Mansions of Misery

by Jerry White Bodley Head 384pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15

Mansions of Misery, the latest of Jerry White’s “explorations of London’s past”, tells the story of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, said John Carey in The Sunday Times. It is a book full of intriguing facts and characters, and shows the prison – which was immortalised by Charles Dickens in David Copperfield and Little Dorrit – to have had a long and varied history. Before the 18th century, the Marshalsea, like all English prisons, was essentially run as a private extortion racket, with inmates charged heftily for the privilege of staying there. The minority who could afford the fees lived comfortably on the “masters’ side”, and were allowed out during the day. The rest lived on the “common side” and were treated “hideously”: packed in up to 50 to a room, provided with neither food nor sanitation, sometimes locked up with dead bodies. Any insubordination was quelled with an “armoury of medieval torture instruments – leg irons, thumb screws, an iron collar”.

By the time Dickens’s family were incarcerated there, in 1824, matters had improved somewhat, said Paula Byrne in The Times. The old prison closed in 1811, and was replaced by a new building which looked “a lot like an Oxford college”. Though the young Dickens himself never lived in the Marshalsea – he rented cheap lodgings nearby and was sent to work in a blacking factory – his family’s experiences there “haunted” him for life, and help explain his abiding preoccupation with imprisonment and social injustice. As a historical account, Mansions of Misery is vivid and deeply impressive, said Simon Callow in The Guardian. But even as he conveys the reality of life in the Marshalsea, White never loses sight of the “crushing hopelessness of the debtor’s situation”. Colourful, exuberant and humane, this is a work of “extraordinary resonance”.