No one certainly can pass the site of the Marshalsea
Prison without recalling that solemn and haunting description in the
preface to "Little Dorrit": "Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place,
turning out of Angel Court leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on
the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; will see its
narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at
all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will
look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; will stand among the
crowding ghosts of many miserable years."
It is still of Dickens most of us will think in passing St George's
Church, for was it not there that Little Dorrit was christened and
married, and was it not in the vestry there she slept with the burial-
book for a pillow? But St George's has other memories too, for it was
there that Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, who staunchly refused the
oath of supremacy to Elizabeth, was buried at midnight after his death
in the Marshalsea, on September 5th, 1569. There too General Monk was
married to Anne Clarges.
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