In Jail with Charles Dickens Part 5

"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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 d.i.c.kens himself visited it in 1857, and wrote:

"I found the outer front court-yard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a b.u.t.ter 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 n.o.body 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 t.i.tle 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, d.i.c.kens 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 pa.s.sage:

"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 a.s.sociated with it, but this part of London I cannot bear. The street is broad, the shops are s.p.a.cious, the noise of the pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sistance 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 s.p.a.ce, 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."

CHAPTER V.

THE KING'S BENCH.

In the "Pickwick Papers" the Fleet Prison was made to serve as an important feature of the story. In "Little Dorrit," the story as far as its human interest, humor and pathos are concerned, centres in the Marshalsea. The introduction of the King's Bench into "David Copperfield" is entirely episodic, but it makes one of the most brilliant chapters in the book, and, from its personal connection with the author's own life, one of the most important. That d.i.c.kens drew largely on his own experience for the material in "David Copperfield"

has been abundantly shown by many commentators. Without being an autobiography, the book gives one many glimpses into the real life of its author. He transfers scenes and changes names a trifle, as he was fond of doing, but the private memoranda furnished by him of his early toil and trials afford a key to much that one reads in "Copperfield" in the flimsy disguise of fiction. Thus, he adapts the knowledge of the Marshalsea, which he acquired while his father was a prisoner there, to the fict.i.tious figure and fortunes of old Dorrit; and he bestows on Mr.

Micawber, in the King's Bench, the traits displayed by his father in the Marshalsea. A recent compiler of odds and ends of d.i.c.kens personalia, sapiently undertakes to show that the elder d.i.c.kens must have been incarcerated in the King's Bench and not in the Marshalsea, because Mr.

Micawber was locked up there. Unfortunately for this arrangement, d.i.c.kens himself had distinctly disproved it in advance. Some years before he wrote "Copperfield"--probably before he even thought of writing it--he jotted down a number of personal facts, many of which were used in Forster's biography. These notes demonstrate positively that in it, as in "Dorrit," he pursued his favorite plan of interchanging occurrences, scenes and characters, without, however, departing from the main facts, which he had grafted in this fashion on the inventions of his fantasy. At the very commencement of the King's Bench interlude in "David Copperfield" this becomes apparent.

"At last Mr. Micawber's difficulties came to a crisis, and he was arrested one morning and carried over to the King's Bench Prison in the Borough. He told me, as he went out of the house, that the G.o.d of day had now gone down upon him--and I really thought his heart was broken, and mine too. But I heard, afterwards, that he was seen to play a lively game of skittles before noon.

"On the first Sunday after he was taken there I was to go and see him and have dinner with him. I was to ask my way to such a place, and just short of that place I should see such another place, and just short of that I should see a yard, which I was to cross, and keep straight on until I saw a turnkey. All this I did, and when at last I did see a turnkey (poor little fellow that I was), and thought how, when Roderick Random was in a debtor's prison, there was a man there with nothing on but an old rug, the turnkey swam before my dimmed eyes and my beating heart.

"Mr. Micawber was waiting for me within the gate, and we went up to his room (top story but one) and cried very much. He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable. After which he borrowed a shilling from me for porter, gave me a written order on Mrs. Micawber for the amount and put away his pocket handkerchief and cheered up.

"We sat before a little fire, with two bricks put within the rusted grate, one on each side, to prevent its burning too many coals until another debtor, who shared the room with Mr. Micawber, came in from the bakehouse with a loin of mutton, which was our joint stock repast.

Then I was sent up to 'Captain Hopkins,' in the room overhead, with Mr. Micawber's compliments, and I was his young friend, and would Captain Hopkins lend me a knife and fork.

"Captain Hopkins lent me a knife and fork with his compliments to Mr.

Micawber. There was a very dirty little lady in his little room, and two wan girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought it was better to borrow Captain Hopkins's knife and fork than Captain Hopkins's comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness, with large whiskers, and an old, old brown great coat, with no other coat below it. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner; and what plates and dishes and pots he had, on a shelf; and I divined (G.o.d only knows how) that though the two girls with the shock heads of hair were Captain Hopkins's children, the dirty little lady was not married to Captain Hopkins. My timid station on the threshold was not occupied more than a couple of minutes at most; but I came down again with all this in my knowledge as surely as the knife and fork were in my hand."

Compare this with d.i.c.kens's description of his actual visit to his father in the Marshalsea. The difference is only that of a slight rounding off or modifying of a sentence in the "Copperfield" version. In the case of Captain Hopkins, whose real name was Captain Porter, one may note how the actual suggested the fict.i.tious t.i.tle. The a.s.sociation between porter and hops is evident and direct. The real experiences of the d.i.c.kens's, at this period, in and out of jail, parallel those credited to the Micawbers. Mrs. d.i.c.kens and the family camped in Gower street just as Mrs. Micawber and the children camped in Windsor Terrace.

The d.i.c.kenses even had a workhouse girl for servant, like the Micawbers, and little Charles made journeys to the p.a.w.nshop and the old book-stall in real life, just as David did in the story. Throughout this portion of biography and book the entries go side by side. For example:

CHARLES d.i.c.kENS.

"At last my mother and her encampment in Gower street north, broke up and went to live in the Marshalsea. The key of the house was sent back to the landlord, who was very glad to get it; and I (small Cain that I was, except that I had never done harm to anyone) was handed over as a lodger to a reduced old lady, long known to our family, in Little College street, Camden town. I felt keenly living so cut off from my parents, my brothers and sisters. One Sunday night I remonstrated with my father on this head, so pathetically and with so many tears, that his kind nature gave away. A back attic was found for me at the house of an insolvent court-agent, who lived in Lant street, in the Borough, where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards. A bed and bedding were sent over for me and made up on the floor. The little window had a pleasant prospect of a timber yard; and when I took possession of my new abode I thought it was a paradise."

DAVID COPPERFIELD.

"At last Mrs. Micawber resolved to move into the prison, where Mr.

Micawber had now secured a room to himself. So I took the key of the house to the landlord, who was very glad to get it; and the beds were sent over to the King's Bench, except mine, for which a little room was hired outside the walls in the neighborhood of that inst.i.tution, very much to my satisfaction, since the Micawbers and I had become too used to one another in our troubles to part. The Orfling was likewise accommodated with an inexpensive lodging in the same neighborhood.

Mine was a quiet back garret, with a sloping roof, commanding a pleasant prospect of a timber yard; and when I took possession of it, with the reflection that Mr. Micawber's troubles had come to a crisis at last, I thought it quite a paradise."

As d.i.c.kens told Forster, his family had no want of bodily comforts in the Marshalsea. His father's income, still going on, was amply sufficient for that; and in every respect, indeed, but elbow room, they lived more comfortably in prison than they had done for a long time while out of it. As he told the public in "David Copperfield": "I was now relieved of much of the weight of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber's cares; for some relatives or friends had engaged to help them at their present pa.s.s, and they lived more comfortably in the prison than they had lived for a long time out of it." As Forster tells us, directly from d.i.c.kens's own statements to him: "They were waited on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham street, the orphan girl of the Chatham workhouse, from whose sharp little worldly and also kindly ways he took his first impression of the Marchioness in the 'Old Curiosity Shop.' She also had a lodging in the neighborhood that she might be early on the scene of her duties; and when Charles met her, as he would do occasionally, in his lounging place by London bridge, he would occupy the time before the gates opened by telling her quite astonishing fictions about the wharves and the Tower." As David Copperfield tells us:

"I used to breakfast with them, now, in virtue of some arrangement, of which I have forgotten the details. I forget, too, at what hour the gates were opened in the morning, admitting of my going in, but I know that I was often up at six o'clock, and that my favorite lounging place in the interval was the old London Bridge, where I was wont to sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people go by, or to look over the bal.u.s.trades at the sun shining in the water, and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the Monument. The Orfling met me here sometimes, to be told some astonishing fictions respecting the wharves and the Tower; of which, I can say no more than I hope I believed them myself. In the evening I used to go back to the prison, and walk up and down the parade with Mr. Micawber; or play casino with Mrs. Micawber and hear reminiscences of her mamma and her papa."

Charles d.i.c.kens's father's "attempts to avoid going through the courts having failed, all needful ceremonies had to be undertaken to obtain the benefit of the Insolvent Debtors' Act." Mrs. Micawber informed David that "her family had decided that Mr. Micawber should apply for his release under the Insolvent Debtors' Act, which would set him free, she expected, in about six weeks." The elder d.i.c.kens, while awaiting his discharge from the Marshalsea, had drawn up a pet.i.tion to the throne for the appropriation of a sum of money to enable the prisoners to drink His Majesty's health on His Majesty's forthcoming birthday. "I mention the circ.u.mstance," writes d.i.c.kens in his autobiographical jottings, "because it ill.u.s.trates to me my early interest in observing people. When I went to the Marshalsea of a night, I was always delighted to hear from my mother what she knew about the histories of the different debtors in the prison; and when I heard of this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious to see them all come in, one after another (though I knew the greater part of them already, to speak to, and they me), that I got leave of absence on purpose, and established myself in the corner near the pet.i.tion. It was stretched out, I recollect, on a great ironing board, under the window, which in another part of the room made a bedstead at night. The internal regulations of the place, for cleanliness and order, and for the government of a common room in the ale-house, where hot water and some means of cooking, and a good fire, were provided for all who paid a very small subscription, were excellently administered by a governing committee of debtors, of which my father was chairman for the time being. As many of the princ.i.p.al officers of this body as could be got into the small room without filling it up supported him, in front of the pet.i.tion; and my old friend, Captain Porter (who had washed himself to do honor to the solemn occasion), stationed himself close to it, to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The door was then thrown open, and they began to come in, in long file, several waiting on the landing outside, while one entered, affixed his signature, and went out. To everybody in succession Captain Porter said: 'Would you like to hear it read?' If he weakly showed the least disposition to hear it, Captain Porter, in a loud, sonorous voice, gave him every word of it. I remember a certain luscious roll he gave to such words as Majesty--gracious Majesty--your gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects--your Majesty's well-known munificence--as if the words were something real in his mouth, and delicious to taste; my poor father meanwhile listening with a little of an author's vanity, and contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the opposite wall. Whatever was comical in this scene, and whatever was pathetic, I sincerely believe I perceived in my corner, whether I demonstrated it or not, quite as well as I should perceive it now. I made out my own little character and story for every man who put his name to the sheet of paper. I might be able to do that now, more truly; not more earnestly or with closer interest. Their different peculiarities of dress, of face, of gait, of manner, were written indelibly upon my memory. I would rather have seen it than the best play ever played; and I thought about it afterwards over the pots of paste-blacking, often and often. When I looked, with my mind's eye, into the Fleet prison during Mr. Pickwick's incarceration, I wonder whether half-a-dozen men were wanting from the Marshalsea crowd that came filing in again to the sound of Captain Porter's voice." Here is the same scene, transferred to the King's Bench.

"By way of going in for anything that might be on the cards, I call to mind that Mr. Micawber, about this time, composed a pet.i.tion to the House of Commons, praying for an alteration of the law of imprisonment for debt. I set down this remembrance here, because it is an instance to myself of the manner in which I fitted my old books to my altered life, and made stories for myself out of the streets, and out of men and women; and how some main points in the character I shall unconsciously develop, I suppose, in writing my life, were gradually forming all the time.

"There was a club in the prison, in which Mr. Micawber, as a gentleman, was a great authority. Mr. Micawber had stated his idea of this pet.i.tion to the club, and the club had strongly approved the same. Wherefore Mr. Micawber (who was a thoroughly good-natured man, and as active a creature about anything but his own affairs as ever existed, and never so happy as when he was busy about something that could never be any profit to him) set to work at the pet.i.tion, invented it, engrossed it on an immense sheet of paper, spread it out on the table, and appointed a time for all the club, and all within the wall if they chose, to come up to his room and sign it.

"When I heard of this approaching ceremony, I was so anxious to see them all come in, one after another, though I knew the greater part of them already, and they me, that I got an hour's leave of absence from Murdstone and Grinby's, and established myself in a corner for that purpose. As many of the princ.i.p.al members of the club as could be got into the small room without filling it supported Mr. Micawber in front of the pet.i.tion, while my old friend Captain Hopkins (who had washed himself to do honor to the solemn occasion) stationed himself close to it, to read it to all who were unacquainted with its contents. The door was then thrown open, and the general population began to come in, in a long file; several waiting outside, while one entered, affixed his signature, and went out. To everybody in succession Captain Hopkins said: 'Have you read it?' 'No.' 'Would you like to hear it read?' If he weakly showed the least disposition to hear it, Captain Hopkins, in a loud, sonorous voice, gave him every word of it.

The Captain would have read it 20,000 times if 20,000 people would have heard him, one by one. I remember a certain luscious roll he gave to such phrases as; 'the peoples' representatives in Parliament a.s.sembled,' 'your pet.i.tioners therefore approach your honorable house,' 'His Gracious Majesty's unfortunate subjects,' as if the words were something real in his mouth and delicious to taste, Mr. Micawber, meanwhile, listening with a little of an author's vanity and contemplating (not severely) the spikes on the opposite wall.

"As I walked to and fro daily between Southwark and Blackfriars, and lounged about at meal times in obscure streets, the stones of which may, for anything I know, be worn at this moment by my childish feet, I wondered how many of these people were wanting in the crowd that used to come filing before me in review again, to the echo of Captain Hopkins's voice. When my thoughts go back now to that slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered facts. When I tread the old ground, I do not wonder that I seem to see and pity, going on before me, an innocent romantic boy, making his imaginative world out of such strange experiences and sordid things."

The fortunate acquisition of a legacy of considerable amount released the elder d.i.c.kens from the Marshalsea. "In due time Mr. Micawber's pet.i.tion was ripe for hearing, and that gentleman was ordered to be discharged under the Act. Mr. Micawber returned to the King's Bench when his case was over, as some fees were to be settled, and some formalities observed, before he could be actually released. The club received him with transport, and held a harmonic meeting that evening in his honor; while Mrs. Micawber and I had a lamb's fry in private, surrounded by the sleeping family." But you may read all there is to be read of the Micawbers and the King's Bench in the first volume of "David Copperfield," Chapters 11 and 12, and compare it, if you choose, with the early pa.s.sages of "The Life of Charles d.i.c.kens," by John Forster, Volume I.

d.i.c.kens's presentations of the Fleet and the Marshalsea had, it will be noted, the interest of description as well as of personal a.s.sociation with the characters of the stories for which they provided a part of the scenario. The King's Bench is an entirely personal episode. The figure of Mr. Micawber obscures all view of the prison. It poses on the merest suggestion of a background of barred windows and spiked walls. For this there are two reasons to be found. In the first place, all of the debtors' prisons of London were alike in their general features. They differed only in degrees and details of misery. In the Fleet and in the Marshalsea d.i.c.kens had exposed all that fell within his vocation to expose. Moreover, the necessity for invoking public obloquy upon the dens had pa.s.sed away with the revision of the laws for debt. To have elaborated the material details of the life in the King's Bench would have been to repeat a twice-told tale. Apart from this, d.i.c.kens had made no special study of the King's Bench Prison. His memories of the Marshalsea were indelibly imprinted on his mind. It had been a part of his own life. He had explored the Fleet with the purpose of lending what aid he could toward its abolishment. His boyish wanderings had made him familiar enough with the external aspect of the King's Bench, and he had visited it on at least one occasion when an acquaintance was incarcerated there. But, after the Fleet and Marshalsea, its familiar features made no appeal to him. What could he say or write of it that had not been said or written by him already?

The King's Bench Prison of Micawber's time stood in the Borough Road. It was much more roomy and endurable than the Marshalsea, and much less wretched than the Fleet. It was enclosed by a wall thirty-five feet high, garnished with the usual chevaux-de-frise, and was entered through a stone lodge three stories in height. The jail buildings themselves carried four stories, and were broken up into nearly 250 rooms, with a chapel, and out-buildings for officials and for cookery and other necessities. The courtyard was comparatively s.p.a.cious, and was especially famous for its racket games. Some champion scores of the day were scored by the collegians at the King's Bench, who certainly had time enough for practice to perfect themselves in the sport. Like the Fleet and the Marshalsea, the King's Bench had its tap-room and its coffee-room, its poor side and its pay side, and its club, which nightly, over a pipe and pot, forgot for a few hours that the jail yard was not all out-of-doors. The prison derived its t.i.tle from the fact that it was the gaol of the High Court of Justice, over which royalty was supposed to sit as supreme judge. So it became the Queen's Bench when England was ruled by a queen, and under the Commonwealth, when royalty was not recognized, bore the name of the Upper Bench Prison.

The original King's Bench Prison was situated in Southwark as early as the reign of Richard II. It was broken into and sacked by the Kentish rebels under Wat Tyler, who, on this occasion, performed a similar service to the old Marshalsea close at hand. It was to the King's Bench that Chief Justice Gascoigne so intrepidly committed the Prince of Wales, afterward Henry V; and down to the time of Oldys the room in which the wild young crony of Sir John Falstaff spent his term in gaol, was known as the Prince of Wales's Chamber. The old King's Bench seems to have been a decidedly easy-going jail. In 1579 we learn from the chronicles that the prisoners used to eat in a little low parlor next the street, and that they always had an audience staring at them through the barred windows, such as nowadays honors the repasts of the wild beasts in the zoo. During this year the prisoners pet.i.tioned for an enlargement of the prison and for a chapel, both of which requests seem to have been granted. Defoe, who sampled the King's Bench as well as Newgate and the Fleet, describes it as "not near so good" as the latter little prison, and complained that "to a man who had money the Bench was only the name of a prison." Indeed, the license of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries in the King's Bench would be hardly credible to persons accustomed only to the rigid discipline of modern jail management. In all the debtors' gaols of this period, the gambler and the swindler, the pickpocket, and even the footpads, who robbed by violence, plied their trades. Drunkenness was universal, and the commitment of loose women and the freedom of entry from without made worse debaucheries than those of the bottle easy of indulgence. At certain periods of their history the prisons seem to have been nothing less than vast bagnio-taverns, only the restriction upon the egress of the debtors distinguishing them from the common resorts of the town. The authorities of the jail were not supersensitive in their morality, provided their purses were kept filled. Wealth might riot, if it paid the piper, as readily and freely as poverty might rot for the wherewithal to buy a crust of bread. Roderick Random's naked debtor shivering in a sc.r.a.p of worn-out carpet was no fiction of the King's Bench, nor Captain Blazer's banquets to his fair friends from over the river a romance.

Smollet knew the Bench well enough. He had spent a term of probation behind its walls, and wrote "Sir Launcelot Greaves" within its rules.

John Wilkes lay by the heels for one of his libels under its smoky roof, and hither came the mob to release him in 1768. The mob a.s.sembled in St.

George's Field for the purpose, and thus in 1780 the Gordon Rioters gathered, who, a few days later, burst the prison gates and turned 700 prisoners loose before they put the rotten and reeking old jail to the torch. Combe was a prisoner under the rules of the King's Bench when he wrote "Dr. Syntax," and Haydon drew his idea of "The Mock Election" from a burlesque enacted among the prisoners while he was locked up in the jail for debt. A volume could be filled with the curious and characteristic events and personal episodes of the prison from the days of Wat Tyler down to 1862, when the last debtor pa.s.sed out at the lodge gate, and the brief career of the King's Bench as a military prison began. Its history covered really that of two prisons, for after the attack of 1780 by the rioters, the old site was abandoned and another chosen for the rebuilding of the jail. In one of d.i.c.kens's last strolls in Southwark, he noticed the fact that no vestige of the King's Bench remained, but that a huge structure devoted to model homes for workingmen redeemed its unlamented grave from the uselessness which had made it a blight during many centuries. In Chapter 14 of Volume 2 of "Nicholas Nickleby," by the way, d.i.c.kens adverts to a feature of the law of which the King's Bench was one of the outgrowths, in connection with the first visit of Nicholas to Madeline Bray.

"The place to which Mr. Cheeryble had directed him was a row of mean and not over cleanly houses, situated within the 'Rules' of the King's Bench Prison, and not many hundred paces distant from the obelisk in St. George's Fields. The Rules are a certain liberty adjoining the prison, and comprising some dozen streets in which debtors who can raise money to pay large fees, from which their creditors do not derive any benefit, are permitted to reside by the wise provisions of the same enlightened laws which leave the debtor who can raise no money to starve in gaol, without food, clothing, lodging, or warmth, which are provided for felons convicted of the most atrocious crimes that can disgrace humanity. There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally obtainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.

"To the row of houses indicated to him by Mr. Charles Cheeryble, Nicholas directed his steps without much troubling his head about such matters as these; and at this row of houses--after traversing a very dirty and dusty suburb of which minor theatricals, sh.e.l.l-fish, ginger-beer, spring vans, green grocery and brokers' shops appeared to compose the main and most prominent features--he at length arrived with a palpitating heart. There were small gardens in the front which, being wholly neglected in all other respects, served as little pens for the dust to collect in, until the wind came around the corner and blew it down the road. Opening the rickety gate which, dangling on its broken hinges, before one of these, half admitted and half repulsed the visitor, Nicholas knocked at the street door with a faltering hand.

"It was, in truth, a shabby house outside, with very dim parlor windows and very small show of blinds, and very dirty muslin curtain dangling across the lower panes on very loose and limp strings.

Neither, when the door was opened, did the inside appear to belie the outward promise, as there was a faded carpeting on the stairs and faded oil-cloth in the pa.s.sage; in addition to which discomforts a gentleman Ruler was smoking hard in the front parlor (though it was not yet noon), while the lady of the house was busily engaged in turpentining the disjointed fragments of a tent-bedstead at the door of the back parlor, as if in preparation for the reception of some new lodger who had been fortunate enough to engage it."

The Fleet had its rules like the King's Bench, but there was no such legalized stretching of the bounds of confinement tolerated at the Marshalsea. There the prisoner was supposed to remain a close prisoner within the walls until the courts ordained his release. In fact, however, if he had money he might buy sly periods of liberty under the eye of the keeper, and this abuse of his office brought the Marshal and his subordinates many a sovereign above their legitimate emoluments. One young gentleman of sporting proclivities, who was committed to the Marshalsea while his lawyer was settling up the wreck of his handsome patrimonial estate, afterwards published an account of his experiences as a detained debtor. From this it appears that during the entire term of his detention he was a regular spectator at the c.o.c.k fights, dog fights and prize fights, of the day, and that he kept his wherry on the Thames, and went out for a row whenever he felt the need of air and exercise. The keeper who accompanied him on these excursions, and who was of a sporting turn himself, left the prison to enter his employ, and was his faithful henchman at the time he printed his book, in the most genteel and elegant style, for circulation among his friends.

It is curious to note that even to our own day, and in our own country, this system of prison favoritism is not entirely unknown. If a man is arrested on a judgment for debt, he can, if he knows the way, save himself from being locked up for a night at least by paying the sheriff's deputy for it. To be sure the deputy will have to be in his company until he is duly handed over at Ludlow street Jail, and properly receipted for, but there are such things as double bedded rooms in New York hotels. In the same way, it is shrewdly suspected, prisoners in Ludlow street who can pay for it can enjoy a night out once in a while.

It used to be so at least; and by the evidence brought out by investigations in the past it was not even an unusual occurrence. It is popularly believed, by the way, that there is no such thing in New York state as imprisonment for debt. Some native realist in the line of fiction ought to take a turn over to the east side of the commercial metropolis of the United States, and weave his experiences of the Ludlow street cage into some such shape as d.i.c.kens did his of the Fleet, the Marshalsea, and the King's Bench.