Dickens in Southwark

I have a useful booklet called Charles Dickens and Southwark, from Southwark Libraries, so I caught the bus and went looking for Dickens.  Seeing Lant Street from the bus I hastily got off; this is where Dickens lived as a boy when his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtor's prison and he was sent to work in a blacking factory. Why Marshalsea?  Because the King's Marshall was overseer of debt collection.

  It was an eerie feeling, walking in Dickens' footsteps, down Lant Street and Mint Street, by Union Street, where, I think, the workhouse once was and on to Borough High Street.  Today lots of the streets around are called by names from his novels; Quilp St. Copperfield St. and there is a Little Dorrit Park.  I walked up Borough High Street to St. George the Martyr Church , built 1734, where Little Dorrit slept in the vestry when she was locked out of the Marshalsea one night.  Across the road the very last remaining wall of the Marshalsea runs  along the churchyard.  Carved paving stones memorialise the unfortunate debtors locked up there.  The prison of King's Bench was on the other side of the road; more well-to-do debtors were imprisoned there. 

All along Borough High Street there used to be coaching inns where coaches and wagons coming into London unloaded.   The George is famous as the very last inn to retain its upper galleries, where in Elizabethan times spectators would sit to watch the players, on a raised stage in the inn yard.  At the Russia House I could see Jacobean or older timbers, revealed under later plasterwork, At the Tabard is a memorial to John Harvard, born in Southwark, who sailed to Massachusetts in 1637, founder of Harvard College.  The 16th century St.l Christopher's Inn was once on the site of Kentish Buildings, and is remembered in a plaque at the yard entrance.  All those old entrances are still there, paved with huge, uneven cobbles that must have been there in Dickens' time too.