Alfred Trumble

It was a good seven years—or an evil seven—for many a poor debtor, after the Fleet was legislated out of existence, before its younger brother on the other side of the river followed it. The Marshalsea was not officially abolished until 1849, and even then it escaped the doom of extinction meted out to the Fleet, and prolonged its material existence into our own day. What had been a frowsy jail became a frowsy shelter for a community scarcely poorer than that which had once inhabited it; albeit this newer community enjoyed the advantage of being miserable in freedom from the restrain of barred windows and spike-topped walls.

Of the prison, Dickens sketches a good description in Chapter 6 of the first volume of “Little Dorrit.” “Thirty years ago,” he says, “there stood, a few doors short of the church of St. George, in the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way going southward, 107 the Marshalsea Prison. It was an oblong pile of barrack buildings, partitioned into squalid rooms standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms; environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed by high walls duly spiked on the top. Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within it a much closer and more confined gaol for smugglers. Offenders against the revenue laws, and defaulters to the excise or customs, who had incurred fines which they were unable to pay, were supposed to be incarcerated behind an iron-plated door, closing up a second prison, consisting of a strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which formed the mysterious termination of the very limited skittle ground in which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles. Supposed to be incarcerated there, because the time had rather outgrown the strong cells and the blind alley. In practice they come to be considered a little too bad, though in theory they were quite as good as ever; which may be observed to be the case at the present day with other cells that are not at all strong, and with other blind alleys that are 108 stone blind. Hence the smugglers habitually consorted with the debtors (who received them with open arms) except at certain constitutional moments when somebody came from some office, to go through the form of overlooking something, which neither he nor anybody else knew anything about. On these truly British occasions, the smugglers, if any, made a feint of walking into the strong cells and the blind alley, while this somebody pretended to do his something, and made a reality of walking out again as soon as he hadn’t done it—nearly epitomising the administration of the most of the public affairs in our own right, tight little island.”

The Marshalsea had several notable neighbors in its own line of trade. One of these was Horsemonger Lane Gaol, the county jail for Surrey. It was a sturdy, thick-set prison, with a massive-looking lodge and powerful walls. Executions took place on the roof of the lodge, the gallows being set up there, and the drop cut in the roof itself. These hangings were a popular show in their day, and the tenants of the houses across the way from the jail used to reap a harvest by letting 109 their front windows to sightseers. It is said that they would commonly make a year’s rent, and often more, out of the morbid curiosity of the town on one of these occasions. What the occasions were like, Dickens has left us an idea in his famous letter to the “Times,” on the occasion of the execution of the Mannings, husband and wife, on November 13, 1849. Dickens and John Foster attended this ghastly raree-show. Here is a description of it:

“I was a witness to the execution of the Mannings in Horsemonger Lane. I went there with the intention of observing the crowd gathered to behold it, and I had excellent opportunities of doing so; at intervals all through the night, and continuously from daybreak until the spectacle was over. I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun. The horrors of the gibbet and of the crime which brought these wretched murderers to it, faded in my mind before the atrocious bearing, looks and language of the assembled spectators. When I came upon the scene, at midnight, the shrillness of the cries and howls that were raised from time to time, denoting that they came from a concourse of 110 boys and girls already assembled in the best places, made my blood run cold. As the night went on, screeching and laughing and yelling, in strong chorus of parodies on negro melodies, with substitutions of ‘Mrs. Manning’ for ‘Susannah,’ and the like, were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly, as it did, it gilded the thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the devil. When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgment, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities than if the name of Christ had never been heard in the world, and there was no belief among men but that they perished 111 like beasts. I have seen, habitually, some of the sources of general contamination and corruption, and I think there are not many phases of London life that could surprise me. I am solemnly convinced that nothing that ingenuity could devise to be done in this city, in the same compass of time, could work such ruin as one public execution, and I stand astounded and appalled by the wickedness it exhibits. I do not believe that any community can prosper where such a scene of horror and demoralization as was enacted this morning outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol is presented at the very doors of the good citizens, and is passed by unknown or forgotten.”

This letter created a tremendous sensation, and started a whole flood of literature, condemnatory and demanding the abolishment of public hangings; but they were not finally done away with until nearly twenty years later. Apropos of Horsemonger Lane, readers of “Little Dorrit” may recall that it was here that John Chivery resided, assisting his mother “in the conduct of a snug tobacco business, which could usually command a neat connection within the college walls”—the college being a polite title for the Marshalsea, whose inmates were, by natural association, 112 technically known among themselves as collegians.

“The tobacco business around the corner of Horsemonger Lane was carried on in a rural establishment one story high, which had the benefit of the air from the yards of the Horsemonger Lane Gaol, and the advantage of a retired walk under the wall of that pleasant establishment. The business was of too modest a character to support a life-sized Highlander, but it maintained a little one on the bracket on the door post, who looked like a fallen cherub that had found it necessary to take to a kilt.”

It was from the stock of this establishment that John Chivery produced the cigars of which he made a Sunday offering on the altar of the Father of the Marshalsea, who not only “took the cigars and was glad to get them,” but “sometimes even condescended to walk up and down the yard with the donor, and benignantly smoke one in his society.” It was also from this establishment that he issued forth on the memorable Sunday, “neatly attired in a plum-colored coat, with as large a collar of black velvet as his figure could carry; a silken waistcoat, bedecked with golden sprigs, a chaste neckerchief much in vogue in 113 that day, representing a preserve of lilac pheasants on a buff ground; pantaloons, so highly decorated with side stripes that each leg was a three-stringed lute; and a hat of state, very high and hard,” not to mention a pair of white kid gloves, and a cane like a little finger post, surmounted by an ivory hand, to propose to Little Dorrit on the Iron Bridge.

Another of the famous Southwark gaols was the King’s Bench, but in justice to Mr. Micawber, it demands a chapter to itself. To return to the Marshalsea, it may be remarked that Dickens knew it by such early experience that he was qualified to write about it, even more exhaustively than he did in “Little Dorrit.” While he was still a boy, in 1822, his father endured a period of compulsory retirement behind its lock, and the future chronicler of the jail lodged in a cheap garret near by, an episode of his life which he has introduced in “David Copperfield,” in connection with the Micawbers and the King’s Bench. Every morning, as soon as the gates were opened, the boy went to the Marshalsea, where his mother had joined his father, to breakfast. In the evening he would go to the jail from 114 the blacking factory, where he was employed, to get his supper. The family got along quite gayly while the elder Dickens’s affairs were in the courts. He had an income on which they lived and kept a servant, a workhouse girl, from whom the novelist is said to have drawn his character of The Marchioness in “Old Curiosity Shop.” The girl and the boy had to leave the prison before ten, when the gate was locked for the night, and they became great friends. On holidays he would go to the seminary on Tenterden street, where his sister Fanny was at school, and fetch her to spend the day in the family circle, escorting her back in the evening. How freely he used his Marshalsea experiences in “David Copperfield,” and transferred to Mr. Micawber the actualities of his own family life, may be appreciated from the passage, written by himself and quoted by Foster, relating to his first visit to his father in the jail:

“My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room (on the top story but one) and cried very much, and he told me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if any man had twenty pounds a year, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen 115 shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before now, with two bricks in the rusted grate, one on each side to prevent its burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room with him, who came in by-and-by; and, as the dinner was a joint-stock repast, I was sent up to Captain Porter in the room overhead, with Mr. Dickens’s compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., lend me a knife and fork. Captain P. lent me a knife and fork, with his compliments in return. There was a very dirty lady in his room, and two wan girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I should not have liked to borrow Captain Porter’s comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremities of shabbiness, and if I could draw at all, I would draw an accurate portrait of the old, old brown great-coat he wore, with no other coat below it. His whiskers were large. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner, and what plates and dishes and pots he had on a shelf; and I knew (God knows how) that the two girls with the shock heads were Captain Porter’s natural children, and that the dirty lady was not married to Captain P. My timid, wondering station on his threshold was not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I daresay; but I came down into the room 116 below with all this as surely in my knowledge as the knife and fork were in my hand.”

It was into this familiar scene that Dickens introduced Mr. William Dorrit, a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged gentleman, who was “going out again directly. Necessarily he was going out again directly, because the Marshalsea lock never turned upon a debtor who was not. He brought in a portmanteau with him, which he doubted it worth while to unpack, he was so perfectly clear—like all the rest of them, the turnkey on the lock said—that he was going out again directly. He was a shy, retiring man, well-looking, though in an effeminate style; with a mild voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands—rings upon the fingers those days, not one of which was left” upon them a little while after—when the drunken doctor, fetched in haste, ushered Little Dorrit into the world, with the assistance of Mrs. Bangham and the brandy bottle. The doctor was a type of one class of tenants to be found in every debtors’ prison. He lived in a wretched, ill-smelling room under the roof, with a puffy, red-faced chum, who helped to pass the time playing all fours, with pipe and 117 brandy trimmings. “The doctor’s friend was in the positive stage of hoarseness, puffiness, all fours, tobacco, dirt and brandy; the doctor in the comparative—hoarser, puffier, more red-faced, more all foury, tobaccoer, dirtier and brandier. The doctor was amazingly shabby in a torn, darned, rough weather sea jacket, out at the elbows, and eminently short of buttons (he had been in his time the experienced surgeon carried by a passenger ship), the dirtiest white trowsers conceivable by mortal man, carpet slippers and no visible linen. ‘Childbed?’ said the doctor (to Mr. Dorrit, who had come to summon him) ‘I’m the boy!’ With that the doctor took a comb from the chimneypiece, and stuck his hair upright—which appeared to be his way of washing himself—produced a professional case or chest, of the most abject appearance, from the cupboard where his cup and saucer and coals were, settled his chin in a frowsy wrapper round his neck, and became a ghastly medical scarecrow.”

To enter the public establishment of which he was destined to become the patriarch, Mr. William Dorrit had passed through an open outer gate on High street in the Borough, to 118 give Southwark its more familiar name; had crossed a little court-yard, ascended a couple of stone steps, traversed a narrow entry, and been admitted by a string of locked doors into the prison lodge. Here he had waited, as the form and practice of the proceeding required, until his arrival was registered, and the tipstaff, who had kindly guided and guarded his feet to this harbor of refuge from the cares of the world which works for a living, had received a receipt for his safe delivery. Through another door at the rear of the lodge, which was built in the wall of the jail itself, he was conducted to what was to be his home for half the lifetime allotted to mortal man. Before him was the jail court, the aristocratic court, where the pump was; and facing the lofty wall which divided it from the street, the barrack, on the next to the top floor of which he found the shabby room in which the child of the Marshalsea was to be born. Debtors were playing at racket and skittles in the court, and grouped around the entrance to the snuggery or tap-room at the further end of the barrack. There were “the collegian in the dressing gown, who had no coat, the stout greengrocer collegian in the corduroy 119 kneebreeches, who had no cares, the collegian in the seaside slippers, who had no shoes, and the lean clerk collegian in buttonless black, who had no hopes; the man with many children and many burdens, whose failure astonished everybody; the man of no children and large resources, whose failure astonished nobody; the people who were always going out to-morrow, and always putting it off; the slatternly women at the windows, gossiping shrilly, the smudgy children playing noisily; all those people in fine who belong to such a place, not forgetting the nondescript messengers, go-betweens and errand runners, who formed a class by themselves.”

Every debtors’ prison had its corps of such attendants, who came and went in the service of the inmates whose liberty ended at the lodge door. “The shabbiness of these attendants upon shabbiness, the poverty of the insolvent waiters on insolvency, was a sight to see. Such threadbare coats and trowsers, such fusty gowns and shawls, such squashed hats and bonnets, such boots and shoes, such umbrellas and walking sticks, never were seen in Rag Fair. All of them wore the cast-off clothes of other 120 men and women; were made up of patches and pieces of other peoples’ individuality, and had no sartorial existence of their own proper. Their walk was the walk of a race apart. They had a peculiar way of doggedly slinking around the corner, as if they were eternally going to the pawnbroker’s. When they coughed, they coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on the doorsteps and draughty passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink, which gave the recipients of those manuscripts great mental disturbance and no satisfaction. As they eyed the stranger in passing, they eyed him with borrowing eyes—hungry, sharp, speculative as to his softness if they were accredited to him, and the likelihood of his standing something handsome. Mendicity on commission stooped in their high shoulders, shambled in their unsteady legs, buttoned and pinned and darned and dragged their clothes, frayed their button-holes, leaked out of their figures in dirty ends of tape, and issued from their mouths in alcoholic breathings.”

In spite of occasional touches such as this, the comparative brightness of Dickens’s picture of the Marshalsea, as contrasted with the 121 gloom and horror of his delineation of the Fleet, has been frequently commented upon, but there was a reason for this in fact. Squalid and miserable enough the Marshalsea was, but it was still more merciful and humane a house of confinement than the other. Extortions were common to all such places, but they were carried to their worst extent at the Fleet. The Marshalsea, moreover, was a smaller prison, its population came and went at shorter intervals than that of the Fleet, and it did not include so heavy a percentage of the baser elements of society as festered in the social cesspool opposite the Fleet Market. Very few debtors remained in the gaol for an extended period. The average generation of a Marshalsea prisoner was, as Dickens himself says, three months. The case of the Father of Marshalsea—which, by the way, was based on that of a real prisoner in the last century—was unique. “The affairs of this debtor were perplexed by a partnership of which he knew no more than that he had invested money in it, by legal matters of assignment and settlement, conveyance here and conveyance there, suspicion of unlawful preference of creditors in this direction, and of mysterious 122 spiriting away of property in that.” In short, Mr. William Dorrit’s affairs were so tangled up that even the lawyers could not untwist them, and finally they gave him up, and in the inextricable entanglement he remained fettered to the Marshalsea as if he had never been a part of any world beyond its confining wall. “Crushed at first by his imprisonment” (vide Chapter 6, Volume I, “Little Dorrit”), “he had soon found a dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that kept him in kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with strength of purpose to face these troubles and fight them, he might have broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but, being what he was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent and never took one step upward. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder children played regularly about the yard, and everyone knew the baby and claimed a kind of proprietorship in her.” The title conferred upon him by a turnkey he came to hear with pride, and under it he levied the tribute of selfish and ungrateful beggary upon the goodnatured subjects over whom he presumed to rule.

There was a certain snugness about the Marshalsea which was not to be found in the Fleet. There the company was too numerous and heterogeneous to form any social combination. In the smaller prison a specie of club system was kept up. The tap-room, or snuggery, was a public room where meat and drink might be procured, and where a fire was maintained for the use of the prisoners who did not wish to cook in their rooms. The furnace was kept fed by assessment of those who used it. At the club, which met nightly, each man paid his own scot. The requisite for membership was the possession of the price of the potations served to the member. The club was of indefinite proportions and individuality. Its members came with the tipstaves and went with the orders of release issued by the courts. The general form of its management was that which used to be known as the “free and easy.” If any person present was a mimic, a singer, a musician, or otherwise gifted with a pleasing or popular accomplishment, he might be called upon to display it for the general good. Poor debtors, who could do something to amuse, might have their beer free at the charge of the more solvent 124 collegians whom they consented to divert. There is a legend of a comedian, broken down by drink, who was sent to the Marshalsea and who lived off the fat of the jail for several years, until he died of it, all through the discreet application of his mimetic and comic powers in the snuggery club. Once in a while the club would perform a piece of serious business. Sometimes it would draft a memorial against imprisonment for debt to the Throne or Judges, which neither Throne nor Judges saw or read, of course. Sometimes it would issue patriotic manifestoes to Parliament, of which Parliament remained equally ignorant. When a popular member secured his release the club would present him with a memorial, properly engrossed and framed, of its esteem. Mr. Dorrit received such a memorial when he came into his fortune and resigned his paternal supremacy over the college; and in return he treated the whole jail to a refection in the Pump Yard, as you may read in the last chapter of the first volume of the record of his prison patriarchy. But one drop of bitterness flavored the cup of the Marshalsea Club. Its festivities were limited by the public hours of the prison. 125 The clangor of the jail bell announced the closing of the gates at ten o’clock at night, and warned all visitors to retire or be locked in until morning. Such experience befell Mr. Arthur Clennam when he made his first visit to the Dorrits’ at home.

“The stoppage of the bell, and the quiet in the prison, were a warning to depart. But he had remained too late. The inner gate was locked and the lodge closed. This brought them to the tavern establishment at the upper end of the prison, where the collegians had just vacated their social evening club. The apartment on the ground floor in which it was held was the Snuggery: the presidential tribune of the chairman, the pewter pots, glasses, pipes, tobacco ashes and general flavor of members were still as that convivial institution had left them on its adjournment. The Snuggery had two of the qualities popularly held to be essential for grog for ladies, in respect that it was hot and strong; but in the third point of analogy, requiring plenty of it, the Snuggery was defective; being but a cooped-up apartment.

“The unaccustomed visitor from the outside naturally assumed everybody to be prisoners—landlord, waiter, barmaid, potboy and all. Whether they were or not did not appear; but they all had a weedy look. The keeper of the chandler’s shop in the front parlor, who took in 126 gentlemen boarders, lent his assistance in making the bed. He had been a tailor in his time, and had kept a phaeton, he said. It was evident, from the general tone of the whole party, that they had come to regard insolvency as the normal state of mankind, and the payment of debts a disease that occasionally broke out. In this strange scene, and with these strange spectres flitting about him, Arthur Clennam looked on the preparations as if they were a part of a dream. Pending the while the long initiated Tip, with an awful enjoyment of the Snuggery’s resources, pointed out the common kitchen fire maintained by subscription of the collegians, the boiler for hot water, supported in the same manner, and other premises generally tending to the deduction that the way to be healthy, wealthy and wise was to come to the Marshalsea.

“The two tables put together in a corner were, at length, converted into a very fair bed; and the stranger was left to the Windsor chairs, the presidential tribune, the beery atmosphere, sawdust, pipelights, spittoons and repose. But the last item was long, long, long in linking itself to the rest. The novelty of the place, the coming upon it without preparation, the sense of being locked up, kept him waking and unhappy. Speculations, too, bearing on the strangest relations towards the prison, but always concerning the prison, ran like nightmares 127 through his mind while he lay awake. Whether coffins were kept ready for people who might die there, where they were kept, how they were kept, where people who died in prison were buried, how they were taken out, what forms were observed, whether an implacable creditor could arrest the dead? As to escaping, what chances were there of escape? Whether a prisoner could scale the walls with a cord and grapple? How he would descend on the other side; whether he could alight on a housetop, steal down a staircase, let himself out at a door, and get lost in the crowd? As to fire in the prison, if one were to break out while he lay there?

“The morning light was in no hurry to climb the prison wall and look in at the Snuggery windows; and when it did come, it would have been more welcome if it had come alone, instead of bringing a rush of rain with it. But the equinoctial gales were blowing out at sea, and the impartial southwest wind, in its flight, would not neglect even the narrow Marshalsea. While it roared through the steeple of St. George’s church, and twirled all the cowls in the neighborhood, it made a swoop to beat the Southwark smoke into the gaol; and, plunging down the chimneys of the few collegians who were yet lighting their fires, half suffocated them.

“Heartily glad to see the morning through little 128 rested by the night, he turned out as soon as he could distinguish objects about him, and paced the yard for two heavy hours before the gaol was opened. The walls were so near to one another, and the wild clouds hurried over them so fast, that it gave him a sensation like the beginning of seasickness to look up at the gusty sky. The rain, carried aslant by flaws of wind, blackened that side of the central building which he had visited last night, but left a narrow dry trough under the lee of the wall, where he walked up and down among the waifs of straw and dust and paper, the waste droppings of the pumps and the stray leaves of yesterday’s greens. It was as haggard a view of life as a man need look upon.”

By the arrangement of the walls, all that the prisoners in the Marshalsea could see out of doors was the sky. The view from the barred windows of the uppermost rooms was cut off by the higher line of the wall topped with its chevaux-de-frise. But Little Dorrit’s own room, being in the Warden’s house, had a somewhat freer prospect. “A garret and a Marshalsea garret without compromise was Little Dorrit’s room,” but “the housetops and the distant country hills were discernible over the walls in the clear morning.” Since the prison has 129 been put to ordinary uses, such of the wall as is left has been lowered so that the view except from the lower windows is not obstructed. The sharp and cruel spikes that reddened in the sunrise like the bloody fangs of a savage beast, are gone. Poverty looks out of the old windows without having to peep between iron bars, and in the prison where the smugglers did not abide a factory is busy. The place, when I saw it, had changed but little since Dickens himself visited it in 1857, and wrote:

“I found the outer front court-yard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the gaol for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent ‘Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,’ I came to ‘Marshalsea Place,’ the houses in which I recognized; not only the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind’s eye when I became Little Dorrit’s biographer. A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used to inclose the pent-up inner prison, where nobody was put except for ceremony. But whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turned out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea Gaol; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the 130 left, very little altered, if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of many years.”

The Marshalsea has a history nearly as ancient as the Fleet. Stow tells us that it was so called as “pertaining to the Marshalls of England.” In it were confined all manners of marauders, with a special tendency towards persons who had been guilty of piracy and other offenses on the high seas. Some authorities place its foundation as far back as the Twelfth Century. It was a prison of considerable extent in 1377, when a mob of sailors broke into it and murdered a gentleman who had been incarcerated there for killing one of their comrades in a pot-house brawl. Three years later, Wat Tyler, in the course of his rebellion, seized and hanged the Marshal of the Marshalsea. The official title of the Warden of the prison was, by the way, Marshal. When Bishop Bonner was deprived of his see of London for his adherence to the Church of Rome, he was sent to the Marshalsea. He lived there ten years, and there dying, in 1569, he was buried at midnight in St. George’s Church hard 131 by. This ancient prison occupied another site on the same street as the later structure. Under Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth, it was the second prison in importance in London, being inferior only to the Tower. Here Christopher Brooke, the poet, was confined for being concerned in the wedding of Dr. Donne, and here George Wither was a prisoner for one of his satires against the Government aggressions and the abuse of the royal prerogative. The Nonconformist confessors were divided up among the Southwark prisons, and the Marshalsea received its share of them. John Udall, the Puritan martyr, fell a victim to its gaol fever. Its blight extended through many generations, and the shadow of its walls darkened many useful lives for no crime worse than the accident of failure that may come to any man. A false system ground its abject shabbiness, its haggard anxiety, and hopeless stupor of energies, into natures that might, but for it, have triumphed over care, and converted the defeat of to-day into the victory of to-morrow. “Changeless and barren, looking ignorantly at all seasons with its fixed, pinched face of poverty and care, the prison 132 had not a touch of any of these beauties in it. Blossom what would, its bricks and bars bore uniformly the same dead crop.”

Long before “Little Dorrit” was projected, Dickens introduced the Marshalsea to his readers; even before he introduced the Fleet, indeed. The ceremony was performed in Volume I chapter 21 of the “Pickwick Papers,” in the sketch called “The Old Man’s Tale about the Queer Client.” Here is the passage:

“In the Borough High street, near St. George’s Church, and on the same side of the way, stands, as most people know, the smallest of our debtors’ prisons—the Marshalsea. Although in later times it has been a very different place from the sink of filth and dirt it once was, even its improved condition holds out but little temptation to the extravagant or consolation to the improvident. The condemned felon has as good a yard for air and exercise in Newgate as the insolvent debtor in the Marshalsea Prison.

“It may be my fancy, or it may be that I cannot separate the place from the old recollections associated with it, but this part of London I cannot bear. The street is broad, the shops are spacious, the noise of the passing vehicles, the footsteps of a perpetual stream of people—all the busy sounds of traffic resound 133 in it from morn to midnight, but the streets around are mean and close; poverty and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are penned up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems, in my eyes at least, to hang about the scene, and to impart to it a squalid and sickly hue.

“Many eyes that have long since closed in the grave, have looked around upon that scene lightly enough, when entering the gate of the old Marshalsea Prison for the first time; for despair seldom comes with the first severe shock of misfortune. A man has confidence in untried friends, he remembers the many offers of assistance so freely made by his boon companions when he wanted them not, he has hope—the hope of happy inexperience—and however he may bend beneath the first shock, it springs up in his bosom, and flourishes there for a brief space, until it droops beneath the blight of disappointment and neglect. How soon have those same eyes, deeply sunken in the head, glared from faces wasted with famine, and sallow from confinement, in days when it was no figure of speech to say that the debtors rotted in prison, with no hope of release, and no prospect of liberty. The atrocity in its full extent no longer exists, but there is enough of it left to give rise to occurrences that make the heart bleed.”