ABSTRACT
The annals of the eighteenth-century poor are short enough; no doubt to their more fortunate contemporaries they seemed simple also. Small debtors, mostly poor people, were treated worse than heavy debtors, mostly dishonest ones. Men jailed on trifling counts were intentionally exposed to the companionship of the most vicious criminals. The poor man lived obscurely and untended. Strength of character merely kept him clear of crime; it never spurred him on toward any chimera as rising in the world. The South Sea Bubble, temporarily wrecking middle-class security, had more lasting repercussions on the poor. Higher up, a huge and hideous debtor class arose; the debtors, thrown into prisons or on the fringes of society, became at one stroke a part of lower-class life. The backwardness of the law, the indifference of those who could have modified it, the rapacity of those who administered it, are no revelation to people and were nothing new in eighteenth-century England.
