In Jail with Charles Dickens

Prison walls connect Alfred Trumble's account of Dickens's fiction with the institutions that helped shape it. Drawing on visits to Newgate, the New York Tombs and a Philadelphia penitentiary, Trumble combines personal observation with historical records. For vanished London prisons, including the Fleet and the King's Bench, he turns to earlier chroniclers. The result brings literary passages into contact with the buildings, rules and abuses behind them.

The opening follows Trumble's first encounter with Newgate's forbidding exterior and considers the public spectacles once staged outside its walls. A later section enters the crowded world of the Fleet, where debtors and their families live amid poor conditions, then traces the prison's longer history. Readers interested in Dickens's social concerns or the history of confinement will find concrete details of prison life alongside an account of how those details became material for fiction.