The standard assumption about debtors’ prisons in British history has been that they do not make economic sense: why would you imprison someone who could not pay a debt? How would they be able to work to pay it back? Alexander Wakelam's book addresses this question head on, explaining that we have misunderstood the intention and practice of British debtors’ prisons. Rather than an antiquated, medieval system, he argues that debt imprisonment was a rational solution in an enlightened economy. His provocative argument is that imprisonment for debt worked, and that creditors understood it to be beneficial to credit markets.
One of the reasons we have misconstrued debt imprisonment is that our assumptions have been shaped by literature. Wakelam notes that Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit has had “an evocative impact upon subsequent scholarly discussion of debtors’ prisons” (p. 86). Rather than relying on Victorian literature and examining debt imprisonment through a lens of shame or tragedy, Wakelam suggests we view it as a mechanism that was “a public and accepted feature of commercial life” (p. 4). He studies this method of compelling repayment through the commitment registers of two London prisons – Wood Street Compter and the Fleet – and a third comparative example, the Lancaster Castle Gaol.
Wakelam's book differs from Tawny Paul's Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which explored the experiences of debtors. Wakelam's focus instead is on the process of debt retrieval, the place of the prisons in that process, and the creditors who made use of these institutions. The ubiquity and informality of credit in eighteenth-century Britain made repayment enforcement tricky. A creditor could pursue a breach of promise suit in the common law courts, but these were costly, slow, and only some of a debtor's goods could be garnished for repayment. Bankruptcy was another option, but pre-modern laws only allowed creditors to pursue this method for sums over £100 and only for debtors who were traders or merchants. Because of these limitations, Wakelam argues that although “prisons were far from perfect mechanisms of contract enforcement, they were essentially the least flawed option for commercial debt” repayment (p. 11). Imprisonment, he avers, was not meant to punish a debtor but to compel payment. Wakelam urges us to think of debtors’ prisons not as places of punishment but as “pawnshops dealing in human flesh” (p. 34). The debtor's body was the pledge to pay the debt.
The meager (until recently) scholarship on prisons and imprisonment has contributed to our lack of understanding about incarcerated debtors vs. other types of prisoners. Since more than half of all prisoners were debtors in the eighteenth century, this makes Wakelam's assertion that imprisonment was not construed as punishment significant to our understanding of prisoners in general.
Scholars have linked a supposed decline in debt imprisonment to the Enlightenment and capitalism, but by providing some of the first quantitative research on debt imprisonment, Wakelam shows there was no decline in the eighteenth century. Rather, the commitment registers show a consistent rate of imprisoning debtors and even periods of increase in 1768–1773 and again in 1786–1793. Imprisonment was a consistent method of ensuring debt repayment throughout the long eighteenth century, what changed was attitudes toward it.
Britain had no coordinated national system of debtors’ prisons. A hierarchy of prisons existed though, and the more prosperous and elite prisoners utilized the writ of habeas corpus to transfer their cases to superior courts and its prisons. In this way, the well-off moved to King's Bench and the Fleet, which boasted better accommodations and, in the case of the latter, the freedom to move about and reside in the rules that extended a half mile out from the prison. Intriguingly, eighteenth-century registers only record four cases of prisoners escaping the rules. Although Wakelam is cautious, all his examples make an implicit argument that imprisonment and prisons were not as bad as we (and later reformers) have made them out to be. Indirect evidence for this are the infrequent escapes and the surprising anecdote that, when the Gordon rioters opened London's prisons in 1780, the majority of debtors who fled turned themselves back in, and a group of debtors in Wood Street even refused to leave.
Wakelam affirms that debtors’ prison was largely a middling experience. Peers enjoyed protection from imprisonment, and Wakelam's data shows that the poor and wage workers were underrepresented in them. The lack of poor prisoners is some of the best evidence for his argument that incarceration for debt was not punishment but a way to ensure repayment. Wakelam shows that certain middling occupations were more prone to debt and thus incarceration. Individuals involved in “vending or dealing” made up the largest category, along with alehouse keepers and clothiers, and while professionals were not commonly arrested, those in medicine were more likely to be. Debt imprisonment was also not just a male experience, for at one point twenty per cent of London's imprisoned debtors were female (although for unclear reasons this declined precipitously to five per cent after 1780).
Wakelam's quantitative research also provides data on how long debtors were imprisoned. He characterizes debtors’ prisons as having ‘revolving doors’ since between seventy-two and ninety-one per cent of debtors (depending on the prison) were confined for under a year. Wakelam argues such short sentences show the system worked: people paid their debts and gained release relatively quickly. There were outliers who stayed in prison long-term and these individuals inevitably faced higher chances of death; however, the numbers who died were annually in the single digits (after a 1750 outbreak of typhus led to reforms). Wakelam states that debtors’ prisons were unsanitary yes, but not death traps. The middling status of most occupants must have helped too with their ability to purchase food and medicine.
A chapter replete with the personal accounts of debtors explains how individuals were able to raise money for release. Loans from family and friends were common (more debt!) as was the selling of jewelry and clothing. Incarcerated debtors frequently had debts owed to them, which they called in, sometimes by imprisoning their debtors. Wakelam asserts that working to pay off a debt was a real option for “debtors ([who] compared with other prisoners such a felons) had a surprising degree of liberty within the gaol to conduct normal lives” (p. 127). This was more likely if a prisoner could afford a private apartment in the Master's ward, where attorneys, tailors, and craftsmen continued to work. But even the Commons ward offered opportunities for small manufacturing, washing, barbering, working as servants to those on the Master's side, or running food and coffee establishments. Many of Wakelam's examples are women, but he does not address whether sex work was also an option (although writing one's memoirs was).
While most of Wakelam's evidence indicates that imprisoned debtors were able to pay, he admits a ‘certain minority’ could not (p. 140). This group was aided by state intervention in the form of the Insolvency Acts. The Acts were not meant as a full amnesty but an opportunity for debtors to sell their estate and settle their debt at shillings on the pound. Nineteen Insolvency Acts were passed at irregular intervals between 1711–1801. Contemporaries looked askance at those released due to the Acts and associated them with fraud. Their names and addresses appeared publicly in the London Gazette, which helps explain why not all who were eligible applied to be released. Being cleared by the Act hurt one's credit and meant that a person had to sell all their assets rather than deciding on which ones. Wakelam makes clear that the Insolvency Acts were more of a last resort rather than a get out of jail free card.
In keeping with his economic vs. penal examination of debtors’ prisons, Wakelam's chapter on prison keepers characterizes them as businesspeople rather than evil villains. Contemporaries complained that the fees prisoners had to pay were onerous and unreasonable, but prisons were a private, for-profit venture. Gaolers often earned no salary and thus had to make a living off charges. Wakelam finds that the rents charged were at or below market rate for London, perhaps leading some to prefer debtors’ prison over other lodgings. After all, given the expenses of running a prison (taxes, tithes, poor rates, wages for staff), it is not clear that the gaolers of debtor prisons made much profit, and maybe not enough to justify the outrage of prison reformers.
Wakelam admits that although “debt imprisonment was generally an effective means of securing repayment, this does not mean contemporaries did not find the practice distasteful […]” (p. 187). Over the eighteenth century, there were growing calls for reform, which included abolishing fees, making the Insolvency Acts permanent or more regular, or having debt cases settled by judges. Despite these calls for reform, the debtors’ prisons subsisted over the long eighteenth century, although there were changes, the most significant of which involved the poor. In 1725, confinement was limited to debts worth over £2. And there was the growth of Courts of Requests in various towns. These were “small debt courts” where the complainant usually won, and the debt could either be paid (installments were allowed) or the debtors’ goods sold. Originally, all imprisoned debtors, no matter their social status, were treated the same. In the 1780s, limits were put on imprisonment for small debts: twenty days maximum for debts less than 20s., for instance. Wakelam argues that by limiting the prison stay for the poor, imprisonment became equated with punishment. Time served now satisfied a debt. Creditors might not receive repayment, the whole point of debtors’ prisons. With this change, the imprisonment of debtors for small amounts had all but disappeared by 1805. But Wakelam's perspective shows this was not necessarily all to the good. An unintended consequence of these reforms was the decreased usefulness of debtors’ prisons for creditors, and perhaps a contraction in extending loans under £2.
Wakelam's economic rather than penal perspective on debtor's prisons is a useful counterbalance to entirely accepting the negative views of late eighteenth-century prison reformers. His research into the prison records helps us understand why creditors utilized debt imprisonment to obtain repayment. More research from the debtors’ perspective will help round out this new view.
