In spite of occasional touches such as this, the comparative brightness of Dickens's picture of the Marshalsea, as contrasted with the gloom and horror of his delineation of the Fleet, has been frequently commented upon, but there was a reason for this in fact. Squalid and miserable enough the Marshalsea was, but it was still more merciful and humane a house of confinement than the other. Extortions were common to all such places, but they were carried to their worst extent at the Fleet. The Marshalsea, moreover, was a smaller prison, its population came and went at shorter intervals than that of the Fleet, and it did not include so heavy a percentage of the baser elements of society as festered in the social cesspool opposite the Fleet Market. Very few debtors remained in the gaol for an extended period. The average generation of a Marshalsea prisoner was, as Dickens himself says, three months. The case of the Father of Marshalsea--which, by the way, was based on that of a real prisoner in the last century--was unique. "The affairs of this debtor were perplexed by a partnership of which he knew no more than that he had invested money in it, by legal matters of assignment and settlement, conveyance here and conveyance there, suspicion of unlawful preference of creditors in this direction, and of mysterious spiriting away of property in that." In short, Mr. William Dorrit's affairs were so tangled up that even the lawyers could not untwist them, and finally they gave him up, and in the inextricable entanglement he remained fettered to the Marshalsea as if he had never been a part of any world beyond its confining wall. "Crushed at first by his imprisonment" (vide Chapter 6, Volume I, "Little Dorrit"), "he had soon found a dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that kept him in kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with strength of purpose to face these troubles and fight them, he might have broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but, being what he was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent and never took one step upward. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder children played regularly about the yard, and everyone knew the baby and claimed a kind of proprietorship in her." The title conferred upon him by a turnkey he came to hear with pride, and under it he levied the tribute of selfish and ungrateful beggary upon the goodnatured subjects over whom he presumed to rule.