Sponging-house

A sponging-house was a place of temporary confinement for debtors in the United Kingdom.

If someone were to get into debt, their creditor would lay a complaint with the sheriff, the sheriff sent his bailiffs, and the debtor would be taken to the local sponging-house. This was not a debtors' prison, as such, but a private house, often the bailiff's own home. The debtor would be held there temporarily in the hope that they could make some arrangement with the creditors. Anthony Trollope set out the system in his novel The Three Clerks of 1857: