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Mansions of Misery: Life Inside the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison by Jerry White is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Mansions of Misery: Life Inside the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison about?

For ordinary Londoners debt was part of everyday life. The poor depended on credit from shopkeepers and landlords to survive, but the better-off too were often deep in debt to finance their more comfortable, even luxurious lifestyle. When creditors lost their patience both rich and poor Londoners could be thrown into one the capital’s debtors’ prisons where they might linger for years. The most notorious of them was the Marshalsea. In the eighteenth century, the Marshalsea became a byword for misery; in the words of one of its inmates, it was ‘hell in epitome’. In 1729 a parliamentary committee of enquiry found that prisoners had been deliberately starved to extort fees from them and that many had died of deprivation and brutality at the hands of the gaolers. In 1768 a mutiny led to an attempt to burn down the gaol. But the prison was also a microcosm of London life, and where as its poor estinmates lived in fear of starvation, the more wealthy and better connected living in the prison’s ‘masters’ wing’ carried on as they would in the outside world, employing servants and entertaining guests — a lifestyle that was often funded again by debt. In 1824 Charles Dickens’s father was det

Who reads Mansions of Misery: Life Inside the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison?

Author

Jerry White

Publisher

Random House Children's Books; Bodley Head

Published

2016

Language

EN

ISBN

9781847923028

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Social Science, History, Biography

Rating

3.6 / 5 (5 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14