book, but it will never take a
front-rank place. The story, however, on its appearance in
monthly parts, the first of which was published in January
1856, and the completed work in 1857, was enormously
successful, beating, in Dickens's own words, "'Bleak House'
out of the field." Popular with the public, it has never won
the critics.

_I.--The Father of the Marshalsea_

Thirty years ago there stood, a few doors short of the church of Saint
George, in the Borough of Southwark, on the left-hand side of the way
going southward, the Marshalsea Prison. It had stood there many years
before, and it remained there some years afterwards; but it is gone now,
and the world is none the worse without it.

A debtor had been taken to the Marshalsea Prison, a very amiable and
very helpless middle-aged gentleman who was perfectly clear--"like all
the rest of them," the turnkey on the lock said--that he was going out
again directly.

The affairs of this debtor, a shy, retiring man, with a mild voice and
irresolute hands, were perplexed by a partnership, of which he knew no
more than that he had invested money in it.

"Out?" said the turnkey. "He'll never get out unless his creditors take
him by the shoulders and shove him out!"

The next day the debtor's wife came to the Marshalsea, bringing with her
a little boy of three, and a little girl of two.

"Two children," the turnkey observed to himself. "And you another, which
makes three; and your wife another, which makes four."

Six months later a little girl was born to the debtor, and when this
child was eight years old, her mother, who had long been languishing,
died.

The debtor had long grown accustomed to the place. Crushed at first by
his imprisonment, he had soon found a dull relief in it. His elder
children played regularly about the yard. If he had been a man with
strength of purpose, he might have broken the net that held him, or
broken his heart; but being what he was, he slipped easily into this
smooth descent, and never more took one step upward.

The shabby old debtor with the soft manners and the white hair became
the Father of the Marshalsea. And he grew to be proud of the title. All
newcomers were presented to him. He was punctilious in the exaction of
this ceremony. They were welcome to the Marshalsea, he would tell them.

It became a not unusual circumstance for letters to be put under his
door at night enclosing half-a-cr