November that year the inmates were relocated to the Bethlem hospital if they were mentally ill, or to the King's Bench Prison, at that point renamed the Queen's Prison. On 31 December 1849 the Court of the Marshalsea of the Household of the Kings of England was abolished, and its power transferred to Her Majesty's Court of Common Pleas at Westminster. The buildings and land were auctioned off in July 1843 and purchased for £5,100 by W. G. Hicks, an ironmonger. The property consisted of the keeper's house, the canteen (known as a suttling house), the Admiralty section, the chapel, a three-storey brick building and eight brick houses, all closed off from Borough High Street by iron gates. Imprisonment for debt was finally outlawed in England in 1869, except in cases of fraud or refusal to pay, and in the 1870s the Home Office demolished most of the prison buildings, though in 1955 parts of it were still in use by George Harding & Sons, hardware merchants. Dickens visited what was left of the Marshalsea in May 1857, just before he finished Little Dorrit. He wrote in the preface: Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed whether or no any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet standing. I did not know, myself, until the sixth of this present month, when I went to look. I found the outer front courtyard, often mentioned in this story, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and then I almost gave up every brick of the jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent "Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey", I came to "Marshalsea Place": the houses in which I recognised, not only as 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 enclose the pent-up inner prison where nobody was put, except for ceremony. But, whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail; 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;