Mansions of misery: Visiting the Marshalsea prison’s dark past with Jerry White

When a committee of MPs investigating the state of the country’s gaol’s visited the Marshalsea debtor’s prison in Borough in 1729 the conditions they reported were appalling. Wards were “excessively Crowded, Thirty, Forty, nay Fifty Persons having been locked up in some of them not Sixteen Foot Square”. […]