BOOKS & ARTSA tale of two prisons
Hermione EyreMansions of Misery: A Biography of
the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison
by Jerry White
Bodley Head, £20, pp. 364The Marshalsea was the best and worst
place for a debtor to be imprisoned. From
1438 until its closure in 1842, there was dis-
honour in its name, contagion in its air and
cruelty in its very premise: once detained,
debtors could take no action to improve
their lot. Instead, imprisonment was meant
to serve to ‘rally friends and family’. Where
none were forthcoming, many inmates
died of starvation. The ancient barbarity of
the system was redressed in 1729 when an
inquiry revealed that medieval instruments
of restraint were still in use — as well as a
3ft-long whip that terrified the debtors, fash-
ioned out of ‘a bull’s pizzle, dried as hard as
teak’.
Even after the prison’s reform it was a
death sentence to be on the ‘common side’.
But on the ‘master’s side’, better-off inmates
found themselves in comfortable purga-
tory. More than any other prison, it seems
to have bred camaraderie, offering ‘fes-
tive meetings in seasons of gaiety and opu-
lence’ (as a report in 1815 found) and even asense of peacefulness, summed
up by the lassitude of William
Dorrit, played by Alec Guinness
in the wonderful 1988 adapta-
tion of Little Dorrit. Known as
the ‘Father of the Marshalsea’,
he is permanently clad in his
dressing gown, preserved
beyond his creditors and other
such worldly cares, indulged by
visitors and mothered by his
daughter.
He is a version of John
Dickens, of course, imprisoned
there in 1824, when his son
Charles was 12. In this excel-
lent, detailed book, Jerry White
sensitively traces Dickens’s
relationship with the Marshal-
sea, from his first childhood
encounter with it in the pages
of Smollett’s Roderick Random
(an adored book he was forced
to pawn) to his later struggles
with the constitutionally insol-
vent John Dickens, who hoped
his successful son’s publish-
ers would pick up his debts.
Incensed, Dickens placed an
advert against him in all the
leading London newspapers,
warning that bills placed by
‘certain persons bearing or pur-
porting to bear the name of our
said client... will not be paid’.
Dickens could never speak easily about
the Marshalsea, and his autobiographical
writings on it, given to his biographer, were
lost except for a fragment. But The Pick-
wick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, David
Copperfield and of course Little Dorrit are
all rich with the pathos and comedy of debt
culture, such as the antics of Dick Swiveller,
blocked from walking down streets where
his creditors have shops: ‘There’s only one
avenue to the Strand left open now, and I
shall have to stop that up tonight with a pair
of gloves.’
Debt then was personal, and had what
Jerry White calls ‘spatial consequences’,
such as the impunity of ‘Sunday prome-
naders’ (bailiffs were not allowed to make
arrests on a Sunday) and cat-and-mouse
games on Whitehall steps and other ancient
debtors’ redoubts. Today’s automated credit
ratings and toxic online lenders are certain-
ly less useful for novelists.
White raises many long-dead Marshal-
sea voices — the claims of outrageous
conmen and conwomen; the excruciat-
ing begging letters of imprisoned curates.
There is particularly strong material from
the diaries of one John Baptist Grano,
a talented musician and composer who
played with Handel before falling into
debt due to his ‘fatal aspirations to gentil-
ity’. In the Marshalsea he learned to call it,
in the slang of those inside, ‘this enchantedCastle’, or ‘college’ (partly an ironic ref-
erence to its dusty quadrangle) and the
prisoners ‘collegians’. Grano played shut-
tlecock, found good company, ate well, and
drank even better.
After dinner we Smoak’d a Pipe and a very
handsome bowl of Punch was set on the table
and when that was empty’d...’twas time to go
to Supper, as accordingly we did; and after
Supper we had a Bowl of the same Magni-
tude and was so extream Merry Singing and
Telling of Stories that I was never happier in
my Life...This predates Dickens’s myth-
making. The facetious praise of the insti-
tution (Grano calls the female inmates
‘Nymphs’) and the air of contentment
among desperadoes was already a real sub-
culture, which fed Dickens’s imagination.
Poor Grano spent 16 months there, even
becoming godfather to one of the turnkeys’
children, but when he left, it seems his thriv-
ing career was over, as short of one gig in
Bath in 1732, nothing more of him can be
discovered.
White, a great historian of London, ably
untangles the afterlife of the Marshalsea
buildings and identifies that, despite exten-
sive bombing in the area, it was actually
between 1968 and 1970 that John Dickens’s
Marshalsea (opened 1811) was demolished
by the newly established Borough of South-
wark, to make way for — oh the irony —
the Southwark Local Studies Library. But
one wall remains, and White has done a fan-
tastic job of restitution, so that we too, like
Dickens returning there, may feel ourselves
‘among the crowding ghosts of many miser-
able years’.Tormented genius
Maggie FergussonAriel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris
by Derek Johns
Faber & Faber, £14.99, pp. 208Married as I am to an antiquarian book
dealer, and living in a house infested with
books and manuscripts, I’m constantly hav-
ing to edit my own little library so as to be
able to breathe. But three volumes have
survived successive culls — Pax Britanni-
ca, Heaven’s Command and Farewell the
Trumpets — Jan (or James as she was when
these books were written) Morris’s trilogy
about the British empire. It is, Morris says,
‘the intellectual and artistic centrepiece of
my life’, and it opens on the morning of
22 June 1897 with Queen Victoria visiting
the telegraph room at Buckingham Palace
on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee.
She was, Morris tells us:
wearing a dress of black moiré with panels
of pigeon grey, embroidered all over with
silver roses, shamrocks and thistles. It was a‘Little Dorrit and the Turnkey’,
by Arthur A. DixonTHE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY