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Updated: May 28, 2025
It had already collected round itself an army of the worst part of the native population, informers, and false witnesses, and common barrators, and agents of chicane, and, above all, a banditti of bailiffs' followers, compared with whom the retainers of the worst English sponging-houses, in the worst times, might be considered as upright and tender-hearted.
The history of our trade has been that of an incessant round of inflations and collapses; and the amount of rascality and fraud perpetrated in connection with the banks, in order to defeat the restrictions upon them, has no parallel but in the sponging-houses.
Garrick deserved his fame and his fortune, his splendid successes and his shining rewards; but the grand, rough writer of books did not deserve his buffets and mishaps, his ferocious hungers, his acquaintanceship with sponging-houses, and all the catalogue of his London agonies. His struggle for life was a Titan's struggle, and it was never either selfish or ignoble.
In justice to the poets of the present day, it may be noticed that they have improved on their brethren in Johnson's time, who were, according to Lord Macaulay, hunted by bailiffs and familiar with sponging-houses, and who, when hospitably entertained, were wont to disturb the household of the entertainer by roaring for hot punch at four o'clock in the morning.
When appointed to the office of Commissioner of Stamps, with a moderate income, he set up a carriage with two and sometimes four horses; and he maintained two houses, one in London, the other at Hampton. His means being altogether inadequate to this style of living, he soon became drowned in greater debt than before. He was repeatedly impounded by lawyers, and locked up in sponging-houses.
What bowls of punch, too, they would imbibe o' nights, and what mad carouses they would have! Such roaring Squires as these would have been much better bestowed in the Messengers' Houses; but these were all full, likewise the common gaols; nay, the debtors' prisons and vile sponging-houses were taken up by Government for the temporary incarceration of suspected persons.
She had been remarkable, when a tender prattler for an uncommon talent in counterfeiting the walk and manner of a bailiff: in which character she had learned to tap her little playfellows on the shoulder, and to carry them off to imaginary sponging-houses, with a correctness of imitation which was the surprise and delight of all who witnessed her performances, and which was only to be exceeded by her exquisite manner of putting an execution into her doll's house, and taking an exact inventory of the chairs and tables.
Opening off from Chancery Lane are various other small lanes, quiet, dingy nooks, some of them in the guise of streets going no whither, some being thoroughfares to other dingy streets beyond, in which sponging-houses abound, and others existing as the entrances to so-called Inns of Court, inns of which all knowledge has for years been lost to the outer world of the laity, and, as I believe, lost almost equally to the inner world of the legal profession.
Let the improvident literary hack; the starved impecunious Grub Street debtor; the newspaper frequenter of sponging-houses, remember this in their criticisms of the vile and slavish Yankee. * I make no pretension to fine writing, but perhaps Mrs. Hardinge can lay over that. O, of course! M. McG. The Declaration of Independence grants to each subject "the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness."
Cursitor Street was in the eighteenth century noted for its sponging-houses, and many a reference is made to it in contemporary literature. We are now in the Liberties of the Rolls, a parish in itself.
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