686 and 1754, which are in the Registry Office of the Bishop of London, where they were deposited by the Government, which purchased them in 1821. These Fleet Marriages were the scandal and disgrace of their time. While they lasted the debtor’s gaol was the Gretna Green of London. There were no end of hard-living parsons flung into the Fleet for debt, and as these men were always paupers in purse, they were put to strange shifts to keep themselves in meat and drink—especially the latter. The idea to convert clandestine marriages into a source of gain, once originated, with men who had neither money, character or liberty to lose, was not long in spreading. At first the ceremony was performed within the prison chapel. Then they became too numerous and the business 101 too extensive for the confines of the gaol, and every tavern around the prison had its marriage mill, and a parson who in the rules of the prison was permitted to go at large within certain limits, to grind the mill for anyone who listed. These clerical vagabonds employed touts, who roved about the market and the adjacent streets drumming up custom for the parson, who sat swigging while he waited for trade, very much as the slop-shop salesman of to-day seeks for custom passing on the sidewalk. Tennant relates that in walking the street in his youth, on the side next to this prison: “I have often been tempted by the question, ‘Sir, will you be pleased to walk in and be married.’” Along this most lawless space was frequently hung up the sign of a male and female hand conjoined, with “Marriages Performed Within” written beneath. A dirty fellow invited you in. The parson was seen walking before his shop, a squalid, profligate figure, clad in a tattered plaid night-gown, with a fiery face, and ready to couple you for a dram of gin or roll of tobacco. “The Grub Street Journal,” in January, 1735, says: “There are a set of drunken, 102 swearing parsons, with their myrmidons, who wear black coats and pretend to be clerks and registers of the Fleet, and who ply about Ludgate Hill, pulling or forcing people to some peddling ale-house or brandy shop to be married; even on a Sunday stopping them as they go to church and almost tearing the clothes off their backs.”

Competition in the business was fierce. While the Fleet parsons sent their pullers-in forth to scour the streets, they hung their signs out in the windows under the shadow of the prison wall. Thus at one corner might be seen a window, “Weddings performed here cheap.” The business was advertised in the newspapers. The marriage taverns lined Fleet Lane and Fleet Ditch. Two of them—the Bull and Garter and the King’s Head—were kept by warders of the prison. The parson and the landlord divided the fee between them, after deducting a shilling for the tout who brought the customers in. If a marriage was desired to be secret it was not entered on the register of the house. Otherwise it was, for a small fee, written down in a book which each tavern kept. Thus a profligate man could victimize 103 a confiding girl with impunity. Men and women might commit bigamy at will, since any name they chose to give, along with their fee, satisfied the parson, and they could have the “ceremony” kept unregistered, or dated back as they chose. The law held a married woman free of the responsibility of her debts, while a single woman could be arrested and locked up for them. All a woman of free life had to do to defraud her creditors was to get some man to marry her at the Fleet. Then she could not be prosecuted. As for the man, the creditors had to find him before they could proceed against him.

Women of quality who had led extravagant lives did not hesitate at the same shift. There were parsons who kept husbands in hire at five shillings each. There is record of one fellow having been “married” to four women in one day. There is also a record of women, dressed as men, being hired out as mock husbands for the occasion. All classes were fish for the Fleet parson’s net. Drunken sailors and soldiers were united to the gin-perfumed fairies of the market; rouÉs fetched their silly, girlish victims in coaches to the altar reeking of stale 104 beer and brandy; and great men of the realm utilized the functions of the clerical mountebanks to a similar result. In five months—from October, 1704, to February, 1705—2,954 marriages were recorded at the Fleet. How many went unrecorded can only be surmised. The church strove in vain to eradicate the scandal, and it required an Act of Parliament to put an end to it in 1754.

The Fleet marriages provided Dickens with no material, although other and less distinguished romancers have found use for them, with more or less effect. In fact, Dickens rarely wrote without a distinct object, and in “Pickwick,” desultory and irregular as the thread of the narrative is, he had such a purpose when he took the Fleet in hand. At the time he wrote of it (1836) the monstrosity was at its worst. The prevalent system of imprisonment for debt rendered the hideous gaol a tool at the hands of a vengeful enemy, and in those of a rapacious and dishonest man. The outrages to which it lent itself, at the call of swindling lawyers and commercial extortioners, had commenced to attract public attention. That the chapters on the Fleet in “Pickwick” bore a share in arousing 105 the general indignation which forced the Government into action cannot be questioned. They shaped the popular sentiment and gave it a war-cry. But the good work was not to be done in a day. It required an Act of Parliament, debated on and contested with the usual ponderous procrastinativeness, to rid the earth of the Fleet. The Act was at last passed in 1842, and by it the prison was abolished, and its inmates were drafted into the Queen’s Prison. The Fleet was later sold to the Corporation of the City of London, and in the spring of 1846 it was razed to the ground. Its site to-day is marked by business buildings, whose ceaseless industry makes a strange monument for the stagnant and idle life of which the spot was once the scene.