The first public buildings to be restored after the Great Fire of London were not the churches but the prisons. Gaols and gaol culture continued to have a baneful influence on Londoners’ lives throughout the eighteenth century, not merely through the workings of the criminal justice system but because imprisonment for debt threatened the wellbeing of all below the richest. Indeed, imprisonment for debt could threaten life itself.

 

Of all the London prisons the Marshalsea, an ancient gaol in Southwark, held most fears for London’s poorest debtors. It was a terrible place for penniless prisoners right through the century. But in the 1720s it became a place of starvation, torture, brutal oppression and murder. After a parliamentary inquiry, its Deputy Keeper, William Acton, was tried on six charges of murder. He was acquitted on all, the result of political chicanery involving corrupt juries, suborned witnesses, and the hidden hand of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole himself. And we are given an extraordinary insight into the daily workings of the Marshalsea at that very same period through the prison diary of John Baptist Grano, ‘Handel’s Trumpeter’.

 

Jerry White situates the Marshalsea in a nexus of power, oppression and legalised terrorism; and looks at some of the ways that prisoners fought back.

 

Jerry White is a leading historian of London. His London in the Twentieth Century: a City and Its People, won the Wolfson History Prize for 2001 and his most recent book, London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’, was published to critical acclaim in 2007. His London in the Eighteenth Century will be published in 2012. A longstanding friend of Raphael Samuel’s, and former editor of History Workshop Journal, Jerry White is now Local Government Ombudsman, and Visiting Professor of London History at Birkbeck College.

 

At 8.00 pm, following the Memorial Lecture, there will be a re-launch celebration of the Raphael Samuel History Centre

 

In September 2008 the Raphael Samuel History Centre will be relaunched as a partnership between the University of East London, Birkbeck College, and Bishopsgate Institute. Jerry White’s memorial lecture will be followed by a wine reception to celebrate this new and exciting phase in the RSHC.

For details of the re-launch, click here.

 

Both the lecture and re-launch celebration are free of charge and open to all.

 

For previous Memorial Lectures, click here.