THE MARSHALSEA.
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, 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 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 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 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 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,
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 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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
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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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."