London’s debtors’ prisons

In the week when the government announced a new debt respite scheme to help those with serious money problems, and with ever-growing recognition of the importance of financial stability to good mental health, I thought I would take a look at how such issues were dealt with in times gone by. With harsh punishments, including indefinite incarceration, the order of the day, Victorian debtors had much more to fear than just stigma.  

Nineteenth-century London, and the Southwark area in particular, was well endowed with prisons, not surprising given the Victorians’ penchant for locking people up! Nearly 40,000 men and women entered the prison population annually throughout the 1850s, mostly for the crime of defaulting on debts.

 

Map showing London's courts and prisons 1862

London's main debtors' prisons were the Fleet, the King's Bench and the Marshalsea, but most people will also have heard of The Clink, which had a debtor's entrance in Stoney Street. The names of course gave rise to the slang terms "in the clink" and "stony broke".

The debts did not need to be large – in 1827, 414 of the Marshalsea’s 630 debtors were there for defaulting on amounts under £20. Without outside help, debtors could stay in prison for years – in theory you could be jailed for as long as your creditors wanted you to be. When they closed the Marshalsea in 1842, they found two prisoners who had been there for 30 years! Other European countries were more enlightened and had legislation limiting imprisonment for debt to one year.

For many, the door to the debtors’ prison was a revolving one – it was quite common for people to enter these institutions time and time again. Given that you accrued fees while you were incarcerated (debtors’ prisons were run as for-profit enterprises so food, clothing, and even cells, were all charged for), it was inevitable that your original - possibly quite small - debt would proliferate to the point where there was no realistic prospect of release.

Debt affected all classes of people, but (as ever) there were more options open to those with ‘connections’ who could, for example, hastily arrange an escape across the water from those pursuing them for money. A popular destination was Boulogne in Northern France where at one time nearly a quarter of the townspeople were debt-ridden English folk. 

King's Bench Prison in 1808

There was a definite hierarchy among debtors’ prisons. The King’s Bench was for better-off debtors who could pay for a decent room, entertainment and to be joined by their families. For payment of a large sum, you could even buy the ability to live outside the prison, within a three-mile radius of the prison walls. This was known as living “in the rules”. In 1823, an anonymous writer published an enthusiastic account of the King's Bench describing its amenities: the ‘fives’ courts, reading rooms, public kitchen, bakehouse, etc: "A good and substantial brick building, containing eight spacious and excellent apartments, let at one shilling per week, to the oldest prisoners, or those who, by their good conduct and gentlemanly behaviour, have entitled themselves to this indulgence." There were also two pubs and it was said that 120 gallons of gin and eight butts of beer were drunk in the Kings Bench per week. Not for nothing was this prison known as “the most desirable place of incarceration for debtors in England.” 

The Fleet (situated in what is now Farringdon St) was ‘home’ to two distinct classes of debtors and bankrupts. With sufficient means,  it was possible to live a reasonably comfortable life in there. The ‘master’s side’, where the wealthier inmates resided, had a coffee room, billiard room and tap-room from which gaolers did well financially. It even had an official address: 9, Fleet Market, which inmates could use in correspondence without people knowing the truth of their situation!

Poorer prisoners, however, had it less well. Confined on what was known as the ‘common side’ these lower-status prisoners lived in much worse conditions and would often be seen with their hands outstretched through a specially-provided grate near the street, begging for alms to pay both their fees and their debts.

   

The Fleet (above two pics) eventually closed in 1842.

But by far the most notorious institution, and the one most feared by debtors, was the Marshalsea. Records show that in 1729 the original prison bearing this name had over 300 debtors who were ‘stacked’ on shelves one above the other and routinely starved of food. Such was the misery suffered by its inmates that the philanthropist General Oglethorpe was prompted to raise a fund to pay off the debts of as many as possible, later going on to found Georgia as a colony for the resettlement of debtors and petty offenders.

Remnant of Marshalsea wall

The Marshalsea moved into new premises on Borough High St in 1811 (a segment of its outer wall still remains)  and this is where Charles Dickens’ father John Dickens spent several months during 1823-4. Aged 12 at the time, Charles would visit his father on Sundays when he wasn’t working in the blacking factory. Often a debtor would have his wife and children in with him (they were unlikely to survive on their own outside) but Charles was of working age and so avoided this indignity. His visits to the prison, however, made a lasting impression on him and he famously went on to describe his experience in the novel Little Dorrit (1856): “[the Marshalsea] had stood there many years before and it remained there some years afterwards; but it is gone now, and the world is none the worse without it”. John Dickens was released after only a few months through the good fortune of a legacy.

As in the Fleet, a strict demarcation system existed in this prison. If you could afford a room on the Master’s Side, all well and good. If you had been unable to hide some money from your creditors and had no support from friends or relatives, you were given one of nine small rooms on the Common Side with up to 300 others. Prisoners here had a wretched time and were frequently starved (as they couldn’t pay the gaoler for food) and tortured. By 1840 there were just 22 prisoners in Marshalsea and it was subsequently shut down. The building was consolidated into the Queen’s Bench prison.

 

Major change came with the passing of the Debtors’ Act in 1869. This reduced courts’ power to detain debtors for what we would now consider negligible amounts. Initially, this brought about a significant drop in the number of debtors imprisoned. However, by 1905 that number had increased to 11,427, a reflection of the Edwardians’ view of ‘indebtedness’ as a highly immoral crime, worthy of the most stringent punishment.

 

 

 

References:

Shepherd’s London J.F.C. Phillips (1976)

Map of London’s prisons: The Times History of London Hugh Clout (1991)

The London We Have Lost Richard Tames (2008)

The London Encyclopedia ed. Ben Weinreb et al. (2008)

Georgian London: Into the Streets Lucy Inglis (2014)

London in the 18th century Jerry White (2012)