THE FLEET PRISON.
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 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 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. 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 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 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.
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 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 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 paid L1 a week, and
for the furniture, which he hired from a keeper, L1 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.'
"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?'
"'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
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 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 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
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 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 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
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 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 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 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," L21 10s.; a
lord, spiritual or temporal, L10 5s. 10d.; a knight, L5; an esquire, L3
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 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 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 L4,632 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 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 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, 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 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; roues fetched their silly,
girlish victims in coaches to the altar reeking of stale 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 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.