St George the Martyr and the Marshalsea: Dickens's Secret
Why is it significant?
Stand by the church of St George the Martyr, with its slim white spire, then step into the little garden just to the north of it. Along one side runs a long, high brick wall. It does not look like much.
Key Facts
| Place | St George the Martyr and the Marshalsea: Dickens's Secret |
|---|---|
| Address | Borough High Street, London SE1 1JA, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50130, -0.09260 |
| Part of Walk | Shakespeare's Southwark: Bankside, the Globe and Tate Modern in London |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand by the church of St George the Martyr, with its slim white spire, then step into the little garden just to the north of it. Along one side runs a long, high brick wall. It does not look like much. It is the last surviving wall of the Marshalsea, the debtors' prison where a twelve-year-old boy's world fell apart.
In February 1824 John Dickens, a cheerful, hopeless clerk in the Navy Pay Office, was arrested for a debt of about forty pounds and locked up in the Marshalsea. His wife and the younger children soon moved in with him, as families often did. His son Charles had already been taken out of school and sent to work ten hours a day in a blacking factory by the Thames, sticking labels on pots of boot polish.
Charles lodged on his own nearby, and when he could he came to the prison to breakfast with his family before going to work. He hardly told anyone about it, ever. Only after his death, when his friend John Forster published his biography, did readers learn the secret... and realise how much of it had been hidden in plain sight in the novels.
Because Dickens put the Marshalsea into Little Dorrit, published in the 1850s. Its heroine, Amy Dorrit, is born inside the prison, and this church plays its part in her story: one night she sleeps in its vestry with a burial register for a pillow, and at the end of the novel she is married here. A small kneeling Little Dorrit even appears in one of the church's stained-glass windows.
The Marshalsea closed in 1842, by which time the boy from the blacking factory was the most famous writer in Britain. Now walk west along Marshalsea Road and turn left into Lant Street, the quiet street where he had his lodging.