In Jail with Charles Dickens Part 4

"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 a.s.sume 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, d.i.c.kens 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 p.a.w.ning his master's last coat, with a sc.r.a.p 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, d.i.c.kens sketches a vivid picture of the daily scene in the jail-yard.

"Sauntering or sitting about, in every possible att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 d.i.c.kens 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 ca.n.a.l, 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 d.u.c.h.ess had to pay for a commitment fee and the first week's "dyett," 21 10s.; a lord, spiritual or temporal, 10 5s. 10d.; a knight, 5; an esquire, 3 6s. 8d.; and even a poor man in the wards, "that hath a part at the box, to pay for his fee, having no dyett, 7s. 4d." The warden's charge for lawful license "to go abroad" was 20d. per diem. Thus, as may be seen, the fleecing and flayings, the inhumanities and the injustices which characterized the later years of the prison were hereditary to it.

From the reign of Elizabeth to the sixteenth year of King Charles I, 1641, the Star Chamber Court was in full activity, and several bishops and other persons of distinction were imprisoned in the Fleet for their religious opinions. Thither, too, were consigned political victims of the Star Chamber, two of the most interesting cases of this period being those of 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 pet.i.tion 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 4,632 18s. 8d. per annum. James Gambier succeeded Bambridge in the wardenship, was succeeded by John Garth, and to him followed John Eyles, and in 1758 Eyles's son succeeded him in the office, which he held for sixty-two years. He was succeeded in 1821 by his deputy, Nixon, who died in 1822.

The next appointed was W. R. H. Brown, he being the last of the wardens of the prison.

In the riots of 1780 the Fleet was destroyed 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 doc.u.ments of several centuries back. Although he does not deal specifically with the attack on the prison at this period, d.i.c.kens 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 pa.s.sengers 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 dest.i.tute 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce 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."

Compet.i.tion 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 cla.s.ses 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 d.i.c.kens with no material, although other and less distinguished romancers have found use for them, with more or less effect. In fact, d.i.c.kens 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 pa.s.sed 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.

CHAPTER IV.

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, d.i.c.kens 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, part.i.tioned 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 const.i.tutional 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 st.u.r.dy, thick-set prison, with a ma.s.sive-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, d.i.c.kens 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.

d.i.c.kens 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sembled 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 subst.i.tutions of 'Mrs. Manning' for 'Susannah,' and the like, were added to these. When the day dawned, thieves, low prost.i.tutes, 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 compa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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, a.s.sisting 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 t.i.tle for the Marshalsea, whose inmates were, by natural a.s.sociation, 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 d.i.c.kens 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 d.i.c.kens'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 f.a.n.n.y 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 pa.s.sage, 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.

d.i.c.kens'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 (G.o.d 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 d.i.c.kens 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 a.s.sistance of Mrs. Bangham and the brandy bottle. The doctor was a type of one cla.s.s 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 pa.s.s the time playing all fours, with pipe and brandy tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. "The doctor's friend was in the positive stage of hoa.r.s.eness, puffiness, all fours, tobacco, dirt and brandy; the doctor in the comparative--hoa.r.s.er, 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 b.u.t.tons (he had been in his time the experienced surgeon carried by a pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.tonless 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 n.o.body; 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 cla.s.s 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 p.a.w.nbroker's. When they coughed, they coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on the doorsteps and draughty pa.s.sages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink, which gave the recipients of those ma.n.u.scripts great mental disturbance and no satisfaction. As they eyed the stranger in pa.s.sing, 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, b.u.t.toned and pinned and darned and dragged their clothes, frayed their b.u.t.ton-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 d.i.c.kens'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 d.i.c.kens 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 a.s.signment 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.sessment 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, gla.s.ses, pipes, tobacco ashes and general flavor of members were still as that convivial inst.i.tution 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 a.n.a.logy, requiring plenty of it, the Snuggery was defective; being but a cooped-up apartment.

"The unaccustomed visitor from the outside naturally a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sistance 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.