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 all, except that
the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon rooms
in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of
many miserable years.

In the Preface to Bleak House I remarked that I had never had so many
readers. In the Preface to its next successor, Little Dorrit, I have
still to repeat the same words. Deeply sensible of the affection and
confidence that have grown up between us, I add to this Preface, as I
added to that, May we meet again!

London May 1857

BOOK THE FIRST: POVERTY

CHAPTER 1. Sun and Shadow

Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.

A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern
France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in
Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and b