counts, if need be, and to accept the assurance (on good authority)
that nothing like them was ever known in this land.
Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether
or no any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I
did not know, myself, until the sixth of this present month, when
I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned
here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up
every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a
certain adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey', I came to
'Marshalsea Place:' the houses in which I recognised, not only as
the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms
that arose in my mind's-eye when I became Little Dorrit's
biographer. The smallest boy I ever conversed with, carrying the
largest baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally intelligent
explanation of the locality in its old uses, and was very nearly
correct. How this young Newton (for such I judge him to be) came
by his information, I don't know; he was a quarter of a century too
young to know anything about it of himself. I pointed to the
window of the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where her
father lived so long, and asked him what was the name of the lodger
who tenanted that apartment at present? He said, 'Tom Pythick.'
I asked him who was Tom Pythick? and he said, 'Joe Pythick's
uncle.'

A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used
to enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except
for ceremony. But, 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