Pain and Degradation in Georgian London: Life in Marshalsea Prison

Author Jerry White discusses the infamous Marshalsea Prison

The first public buildings to be restored after the Great Fire of London were not churches, but prisons. In particular, imprisonment for debt threatened the wellbeing and lives of all below the richest. Of all the London prisons the Marshalsea, an ancient gaol in Southwark, was most feared by London’s poorest debtors – by the 1720s it was a place of starvation, torture, brutal oppression and murder. Jerry White situates the Marshalsea in a nexus of power, oppression and legalised terrorism, and looks at some of the ways that prisoners fought back.

Jerry White is the author of London in the Twentieth Century: a City and Its People, winner of the Wolfson History Prize for 2001, and London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’ (Jonathan Cape, 2007). A longstanding friend of Raphael Samuel’s, and former editor of History Workshop Journal, Jerry White is Visiting Professor of London History at Birkbeck College.

This event is organised by the Raphael Samuel History Centre (University of East London, Birkbeck College and Bishopsgate Institute).

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