Sponging-house explained

A sponging-house (more formally: a lock-up house)^[1] was a place of temporary confinement for debtors in the United Kingdom.

If a borrower defaulted on repaying a debt, a creditor could lay a complaint with the sheriff. The sheriff sent his bailiffs or tipstaffs to arrest the debtor and to take him to the local sponging-house. This was not a debtors' prison as such, but a private house, often the bailiff's own home. Debtors would be held there temporarily in the hope that they could make some arrangement with creditors. Anthony Trollope set out the system in his 1857 novel The Three Clerks:

If debtors could not sort matters out quickly, they were then taken before a court and transferred to a debtor's prison.

Sponging-houses had a terrible reputation. They could be much feared,^[2] and were not always appreciated by their clients, as was made clear in a description of Abraham Sloman's establishment in Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane,^[3] which was provided by one of the characters featuring in the 1892 book Round London: Down East and Up West,which was written by Montagu Williams (1835-1892), a London lawyer, to whom sponging-houses were well-known:

The idea of the sponging-house was based on that of the sponge that gave it its name, which readily gives up its contents on being squeezed. In the sponging-house, debtors had any available cash squeezed out of them, partly to the creditor's benefit, but also to that of the bailiff who ran it.

In French, ('sponge-up a debt') means to repay one's debt. Scottish English has the verb to spung, meaning to rob. The English-language term spunging-house dates from at least 1699.

Notable sponging-house residents

• William Paget (actor)
• Henry Fielding – author
• Michael Arne – composer
• Theodore Edward Hook – author
• George Morland – painter
• John Murray – Universalist minister https://books.google.com/books?id=MjQRAAAAYAAJ&q=sponging-house
• Gilbert Stuart – painter

See also

• Marshalsea

Notes and References

1. Book: Finn . Margot C. . Margot Finn . 'Mansions of misery': the unreformed debtors' prison . The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 . Volume 1 of Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories . 21 August 2003 . Cambridge University Press . 2003 . 116 . 9780521823425 . 19 March 2022 . Maintained by sheriff's officers and lesser court officials, lock-up houses held recently arrested debtors while they attempted to secure bail or settle with their creditors. They were commonly referred to a 'spunging-houses', a term that reflected the excessive fees extracted by their keepers..
2. Book: Anton . Peter . 1883 . Bacon . England's Essayists: Addison, Bacon, De Quincey, Lamb . Cabinet of biography . Edinburgh . Macniven & Wallace . 130 . 23 March 2023 . Without doubt, this sentence had its rise in the dread of the sponging-house which now possessed him. .
3. Book: Fitzmaurice . Andrew . 30 November 2021 . Pharaïlde van Lynseele . King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century . Princeton . Princeton University Press . 364 . 9780691148694 . 23 March 2023 . Montagu Williams, the barrister and writer, described Sloman's [sponging-house], in his Round London, through the eyes of a friend who was taken there, and declared to Williams: 'Slowman's, the sponging house in Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane. Ah, my dear fellow, you've never seen a sponging house! Ye gods! What a place! [...]'.