By the arrangement of the walls, all that the prisoners in the Marshalsea could see out of doors was the sky. The view from the barred windows of the uppermost rooms was cut off by the higher line of the wall topped with its chevaux-de-frise. But Little Dorrit's own room, being in the Warden's house, had a somewhat freer prospect. "A garret and a Marshalsea garret without compromise was Little Dorrit's room," but "the housetops and the distant country hills were discernible over the walls in the clear morning." Since the prison has been put to ordinary uses, such of the wall as is left has been lowered so that the view except from the lower windows is not obstructed. The sharp and cruel spikes that reddened in the sunrise like the bloody fangs of a savage beast, are gone. Poverty looks out of the old windows without having to peep between iron bars, and in the prison where the smugglers did not abide a factory is busy. The place, when I saw it, had changed but little since Dickens himself visited it in 1857, and wrote: "I found the outer front court-yard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the gaol for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,' I came to 'Marshalsea Place,' the houses in which I recognized; not only the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind's eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer. A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used to inclose the pent-up inner prison, where nobody was put except for ceremony. But whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turned out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea Gaol; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered, if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of many years."