"The morning light was in no hurry to climb the prison wall and look in at the Snuggery windows; and when it did come, it would have been more welcome if it had come alone, instead of bringing a rush of rain with it. But the equinoctial gales were blowing out at sea, and the impartial southwest wind, in its flight, would not neglect even the narrow Marshalsea. While it roared through the steeple of St. George's church, and twirled all the cowls in the neighborhood, it made a swoop to beat the Southwark smoke into the gaol; and, plunging down the chimneys of the few collegians who were yet lighting their fires, half suffocated them.
"Heartily glad to see the morning through little rested by the night, he turned out as soon as he could distinguish objects about him, and paced the yard for two heavy hours before the gaol was opened. The walls were so near to one another, and the wild clouds hurried over them so fast, that it gave him a sensation like the beginning of seasickness to look up at the gusty sky. The rain, carried aslant by flaws of wind, blackened that side of the central building which he had visited last night, but left a narrow dry trough under the lee of the wall, where he walked up and down among the waifs of straw and dust and paper, the waste droppings of the pumps and the stray leaves of yesterday's greens. It was as haggard a view of life as a man need look upon."
By the arrangement of the walls, all that the prisoners in the Marshalsea could see out of doors was the sky. The view from the barred windows of the uppermost rooms was cut off by the higher line of the wall topped with its chevaux-de-frise. But Little Dorrit's own room, being in the Warden's house, had a somewhat freer prospect. "A garret and a Marshalsea garret without compromise was Little Dorrit's room," but "the housetops and the distant country hills were discernible over the walls in the clear morning." Since the prison has been put to ordinary uses, such of the wall as is left has been lowered so that the view except from the lower windows is not obstructed. The sharp and cruel spikes that reddened in the sunrise like the bloody fangs of a savage beast, are gone. Poverty looks out of the old windows without having to peep between iron bars, and in the prison where the smugglers did not abide a factory is busy. The place, when I saw it, had changed but little since Dickens himself visited it in 1857, and wrote: