"Come and assist your loving mother. I am in prison for debt". "Dear mother, so am I"

Debtors' prisons inflicted untold misery on families in the 18th and 19th centuries.

- By Alexander Wakelam

Straitened circumstances

The debtors' excercise grounds at Newgate prison in 1809. "The debtors' prison was not a distant threat in 18th-century England but a feature of everyday life," argues Alexander Wakelam.

In May 1728, the 36-year-old trumpet player John Grano discovered his luck had finally run out. Grano’s debts had been piling up for weeks. Business had not been good of late but his spending on fine clothes and finer wines had not slowed. By Thursday 30th his creditors had finally had enough of Grano’s empty promises and applied to the court for his arrest. He was seized by a bailiff in the street and instructed to pay up or face the consequences of his spending. Grano was not panicked – this was hardly the first time he had faced his creditors’ threats. However, this time there was no deal to be done, no new extension to be found and, as he wrote in his diary that night, no “brother, relation or friend came nigh me” to bail him out. Unable to pay, Grano was taken to “this Hell between 7&8 at night” – the Marshalsea debtors’ prison.

The debtors’ prison was not a distant threat in 18th-century England but a feature of everyday life. Almost every town had a jail, and some maintained several – when Grano was arrested, at least 15 were operating in London. Prisons stood on bridges, on the edges of marketplaces, and in the middle of fashionable high streets.