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Thirty years ago there stood, a few doors short of the church of Saint

George, in the borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way

going southward, the Marshalsea Prison It had stood there many years

before, and it reone now,

and the world is none the worse without it

It was an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid

houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooh walls duly spiked at

top Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within

it a ainst

the revenue laws, and defaulters to excise or customs who had incurred

fines which they were unable to pay, were supposed to be incarcerated

behind an iron-plated door closing up a second prison, consisting of a

strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which

forround in

which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles

Supposed to be incarcerated there, because the ti cells and the blind alley In practice they had coh in theory they were quite as good as