The foregoing conditions still obtained at the date of Charles Dickens’ description. “Pickwick” first appeared in 1836, but the observations on which the account of the Fleet was based were no doubt made much earlier and the picture drawn is strikingly realistic, as a few quotations will abundantly show.
When Mr. Pickwick accompanied by his astute solicitor Mr. Perker and his faithful bodyservant Sam Weller was committed to the Fleet at the suit of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, he went through the usual preliminaries, sat for his portrait and was duly passed through the inner gate and found himself within the “lock” as imprisonment was euphemistically described. His further progress in search of quarters for the night is thus described: “It was getting dark; that is to say, a few jets were kindled in this place, which was never light, by way of compliment to the evening which had set in outside. As it was rather warm some of the tenants of the numerous little rooms which opened into the gallery on either hand had set their doors ajar. Mr. Pickwick peeped into them as he passed along, with great curiosity and interest. Here four or five great hulking fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco-smoke, were engaged in noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of beer or playing at ‘all-fours’ with a very greasy pack of cards. In the adjoining room some solitary tenant might be seen, poring, by the light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers, yellow with dust and dropping to pieces from age, writing, for the hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances, for the perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose heart it would never touch. In a third, a man, with his wife and a whole crowd of children, might be seen, making up a scanty bed on the ground and upon a few chairs, for the younger ones to pass the night in. And in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth and a seventh, the noise and the beer and the tobacco smoke, and the cards all came over again in greater force than before.
“In the galleries themselves and more especially on the staircases, there lingered a great number of people who came there, some because their rooms were empty and lonesome, others because their rooms were full and hot, and the greater part because they were restless and uncomfortable, and not possessed of the secret of exactly knowing what to do with themselves. There were many classes of people here--from the labouring man in his fustian jacket to the broken-down spendthrift in his shawl dressing-gown, most appropriately out at elbows; but there was the same air about them all--a listless, jail-bird, careless swagger, a vagabondish who’s afraid sort of bearing, which is wholly indescribable in words.”