SOURCE: Philpotts, Trey. “The Real Marshalsea.” The Dickensian 87, no. 3 (autumn 1991): 133-45.

[In the following essay, Philpotts discusses the London debtor's prison in which Dickens's father was incarcerated and which inspired the dominant symbol of Little Dorrit.]

When John Dickens entered the gates of the Marshalsea on February 20, 1824, he unwittingly supplied his son with the presiding symbol for one of his greatest novels, Little Dorrit, as well as material that would influence his portrayal of the debtors' prison in The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield. Despite the importance of the Marshalsea experience to the young Dickens, the prison itself, the real Marshalsea that John Dickens knew all too well, remains a shadowy presence for modern readers. In 1927 William Kent, citing James Neild's State of the Prisons in England, Scotland, and Wales (1811) as the only other book that he could find approaching in detail the descriptions in Dickens, provided the measurements for the Marshalsea rooms and the debtors' court, but little else, acknowledging that ‘Of the appearance [of the prison], apart from Dickens, we know very little, as no illustration is extant’ (Dickensian 23: 262). In 1932 George F. Young improved on Kent's findings when he visited the former site of the prison—then occupied by the Marshalsea Press—took some invaluable photographs, verified that Marshalsea had changed locations in 1811, and tried to imagine what the old prison must have been like from its present condition. Even as recent, and as well-researched, a work as Peter Ackroyd's biography of Dickens still cites Young as the main source, particularly praising the photographs. But Young's type of retrospective analysis, while helpful, can also lead to a mistaken inference. For example, a photograph that he labels as ‘The Marshalsea as seen by Little Dorrit from her room in the Turnkey's house’ (Dickensian 28: 225) is not, a ground plan of the Marshalsea suggests, from Little Dorrit's garret room but a picture of her room.

Fortunately for those interested in attempting to recreate the reality of Dickens's world, the Select Committees and Commissioners on the State and Management of Prisons in London and Elsewhere reported at some length on the condition of the Marshalsea between 1815-1818, providing not only a detailed ground plan of the prison, but interviews with its major officers, a listing of prison rules, and statistics defining the exact nature of the prison population. From these reports, published in the British Parliamentary Papers, I have culled a description of the Marshalsea as it would most probably have been during John Dickens's—and thus, William Dorrit's—stay. For a later account of conditions at the Marshalsea, I have consulted ‘An Expose [sic] of the Practice of the Palace, or Marshalsea Court’, an anonymous attack by an ‘eye-witness’ on the practice of imprisonment for debt, published in 1833 just as the Solicitor General was bringing in a bill for the ‘Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt in certain cases’. While the ‘Expose’ may lack the dispassion—and, I suspect, some of the reliability—of the parliamentary reports, it provides an invaluable account of what the Marshalsea must have seemed like to an outsider who was nonetheless an ‘eye-witness’, an outsider who was clearly sympathetic to the debtors. Overall, both the parliamentary and private descriptions of the Marshalsea tend to confirm each other, since they show how little had changed between 1815 and 1833, despite the turnover in the prison staff and the several investigations by the Select Committee. Certain incidental considerations relating to the prison as it was in 1824—such as fees paid—may, of course, have varied slightly from the figures I have included in this description. In every case I have provided the most current (to 1824) information available.

The Marshalsea was the Prison of the Court of the Marshalsea and of the King's Palace Court of Westminster, receiving its authority from two patents of Charles the First and Second. Its jurisdiction extended over the palace of Westminster and the twelve surrounding miles. The Marshalsea had originally stood 130 yards to the North, at an address which would approximate to 161 Borough High Street. Because the older prison had ‘fallen into a state of decay, and was found to be ill suited to its purpose’ (BPP Prisons 8: 356), a ‘new’ Marshalsea was constructed for £8000 in 1811 at 150 (later changed to 211) High Street, the site of the sixteenth-century White Lyon or Borough prison (Young 220-21). Thus, during his lengthy stay, William Dorrit would have moved from one site to the other, though Dickens makes no mention of this.

The Marshalsea was divided into two sections. The debtors' part contained a brick barracks housing those convicted of insolvency, a kitchen or public room, and a tap room or snuggery. The barracks building was divided into eight numbered houses, consisting of three stories of 56 rooms, most about ten and a half feet square and from eight to nine feet high. Each room had a boarded floor, a fire-place, and a glazed window and often contained two, sometimes three, prisoners depending on the overall population of the facility. The rooms were so small that two beds could not be reasonably placed in one room, so debtors would have to share a single bed. Instead of galleries through the middle of each floor, as in the Fleet prison, eight very narrow wooden staircases led to the rooms from outside, an arrangement similar to the chambers in the Inns of Court, as the commissioners point out. Here we find, early in Dickens's life, a convergence of locations which would resonate symbolically through much of the work of the mature writer. Despite being nearly new, the debtors' barracks impressed the commissioners as an ill-constructed fire-hazard with thin lath and plaster partitions between the eight houses of the building and with only the narrow staircase for exists. It is not surprising, then, that Arthur Clennam worries about fire on the night of his accidental confinement. What struck almost everyone who came in contact with the Marshalsea was its cramped and constricted character, helping to make it ‘in many particulars much inferior to the Fleet, and to the generality of modern prisons’. The barracks building itself was less than ten yards wide and 33 yards long, an incredibly small space to house what was often well over 100 debtors, their 50 or so family members, and a handful of Admiralty prisoners. The prison yard itself was little more than an alley at the most 5 yards wide. ‘The boundary wall comprehends so contracted a space,’ the commissioners explained, ‘and the body of the building is in all parts so near to it from the wall, as to leave no sufficient area for any active exercise except walking; nor is there any convenience for any sort of exercise in bad weather’ (BPP Prisons 8: 357). The ‘Expose’ writer adds emphasis to the picture: ‘170 persons have been confined at one time within these walls, making an average of more than four persons in each room—which are not ten feet square!!! I will leave the reader to imagine what the situation of men, thus confined, particularly in the summer months, must be’ (6). He also worries that this terrible confinement ‘must be productive of serious inconveniences and great risk of health’ (6). Eighteen years earlier, the commissioners had sounded a similar warning: ‘from the confined situation of the prison itself, the scanty yard, the want of a free circulation of air, the quantity of waste water that covers the court, the health of the prisoners may be materially affected’ (BPP Prisons 7: 389), a warning echoed by Mr Rugg when he advised Arthur Clennam to avoid the Marshalsea: ‘Now, you know what the Marshalsea is. Very close. Excessively confined. Whereas in the King's Bench—’ (697).

The Admiralty part of the Marshalsea, known as the Admiralty division, contained those handful of prisoners under sentence of naval courts martial, most often for mutiny, desertion, attempting to commit others to desert or for what the Deputy Marshal in 1815 described as ‘unnatural crimes’. A chapel was accessible, by separate passages, to both debtors and Admiralty prisoners. Although the barrack building was itself rather new, having been constructed in 1811, the northern boundary wall and the interior buildings from the day-room to the chapel, including all of the Admiralty section, had been part of the Borough prison and were exceedingly run down. The strong rooms were so old and rotten they could not adequately confine prisoners. As Dickens explains in Little Dorrit: ‘time had rather outgrown the strong cells and the blind alley’ which had ‘come to be considered a little too bad’ (58), so bad that in 1817 a prisoner had easily broken through the cell walls and climbed to the top of the outside wall before being discovered by the Deputy Marshal. Although escapes rarely occurred, no part of the prison was considered secure because of the low boundary wall and the spotty placement of the chevaux-de-frise (Little Dorrit's spikes). Due to the dilapidation of the strong cells, troublesome Admiralty prisoners would be confined in the ‘more airy and better fitted’ and seldom-used infirmary, apparently chained to ring bolts fixed in the floor (BPP Prisons 7: 388). The Admiralty division had been designed to have a separate yard to prevent the criminals from communicating with the debtors, but those midshipmen and petty officers not sentenced to what was considered to be solitary confinement (which simply meant being locked in your room at dusk) were allowed to live among the debtors, a privilege that troubled the commissioners. As they explained in 1815,

Your committee cannot but deplore the continuance of a system of imprisonment that mixes these persons with debtors. They are generally midshipmen and warrant officers, mostly young men. The entire absence of all control, the riot in which they live, and the licentious examples that are before them, cannot fail to send them back to their profession and to the world worse members of society than when they first entered the walls of the prison.

(BPP Prisons 7: 391).

Although the commissioners found the prison, which was white-washed once a year, to be ‘tolerably clean’ and noted that ‘no infectious disorder’ had occurred, they reported with concern that the prison yard overflowed with waste water and that the open drains were ‘sometimes choked and offensive’ and smelled bad (BPP Prisons 8: 348). The dust-holes were also open and the privies were said ‘to scent’ the kitchen, which was located nearby. Three to four times a week, the scavenger appointed by the debtors' committee would wash the drains and six times a year, or somewhat oftener, empty the contents of the privy, carrying them through the Keeper's house to the ‘great inconvenience’ of his family. A persistent complaint of the debtors concerned the foulness of the drinking water—what Dickens referred to in Little Dorrit as that ‘peculiar stain’—which was ‘decidely chalybeate’ (i.e. containing salts of iron), turbid, unpalatable, and ‘smell[ed] horribly’ (‘Expose’ 6), though prison officials made the point that this was the same water used by the residents of the Southwark borough. Notably, the Deputy Marshal sent away for his own drinking water. Despite all of this, the prison's surgeon rather blithely declared the prisoners to be generally healthy, noting that the most prevalent diseases were ‘those arising from debauchery, dissipation, and drinking’ (BPP Prisons 7: 559), though occasionally prisoners would be found suffering from lack of food.

Upon arriving at the Marshalsea, a debtor would be met by the secretary of the prisoner's committee who would explain the debtors' rules. The new prisoner would then contribute five shillings and sixpence (in 1833 8s. 6d.) to the general fund—for women it would be less—which would permit him to use the snuggery, where he could boil water or cook a meal, obtain candles or read a newspaper. Failure to pay the fee would result in his ‘being publicly declared by the crier a defaulter, and his name placarded as such in the public kitchen’ (‘Expose’ 7-8). Within about an hour, the new arrival would be given a chum ticket indicating the room to which he had been assigned. If a vacant room was available, he would be placed in it. If not, he would be ‘chummed’ on one already occupied according to a fixed principle of rotation, the incoming debtor being placed with the youngest prisoner living by himself. Most often the first night of the debtor's stay was spent in a vacant room in the infirmary, presumably to allow time for a room to be made ready. Sometimes, the ‘eye-witness’ reported, the new debtor might walk the yard for three or four days before being chummed, even though he would still be paying for a bed (8). For those insolvents who could afford it and who wished to live alone (like Mr. Pickwick in the Fleet Prison), the chum could be bought out for a half-a-crown per week. Those who were so paid would then hire lodgings somewhere else in the prison or sleep in the tap.

Once he had made himself at home in the Marshalsea, a debtor would discover a world governed largely by the prisoners themselves. Although the Deputy Marshal or Keeper was directly responsible for the day-to-day management of the prison, he seems rather remote in 1818, inspecting the prison only once every week or two. Besides the Keeper, six other officers were employed: the head turnkey (the position held by John Chivery and later his son), who was appointed for life by the Knight Marshal; a subordinate turnkey; two watchmen, one of whom would act as a third turnkey; the chaplain and the surgeon. At times, when the other officers were in court or unavailable, the prison would be left in the care of only one of the turnkeys, a circumstance which seems to have made him uncomfortable. The main administrative apparatus in the Marshalsea was a committee of debtors, consisting of nine prisoners and a chairman, who were appointed on the last Wednesday of each month. The committee would meet each Monday at 11 a.m. to ‘decide all matters in dispute which may happen to arise in the college between the members thereof’ (BPP Prisons 7: 637). It is this committee which Charles Dickens declared to be ‘excellently administered’ (Forster 1: 30), and which his father chaired for a time. Besides deciding disputes, the committee also set regulations and fines. These prohibitions provide a valuable window on what might be considered the hidden world of the Marshalsea, the world that John Dickens experienced but that only occasionally finds expression in his son's fiction. Debtors could be fined for taking the property of others; throwing water, soil or filth out of their windows or into someone else's room; making noise after 12 midnight; cursing; fighting; singing obscene songs ‘on a club night, smoking in the ale room between eight and ten in the morning and twelve and two in the afternoon; defacing the staircase or dirtying the privy seats; urinating in the yard; stealing the newspaper or utensils from the snuggery; criticising the committee, which had ‘too frequently been the case’; and even drawing water before it had come to a boil (BPP Prisons 7: 631-32). The 1833 ‘eye-witness’ is more succinct. ‘The novice [upon entering the Marshalsea] is now witness to the various methods of time-killing, viz. drinking, singing, gambling, fornication, adultery, and, in short, every kind of debauchery’ (8).¹

The prisoners on the whole, however, seemed to have behaved reasonably well, at least according to the commissioners, for as of 1818 no riots were reported and only a few disturbances due to drink. As long as he did not bother others, a debtor could consume as much beer as he could afford (fivepence per pot in 1815), and even send his children outside of prison to purchase more palatable beer or the wine not available inside. If they desired, the debtors could also procure food from outside and dress it in their own rooms, though generally they would cook the food in the very small communal kitchen. The external gates of the Marshalsea were closed at 10 p.m. every night. At 9.30 a bell would be rung to warn visitors out; then one of the officers would go around the prison calling ‘Strangers, women and children all out!’, though no means were taken to enforce the warning (BPP Prisons 8: 363 and 412). At 11 p.m. the tap room and day room would be shut, and the prisoners forced to retire for the night, except on Mondays when the day room would stay open until midnight for the debtors' weekly club.

As was the case with John Dickens, many debtors had their families stay with them. Indeed, after 8 a.m., the gates were open to almost anybody, with very few restrictions. If the women visiting the prison behaved, they would not be asked in what relation they stood to the prisoner, the Deputy Marshal admitting that at least a few of the women were not married to the men they called on and in some cases lived with. Some of the rooms were even let out for prostitution (‘Expose’ 8). Indeed, a licentiousness seemed to pervade the prison, at least as it is described by the ‘eye-witness’. ‘How often has female virtue been assailed in poverty?’, he asks rhetorically. ‘Alas how often has it fallen, in consequence of a husband or a father having been a prisoner for debt’ (9). He then relates several representative stories—I have included three—that reveal a world considerably more sordid than Dickens's depiction of the Marshalsea, at least on the surface, would suggest:

The wife of a tradesman, who was confined in this prison, by visiting her husband, became acquainted with another prisoner, who shortly after obtained his discharge. This man seduced the wife of his late fellow-prisoner, possessed himself of the wreck of his property, and decamped with his frail partner; leaving the unsuspecting husband, still in prison, in a state of mind scarcely to be conceived!

(9)

.....

The prisoner had been a respectable tradesman. The wife, as is usual, visited him almost daily, and by that means formed an acquaintance with several of the prisoners; since the husband's discharge, this woman is almost a daily visitor to the prison, for purposes too well known to all the inmates to leave any doubt!

(9)

.....

Three lovely girls, the daughters of a prisoner, by visiting their father in prison, became acquainted with a villain, who, in conjunction with another fiend, accomplished the ruin of two out of three of these previously innocent females. In this case their mother attempted suicide, on becoming acquainted with their disgrace!

(9)

Even allowing for the breathless melodrama of the last piece and the likelihood that these were second or third-hand stories that might well have gained a bit of colour in the retelling, one cannot escape the fact that Fanny and Little Dorrit would have been subjected to an enormous amount of pent-up libido. Set in this context, William Dorrit's desire for Amy to flirt with young John Chivery in exchange for favours from his turnkey father and the general air of disrepute that surrounds Fanny, her theatrical background and her willingness to barter himself for a rich husband, take on added meaning. Dickens renders the sordidness of the real Marshalsea, but only indirectly, his characters, as it were, protected by mid-Victorian morality from a too vivid and, as the ‘expose’ suggests, an all too real debasement.

Social stratification existed even in debtors' prisons, as Dickens is at pains to point out in The Pickwick Papers and Little Dorrit. Those debtors who took an oath that they were not worth forty shillings resided on the ‘poor side’ of the barrack building, which permitted them to receive a small weekly allowance from the county. They also benefitted from the emoluments that local charities contributed to the Marshalsea. Dickens explains in The Pickwick Papers that the poor side of a debtors' prison is where

the most miserable and abject class of debtors are confined. A prisoner having declared upon the poor side, 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.

(654)

The ‘poor side’ of the Marshalsea was more like an end than a side, containing only a small portion of the overall prison population. For the much greater number on the ‘master's side’, daily life still revolved around money. Articles of bedding, clothing, and furniture, utensils, food, fuel and washing were all found for the prisoners at their own expense. Even the prison rules were sold for an extra fee, and if beer were consumed in the tap room a penny would be charged. The surgeon's medicines were free to the prisoners (‘the only thing that is given away’, the ‘eye-witness’ sardonically remarks), though they had to pay for linen rags, lint, trusses, and cupping. And the surgeon, who lived outside the prison, would usually attend only prisoners, not their families, which probably explains why he does not preside at Little Dorrit's birth. Perhaps in anger or frustration, the debtors would break the ‘glass’ (here, I assume the ‘eye-witness’ means the windows) of the infirmary, a great portion of which, he claims, was ‘broke designedly’ (‘Expose’ 7).

The prisoners could earn money as well as spend it. Besides being employed as a secretary, scavenger, steward, or master of the ale room—jobs which were paid for from the prison committee's funds—debtors could earn money by working at their own trades, so long as they did not bother the others or ‘endanger escapes’. Although a prisoner's material wants could be eased, if he were willing and able to pay for it, little was done at the Marshalsea to promote his spiritual welfare. The commissioners lamented the ‘general remissness of religious duty on the part of almost everyone connected with the prison’ (340). For a number of years the chaplain had passed on his duties—and part of his salary—to a curate who performed sermons only once on Sundays, and on Christmas and Good Fridays, all much to the disgruntlement of the commissioners. The chapel was said to be dirty (though ‘neat’ in 1833), and there were no Bibles distributed to the inmates or even provided for their use in the chapel. Nor were prayer books furnished or the sacrament administered. Not surprisingly, church attendance was low. The curate explained that, although he had delivered a sermon on the sacrament, several prisoners told him that ‘they were much hurt at hearing the sacrament should be administered in such a place as this—such a profligate place’. They went on to explain that ‘we cannot compose our minds, to attend upon so sacred an ordinance when we are confined here’ (BPP Prisons 7: 565). This inability to compose the mind, a characteristic shared by William Dorrit, surely reflected the dark side of John Dickens's stay in the Marshalsea, despite his son's insistence that the Dickens ‘family lived more comfortably in prison than they had done for a long time out of it’ (Forster 1: 26). Even with a servant and some of the comforts of home, a debtor in the Marshalsea still had little privacy and less room to move, eating was difficult, the water foul, the narrow yard ‘offensive’ and living in close quarters with strangers oppressive. And, unlike the King's Bench or Fleet prisons, where debtors might pay a fee to the Keeper or turnkey to live within two and a half miles—or ‘the rules’—of the prison, in the Marshalsea debtors were forced to remain within its claustrophobic walls at all times.

The ground plan of the Marshalsea, published in 1819, permits us to situate certain important places in Little Dorrit. Not only does the plan display the precise locations of the lodge and the snuggery, but it also helps us to determine where William Dorrit and his youngest daughter lived. On his first visit to the Marshalsea, Arthur Clennam follows Frederick Dorrit to his brother's room at the third or fourth doorway (it is dark and Clennam cannot see well) on the right side of the yard. This is also the room, of course, which Arthur Clennam later occupies. The ground plan would seem to suggest that William Dorrit lived in the third house, since the fourth was occupied by the female debtors and the chandler's shop, a fact of which Dickens makes no mention. Some uncertainty still remains, however, because Dickens locates the chandler's shop in the tap room, so that either the shop had moved by 1824 or he simply confuses locations. This is the only case I have discovered of a possible discrepancy between the real and fictional worlds. As might be expected, Little Dorrit (and later young John Chivery) lived close by, in the garret room of the turnkey's house. In 1932 George Young had used circumstantial information to adduce that this would have been over the lodge. But the testimony of prison officials and the ground plan make clear that the turnkey's house was the first single house on the right side of the main building, which accords with Dickens's own description of Little Dorrit's room as the ‘first house, sky parlor’ (72). Simply put, Amy Dorrit would have lived two doors down from her father, both being on ‘the master's side’ of the prison.

Dickens's Marshalsea, the ‘new’ Marshalsea built in 1811, was only in existence for a short period of time, 38 years. In 1842 the prison was consolidated with the Queen's bench and the Fleet, with all the prisoners—not only debtors and admiralty prisoners but also those charged with contempt of court—being lodged in the Queen's bench. In 1849 the Marshalsea was abolished. As Dickens indicates in his preface to Little Dorrit, however, the buildings at the time of the writing were ‘very little altered, if at all’ (lx).

Although Dickens had first-hand experience of the Marshalsea for only a few months in 1824 when he was 12, his rendering of it in Little Dorrit is remarkably perceptive and, except for the important omission of the licentiousness, accurate. Not only does he remember the terrible closeness of the place—bad even by early nineteenth-century standards—its general squalor and even the foulness of the water, but also the social hierarchy that obtained among the debtors. This is a world with an ‘aristocratic side’, where the quasi-royal ‘Father of the Marshalsea’ condescends to accept the meagre tribute of those who are even worse-off on the ‘poor side’. But by this very act of rendering the real, Dickens goes beyond it. William Dorrit becomes a legendary figure, a paterfamilias who has resided in the Marshalsea for an unheard of 23 years (debtors were rarely kept there for more than six months), a type representing both aristocratic pretence and parental neglect. And the Marshalsea, more than any actual prison precisely remembered, becomes a microcosm for society. For it is not just, as Little Dorrit thinks, that society is like the Marshalsea, but that the Marshalsea is society in a reduced form, its supposed freedom a chimera of a class system contingent on what the odd shilling will buy: warmth, food, and even space. This is ultimately a discomposed world, a reflection of the real Marshalsea where the provisional order—that community of debtors who made their own rules and set their own fines, consoling themselves with everything from illicit sex to weekly club meetings to drinks of ale and smokes while reading the newspaper in the snuggery—rested on a pretence that the prisoners were more than a shabby group of men and women who owed money, but rather ‘aristocrats’ and ‘masters’ and even, in Dickens's version, ‘Fathers’. At least so long as they had money.

Note

1. The story of Mr Hemens, a meddlesome Marshalsea prisoner who was tormented by his fellow inmates, vividly confirms this raucous and violent quality that is largely absent from Dickens's own depiction of the Marshalsea (see Angus Easson, ‘Marshalsea Prisoners: Mr Dorrit and Mr Hemens’, DSA [Dickens Studies Annual] 3, 1974: 77-86).

Works Cited

British Parliamentary Papers: Reports from Select Committees and Commissioners on the State and Management of Prisons in London and Elsewhere with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices 1809-1815. Crime and Punishment: Prisons 7. Shannon, Ireland: Irish UP, 1971.

British Parliamentary Papers: Reports and Papers Relating to the Prisons of the United Kingdom with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices 1818-22. Crime and Punishment: Prisons 8. Shannon, Ireland: Irish UP, 1971.

Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979.

———. The Pickwick Papers. Oxford: Clarendon.

“An Expose of the Practice of the Palace, or Marshalsea Court. With a Description of the Prison, Prison-House, Its Regulations, Fees, & c. & c. in which is Shown, the Folly of the Present Debtor and Creditor Laws, and the Demoralizing Effects of Imprisonment for Debt by an Eye-Witness.” Political Economy Pamphlets: Finance. 205 (1833): 2-15.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. 2 vols. London: Dent, 1966.

Kent, William. ‘The Marshalsea Prison’. The Dickensian 23 (1927): 260-64.

Young, George F. ‘The Marshalsea Revisited’. The Dickensian 28 (1932): 219-27.