Wij zullen deze zelfde toestanden terugvinden in Dickens' tijd.
De parlementaire rapporten geven geen uitvoerige beschrijving van de Kina's Bench
Prison. Enige gegevens kan men echter ontlenen aan de beschrijving van de
toestanden in hef rapport van T 815, zoals:
The prison contains within the walls about 200 rooms, 8 of which are called state
rooms, and are let for 2s.6d. each per week, unfurnished:
The prison was former! divided info Master's Sinde and Poor Side; that distinction has
long ceased, though there are a few of the lower rooms, at back of the prison,
exclusively occupied by the poorer classes
Het parlementaire rapport van 1818 noemt de Fleet Prison een gevangenis voor
personen "under process of debt issuing out of fhe courts of Common Pleas and
Exchequer" en van personen tot gevangenisstraf veroordeeld wegen 'contempt' op last
van beide genoemde hoven of op last van de Court of Chancery".
In deze gevangenis konden mr.Pickwick en Sam Welter dus inderdaad chancery-
gevangenen ontmoeten.(ch.42+44) The Pickwick Papers zijn hierin juist.
Het rapport van 1818 noemt de Fleet Prison een modern, sterk, solide gebouw en
beveiligd tegen brand door stenen trappen en stenen vloeren in de galerijen en
kamers, behalve de bovenste verdieping, waar de vloeren met planken waren be
schoten. De gevangenis en de open ruimte waren omgeven door een hoge muur met
Spaanse ruiters. Er waren vijf verdie-pingen met galerijen over de hele lengte. Alle
galerijen hadden talloze deuren naar telkens één kamer.
Toen in 1846 de Fleet Prison werd afgebroken. Schreef op 14 madrt The Illustrated
London New o.m. het volgende:
The interior arrangement were very simple - On each of five stories, a long
passage extended from one extremity to the other, with almost countless doors
opening in single rooms. These passages, or galleries, were ill-lighted and with their
dark and dirty appearace, und turmoil of prisoners and visitors passing to and from
the rooms, the ceaseless banging of doors, echocing through the vaulted roofs, they
had a most extaordinary effect upon the nen/es of the sensitive visitor, and made him
shudder at man's self-imposed suffering. The rooms presented the usually wretched
aspect of a Debtor's prison luxury, in dirty-white squalor of fhe walls, perchance
scrawled with the offscourings of a low mind, or vulgarity ill at ease. Perchance, too,
the light streamed through murky and begrimed glass upon a bed of "London
white,", which the occupant, in fhe heyday of his dissipation, would have scarcly
deemed, fit for a pauper. In short, fhe tattered curtain, the rickety of broken furniture,
and the G. R upon the jambs of grate, denoted all manner of unrest," however
