What is the name of the debtors' prison featured in 'Little Dorrit'?

The debtors’ prison featured in Little Dorrit is the Marshalsea. Charles Dickens uses this London prison as the central setting for the Dorrit family, especially Amy Dorrit, who is born there and spends much of her early life caring for her imprisoned father.

The Marshalsea was a real prison in Southwark, south of the River Thames. It operated from the late medieval period until 1842 and became particularly notorious for imprisoning people who could not pay their debts. Prisoners often had to pay fees for food, lodging, and services, meaning that incarceration could make their debts even harder to clear.

Dickens had a personal connection to the institution: his father, John Dickens, was imprisoned in the Marshalsea in 1824. That experience influenced Dickens’s lifelong concern with poverty, debt, and the cruelty of English institutions. In the novel, William Dorrit has been confined for years and becomes known as the “Father of the Marshalsea.”

The prison was not Dickens’s invention, although Little Dorrit fictionalizes its inhabitants and social life. It is often confused with the Fleet or King’s Bench, other London prisons that also held debtors.