Just behind the busy Borough High Street at the rear of St. George’s Church, stood the smallest of our debtors’ prisons the Marshalsea. Charles Dickens father, John Dickens was incarcerated for debt in 1824. Charles was just 12 years old at the time and this was Dickens worst memory, which was to haunt him for the rest of his life. He was put into lodgings at nearby Lant Street and sent out to work in a boot blacking factory, where present day Hungerford bridge now stands. The prison that dates from medieval times, was closed in 1842 and was demolished soon afterwards. All that is now left of this once notorious debtors prison is this long piece of wall in Angel Court. A description of this passageway is best left to Charles Dickens himself; 'Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, I came to Marshalsea Place, the houses in which I recognised, not only as 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.... Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea Goal; 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; will stand among the crowded ghosts of many miserable years.' While Dickens's father was in the Marshalsea a Mr Dorrett of Rochester was in the King's Bench. John Dickens may have known him at Chatham. 'Dorrett' is in the Dickens memorandum book, and there can be no doubt how the name 'Little Dorrit' was derived.

A blue plaque on a school wall close to the Marshalsea prison in nearby Lant Street, is all that remains to remined us of the spot where Charles Dickens lived in those nightmare times. 'There's my lodgings, Lant Street, Borough; it's handyfor me you know. Little distance after you've passed St George's Church - turns out of the High Street on the right hand side of the way.' ' I shall find it,' said Mr Pickwick. Dicken's also referred to Lant Street in Sketches by Boz when he discribed the Tuggs family as living in a 'narrow street on the Surrey side of the water within three minutes 'walk of old London Bridge.'

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