Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison by Jerry White

Abstract

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...