Chapter: Thirty years ago there stood, a few doors short of the church of Saint
George, in the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way
going southward, the Marshalsea Prison. It had stood there many years
before, and it remained there some years afterwards; but it is gone now,
    and the world is none the worse without it.

    It was an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid
    houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms;
    environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at
    top. Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within
    it a much closer and more confined jail for smugglers. Offenders against
    the revenue laws, and defaulters to excise or customs who had incurred
    fines which they were unable to pay, were supposed to be incarcerated
    behind an iron-plated door closing up a second prison, consisting of a
    strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which
    formed the mysterious termination of the very limited skittle-ground in
    which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles.

    Supposed to be incarcerated there, because the time had rather outgrown
    the strong cells and the blind alley. In practice they had come to be
    considered a little too bad, though in theory they were quite as good as
    ever; which may be observed to be the case at the present day with other
    cells that are not at all strong, and with other blind alleys that are
    stone-blind. Hence the smugglers habitually consorted with the debtors
    (who received them with open arms), except at certain constitutional
    moments when somebody came from some Office, to go through some form of
    overlooking something which neither he nor anybody else knew anything
    about. On these truly British occasions, the smugglers, if any, made a
    feint of walking into the strong cells and the blind alley, while this
    somebody pretended to do his something: and made a reality of walking
    out again as soon as he hadn't done it--neatly epitomising the
    administration of most of the public affairs in our right little, tight
    little, island.

    There had been taken to the Marshalsea Prison, long before the day when
    the sun shone on Marseilles and on the opening of this narrative, a
    debtor with whom this narrative has some concern.

    He was, at that time, a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged
    gentleman, who was going out again directly. Necessarily, he was going
    out again directly, because the Marshalsea lock never turned upon a
    debtor who was not. He brought in a portmanteau with him, which he
    doubted its being worth while to unpack; he was so perfectly clear--like
    all the rest of them, the turnkey on the lock said--that he was going
    out again directly.

    He was a shy, retiring man; well-looking, though in an effeminate style;
    with a mild voice, curling hair, and irresolute hands--rings upon the
    fingers in those days--which nervously wandered to his trembling lip a
    hundred times in the first half-hour of his acquaintance with the jail.
    His principal anxiety was about his wife.

    'Do you think, sir,' he asked the turnkey, 'that she will be very much
    shocked, if she should come to the gate to-morrow morning?'

    The turnkey gave it as the result of his experience that some of 'em was
    and some of 'em wasn't. In general, more no than yes. 'What like is she,
    you see?' he philosophically asked: 'that's what it hinges on.'

    'She is very delicate and inexperienced indeed.'

    'That,' said the turnkey, 'is agen her.'

    'She is so little used to go out alone,' said the debtor, 'that I am at
    a loss to think how she will ever make her way here, if she walks.'

    'P'raps,' quoth the turnkey, 'she'll take a ackney coach.'

    'Perhaps.' The irresolute fingers went to the trembling lip. 'I hope she
    will. She may not think of it.'

    'Or p'raps,' said the turnkey, offering his suggestions from the the top
    of his well-worn wooden stool, as he might have offered them to a child
    for whose weakness he felt a compassion, 'p'raps she'll get her brother,
    or her sister, to come along with her.'

    'She has no brother or sister.'

    'Niece, nevy, cousin, serwant, young 'ooman, greengrocer.--Dash it! One
    or another on 'em,' said the turnkey, repudiating beforehand the refusal
    of all his suggestions.

    'I fear--I hope it is not against the rules--that she will bring the
    children.'

    'The children?' said the turnkey. 'And the rules? Why, lord set you
    up like a corner pin, we've a reg'lar playground o' children here.
    Children! Why we swarm with 'em. How many a you got?'

    'Two,' said the debtor, lifting his irresolute hand to his lip again,
    and turning into the prison.

    The turnkey followed him with his eyes. 'And you another,' he observed
    to himself, 'which makes three on you. And your wife another, I'll lay
    a crown. Which makes four on you. And another coming, I'll lay
    half-a-crown. Which'll make five on you. And I'll go another seven and
    sixpence to name which is the helplessest, the unborn baby or you!'

    He was right in all his particulars. She came next day with a little
    boy of three years old, and a little girl of two, and he stood entirely
    corroborated.

    'Got a room now; haven't you?' the turnkey asked the debtor after a week
    or two.

    'Yes, I have got a very good room.'

    'Any little sticks a coming to furnish it?' said the turnkey.

    'I expect a few necessary articles of furniture to be delivered by the
    carrier, this afternoon.'

    'Missis and little 'uns a coming to keep you company?' asked the
    turnkey.

    'Why, yes, we think it better that we should not be scattered, even for
    a few weeks.'

    'Even for a few weeks, _of_ course,' replied the turnkey. And he followed
    him again with his eyes, and nodded his head seven times when he was
    gone.

    The affairs of this debtor were perplexed by a partnership, of which he
    knew no more than that he had invested money in it; by legal matters
    of assignment and settlement, conveyance here and conveyance there,
    suspicion of unlawful preference of creditors in this direction, and of
    mysterious spiriting away of property in that; and as nobody on the face
    of the earth could be more incapable of explaining any single item in
    the heap of confusion than the debtor himself, nothing comprehensible
    could be made of his case. To question him in detail, and endeavour
    to reconcile his answers; to closet him with accountants and sharp
    practitioners, learned in the wiles of insolvency and bankruptcy; was
    only to put the case out at compound interest and incomprehensibility.
    The irresolute fingers fluttered more and more ineffectually about the
    trembling lip on every such occasion, and the sharpest practitioners
    gave him up as a hopeless job.

    'Out?' said the turnkey, '_he_'ll never get out, unless his creditors take
    him by the shoulders and shove him out.'

    He had been there five or six months, when he came running to this
    turnkey one forenoon to tell him, breathless and pale, that his wife was
    ill.

    'As anybody might a known she would be,' said the turnkey.

    'We intended,' he returned, 'that she should go to a country lodging
    only to-morrow. What am I to do! Oh, good heaven, what am I to do!'

    'Don't waste your time in clasping your hands and biting your fingers,'
    responded the practical turnkey, taking him by the elbow, 'but come
    along with me.'

    The turnkey conducted him--trembling from head to foot, and constantly
    crying under his breath, What was he to do! while his irresolute fingers
    bedabbled the tears upon his face--up one of the common staircases in
    the prison to a door on the garret story. Upon which door the turnkey
    knocked with the handle of his key.

    'Come in!' cried a voice inside.

    The turnkey, opening the door, disclosed in a wretched, ill-smelling
    little room, two hoarse, puffy, red-faced personages seated at a
    rickety table, playing at all-fours, smoking pipes, and drinking brandy.

    'Doctor,' said the turnkey, 'here's a gentleman's wife in want of you
    without a minute's loss of time!'

    The doctor's friend was in the positive degree of hoarseness, puffiness,
    red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt, and brandy; the doctor in
    the comparative--hoarser, puffier, more red-faced, more all-fourey,
    tobaccoer, dirtier, and brandier. The doctor was amazingly shabby, in
    a torn and darned rough-weather sea-jacket, out at elbows and eminently
    short of buttons (he had been in his time the experienced surgeon
            carried by a passenger ship), the dirtiest white trousers conceivable by
    mortal man, carpet slippers, and no visible linen. 'Childbed?' said
    the doctor. 'I'm the boy!' With that the doctor took a comb from the
    chimney-piece and stuck his hair upright--which appeared to be his
    way of washing himself--produced a professional chest or case, of most
    abject appearance, from the cupboard where his cup and saucer and coals
    were, settled his chin in the frowsy wrapper round his neck, and became
    a ghastly medical scarecrow.

    The doctor and the debtor ran down-stairs, leaving the turnkey to return
    to the lock, and made for the debtor's room. All the ladies in the
    prison had got hold of the news, and were in the yard. Some of them
    had already taken possession of the two children, and were hospitably
    carrying them off; others were offering loans of little comforts from
    their own scanty store; others were sympathising with the greatest
    volubility. The gentlemen prisoners, feeling themselves at a
    disadvantage, had for the most part retired, not to say sneaked,
    to their rooms; from the open windows of which some of them now
    complimented the doctor with whistles as he passed below, while others,
    with several stories between them, interchanged sarcastic references to
    the prevalent excitement.

    It was a hot summer day, and the prison rooms were baking between the
    high walls. In the debtor's confined chamber, Mrs Bangham, charwoman and
    messenger, who was not a prisoner (though she had been once), but
    was the popular medium of communication with the outer world, had
    volunteered her services as fly-catcher and general attendant. The walls
    and ceiling were blackened with flies. Mrs Bangham, expert in sudden
    device, with one hand fanned the patient with a cabbage leaf, and with
    the other set traps of vinegar and sugar in gallipots; at the same time
    enunciating sentiments of an encouraging and congratulatory nature,
    adapted to the occasion.

    'The flies trouble you, don't they, my dear?' said Mrs Bangham. 'But
    p'raps they'll take your mind off of it, and do you good. What between
    the buryin ground, the grocer's, the waggon-stables, and the paunch
    trade, the Marshalsea flies gets very large. P'raps they're sent as a
    consolation, if we only know'd it. How are you now, my dear? No better?
    No, my dear, it ain't to be expected; you'll be worse before you're
    better, and you know it, don't you? Yes. That's right! And to think of
    a sweet little cherub being born inside the lock! Now ain't it pretty,
    ain't _that_ something to carry you through it pleasant? Why, we ain't
    had such a thing happen here, my dear, not for I couldn't name the time
    when. And you a crying too?' said Mrs Bangham, to rally the patient more
    and more. 'You! Making yourself so famous! With the flies a falling into
    the gallipots by fifties! And everything a going on so well! And here if
    there ain't,' said Mrs Bangham as the door opened, 'if there ain't your
    dear gentleman along with Dr Haggage! And now indeed we _are_ complete, I
    _think_!'

    The doctor was scarcely the kind of apparition to inspire a patient
    with a sense of absolute completeness, but as he presently delivered the
    opinion, 'We are as right as we can be, Mrs Bangham, and we shall
    come out of this like a house afire;' and as he and Mrs Bangham took
    possession of the poor helpless pair, as everybody else and anybody else
    had always done, the means at hand were as good on the whole as better
    would have been. The special feature in Dr Haggage's treatment of the
    case, was his determination to keep Mrs Bangham up to the mark. As thus:

    'Mrs Bangham,' said the doctor, before he had been there twenty minutes,
    'go outside and fetch a little brandy, or we shall have you giving in.'

    'Thank you, sir. But none on my accounts,' said Mrs Bangham.

    'Mrs Bangham,' returned the doctor, 'I am in professional attendance
    on this lady, and don't choose to allow any discussion on your part. Go
    outside and fetch a little brandy, or I foresee that you'll break down.'

    'You're to be obeyed, sir,' said Mrs Bangham, rising. 'If you was to put
    your own lips to it, I think you wouldn't be the worse, for you look but
    poorly, sir.'

    'Mrs Bangham,' returned the doctor, 'I am not your business, thank you,
    but you are mine. Never you mind _me_, if you please. What you have got to
    do, is, to do as you are told, and to go and get what I bid you.'

    Mrs Bangham submitted; and the doctor, having administered her
    potion, took his own. He repeated the treatment every hour, being very
    determined with Mrs Bangham. Three or four hours passed; the flies
    fell into the traps by hundreds; and at length one little life, hardly
    stronger than theirs, appeared among the multitude of lesser deaths.

    'A very nice little girl indeed,' said the doctor; 'little, but
    well-formed. Halloa, Mrs Bangham! You're looking queer! You be off,
    ma'am, this minute, and fetch a little more brandy, or we shall have you
    in hysterics.'

    By this time, the rings had begun to fall from the debtor's irresolute
    hands, like leaves from a wintry tree. Not one was left upon them that
    night, when he put something that chinked into the doctor's greasy palm.
    In the meantime Mrs Bangham had been out on an errand to a neighbouring
    establishment decorated with three golden balls, where she was very well
    known.

    'Thank you,' said the doctor, 'thank you. Your good lady is quite
    composed. Doing charmingly.'

    'I am very happy and very thankful to know it,' said the debtor, 'though
    I little thought once, that--'

    'That a child would be born to you in a place like this?' said the
    doctor. 'Bah, bah, sir, what does it signify? A little more elbow-room
    is all we want here. We are quiet here; we don't get badgered here;
    there's no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a
    man's heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man's at
    home, and to say he'll stand on the door mat till he is. Nobody writes
    threatening letters about money to this place. It's freedom, sir, it's
    freedom! I have had to-day's practice at home and abroad, on a march,
    and aboard ship, and I'll tell you this: I don't know that I have ever
    pursued it under such quiet circumstances as here this day. Elsewhere,
    people are restless, worried, hurried about, anxious respecting one
    thing, anxious respecting another. Nothing of the kind here, sir. We
    have done all that--we know the worst of it; we have got to the bottom,
    we can't fall, and what have we found? Peace. That's the word for
    it. Peace.' With this profession of faith, the doctor, who was an old
    jail-bird, and was more sodden than usual, and had the additional and
    unusual stimulus of money in his pocket, returned to his associate and
    chum in hoarseness, puffiness, red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt,
    and brandy.

    Now, the debtor was a very different man from the doctor, but he had
    already begun to travel, by his opposite segment of the circle, to the
    same point. Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a
    dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that
    kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with
    strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have
    broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he
    was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took
    one step upward.

    When he was relieved of the perplexed affairs that nothing would make
    plain, through having them returned upon his hands by a dozen agents in
    succession who could make neither beginning, middle, nor end of them or
    him, he found his miserable place of refuge a quieter refuge than it
    had been before. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder
    children now played regularly about the yard, and everybody knew the
    baby, and claimed a kind of proprietorship in her.

    'Why, I'm getting proud of you,' said his friend the turnkey, one day.
    'You'll be the oldest inhabitant soon. The Marshalsea wouldn't be like
    the Marshalsea now, without you and your family.'

    The turnkey really was proud of him. He would mention him in laudatory
    terms to new-comers, when his back was turned. 'You took notice of him,'
    he would say, 'that went out of the lodge just now?'

    New-comer would probably answer Yes.

    'Brought up as a gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed'cated at no
    end of expense. Went into the Marshal's house once to try a new piano
    for him. Played it, I understand, like one o'clock--beautiful! As to
    languages--speaks anything. We've had a Frenchman here in his time, and
    it's my opinion he knowed more French than the Frenchman did. We've had
    an Italian here in his time, and he shut _him_ up in about half a minute.
    You'll find some characters behind other locks, I don't say you won't;
    but if you want the top sawyer in such respects as I've mentioned, you
    must come to the Marshalsea.'

    When his youngest child was eight years old, his wife, who had long been
    languishing away--of her own inherent weakness, not that she retained
    any greater sensitiveness as to her place of abode than he did--went
    upon a visit to a poor friend and old nurse in the country, and died
    there. He remained shut up in his room for a fortnight afterwards;
    and an attorney's clerk, who was going through the Insolvent Court,
    engrossed an address of condolence to him, which looked like a Lease,
    and which all the prisoners signed. When he appeared again he was
    greyer (he had soon begun to turn grey); and the turnkey noticed that
    his hands went often to his trembling lips again, as they had used to do
    when he first came in. But he got pretty well over it in a month or
    two; and in the meantime the children played about the yard as regularly
    as ever, but in black.

    Then Mrs Bangham, long popular medium of communication with the outer
    world, began to be infirm, and to be found oftener than usual comatose
    on pavements, with her basket of purchases spilt, and the change of her
    clients ninepence short. His son began to supersede Mrs Bangham, and
    to execute commissions in a knowing manner, and to be of the prison
    prisonous, of the streets streety.

    Time went on, and the turnkey began to fail. His chest swelled, and his
    legs got weak, and he was short of breath. The well-worn wooden stool
    was 'beyond him,' he complained. He sat in an arm-chair with a cushion,
    and sometimes wheezed so, for minutes together, that he couldn't turn
    the key. When he was overpowered by these fits, the debtor often turned
    it for him.

    'You and me,' said the turnkey, one snowy winter's night when the lodge,
    with a bright fire in it, was pretty full of company, 'is the oldest
    inhabitants. I wasn't here myself above seven year before you. I shan't
    last long. When I'm off the lock for good and all, you'll be the Father
    of the Marshalsea.'

    The turnkey went off the lock of this world next day. His words were
    remembered and repeated; and tradition afterwards handed down from
    generation to generation--a Marshalsea generation might be calculated as
    about three months--that the shabby old debtor with the soft manner and
    the white hair, was the Father of the Marshalsea.

    And he grew to be proud of the title. If any impostor had arisen to
    claim it, he would have shed tears in resentment of the attempt to
    deprive him of his rights. A disposition began to be perceived in him
    to exaggerate the number of years he had been there; it was generally
    understood that you must deduct a few from his account; he was vain, the
    fleeting generations of debtors said.

    All new-comers were presented to him. He was punctilious in the exaction
    of this ceremony. The wits would perform the office of introduction with
    overcharged pomp and politeness, but they could not easily overstep his
    sense of its gravity. He received them in his poor room (he disliked an
            introduction in the mere yard, as informal--a thing that might happen
            to anybody), with a kind of bowed-down beneficence. They were welcome to
    the Marshalsea, he would tell them. Yes, he was the Father of the place.
    So the world was kind enough to call him; and so he was, if more than
    twenty years of residence gave him a claim to the title. It looked
    small at first, but there was very good company there--among a
    mixture--necessarily a mixture--and very good air.

    It became a not unusual circumstance for letters to be put under his
    door at night, enclosing half-a-crown, two half-crowns, now and then at
    long intervals even half-a-sovereign, for the Father of the Marshalsea.
    'With the compliments of a collegian taking leave.' He received the
    gifts as tributes, from admirers, to a public character. Sometimes
    these correspondents assumed facetious names, as the Brick, Bellows, Old
    Gooseberry, Wideawake, Snooks, Mops, Cutaway, the Dogs-meat Man; but he
    considered this in bad taste, and was always a little hurt by it.

    In the fulness of time, this correspondence showing signs of wearing
    out, and seeming to require an effort on the part of the correspondents
    to which in the hurried circumstances of departure many of them might
    not be equal, he established the custom of attending collegians of
    a certain standing, to the gate, and taking leave of them there. The
    collegian under treatment, after shaking hands, would occasionally
    stop to wrap up something in a bit of paper, and would come back again
    calling 'Hi!'

    He would look round surprised.'Me?' he would say, with a smile.

    By this time the collegian would be up with him, and he would paternally
    add,'What have you forgotten? What can I do for you?'

    'I forgot to leave this,' the collegian would usually return, 'for the
    Father of the Marshalsea.'

    'My good sir,' he would rejoin, 'he is infinitely obliged to you.' But,
    to the last, the irresolute hand of old would remain in the pocket into
    which he had slipped the money during two or three turns about the yard,
    lest the transaction should be too conspicuous to the general body of
    collegians.

    One afternoon he had been doing the honours of the place to a rather
    large party of collegians, who happened to be going out, when, as he was
    coming back, he encountered one from the poor side who had been taken in
    execution for a small sum a week before, had 'settled' in the course of
    that afternoon, and was going out too. The man was a mere Plasterer in
    his working dress; had his wife with him, and a bundle; and was in high
    spirits.

    'God bless you, sir,' he said in passing.

    'And you,' benignantly returned the Father of the Marshalsea.

    They were pretty far divided, going their several ways, when the
    Plasterer called out, 'I say!--sir!' and came back to him.

    'It ain't much,' said the Plasterer, putting a little pile of halfpence
    in his hand, 'but it's well meant.'

    The Father of the Marshalsea had never been offered tribute in copper
    yet. His children often had, and with his perfect acquiescence it had
    gone into the common purse to buy meat that he had eaten, and drink that
    he had drunk; but fustian splashed with white lime, bestowing halfpence
    on him, front to front, was new.

    'How dare you!' he said to the man, and feebly burst into tears.

    The Plasterer turned him towards the wall, that his face might not be
    seen; and the action was so delicate, and the man was so penetrated with
    repentance, and asked pardon so honestly, that he could make him no less
    acknowledgment than, 'I know you meant it kindly. Say no more.'

    'Bless your soul, sir,' urged the Plasterer, 'I did indeed. I'd do more
    by you than the rest of 'em do, I fancy.'

    'What would you do?' he asked.

    'I'd come back to see you, after I was let out.'

    'Give me the money again,' said the other, eagerly, 'and I'll keep it,
    and never spend it. Thank you for it, thank you! I shall see you again?'

    'If I live a week you shall.'

    They shook hands and parted. The collegians, assembled in Symposium in
    the Snuggery that night, marvelled what had happened to their Father; he
    walked so late in the shadows of the yard, and seemed so downcast.

 The Marshalsea is a prison that was originally divided into two parts: one part for those who couldn't pay their debts and the other for smugglers. . But over time, the prison buildings have fallen into disrepair, and all these prisoners now mingle together. One day Mr. Dorrit is taken to Marshalsea. He is in his 40s, married, with two children and another on the way. He has almost no idea what his debt is. - and left him with the company debts . In the middle of the 19th century, corporations were finally invented, and investing in a company became much more like what we think of today - you can buy some stock in General Motors, but that doesn't make you responsible for that company in any way.) So, yeah. Mr. Dorrit. Debts. Prison. His wife and kids come with, because where else are they going to go? They aren't actually prisoners, though, and can come and go as they please. A few months later, his youngest daughter is born inside the prison. Eight years later, his wife dies. Mr. Dorrit has become very used to prison life. His son takes over from Mrs. Bangham as the prison's errand-boy. Eventually he is the longest-serving prisoner and gets the nickname Father of the Marshalsea. He starts to be proud of this title, and exaggerates how many years he's been in prison, how fancy a gentleman he used to be before, and how much debt he really has. Other prisoners who are leaving start giving him tips as a kind of charity and token of respect. He starts to expect, and then demand, these handouts.

