Today, being sent to prison is seen as a form of punishment, but prisons served a very different function in the time leading up to the Victorian period in England. While imprisonment was meant to serve as punishment for some crimes, prisons were essentially lodging places where individuals convicted of crimes either waited for their punishments to be determined, or for their situation to be resolved. For those imprisoned for debt, this effectively meant remaining in prison until their debts could be paid off.
It has been estimated that in the 18th century, half of all the prisoners in England were imprisoned due to debt. Marshalsea Prison stood in the Southwark neighborhood (now part of London), on the south bank of the River Thames, between 1373 and 1842. It held prisoners charged with other crimes, but was noted mostly as a debtors' prison. As Little Dorrit reveals, it was not uncommon for prisoners to bring their families to come and live with them, especially if they were going to be imprisoned for a long time. The prison was run on a for-profit basis and incorporated an entire internal economic system where goods and services were sold, bartered, and exchanged.
As time went on, there were outcries for reform of both prison conditions and the laws that led many people to be imprisoned for relatively small amounts of debt. For example, the Debtors' Act of 1869 restricted the ability of courts to send individuals to prison, although it did not entirely eliminate the practice of doing so. Dickens's investment in describing the experience of debtors' prisons was also personal. In February 1824, when Charles Dickens was 12 years old, his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea due to a debt he owed to a baker. Dickens's mother and his younger siblings moved into the prison to live with his father, but the future author was sent to work in a factory so that he could contribute his earnings to paying off the debt. Living in cheap rented rooms and laboring at the factory was a traumatic experience for Dickens, one that would go on to shape several of his novels. He regularly visited his family in the Marshalsea, and this experience allowed him to vividly evoke the prison years later in his writing. His father was released after three months, but the financial consequences of the imprisonment meant that the young Dickens still had to keep working.
The Marshalsea was closed in 1842, which explains why Dickens had to set Little Dorrit several decades in the past. Most of the Marshalsea was demolished in the 1870s. The site where it stood is marked by a historical plaque.
