Place Name
Previously Union Square. Charles John Huffam Dickens (February 7, 1812 – June 9, 1870) was an author, journalist, and social critic who created some of the world’s best-known and enduring fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. He was born the second of eight children into a middle-class but financially stretched family. In 1824, when Dickens was 12, his father was imprisoned for three months in Marshalsea debtors’ prison after running up a baker’s bill. To make ends meet he was sent to live in lodgings in Camden walking each day to Warren’s blacking factory at 30 Hungerford Stairs, which was owned by a relative of his mother. He spent 10 hours a day wrapping bottles of shoe polish, for six shillings a week to pay for his keep. Meanwhile his mother, Elizabeth Barrow, and her three youngest children, joined her husband in the Marshalsea, which was located not far from this street. Dickens would visit them every Sunday until he found lodgings closer to the prison in Lant Street. This meant he was able to breakfast with his family in Marshalsea and dine with them after work. After his studies resumed he left school to become at first a clerk and then a journalist. He was a talented and prolific writer, writing Parliamentary reports and reportage in his Sketches by Boz. In 1836 he published the Pickwick Papers which became a huge hit as part works. He kept up a furious pace with Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop all following in short order. Many more followed most to become household names, A Christmas Carol, Hard Times and Great Expectations among them. Despite his success, he never forgot his father’s incarceration and Marshalsea appeared in The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, and most extensively in Little Dorrit. In later years Dickens returned to the site of his father’s imprisonment. Writing in May 1857: “Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I did not know, myself, until the sixth of this present month, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned in this story, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and then I almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. 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… A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used to enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except for ceremony. But, 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 jail; 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 miserable years.” Today only the prison’s boundary wall remains at nearby Angel Place. Several nearby locations are named after his character Little Dorrit.
