If I were to relate it in the order in which it
reached me, I should commence in the middle, and when I had
arrived at the conclusion, go back for a beginning. It is enough
for me to say that some of its circumstances passed before my
own eyes; for the remainder I know them to have happened, and
there are some persons yet living, who will remember them but
too well.
'In the Borough High Street, near St. George's Church, and on
the same side of the way, stands, as most people know, the
smallest of our debtors' prisons, the Marshalsea. Although in
later times it has been a very different place from the sink of filth
and dirt it once was, even its improved condition holds out but
little temptation to the extravagant, or consolation to the
improvident. The condemned felon has as good a yard for air and
exercise in Newgate, as the insolvent debtor in the Marshalsea
Prison. [Better. But this is past, in a better age, and the prison
exists no longer.]
'It may be my fancy, or it may be that I cannot separate the
place from the old recollections associated with it, but this part of
London I cannot bear. The street is broad, the shops are spacious,
the noise of passing vehicles, the footsteps of a perpetual stream
of people--all the busy sounds of traffic, resound in it from morn
to midnight; but the streets around are mean and close; poverty
and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and
misfortune are pent up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and
dreariness seems, in my eyes at least, to hang about the scene,
and to impart to it a squalid and sickly hue.
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