his affliction by saying: "We are quiet here; we don't get badgered
here; there's no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors,
and bring a man's heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a
man's at home, and to say he'll stand on the door-mat till he is.
Nobody writes threatening letters about money to this place. It's
freedom, sir, it's freedom!" One smiles as one reads; and it adds a
pathos, I think, to the smile, to find that these are records of
actual experience. The Marshalsea prison was to Mr. Dickens a haven of
peace, and to his household a place of plenty. Not only could he
pursue his career there untroubled by fears of arrest, but he
exercised among the other "gentlemen gaol-birds" a supremacy, a kind
of kingship, such as that to which Charles Lamb referred. They
recognized in him the superior spirit, ready of pen, and affluent of
speech, and with a certain grandeur in his conviviality. He it was
who drew up their memorial to George of England on an occasion no less
important than the royal birthday, when they, the monarch's
"unfortunate subjects,"--so they were described in the
memorial--besought the king's "gracious majesty," of his "well-known
munificence," to grant them a something towards the drinking of the
royal health. (Ah, with what keen eyes and penetrative genius did
little Charles, from his corner, watch the strange sad stream of
humanity that trickled through the room, and may be said to have
_smeared_ its approval of that petition!) And while Mr. Dickens was
enjoying his prison honours, he was also enjoying his Admiralty
pension,[3] which was not forfeited by his imprisonment; and his wife
and children were consequently enjoying a larger measure of the
necessaries of life than had been theirs for many a month. So all went
on merrily enough at the Marshalsea.

But even under the old law, imprisonment for debt did not always last