1

THE DEBTOR’S WORLD

So Dick Swiveller, one of Charles Dickens’s more amiable debtors, made shift to exist on an empty pocket in his single room dwelling, somewhere ‘in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane’ around 1840. As a debtor he was in good company. Everyone was a debtor in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, as had been the case for long before. Almost everyone remains a debtor two centuries on too, though with one big difference. In Dick Swiveller’s day and before there was no generally applicable credit mechanism available from a bank or building society or credit provider that enabled a debtor to spend freely in many places to an agreed limit. Debt then was personal, between a purchaser needing credit for one or a few items and a seller prepared to provide it. It was a face-to-face arrangement between individuals who would know each other again. So debt, because personal, had spatial consequences, curtailing movement to avoid embarrassing local encounters, as for Dick. It could also involve restrictions of a more drastic kind, as we shall see.

If everyone was a debtor for a time it was not necessarily through inability or unwillingness to pay, for deferred payment on credit was the way business was generally organised. Great merchants or bankers traded not in ready money but by means of bills of exchange, a promise to pay at some point in the future, allowing time for goods to be sold or other debts gathered in. If disaster struck and merchants proved unable to honour outstanding bills they could take advantage of the bankruptcy laws and sell up in gentlemanly sessions with the Commissioners in Bankruptcy, without any of the humiliations of arrest or imprisonment that less wealthy people suffered.

For ordinary folk too, debts were an unavoidable part of everyday life. During much of the eighteenth century, specie – ready coin of the realm – was in such short supply, especially in small denominations, that it suited buyer and seller to allow an account to accumulate till it could be paid in silver or gold or, more rarely, by a banknote or draft. Paying with ready money was reserved generally for transactions between strangers – travellers at an inn, say, or buyers from a street seller or pedlar. An account or tally would be run up with the grocer, baker, butcher or milkman, all on the credit of an address given, confirmed by the tradesman’s delivery. Something ought to and might be occasionally paid on account, but otherwise the bill was rendered after a time thought reasonable by both sides: on the four quarter days, for instance, or even, for smart tailors or upholders (furnishers and interior designers) serving the quality, once a year at Christmas, when interest would be openly added to the bill. Indeed, delays in presenting a bill were considered polite. Delivering a bill or account too early was thought greedy or impertinent and could lose a customer for life. Tradesmen built into their pricing an element for bad debts, because it was anticipated that not all money owed could be gathered in.²

The poor needed credit too, perhaps none more so, when the absence of ready money might mean a family going hungry. For them special mechanisms had been constructed, like pawnbrokers who would lend money on possessions at high interest, or informal pawning arrangements at public houses or with their grocers. By the beginning of the eighteenth century a new facility had come into fashion: tallymen or ‘Manchester’ or ‘Scotch’ drapers selling ‘Cloaths and such Things’ on credit, but requiring weekly repayments from poor customers at high interest. All these transactions could go wrong and tallymen were seen as ‘a sort of Usurers’, according to a pamphlet of 1716, ‘where some of these Oppressors are said to have above a Hundred of these poor Wretches in the several Jayls in and near London at a time’.³

Although the tallymen may have been notoriously quick off the mark, the truth is that when people got into debt they usually owed money everywhere. When John Rummells, ‘Marriner’ of Greenwich, totted up his creditors while in the Marshalsea in 1725 he listed six different ‘victuallers’, probably publicans, a City tallyman and a ‘Salesman’, a butcher, baker, candle seller (tallow chandler), ‘Fisherman’ and ‘Fisherwoman’, a carpenter, an ‘officer’ (probably a Marshalsea bailiff), two ‘Marriners’, ‘Elizabeth Baker, alias Read’ (no occupation given) and three doctors (a ‘Surgion’ and two ‘Barbers’), twenty-one in all and scattered around the four naval towns of Greenwich, Deptford – or Debtford, as he once appropriately rendered it – Gosport and Portsmouth. It was the butcher who got his claim in first and made the arrest that put Rummells in the Marshalsea for £30.⁴

Many tradesmen devised mechanisms to avoid the losses consequent on untrustworthy credit and an unpaid bill. Landlords, those unofficial and unwilling bankers to the poor, frequently demanded prior references and a week’s or month’s rent in advance. Many shopkeepers had their own rules for refusing credit: ‘Upon my word, Sir, you must excuse me. It is a thing we never do to a stranger,’ a sword-maker in the Strand told James Boswell, who had asked to take away a silver-hilted weapon on a promise to pay later, though he relented under his customer’s haughty gaze.⁵ Others sought security by requiring a debtor to obtain a counter-signature or ‘acceptance’ to an IOU or promissory note, ideally a known householder or one from a good address; anyone signing, often family members or close friends, could find themselves liable for the whole sum if the debtor defaulted, and this gave creditors a further opportunity to get their money back.

Tradesmen who gave long credit were also, of course, debtors themselves. Tailors would owe drapers, cabinetmakers would owe gilders or timber merchants, shopkeepers would notoriously owe suppliers, employers would owe their journeymen wages, journeymen would owe publicans, publicans would owe brewers and so on and so forth. And any or all might owe the moneylenders if no other resource was open to them, none more experienced in the fine arts of recovering a debt through adroit manipulation of the law.

True it was, then, that all sorts and conditions of men and women were in debt. When the Morning Post analysed the occupations of 941 debtors going through the insolvency court in August 1801, it listed 252 distinct walks of life, from labourers (nineteen) to Doctors of Divinity (one). Retailers of one kind or another were prominent among them, with thirty-one ‘shopkeepers’, many others specifically described, and seventy-five ‘victuallers’, victims of countless real-life Dick Swivellers. In general, contemporary authorities agreed that debtors ending up in gaol were ‘About Two-thirds Manufacturers and Labourers – the remainder Seamen, Dealers and Chapmen [or pedlars] and various Professions’. Those who had most difficulties were additionally burdened beyond the daily vicissitudes of industrial life, tending to be ‘married; and many of them have very large Families; some Five, others Six, and others Ten Children’. Added to these, with children or without, was a small but significant proportion of women debtors, including many widows and women abandoned by men.⁶

When a creditor’s patience was exhausted the law provided the means to bully or frighten a debtor into paying up at last. The weapons at a creditor’s disposal meant that, for countless numbers of debtors, debt could become a galling blight on their lives, never shaken off. Many of those cultured and sophisticated men and women who made the eighteenth century a particular age of genius did so with the shadow of the debtors’ prison wall dark upon them. Artists like Gawen Hamilton, George Morland and Thomas Bonner, writers like Daniel Defoe, Sir Richard Steele, Henry Fielding, Laetitia Pilkington, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and John Cleland, actresses like Mary Robinson and Charlotte Charke, all saw the inside of a bailiff’s lock-up or spunging (or sponging) house, if not worse. In England, it was said in 1716, there ‘are more unhappy People to be found, suffering under extream Misery, by the severity of their Creditors, than in any other Nation in Europe’.⁷

Not all of them were innocent victims. Debtors might have subterfuge, dishonesty, even fraud among the weapons with which they waged war on the innocent creditor. Hiding might be the first instinct, as it was for Dick Swiveller, perhaps ‘in an obscure lodging, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Kilburn, in order to avoid the traps’, or bailiffs, it was said in 1821. Because arrests couldn’t be made at night or on Sundays, such a discreet debtor was called ‘a once-a-week man, or, in other words, a Sunday promenader . . .’⁸ Obscure and ancient jurisdictions gave certain places in London immunity from arrest for debt, the longest-lived of these being the ‘verge of the court’, land belonging to the royal household around the King’s Mews north of Charing Cross and extending to the royal parks. Sought-after lodgings could be rented in the verge: ‘I knew an artful fellow once’, recalled the Reverend John Trusler in 1786, ‘that eluded all his creditors, by residing there; if he wanted to go out of it, he took water at Whitehall-stairs, which place is privileged, and as no writ can be served on the water, without a water-bailiff’s warrant, which cannot be immediately procured, he would land safely in the city, or on the Surry side’, where some Middlesex or City writs had no force.⁹

Experienced debtors would know their way around such rabbit warrens: that proceedings in the Marshalsea or Palace court could not be brought if a debt was incurred in the City or more than twelve miles from Whitehall, nor arrests made in the City on a Marshalsea warrant alone, for instance, despite that court offering creditors the cheapest and quickest grip on those owing debts above the smallest. Even prison could be an effective hiding place, some debtors intriguing with family or friends – a man could be arrested at his wife’s suit – to work up sham actions and so stop other creditors battening on them:

Others still might procure two householders to bail them out of custody and then abscond abroad, leaving the creditor to recover debt and costs from the bails, a difficult and expensive process, especially if there was collusion between them all. And many debtors managed to squirrel resources away from their creditors and leave them to legatees, as the few surviving Marshalsea wills tell us: for example, Mary Young, who died in April 1750, probably in prison, left money for gold mourning rings and funeral expenses, amid other bequests; and Joseph Railton left ‘all my ffreehold Copyhold and Leasehold Estate or estates’ to John Darkin of Goodman’s Yard, Minories, in 1776.¹¹

In the general sum of things, though, the whip hand lay with creditors. Most no doubt were honest in their intentions to recover money properly owed, aggravated beyond the limits of patience by what looked like their debtors’ refusal to pay, even after repeated and exhausting efforts to cajole or harass or shame them into doing so. Many will have been driven on by their own creditors snapping at their heels. Once they reached the end of their tether, however, the law put a terrible weapon in their hands.

A creditor’s suit was begun by swearing an affidavit quantifying the sum said to be owed. This was put before a judge by the creditor’s attorney and, with only the creditor’s word for it and without hearing from the debtor, permission would be granted to begin due process: the affidavit could be rejected only if it was defective in form, though not all defects were spotted until it was too late. If the debt sworn to was over 40s (£2; increasing to over £10 from 1779), then an arrest could be made at that point, still without the existence of the debt being proved in court, under what was known as ‘mesne process’ – pronounced ‘mean’ and denoting ‘middle’. There were many advantages to the creditor in doing so and this was the way most imprisonments were brought about. At this stage the costs of the action nominally had all to be reimbursed by the debtor. He could escape imprisonment by securing bail from two householders who in effect pledged themselves to pay any proven debt should the debtor default. If bail was not forthcoming (as in most cases), or if it was offered but not accepted by the creditor or his agent because of the inadequate standing of the debtor’s bail, then the debtor could be imprisoned – still without the debt being proved.¹²

There were two ways in which a debt came to trial (the ‘final’ process). A creditor could move straight to this point by way of a writ of execution and without passing through mesne process. He had to do this where debts were below the minimum of £2 (later £10); but even if debts were above these sums, at trial the original debt and costs could be loaded with damages consequent upon the debtor’s original failure to pay – debt, costs and damages had, though, all to be proved at the trial. Once proved, should debtors still remain unable to pay, they were imprisoned. The disadvantage to the creditor, however, was that from this point debtors could claim maintenance while in prison, the creditor having to pay 4d (a groat) a day (2s 4d a week) to the debtor; this obligation was introduced in 1759 by ‘the Lords Act’ and groats were increased from 1797 to 6d a day (3s 6d a week).¹³

Arrest and imprisonment under mesne process, attractively swift and draconian as it appeared, also involved creditors in more costs should they wish to keep a debtor in prison. Creditors had to serve a declaration on the imprisoned debtor, stating the amount of debt and costs and requiring a plea so that the matter could come to trial; this involved further attorney’s fees, which creditors would have to pay, at first at least. Declarations had to contain the names of two sureties to ensure creditors’ attendance in court to prove a case; but the law provided fictional sureties for him, named ‘John Doe and Richard Roe’, ‘Those charming creations of the poet’, as Dickens put it. But ‘the Plaintiff generally proceeds in the slowest manner’ and in any event could wait till the end of the next law term before making a declaration. There were four of these a year, some with long vacations between them, so that a debtor arrested before Christmas, say – a popular time to do so – could wait over six months before a declaration became due.¹⁴ If no declaration was served, then the debtor was ‘superseded’ and could be discharged; this was also the case where groats and sixpences were not paid punctually each week. But a discharge could take place only once papers had been lodged and prison fees paid.¹⁵

Did imprisonment or the threat of it work for the creditor? ‘[T]ho’ it be a common saying amongst us, That a Prison pays no Debts’, in many cases it did. In 1791, of 12,000 bailable writs issued against debtors only some 1,200 led to imprisonment, the rest paying up in some form, absconding, or proving such hopeless cases that creditors despaired of getting their money and let the matter drop. Arrest was also more straightforward than executing against the debtor’s goods, complex and rule-bound as that was. In any event, the goods might not have amounted to anything, while imprisonment could serve to rally friends and family to help discharge the debt. So arrest and imprisonment were widely resorted to.¹⁶

They were, though, not always fairly resorted to. Most creditors were genuine enough and dunned for their bills, repeatedly requesting then demanding they be paid – like the milkmaid with her tally or score in William Hogarth’s The Distressed Poet of around 1740. But some failed even to take these steps. ‘A man may be arrested from mere malice or caprice, without being applied to for the debt, and without any account being rendered to him of the claim: this has frequently happened . . .’ And some used trickery to inflate a debt, perhaps by getting ‘an illiterate person’ such as Francis Brasberry, a Marshalsea prisoner of 1735, to sign a note he could not read admitting to a debt far in excess of the value of the quack medicines he had received. They had been necessary to cure ‘a Rash or Scurvy humour upon him, and his wife had the Ague or ffeaver’, and were sold to him by Francis Butler, ‘who professed a Doctor’ but who ‘called up and down the Country with Baggs upon his Shoulders to Sell Medicines’.¹⁷

There were cases of a debtor spending ‘many months in prison where the court subsequently decided he owed nothing’, the House of Lords was told in 1814. And in the dog-eat-dog world of eighteenth-century London it was always possible to find someone prepared to swear away another’s liberty on a lie. Sarah Dodd or Todd, an oyster seller, was suborned by a ‘Mr. Mitchel’ to swear a debt against one Dancer which landed him for some time in the Marshalsea; she knew nothing of the man, had never in fact seen him, but was paid three guineas for her pains.¹⁸

The power of imprisonment was a godsend to the vindictive: it got a debtor quickly out of the way and it might well lead to financial ruin. So we read around 1830 of a greengrocer ruined by a competitor who loaned him stock worth 35s and then made a demand for 55s. The greengrocer offered 35s but this was refused and a Marshalsea writ issued which he could not afford to defend. The debt was ‘proved’ and he was imprisoned. His landlord, hearing of his plight, distrained against his goods for the rent and ‘sold even the bed from under his wife!’ And a false or contrived debt could be used for other reasons, perhaps to remove a rival in love. The vociferous Ann Cantwell, wife of Walter, was in the Marshalsea in 1696–7 with her child, ‘in a most miserable Condition Lying on the bare boards’. Sarah Wright, Walter’s lover’s mother, had ‘surreptitiously obtained an execution for 5:2:10’ against her. When Ann sought relief from the Middlesex Justices, who issued a warrant against Sarah to appear and answer the complaint, Sarah was said to have ‘told y^e Constable she car’d not a ffart for all y^or Warrants calling them butt Petty Justice . . .’¹⁹

Similarly, debt was a powerful way of raising the stakes in a family dispute. George Hovey, with his wife and child, languished in the Marshalsea for at least two and a half years from 1702 to 1705 at the suit of his allegedly prosperous mother and his brother-in-law for an affront that has not come down to us. And in 1718 ‘One Oades, a Quaker, and an eminent Potter, in Gravel-lane in Southwark’, was imprisoned by his four sons on an action for the enormous sum of £10,000 arising out of a business difference; they also evicted their mother from the home and barricaded themselves inside with their friends. They were wise to do so, because ‘a very great Tumult gather’d about the House, so that it was in a manner Besieg’d, throwing Stones, Dirt, &c. and exclaiming against them . . .’ When someone inside opened fire with a musket, killing a woman in the crowd, the Riot Act had to be read and the house was not cleared until a ‘File or two of Musqueteers’ arrived across the river from Whitehall. Oades’s youngest son and his friend were duly convicted of murder – though through influence all escaped punishment.²⁰

Family disputes aside, some creditors tightened the screw by seizing debtors at their most vulnerable. In June 1733 it was reported that a boy of four had been arrested and confined in the Marshalsea at the suit of a Quaker surgeon – hypocrisy among the saints a popular target of the eighteenth-century press. The creditor had treated the child’s sore finger but it had mortified so he had cut it off. He then sued the child and his guardians for his bill of £15, arresting the boy rather than others involved in the suit. And in 1750 an execution against the heavily pregnant Ann Cox brought her into the Marshalsea, where she was delivered ‘of two Boys and a Girl’.²¹