Further on, in chapter ix of the same work, he summarizes a peculiar episode in the history of the gaol at the same period.
“The gates of the King’s Bench and the Fleet Prison, being opened at the usual hour, were found to have notices affixed to them announcing that the rioters would come that night to burn them down. The wardens, too well knowing the likelihood there was of this promise being fulfilled, were fain to set their prisoners at liberty, and gave them leave to move their goods; so all day such of them as had any furniture were occupied in conveying it, some to this place, some to that, and not a few to the brokers’ shops, where they gladly sold it for any wretched price those gentry chose to give. There were some broken men among these debtors who had been in gaol so long, and were so miserable and destitute of friends, so dead to the world, and utterly forgotten and uncared for, that they implored their gaolers not to set them free, and to send them, if need were to some other place of custody. But they refusing to comply, lest they should incur the anger of the mob, turned them into the streets where they wandered up and down, hardly remembering the ways untrodden by their feet so long, and crying—such abject things those rotten-hearted gaols had made them—as they slunk off in their rags and dragged their slipshod feet along the pavement.”
In spite of the concession of the Warden, the mob, as has been stated, burned the Fleet down, and it was in the successor to the den which had risen on the ruins left by the great fire of 1666 that Mr. Pickwick prosecuted his studies of prison life and character.
Among the curiosities of the London Archives are over a ton of books registering the Fleet Marriages between 1686 and 1754, which are in the Registry Office of the Bishop of London, where they were deposited by the Government, which purchased them in 1821. These Fleet Marriages were the scandal and disgrace of their time. While they lasted the debtor’s gaol was the Gretna Green of London. There were no end of hard-living parsons flung into the Fleet for debt, and as these men were always paupers in purse, they were put to strange shifts to keep themselves in meat and drink—especially the latter. The idea to convert clandestine marriages into a source of gain, once originated, with men who had neither money, character or liberty to lose, was not long in spreading. At first the ceremony was performed within the prison chapel. Then they became too numerous and the business 101 too extensive for the confines of the gaol, and every tavern around the prison had its marriage mill, and a parson who in the rules of the prison was permitted to go at large within certain limits, to grind the mill for anyone who listed. These clerical vagabonds employed touts, who roved about the market and the adjacent streets drumming up custom for the parson, who sat swigging while he waited for trade, very much as the slop-shop salesman of to-day seeks for custom passing on the sidewalk. Tennant relates that in walking the street in his youth, on the side next to this prison: “I have often been tempted by the question, ‘Sir, will you be pleased to walk in and be married.’” Along this most lawless space was frequently hung up the sign of a male and female hand conjoined, with “Marriages Performed Within” written beneath. A dirty fellow invited you in. The parson was seen walking before his shop, a squalid, profligate figure, clad in a tattered plaid night-gown, with a fiery face, and ready to couple you for a dram of gin or roll of tobacco. “The Grub Street Journal,” in January, 1735, says: “There are a set of drunken, 102 swearing parsons, with their myrmidons, who wear black coats and pretend to be clerks and registers of the Fleet, and who ply about Ludgate Hill, pulling or forcing people to some peddling ale-house or brandy shop to be married; even on a Sunday stopping them as they go to church and almost tearing the clothes off their backs.”
Competition in the business was fierce. While the Fleet parsons sent their pullers-in forth to scour the streets, they hung their signs out in the windows under the shadow of the prison wall. Thus at one corner might be seen a window, “Weddings performed here cheap.” The business was advertised in the newspapers. The marriage taverns lined Fleet Lane and Fleet Ditch. Two of them—the Bull and Garter and the King’s Head—were kept by warders of the prison. The parson and the landlord divided the fee between them, after deducting a shilling for the tout who brought the customers in. If a marriage was desired to be secret it was not entered on the register of the house. Otherwise it was, for a small fee, written down in a book which each tavern kept. Thus a profligate man could victimize 103 a confiding girl with impunity. Men and women might commit bigamy at will, since any name they chose to give, along with their fee, satisfied the parson, and they could have the “ceremony” kept unregistered, or dated back as they chose. The law held a married woman free of the responsibility of her debts, while a single woman could be arrested and locked up for them. All a woman of free life had to do to defraud her creditors was to get some man to marry her at the Fleet. Then she could not be prosecuted. As for the man, the creditors had to find him before they could proceed against him.
Women of quality who had led extravagant lives did not hesitate at the same shift. There were parsons who kept husbands in hire at five shillings each. There is record of one fellow having been “married” to four women in one day. There is also a record of women, dressed as men, being hired out as mock husbands for the occasion. All classes were fish for the Fleet parson’s net. Drunken sailors and soldiers were united to the gin-perfumed fairies of the market; roués fetched their silly, girlish victims in coaches to the altar reeking of stale 104 beer and brandy; and great men of the realm utilized the functions of the clerical mountebanks to a similar result. In five months—from October, 1704, to February, 1705—2,954 marriages were recorded at the Fleet. How many went unrecorded can only be surmised. The church strove in vain to eradicate the scandal, and it required an Act of Parliament to put an end to it in 1754.
The Fleet marriages provided Dickens with no material, although other and less distinguished romancers have found use for them, with more or less effect. In fact, Dickens rarely wrote without a distinct object, and in “Pickwick,” desultory and irregular as the thread of the narrative is, he had such a purpose when he took the Fleet in hand. At the time he wrote of it (1836) the monstrosity was at its worst. The prevalent system of imprisonment for debt rendered the hideous gaol a tool at the hands of a vengeful enemy, and in those of a rapacious and dishonest man. The outrages to which it lent itself, at the call of swindling lawyers and commercial extortioners, had commenced to attract public attention. That the chapters on the Fleet in “Pickwick” bore a share in arousing 105 the general indignation which forced the Government into action cannot be questioned. They shaped the popular sentiment and gave it a war-cry. But the good work was not to be done in a day. It required an Act of Parliament, debated on and contested with the usual ponderous procrastinativeness, to rid the earth of the Fleet. The Act was at last passed in 1842, and by it the prison was abolished, and its inmates were drafted into the Queen’s Prison. The Fleet was later sold to the Corporation of the City of London, and in the spring of 1846 it was razed to the ground. Its site to-day is marked by business buildings, whose ceaseless industry makes a strange monument for the stagnant and idle life of which the spot was once the scene.
CHAPTER IV.
THE MARSHALSEA.
It was a good seven years—or an evil seven—for many a poor debtor, after the Fleet was legislated out of existence, before its younger brother on the other side of the river followed it. The Marshalsea was not officially abolished until 1849, and even then it escaped the doom of extinction meted out to the Fleet, and prolonged its material existence into our own day. What had been a frowsy jail became a frowsy shelter for a community scarcely poorer than that which had once inhabited it; albeit this newer community enjoyed the advantage of being miserable in freedom from the restrain of barred windows and spike-topped walls.