CHAPTER III

.

THE FLEET PRISON.

Half a century ago, a stroller about the London streets whose loiterings carried him to the Fleet Market, could not but notice in the brick wall that extended along what is now entitled Farringdon street, facing the market, a wide-grated window, set in a framework of granite blocks. Under the arched top of the framework, between it and the grating, a stone slab or panel bore the carved inscription: "Please Remember Poor Debtors, Having No Allowance." Through the grating one might look into a squalid, dark room, with a rough wooden bench fastened to one wall, and during the hours of daylight some miserable human creature, like a caged and starved beast, always glared from behind the bars upon the street, repeating, in the voice of wheedling mendicancy, the appeal cut in the stone above his head. There was a broad sill to the window, and an opening in the bars, like those of the counter windows in a modern bank, through which the jailed beggar could pass out and draw in a wooden box, in which the charitably inclined might drop an obolus as they passed by.

This was what was called "the grate" of the Fleet Prison, one of the wickedest and most pestilential gaols that ever cursed the earth; and the grimmest satire upon this jail into which men were thrust for not paying money which they owed, was that among these debtors there were many whose absolute inability to pay was demonstrated by the fact that they would, literally, have starved there but for the chance charity of the public. Apropos of this point Dickens, in