Dickens’s presentations of the Fleet and the Marshalsea had, it will be noted, the interest of description as well as of personal association with the characters of the stories for which they provided a part of the scenario. The King’s 149 Bench is an entirely personal episode. The figure of Mr. Micawber obscures all view of the prison. It poses on the merest suggestion of a background of barred windows and spiked walls. For this there are two reasons to be found. In the first place, all of the debtors’ prisons of London were alike in their general features. They differed only in degrees and details of misery. In the Fleet and in the Marshalsea Dickens had exposed all that fell within his vocation to expose. Moreover, the necessity for invoking public obloquy upon the dens had passed away with the revision of the laws for debt. To have elaborated the material details of the life in the King’s Bench would have been to repeat a twice-told tale. Apart from this, Dickens had made no special study of the King’s Bench Prison. His memories of the Marshalsea were indelibly imprinted on his mind. It had been a part of his own life. He had explored the Fleet with the purpose of lending what aid he could toward its abolishment. His boyish wanderings had made him familiar enough with the external aspect of the King’s Bench, and he had visited it on at least one occasion when an acquaintance was incarcerated 150 there. But, after the Fleet and Marshalsea, its familiar features made no appeal to him. What could he say or write of it that had not been said or written by him already?
The King’s Bench Prison of Micawber’s time stood in the Borough Road. It was much more roomy and endurable than the Marshalsea, and much less wretched than the Fleet. It was enclosed by a wall thirty-five feet high, garnished with the usual chevaux-de-frise, and was entered through a stone lodge three stories in height. The jail buildings themselves carried four stories, and were broken up into nearly 250 rooms, with a chapel, and out-buildings for officials and for cookery and other necessities. The courtyard was comparatively spacious, and was especially famous for its racket games. Some champion scores of the day were scored by the collegians at the King’s Bench, who certainly had time enough for practice to perfect themselves in the sport. Like the Fleet and the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench had its tap-room and its coffee-room, its poor side and its pay side, and its club, which nightly, over a pipe and pot, forgot for a few hours that the jail yard was not all out-of-doors. The prison derived 151 its title from the fact that it was the gaol of the High Court of Justice, over which royalty was supposed to sit as supreme judge. So it became the Queen’s Bench when England was ruled by a queen, and under the Commonwealth, when royalty was not recognized, bore the name of the Upper Bench Prison.
The original King’s Bench Prison was situated in Southwark as early as the reign of Richard II. It was broken into and sacked by the Kentish rebels under Wat Tyler, who, on this occasion, performed a similar service to the old Marshalsea close at hand. It was to the King’s Bench that Chief Justice Gascoigne so intrepidly committed the Prince of Wales, afterward Henry V; and down to the time of Oldys the room in which the wild young crony of Sir John Falstaff spent his term in gaol, was known as the Prince of Wales’s Chamber. The old King’s Bench seems to have been a decidedly easy-going jail. In 1579 we learn from the chronicles that the prisoners used to eat in a little low parlor next the street, and that they always had an audience staring at them through the barred windows, such as nowadays honors the repasts of the wild beasts in the zoo. During 152 this year the prisoners petitioned for an enlargement of the prison and for a chapel, both of which requests seem to have been granted. Defoe, who sampled the King’s Bench as well as Newgate and the Fleet, describes it as “not near so good” as the latter little prison, and complained that “to a man who had money the Bench was only the name of a prison.” Indeed, the license of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries in the King’s Bench would be hardly credible to persons accustomed only to the rigid discipline of modern jail management. In all the debtors’ gaols of this period, the gambler and the swindler, the pickpocket, and even the footpads, who robbed by violence, plied their trades. Drunkenness was universal, and the commitment of loose women and the freedom of entry from without made worse debaucheries than those of the bottle easy of indulgence. At certain periods of their history the prisons seem to have been nothing less than vast bagnio-taverns, only the restriction upon the egress of the debtors distinguishing them from the common resorts of the town. The authorities of the jail were not supersensitive in their morality, provided their purses were kept 153 filled. Wealth might riot, if it paid the piper, as readily and freely as poverty might rot for the wherewithal to buy a crust of bread. Roderick Random’s naked debtor shivering in a scrap of worn-out carpet was no fiction of the King’s Bench, nor Captain Blazer’s banquets to his fair friends from over the river a romance.
Smollet knew the Bench well enough. He had spent a term of probation behind its walls, and wrote “Sir Launcelot Greaves” within its rules. John Wilkes lay by the heels for one of his libels under its smoky roof, and hither came the mob to release him in 1768. The mob assembled in St. George’s Field for the purpose, and thus in 1780 the Gordon Rioters gathered, who, a few days later, burst the prison gates and turned 700 prisoners loose before they put the rotten and reeking old jail to the torch. Combe was a prisoner under the rules of the King’s Bench when he wrote “Dr. Syntax,” and Haydon drew his idea of “The Mock Election” from a burlesque enacted among the prisoners while he was locked up in the jail for debt. A volume could be filled with the curious and characteristic events and personal episodes of 154 the prison from the days of Wat Tyler down to 1862, when the last debtor passed out at the lodge gate, and the brief career of the King’s Bench as a military prison began. Its history covered really that of two prisons, for after the attack of 1780 by the rioters, the old site was abandoned and another chosen for the rebuilding of the jail. In one of Dickens’s last strolls in Southwark, he noticed the fact that no vestige of the King’s Bench remained, but that a huge structure devoted to model homes for workingmen redeemed its unlamented grave from the uselessness which had made it a blight during many centuries. In Chapter 14 of Volume 2 of “Nicholas Nickleby,” by the way, Dickens adverts to a feature of the law of which the King’s Bench was one of the outgrowths, in connection with the first visit of Nicholas to Madeline Bray.
“The place to which Mr. Cheeryble had directed him was a row of mean and not over cleanly houses, situated within the ‘Rules’ of the King’s Bench Prison, and not many hundred paces distant from the obelisk in St. George’s Fields. The Rules are a certain liberty adjoining the prison, and comprising some dozen streets in which debtors who can raise 155 money to pay large fees, from which their creditors do not derive any benefit, are permitted to reside by the wise provisions of the same enlightened laws which leave the debtor who can raise no money to starve in gaol, without food, clothing, lodging, or warmth, which are provided for felons convicted of the most atrocious crimes that can disgrace humanity. There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally obtainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.
“To the row of houses indicated to him by Mr. Charles Cheeryble, Nicholas directed his steps without much troubling his head about such matters as these; and at this row of houses—after traversing a very dirty and dusty suburb of which minor theatricals, shell-fish, ginger-beer, spring vans, green grocery and brokers’ shops appeared to compose the main and most prominent features—he at length arrived with a palpitating heart. There were small gardens in the front which, being wholly neglected in all other respects, served as little pens for the dust to collect in, until the wind came around the corner and blew it down the road. Opening the rickety gate which, dangling on its broken hinges, before one of these, half admitted and 156 half repulsed the visitor, Nicholas knocked at the street door with a faltering hand.
“It was, in truth, a shabby house outside, with very dim parlor windows and very small show of blinds, and very dirty muslin curtain dangling across the lower panes on very loose and limp strings. Neither, when the door was opened, did the inside appear to belie the outward promise, as there was a faded carpeting on the stairs and faded oil-cloth in the passage; in addition to which discomforts a gentleman Ruler was smoking hard in the front parlor (though it was not yet noon), while the lady of the house was busily engaged in turpentining the disjointed fragments of a tent-bedstead at the door of the back parlor, as if in preparation for the reception of some new lodger who had been fortunate enough to engage it.”
The Fleet had its rules like the King’s Bench, but there was no such legalized stretching of the bounds of confinement tolerated at the Marshalsea. There the prisoner was supposed to remain a close prisoner within the walls until the courts ordained his release. In fact, however, if he had money he might buy sly periods of liberty under the eye of the keeper, and this abuse of his office brought the Marshal and his subordinates many a sovereign above their legitimate emoluments. One young gentleman 157 of sporting proclivities, who was committed to the Marshalsea while his lawyer was settling up the wreck of his handsome patrimonial estate, afterwards published an account of his experiences as a detained debtor. From this it appears that during the entire term of his detention he was a regular spectator at the cock fights, dog fights and prize fights, of the day, and that he kept his wherry on the Thames, and went out for a row whenever he felt the need of air and exercise. The keeper who accompanied him on these excursions, and who was of a sporting turn himself, left the prison to enter his employ, and was his faithful henchman at the time he printed his book, in the most genteel and elegant style, for circulation among his friends.
It is curious to note that even to our own day, and in our own country, this system of prison favoritism is not entirely unknown. If a man is arrested on a judgment for debt, he can, if he knows the way, save himself from being locked up for a night at least by paying the sheriff’s deputy for it. To be sure the deputy will have to be in his company until he is duly handed over at Ludlow street Jail, and 158 properly receipted for, but there are such things as double bedded rooms in New York hotels. In the same way, it is shrewdly suspected, prisoners in Ludlow street who can pay for it can enjoy a night out once in a while. It used to be so at least; and by the evidence brought out by investigations in the past it was not even an unusual occurrence. It is popularly believed, by the way, that there is no such thing in New York state as imprisonment for debt. Some native realist in the line of fiction ought to take a turn over to the east side of the commercial metropolis of the United States, and weave his experiences of the Ludlow street cage into some such shape as Dickens did his of the Fleet, the Marshalsea, and the King’s Bench.
CHAPTER VI.
THE NEW YORK TOMBS.
