A bloody offal nuisance: the persistence of private slaughter-houses in nineteenth-century London

This guide accompanies the following article: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First‐person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900, History Compass 9/5 (2011): 365–373, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2011.00774.x Author’s Introduction Histories of the experience of poverty are hampered in the period before widespread literacy, owing to the infrequency with which the words of the poor could be inscribed privately and the mediated qualities of public or third‐party recordings (for example, where testimony was given by the poor in their capacity as defendants in criminal trials). Yet comprehension of the gradations of material poverty, and the social allegiances or divisions that it inspired, are vital to our understanding of nineteenth‐century society and can reveal some surprising disjunctions in what we think we know. Jane Humphries’ recent research on autobiographies recalling child labour, for instance, presses for a refocusing of our attention on the role of children in the industrial revolution. Therefore, a programme of work which considers the perceptions and experiences of poverty by drawing on first‐person testimonies can provide detailed insight into lived experience, and has the potential to destabilise our assumptions about the mass of ordinary working people. Author Recommends J. Burnett, D. Vincent and D. Mayall (eds.), The Autobiography of the Working Class. An Annotated Critical Bibliography (New York: New York University Press, 1984–1989), 3 volumes. A calendar of over 3000 working‐class autobiographies with an excellent index. Not all of the autobiographies listed have been published. R. Gagnier, Subjectivities. A History of Self‐Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). A pioneering and interdisciplinary work about autobiography. J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). A recent work which deploys working‐class autobiographies as both qualitative and quantitative sources to reconfigure our understanding of children’s collective contribution to the industrial revolution. S. King, Poverty and Welfare in England 1700–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). A textbook coverage of the transition from the old poor law to the new. P. Sharpe (eds.), Chronicling Poverty. The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). The published papers of a conference held in London in January 1995, drawing together some authors central to the debate about the use of narratives to analyse the experience of poverty (particularly pauper letters). K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor. Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). A wide‐ranging book that considers a startling variety of testimonies including settlement examinations and fictional accounts of poverty. T. Sokoll (ed.), Essex Pauper Letters, 1731–1837 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). An edited collection of the raw material, with useful introductory essays about how to scrutinise this genre. D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom. A Study of Nineteenth‐Century Working‐Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981). An early attempt to make use of the calendaring of working‐class autobiographies, with a particular focus on the history of working‐class family life and experiences of education. Online Materials The Workhouse http://www.workhouses.org/ An excellent website providing information about the Poor Law, pictures of workhouses and extracts of sources relating to workhouse life. Charles Booth Online Archive http://www.lse.ac.uk/booth/ Includes original documents from his survey of London poverty 1886–1903. Syllabus for a course on English poverty, from the final decade of the eighteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth : published first‐person narratives from observers of the poor which may be mined to provide a focus for discussion include: C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (1902). M. Higgs, Glimpse into the Abyss (1906). J. London, People of the Abyss (1903) [full text online at http://www.jacklondons.net/writings/PeopleOfTheAbyss/toc.html ] H. Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851–1862) volume 1 [full text online at Google books]. B. S. Rowntree, Poverty. A Study of Town Life (1901) [full text available via Google books], chapter 4. Texts written by the poor can be identified in Burnett et al. (referenced above). Topics for Lecture and Discussion Week I: Contexts and Methodologies: From Social History to Cultural History, and Back Again? Journal of Social History 37:1 (2003) [special edition considering the relationship between social and cultural histories]. Week II: Statutory Change: Out With the Old Poor Law, in With the New Suggested primary focus: C. Shaw, When I was a Child (1903), chapters 13 and 14 [which, at the time of writing, is being made available full‐text online at http://www.thepotteries.org/focus/011.htm ] OR J. Greenwood, ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, Pall Mall Gazette (1866), 12 January onwards [full text online at <jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink

This paper illustrates the use of descriptions of physical elements of urban space to construct conflicting discourses of national identity in the guides and travel books of Paris and London in the nineteenth century. The metaphors put forward usually imply the existence of different architectural languages, foreign to observers of the other country, and closely linked to a country's moral and political values. Capitals, the use of their space, and their division into private and public, are thus foremost in cross-Channel rivalry.

Reviewed by: The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance eds. by Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva Jessica Queener (bio) Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, eds., The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance ( London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. vi + 232, $114/ £85 hardcover; $102.60/ £85 e-book. Decades of work have gone into dissecting the importance of periodicals and newspapers in the United Kingdom and, increasingly, its empire, and still many avenues of scholarship are yet to be undertaken. As the editors of this volume point out, resources that have been digitized "remain overwhelmingly biased towards English-language publications" while scholarship in the long nineteenth century "retains a mostly national focus" (2). To address this gap, Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva have assembled a collection that examines what will likely be a new area of periodical study for many VPR readers: political periodicals created by [End Page 566] exilic and immigrant communities based in London. While it is a condition of the study of print culture that there will always be more investigation to be done, the strides made in the study of periodicals, as they relate to issues like imperial and transnational networks, gender, race, and class, to name a few examples, prove that there is always a capacity to revisit, complicate, and expand our understanding of an already very full, very complex field. The most exciting aspect of The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance is that in pursuing the "link between personal mobility … and the circulation of political ideas," the editors provide us with yet another lens through which to view nineteenth-century print culture (2). The editors have chosen to cover an expansive period from the start of the nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. Nineteenth-century scholars will no doubt appreciate the context this range offers, particularly as the book encompasses such a variety of socio-political circumstances. Furthermore, the chronology, selection of exilic communities, and introduction help to create a narrative across the nine chapters. The writings of political exile begin with the waning of older European empires and the rise of new nations in Latin America. In the first chapter, Karen Racine offers a usefully broad look at Spanish-American publications in early nineteenth-century London. This is followed by Daniel Muñoz Sempere's examination of the rise of Hispanic Liberalism in exilic papers from 1810 to 1841. The collection then progresses through the dissolution of monarchies and the rise of new republics. For example, Daniel Alves and Paulo Jorge Fernandes carefully explicate the complex ideological conflicts among different groups of Portuguese political exiles. Thomas C. Jones and Constance Bantman provide a very useful overview of French publications in London over the course of fifty years, from 1848 to 1905. We see the emergence of increasingly radical politics while moving through chapters about writers in exile from Italy, Germany, and Russia. And in the last chapter, Ole Birk Laursen focuses on Indian political papers published in Britain, positioning the stages of "nationalist organization, parliamentary agitation and violent resistance" in a far more trans-national, cosmopolitan tradition of radicalism than anti-imperial works published in India could (188). This final chapter drives home a key point of the collection: these writers and publishers were part of the periodical landscape within England, not just nebulous voices from abroad. The arrangement of these chapters stresses not only increased radicalism as the nineteenth century wore on but also a commitment to the liberal exchange of ideas in London—a city that welcomed refugees and provided an opportunity to produce works that created a shared discourse within far-flung political communities. [End Page 567] Some key themes emerge throughout the collection. On the whole, the chapters all demonstrate how London's free press helped disseminate radical political discourse and how periodicals intervened in the development of liberal revolutions, anti-authoritarian causes, and attempts to agitate for a new social order. Abbreviated runs and troubles with funding were often the order of the day, but each community seems...

The growth of interest in urban studies in recent years had induced scholars to take a new interest in Irish immigrants to Britain during the nineteenth century. The Irish encountered most of the problems of immigrants and were the subject of much comment from contemporary English writers. Moreover, since they constituted a small but homogeneous minority, easily discernible in the larger community, they can be conveniently studied in depth. The purpose of this article is not, however, to do this so much as to enter a few caveats for anyone thinking of specialising in one facet of Irish immigration to Britain, namely, juvenile deliquency. The subject of delinquency among Irish children in Britain, which has intrigued Englishmen for at least 150 years, has taken on new importance in recent times, partly as a result of the revival of an old allegation that there is a connexion between Catholicism and crime. Formerly, the assertion was made by ultra-protestants, especially Recordite evangelicals. Now it is being made by some English Roman Catholic priests. While this article will not deal conclusively with the overall question of a connexion between Catholicism and crime, it is intended to argue that, at least as far as Irish immigrant catholics in nineteenth-century London were concerned, such a connexion could not reasonably be said to exist. In the course of doing so, it will contend that, even granting that the Irish were a police problem as distinct from a crime control problem, there is, nevertheless, evidence of police prejudice against them. It also aims to show that destitution and vagrancy were common among London’s juvenile poor, especially the Irish, and that destitute juveniles were frequently classified as delinquent juveniles and treated accordingly. Finally it will put forward evidence to suggest that some English protestant philanthropists, including some evangelicals, have through over-generalisation, and perhaps unwittingly, caricatured the London Irish.

Reviewed by: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Adapted for Covent Garden, 1819 by Henry Rowley Bishop Alison Mero Henry Rowley Bishop. Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Adapted for Covent Garden, 1819. Edited by Christina Fuhrmann. (Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, 55.) Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2012. [Introd., p. ix–xix; 9 plates; score, p. 3–217; crit. report, p. 219–37; appendix of items from the autograph score, p. 239–70. ISBN-13 978-0-89579-720-9. $252.] It is now widely known and accepted that, after their premieres, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century operas were often altered and adapted for subsequent productions. These modifications could be simple, such as the inclusion of substitute arias, or quite complicated involving character changes and large sections of new music. In spite of the ubiquity of this practice, only in the last twenty years or so have scholars paid attention to some of the more extreme adaptations, examining them as a source of great insight into the audience expectations and the performance practices of a certain time and place. Christina Fuhrmann’s edition of Henry Rowley Bishop’s English-language adaptation of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro is a splendid contribution to this field of study, providing a window into the practice of adaptation in nineteenth-century London. As Fuhrmann states in the introduction: “Bishop’s Figaro. . . is an important example of typical practice that scholars of opera, Mozart, musical [End Page 814] theater, and music in both Britain and the United States will benefit from having readily available” (p. ix). This edition also provides an artifact of the reception of Mozart’s operas in England. During Mozart’s lifetime, the only portions of his operas heard in Britain were occasional arias and ensembles inserted into other operas, often by performers such as Nancy Storace who originated the role of Susanna in Vienna. In the early nineteenth century, more complete, but still altered, versions began to appear at the King’s Theatre, sung in Italian usually by Italian singers. There were also occasional concert performances of isolated pieces, but the average early-nineteenth-century Londoner would not have known much of Le nozze di Figaro at all, let alone the entire work. Bishop’s adaptation brought the opera into the realm of common parlance and made it accessible by conforming to audience expectations. Bishop’s Figaro was so successful in its audience appeal that it continued to be performed for several years following its premiere: a significant feat in the fickle and novelty-hungry world of British theatrical tastes. Fuhrmann first explored Bishop’s alterations in her dissertation, “‘Adapted and Arranged for the English Stage’: Continental Operas Transformed for the London Theater, 1814–33” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 2001) and a full description of Bishop’s changes to Le nozze di Figaro is now also available in the front matter of this edition. Fuhrmann provides a discussion of the form and structure of Bishop’s Figaro, as well as an explanation of the practice of adaptation, audience expectations, and the work’s reception. In addition to an excellent introduction that contextualizes the adaptation, the edition also contains a complete piano-vocal score of the opera with interpolated dialogue, the critical apparatus and report, and some items from the autograph score that Fuhrmann used to reconstruct missing numbers. Additionally, Fuhrmann has included a few facsimile pages from the printed and manuscript sources. Bishop’s adaptation of Figaro premiered at Covent Garden in March 1819. Although operatic repertoire had typically been confined to the King’s Theatre, English-language versions of continental operas were starting to appear at other venues, and Bishop played an essential role in developing the trend for operatic adaptations. Bishop’s Figaro is not only an example of a common practice in nineteenth-century London, but it is also a particularly high-quality example, illustrating how a continental opera can be modified to suit a particular venue and audience. In order to appeal to the audience at Covent Garden, Bishop had to make some rather large changes to Mozart’s opera, creating a version that is quite different from...

The City

'Vice and wretchedness exist in their most appalling and hideous forms, stalking about with bold front, unblushingly, as though vice were virtue.' For the middle-class moralists and reformers of Victorian London, poverty was synonymous with depravity: their descriptions of the urban working classes portray a swarming, undifferentiated mass, impoverished and immoral. In the absence of written accounts by the poor themselves, these nineteenth-century prejudices still cloud our understanding of popular attitudes to sensuality and courtship, marriage and pregnancy. Love in the Time of Victoria overturns these prejudices by presenting and analyzing an extraordinary range of hitherto unpublished first-hand documents: love letters and testimonies from working-class women who faced pregnancy alone, and from their suitors, relatives and employers. These unique and moving writings provide the fullest and most accurate picture to date of love and sex among the poor in Victorian London. Francoise Barret-Ducrocq has painstakingly uncovered autobiographical fragments which show women and men who are neither depraved nor unusually virtuous. They meet in the course of their work, in the streets or through family and friends; they seek romance in parks and pubs, servants' attics or rented rooms. The women's own records of their relationships resonate with all the singularities of desire, passion and regret, and they reveal a wide range of responses to separation or abandonment. For, despite their limited options, these women continued to exercise real choice. Their words vividly bring to life the material and emotional conflicts of the poor in nineteenth-century London. This remarkable book restores dignity and individuality to its subjects, but never idealizes them. The stories here contain cynicism and tenderness, cruelty and generosity. As the author says, this is history amazingly like real life.

Multinomial Choice with Social Interactions: Occupations in Victorian London

THE eleventh Benjamin Ward Richardson memorial lecture was delivered, under the chairman ship of Sir James Crichton-Browne, before the Model Abattoir Society on November 30 by Mr. T. Topping, who chose for his title “The Slaughter-House Problem”. He commenced by saying that had local authorities more generally carried out the advice given by Richardson when he founded the Model Abattoir Society fifty years ago, there would have been no slaughter-house problem to-day, and there would have been greater benefit for other public health protective measures. As it is, there is a very real problem owing to the fact that the slaughter house provisions of the Act of 1847 are still the principal law on the subject to-day. No advance was made by the Public Health Act of 1875, so that many buildings quite unsuitable for the purpose came into existence as private slaughter-houses. The Rural District Council (Slaughter Houses) Order of 1924 gave State recognition to and largely increased the capital value of hundreds of unsuitable buildings that had been erected as slaughter-houses prior to the order. Thus for nearly sixty years, most local authorities steadily increased the financial difficulties of providing for the only effective means of supervision of slaughter-houses and of securing hygienic preparation of carcase meat. According to Mr. Topping, there are only about 110 slaughter houses in Great Britain where the buildings and arrangements are satisfactory, whereas in a large percentage, complete supervision and inspection is extremely difficult if not impossible. As a solution of the problem, he suggested first that the Ministry of Health should obtain either directly, or indirectly through the county councils, information as to the eondition of all the private slaughter-houses in the country, particularly as to deficiencies in meat inspection and their cause, and secondly, that abattoir provision should be on a county basis, instead of allowing each local authority to have its own abattoir.

What evidence is there that street music was widespread, problematic and immoral in nineteenth-century London? This article re-examines a substantial literature that has been used to build a case or argument of the pervasive notion that street music was a curse in nineteenth-century London. Looking at a variety of sources afresh the article argues that historical evidence has often been misunderstood, misread or misconstrued in establishing historical narratives about street music in nineteenth-century London.

The Public Health (Meat) Regulations, 1924 have at last been replaced. At the time of their making, they were hailed as a great advance towards an adequate meat inspection service; that they have lasted for almost forty years is not an indication, however, of their success in meeting the needs of the situation. They were too much of a compromise with vested interests; the great obstacle was the private slaughterhouse and complete freedom of action by the butcher. Notices and hours of slaughter and removal of carcases were all designed to help the butcher and not the inspector. In districts with many private slaughterhouses, widely scattered, they made the work of an inspector honestly trying to inspect all animals slaughtered very hard indeed. These difficulties made certain that inspection at the time of slaughter or immediately after of all animals slaughtered for food could only be practicable in the larger centres.

In nineteenth-century London, a broad coalition of urban reformers—including journalists, architects, medical officers of health, coroners, police court magistrates, and inquest juries—called for the construction of public mortuaries in order to remove the dead from working-class homes in the days, sometimes weeks, before burial. Their goal was to protect urban populations—especially the most vulnerable, young children—from the spread of contagious diseases. However, the campaigners for public mortuaries made their case by claiming that working-class burial and grieving practices, particularly Irish Catholic wakes, threatened the moral as well as physical state of childhood—accusations that no doubt fuelled working-class resistance to burial reforms. Furthermore, conflicts over the burial of deceased infants and stillborns suggested that child humanity and selfhood were best realized not in working-class domestic spaces, but through public venues such as mortuaries. The campaign to build public mortuaries and separate the dead from the living thus highlighted the fundamental role of the modernized urban public sphere in shaping Victorian ideals of childhood associated with dependence, sentiment, and human interiority.

Reviewed by: Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London Eileen Cleere (bio) Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London, by Michelle Allen; pp. x + 176. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008, $49.95. At first glance, the title of Michelle Allen's new book Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London seems familiar, even unexceptional; after all, sanitation and geography (independently and dependently) have been compelling academic topics [End Page 691] for more than a decade, and it certainly isn't unusual to find the evocative term "Victorian" yoked to either or both of them. Yet when geography is invoked by a literary critic or cultural historian, it usually signals an abstraction or an analogy that generates cultural rather than actual mappings of cities, of neighborhoods, of homes, and of bodies that are contained, divided, set into conflict, and reformed by the strong arm of the police, or, in this case, the sanitary authorities. Allen's book, by contrast, is committed to supplementing the textual and discursive study of Victorian sanitary reform with a grittier and more detailed analysis of urban space and the human experience of that space. What she calls a "critical geography" of sanitary reform "encompasses at once the textual, the social, and the spatial, allowing us to see interplay among discourse, the social order, and the built environment" (18). The spatial studies of Henri lefebvre, michel Foucault, Yi-Fu Tuan, and edward soja provide a loosely integrated methodology for Cleansing the City, allowing Allen to argue that sanitary reform produced significant and sometimes radical change in the urban environment and in the people who inhabited that environment. Over five chapters Allen addresses three specific sanitary challenges—waste disposal, river purification, and housing reform. By reading locally, she uses her critical geography to disrupt some of our more entrenched assumptions about the broader Victorian hygiene movement. Among Allen's many challenges to the current thinking about Victorian sanitation reform is the criticism that provides her thesis: despite a general academic assumption that sanitary reforms were widely popular and largely uncontested, even when they posed serious threats to cherished Victorian notions of liberalism and self-governance, many hygienic improvements were actually disparaged, ridiculed, and resisted with increasing vehemence throughout the nineteenth century. While a variety of critics have certainly noted local contradictions and conflicts within specific sanitary goals and discourses, Allen comprehensively analyzes sanitary reform as an ongoing series of controversies that grew increasingly pessimistic by the end of the century. Allen's consistent focus on the ambiguities and conflicts within Victorian sanitary reform makes Cleansing the City a useful and satisfying contribution to a growing field that might be accurately described as filth studies. The book is also an important reminder that environmental improvements are never entirely progressive; indeed, at times, the Victorian controversies Allen describes seem not unlike our current angst and paralysis over the variously ambivalent environmental impacts of paper bags, plastic water bottles, and organic food. But ambiguity and ambivalence are sometimes dull instruments for examining novels, and if Cleansing the City has a weakness it might be found in the chapters that explicitly seek narrative mappings and textual geographies. Allen's third chapter, on Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), builds on her previous chapter's fascinating analysis of the debates surrounding the construction of the Thames Embankment. The thematic and narrative importance of the river in that novel, the movement of characters upriver and down, the contradictory moral status of the Thames for characters who derive daily sustenance from dead bodies dredged from its depths, are ambiguities that have been thoroughly discussed by critics such as Catherine Gallagher (though Gallaghers important analysis of "illth" goes unmentioned here), and Allen's assertion that water in Our Mutual Friend is ambivalently symbolic of both pollution and cleanliness falls rather flat. On the other hand, when Allen belatedly [End Page 692] focuses on the paper mill that employs Lizzie Hexam after she flees London, she is able to reveal the ambiguities inherent in papermaking within a more material context: for Dickens, she argues, papermaking was a process of purification because it involved the recycling of old, dirty, brown rags into clean...

Background: Disparities in access to stroke care and stroke outcomes are well documented in the literature. However, research on differences in access to Comprehensive Stroke Centers (CSCs) is scant. Our objective was to analyze travel distance and travel time to CSCs for members of minority communities compared to non-minority communities in one urban county. Methods: A directory of all Los Angeles County Stroke Centers was obtained, and all CSCs were plotted using a geographic information system. Census data was used to create a list of all 121 cities and census designated places (CDPs) in Los Angeles County with a variety of demographic data including neighborhood majority race. Neighborhoods were classified into two groups: majority Black or Hispanic and majority white, Asian, or no majority. Travel distance was calculated along city streets from the center of each city and CDP to the closest CSC. Minimum and maximum travel times to that CSC was estimated at 0800, 1200, and 1700. Average distance, minimum, and maximum travel times were calculated for each neighborhood grouping and analyzed. Results: A one-way MANOVA demonstrated a significant multivariate effect of neighborhood majority race on travel metrics. Pillai’s Trace = 0.157, F (3, 117), p &lt; 0.001, partial n2 = 0.157 There was a statistically significant difference in travel distance for residents of majority Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (M = 7.19, SD = 5.01) compared to residents of majority white, Asian, or no majority neighborhoods (M = 5.43, SD = 4.32). There was a statistically significant difference in minimum travel times for residents of majority Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (M = 13.8, SD = 6.2) compared to residents of majority white, Asian, or no majority neighborhoods (M = 11.2, SD = 5.9). There was a statistically significant difference in maximum travel times for residents of majority Black and Hispanic neighborhoods (M = 29.3, SD = 15.1) compared to residents of majority white, Asian, or no majority neighborhoods (M = 21.5, SD = 11.1). Conclusion: Our work suggests that interactions at the level of demographics, routing policy, and physical location of stroke centers disproportionately disadvantage members of majority Black and Hispanic communities. Specifically, residents of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods must travel further and for a greater duration to arrive at a CSC.

Reviewed by: Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison by Jerry White Trey Philpotts Jerry White. Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison. London: The Bodley Head, 2016. Pp xvii + 364. £20.00. Like Jerry Cruncher in A Tale of Two Cities, Jerry White performs an act of resurrection in his new history of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Although he is not the first in the field,1 he has unearthed a considerable amount of new information on the prison, derived from archives and obscure primary and secondary sources. White has previously published a trilogy of acclaimed histories of London in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries,2 as well as several “microhistories” that concentrate on narrow subjects. His historical knowledge – he is currently Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London – is supplemented by his real-world experience: for more than forty years he worked in local government, mainly in London, including a stint as Chief Executive of the London Borough of Hackney and as a Local Government Ombudsmen for England. He is thus well suited to take up the kind of exhaustive research that breathes life into Mansions of Misery. White begins his “Biography” with a small but important fact. Debt was pervasive and highly personal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and largely unavoidable. Because of the lack of ready cash, middle-class Victorians would commonly buy items on credit, in most instances from merchants they dealt with regularly, with a promise to pay, usually on quarter days. Personal debt was thus based on a personal agreement, and it typically accumulated, even on regular and small purchases. The poor, predictably, found it more difficult to get credit. They would either go to pawnbrokers, who would lend money at high interest, or make informal pawning arrangements at public houses or with their grocers (3). “Everyone was a debtor in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London,” White explains. “Tradesmen who gave long credit were also, of course, debtors themselves. Tailors would owe drapers, cabinet-makers would owe gilders or timber merchants, shopkeepers would notoriously owe suppliers, employers would owe their journeymen wages, journeymen would owe publicans, publicans would owe brewers and so [End Page 58] on and so forth” (1, 4). With this much debt, contracted with so many different creditors, on such a personal and informal basis, non-payment was common. This would lead to legal proceedings, and, if the debt were of a certain magnitude (over 40s. in the eighteenth century), possibly an arrest under the mesne process and, if payment were not forthcoming, eventual incarceration in one of the three major debtors’ prisons in London: the King’s Bench, Fleet and Marshalsea. Although there may have been earlier versions of the prison, the Marshalsea proper was located on the Borough High Street in Southwark. It was considered to be the worst of the three debtors’ prisons – it was dirty, small, and crowded – and the one that debtors tried to avoid. In 1811, the Marshalsea was rebuilt a few yards down Borough High Street to the south, and it is this new prison that was home to Dickens’s father in 1824 and that he knew so well. This new prison was, White writes, a “big improvement” over the older one, especially “in the living conditions for debtors in the new houses,” though its exercise yard was smaller and cramped (188). White paints a vivid and disturbing picture of both prisons, usually by way of first-hand accounts and prisoners’ journals. Given the nature of this publication, I’ll focus on the latter half of his book, the section devoted to John Dickens’s Marshalsea, which was only open for about thirty years. White makes it clear that the new Marshalsea was very close and confined. The central building was narrow and long, and contained four stories and fifty-six rooms, each about ten feet ten inches square. The rooms had only one window and were poorly ventilated. This central building was surrounded by a narrow yard (at its widest, only fifteen feet) that contained a water pump. Behind this central building was another building that housed the day room and an...