Marshalsea Prison Wall 1

Dickens Walk in Southwark. www.walksoflondon.co.uk/31/index.shtml

Dickens was haunted by Marshalsea Prison. It dominates Little Dorrit, the heroine of which is a debtor’s daughter, born and raised within its confines. And Dickens was speaking from personal experience when he wrote about ‘the games of the prison children as they whooped and ran, and played at hide-and-seek, and made the iron bars of the inner gateway “Home”’. He wrote in the same novel that the Marshalsea ‘is gone now, and the world is none the worse without it’. But, as he neared the book’s completion, spurred on by letters from readers of the serialization enquiring what had become of it, he returned to look upon what remained.

See where this picture was taken. [?]