{"id":1617,"date":"2026-02-18T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T12:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=1617"},"modified":"2026-02-27T08:54:25","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T08:54:25","slug":"jacque-pierre-brissot-in-the-sponging-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=1617","title":{"rendered":"Jacques-Pierre Brissot in the Sponging House"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

1784 was a particularly unfortunate year in the life of Jacques-Pierre Brissot. It would see him imprisoned twice: once in London (over unpaid printer’s bills) and once Paris (over his alleged involvement in the production of libellous pamphlets). It was also the year that he, possibly in collaboration with his wife, F\u00e9licit\u00e9, completed the French translation of Macintosh’s Travels<\/em>. In attempting to understand the events of that year, I was curious to know where it was in London that Brissot had been incarcerated. Most secondary sources identify it simply as a “debtors’ prison”, of which there were several in London at the time. Brissot, in his M\u00e9moires<\/em>, does not specify the name or location of the prison, but notes that<\/a>, apart from the bars on the window, his surroundings were almost domestic: “I could have believed I was still at home [j’aurais pu me croire encore chez moi<\/em>].”<\/p>\n\n\n

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Brissot’s account of his imprisonment from his M\u00e9moires<\/a><\/em> (1830, vol. 2, 301)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The closest to a contemporary source I have been able to find\u2014a brief biography of Brissot, written by Joel Barlow<\/a> to accompany his 1794 English translation of one of Brissot’s works\u2014is a little more specific, describing the prison as “a lock-up house in Gray’s Inn Lane.”<\/p>\n\n\n

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Extract from Joel Barlow’s anonymous “A Sketch of the Life of J. P. Brissot” from his translation, New Travels in the United Skates of America: Including the Commerce of America with Europe<\/a><\/em> […] 2 vols. (London: Printed for J. S. Jordan, 1794), vol. 2, vii.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Although Barlow’s sketch of Brissot’s life has been described as “fanciful” by Robert Darnton in The Literary Underground of the Old Regime<\/em> (1982), the specificity of the information with respect to Brissot’s incarceration perhaps lends it some credibility. Rather than a debtors’ prison per se, the lock-up on Gray’s Inn Lane (now Gray’s Inn Road) was a so-called sponging-house<\/a> (sometimes spunging), where debtors were held temporarily in the expectation that a quick agreement could be reached with their creditors\u2014see Margot Finn,The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740\u20131914<\/em> (2003), 116\u201317. This was the case for Brissot, who, thanks to the financial assistance of friends and his mother-in-law, was able to extricate himself after a few days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we consider Barlow to be accurate, the lock-up in question was a public house, the Pied Bull (or Py’d or Pyed). In 1786, not long after Brissot’s incarceration, the pub was insured<\/a> by its then landlord, John Smith. We can, perhaps, suppose that Smith was also in charge at the time of Brissot’s arrest in May 1784. Obviously none of this really matters, and certainly has no particular bearing on Brissot’s translation of Travels<\/em>, but I am always curious about how we know what we know about the past, and that it seems that, in the context of the first of Brissot’s 1784 imprisonments, what we know (or, at least, what appears in the secondary literature) is a little imprecise. Rather than disappear down that rabbit hole myself (I am sure there are archival records that could definitively identify the site of Brissot’s incarceration), I hope this post might encourage others better placed that me to throw some light on that question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1784 was a particularly unfortunate year in the life of Jacques-Pierre Brissot. It would see him imprisoned twice: once in London (over unpaid printer’s bills) and once Paris (over his alleged involvement in the production of libellous pamphlets). It was also the year that he, possibly in collaboration with his wife, F\u00e9licit\u00e9, completed the French […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1617"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1650,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617\/revisions\/1650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}