A sponging-house (more formally: a lock-up house)[1] was a place of temporary confinement for debtors in the United Kingdom.
Anthony Trollope set out the system in his 1857 novel The Three Clerks: He was taken to the sponging-house, and it was there imparted to him that he had better send for two things – first of all for money, which was by far the more desirable of the two; and secondly, for bail, which even if forthcoming was represented as being at best but a dubious advantage.If debtors could not sort matters out quickly, they were then taken before a court and transferred to a debtor's prison.
[citation needed] They could be much feared,[2] and were not always appreciated by their clients, as was made clear in a description of Abraham Sloman's establishment in Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane,[3] which was provided by one of the characters featuring in the 1892 book Round London: Down East and Up West, which was written by Montagu Williams (1835-1892), a London lawyer, to whom sponging-houses were well-known:[citation needed] [...] Ah, my dear fellow, you've never seen a sponging-house!
I had an apartment they were pleased to call a bedroom to myself certainly, but if I wanted to breathe the air I had to do so in a cage in the back garden – iron bars all round, and about the size of one of the beast receptacles at the Zoo.
In the sponging-house, debtors had any available cash squeezed out of them, partly to the creditor's benefit, but also to that of the bailiff who ran it.