Marshalsea - Two Buildings

Two Buildings

The Marshalsea occupied two buildings on what is now Borough High Street, the first from the beginning of the 14th century, and possibly earlier, at what would now be 161 Borough High Street, between King Street and Mermaid Court. In 1799, the government reported that the prison had fallen into a state of decay, though Robyn Adams writes that it was already crumbling and insecure by the late 16th century, and decided to rebuild it 130 yards (119 m) south on Borough High Street, on the site of the White Lion prison, also called the Borough Gaol. The second Marshalsea functioned as a prison from 1811 until 1849 at what is now 211 Borough High Street. Much of it was demolished in the 1870s, when the Home Office took over responsibility for running prisons, though parts of it existed into the 1950s at least, providing rooms and shops to rent.

Although the first Marshalsea survived for 500 years, and the second for just 38, it is the latter that became widely known, thanks largely to Charles Dickens. Trey Philpotts writes that every detail about the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit has a referent in the real Marshalsea of the 1820s. Dickens rarely made mistakes and did not exaggerate; if anything, Philpotts writes, he downplayed the licentiousness of Marshalsea life, perhaps to protect Victorian sensibilities. Most of our information about the first Marshalsea comes from John Baptist Grano (1692–ca. 1748), one of Handel's trumpeters at the opera house in Haymarket, who kept a detailed diary of his 458-day incarceration in the first Marshalsea—for a debt of £99 (worth £11,000 today)—from 30 May 1728, until 23 September 1729.