The hand written caption is hard to read as the paper is torn, ‘ANCIENT SOUTH GATE EXETER/ [work missing] CITY PRISON DEMOLISHED 1819/ [word missing] SHOE ‘Pray remember the poor debtors’.

The work depicts the South Gate in Exeter and the city prison which was demolished in 1819. However, this is an entirely fictional and somewhat Romantic view. The artist has chosen to use the priest’s house of Holy Trinity rather than the South Gate as the setting for the prison. A man under the archway, dressed in green coat and top hat, places something into a shoe which is suspended on string by two men from a window above. It alludes to the story about a room in the Keeper’s house which came to be known as ‘the shoe’, according to the prison reformer James Neild who visited South Gate prison in 1806.