'[It] is an aphorism no more trite than true' that 'a prison pays no debts': The use and role of debtors' prisons in eighteenth-century Britain

The phrase 'a prison pays no debts' was repeated ad nauseum throughout the long eighteenth century, appearing as obvious to writers in the seventeenth centuury as it did to Charles Dickens in the mid-nineteenth.  Historians have also similarly dismissed the debtors' prison as a medieval hangover that inevitable washed away by the rise of an "enlightened" capitalist society as petty vengeance diminished in favour of the needs of commerce.  However, for a supposedly illogical and unprofitable system it attracted considerable use and interest from creditors and one in every twenty-five adult men in London were facing imprisonment for their debts every year.  This paper explores the continued popularity of the prisons as an institution of contract enforcement through a study of prison commitment registers, administrative records, and debtor memoirs and reveals how debt imprisonment prove surprisingly effective as a system of debt enforcement which kep the wheels of commerce turning.