Talk:Marshalsea

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The article's stated date (1849) for the "demolition" of the Marshalsea is likely in error.

In the preface to the 1857 edition of Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens himself confirms that "the great block of the former prison" still stood on May 6, 1857 and describes other then-still-standing portions. Also, the article's own external link site states that the prison was "closed in the late [emphasis added] 19th century and demolished sometime afterwards," though this too may be in error, and a substantial wall framing the entrance arch still exists (see modern-day views at "external link" site and here). So the actual demise of the structure itself may have been due simply to over a century of decay and neglect rather than to any specific or definitive destruction, as suggested by the word demolish.

The 1849 date may be the year of its being rendered functionally inoperative as a prison, or when it was "abolished" according to Encyclopedia Britannica. But a website on early English prisons says the prison was "closed" in 1842 — a date which agrees with other sites — and mentions the subsequent sale of the buildings rather than their destruction, referring to 1930s illustrations of a converted building and expressly stating that "some parts survived until the 1970s."

Therefore, the article's reference to "finally demolished in 1849" should be changed to --ceased to serve as a prison in the mid-nineteenth century but survived as a structure, at least in part, well into the twentieth century--.