In Jail with Charles Dickens

Newgate was the first prison to which Charles Dickens gave any literary attention. An account of a visit to it appears among the early "Sketches by Boz." It is also the only one...

The entrance to Newgate is through the keeper's lodge, which, with the house in which the keeper lives, occupies the centre of what has been well called "this vast quarry of sto...

"Sauntering or sitting about, in every possible attitude of listless idleness, were a number of debtors, the major part of whom were waiting in prison until their day of 'going...

In Philadelphia Dickens made a special request for permission to visit the great prison of the State, remarking that it and the Falls of Niagara were the two objects he most wis...

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 f...

In the "Pickwick Papers" the Fleet Prison was made to serve as an important feature of the story. In "Little Dorrit," the story as far as its human interest, humor and pathos ar...

Dickens may fairly be said to have begun his sight-seeing in America by going to jail. He commenced with those in Boston, and wherever else he found a prison he had a look at it...

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 these troubles an...

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...

Half a century ago, a stroller about the London streets whose loiterings carried him to the Fleet Market, could not but notice in the brick wall that extended along what is now...

distinguished by the likeness of a man being hung and smoking a pipe the while, done in chalk upon the panel. Not liking his company of three here he, as may be recalled, rented...