Take a left off Borough High Street just before Tabard Street, and you’ll find yourself walking down a fairly non-descript alley called Angel Place. On one side is a modern office building and the other a high brick wall.
Wait a minute. Look again at that wall. Does something strike you as rather altogether ‘too imposing’ about it?
Your sixth sense will be serving you well if you do.
Because this wall is the only remaining part of the infamous Marshalsea debtors’ prison that stood here between 1373-1842.
Image courtesy Edward Walford, “Southwark: High Street,” in Old and New London, Volume 6, 1878of Wikipedia. Marshalsea prison, Southwark, London, 18th century
Debtors prisons, around since the Middle Ages, gained a fearsome reputation in the 18th and 19th centuries when the city saw a massive growth in population. You could be sent to prison for even a modest debt with a staggering 10,000 incarcerated every year.
These prisons were privately run institutions where conditions varied enormously depending on your financial position. Inmates were charged for their board and lodgings and had to pay for everything – including having their chains removed on arrival
Only those who had wealthy or influential friends on the outside might afford to pay for better living conditions or have their family join them if they had nowhere else to live – as in the case of Charles Dicken’s father who was convicted of a £40 debt owed a local baker.
For those not so fortunate living conditions were abysmal and they would often resort to begging from passers-by to pay for their keep. There were instances of inmates held in such wretched conditions that they literally starved to death.
Debtors didn’t serve fixed sentences. They could only secure their release when they had paid their debts or reached an agreement with their creditors. It was a terrible catch 22 for many inmates as, unable to work and forced to pay for jail time, their indebtedness could actually increase. Some ended up spending years, even decades locked away.
Finally in 1869, the Debtors Act brought an end to debtors’ prisons and the only thing left of the terrible Marshalsea Prison is the street name Marshalsea Street, and this forbidding prison wall, now Grade II listed.
Footnote: During his father’s stay at Marshalsea, the young Charles Dickens was forced to go out to work at a boot blacking factory.
His family only secured their release when his father came into a small inheritance and was able to pay off his debt. The experience had a profound effect on the young author and, in his book Little Dorrit, the story centres around Amy Dorrit, born and raised in Marshalsea prison.
When the prison closed Dickens wrote: ‘It is gone now; and the world is none the worse without it.’
