Down the road from where I live in London is a wall of yellow-brown brick, running alongside a cheerless park, where tramps gather for food handouts from the nearby St George the Martyr church. Next to an arched doorway built into the wall is a Council plaque stating that this stretch of brick is all that’s left of Marshalsea Prison, a Victorian institution that was used to incarcerate debtors, and where a certain John Dickens was sent with his wife and younger children in 1824.
On this event, John’s son Charles — considered old enough to work at 12 — was sent to a rat-infested blacking factory on the banks of the Thames, where he stuck labels on cans of boot polish in order to assist in his family’s finances. At night, Charles would walk down to Marshalsea to have supper with his family, before returning to his boarding house in Camden, an eight-mile round trip that was most likely the source, many years later, of the observations that led to arguably the most vivid stories we have today of life among Victorian London’s poor.
When Charles complained tearfully about this daily commute to his father, alternative lodgings were found for him on Lant Street, in the house of a vestry clerk at St George’s church. Living now around the corner from the prison, Charles soon settled into relatively peaceful days, even though he later confessed that his work at the blacking factory was deeply humiliating to a young man who had dreamt of a fine education and, more tellingly, that he had found it difficult to forgive his parents for their indifference in allowing this to happen.
Later, as a famous and highly regarded novelist, Charles was to remember “the crowding ghosts of many miserable years”. But, in a manner that many novelists will recognise, it was the ghosts of those miserable years that reappeared with such intense familiarity in the pages of Dickens’ books. As fact and fiction swirl and meld together, Little Dorrit grows up in Marshalsea prison because her father is imprisoned there. Later, she is married in St George’s church. In David Copperfield, Mr Micawber — a genial but irresponsible debtor, not unlike John Dickens — is sent to the King’s Bench Prison. Another mention of Marshalsea makes its way into Nicholas Nickleby, and it was a real-life orphan called Bob Fagin who looked after young Charles with much tenderness, when he was taken ill at the factory one day. Such seemingly effortless shape-shifting between imagination and reality can start playing tricks on the mind of anyone researching Dickens’ life and works.
When Marshalsea prison closed in 1842, Dickens merely said, “It is gone now, and the world is none the worse for it”. But without the anguished suffering of his younger years, could he have ever taken his multitudes of readers, with such brimming empathy, into that world of waifs and strays, orphans and prostitutes? And would Dickens have traded his future success as a novelist with a boyhood of calm prosperity, I cannot help but wonder.
Today, the site of old Marshalsea prison houses my local library and the aroma of coffee and cake wafts through the door onto the rainy pavements outside. A young man scurries in ahead of me, shielding his laptop case from a sudden shower. As I take off my jacket and settle into a chair, I see he is already seated, lost among the words forming on his own screen. His intensity tells me he is probably a writer. Of course, he’d have access to all kinds of virtual and augmented realities in the swirling ether that surrounds us all today. But would it be cruel to also wish on him a little bit of genuine pain and suffering, before he attempts to give the world a truly good book?
Jaishree Misra has written eight novels. Her first book of non-fiction, A House For Mr Misra, published by Westland, is just out
