The Soane Museum Study Group is an open forum for scholars – both established and emerging – to present new research into an aspect of architectural history and/or Soane’s collection.
Debtors’ Court was, during its relatively short existence from 1825 to 1861, one of London’s most feared buildings. Immortalised by Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) as the ‘badly lighted and worse ventilated’ domain of seedy barristers like Solomon Pell and ‘the destitute shabby-genteel people’ of London, the Court, which was built to designs by John Soane, became symbolic of the harsh injustice of nineteenth-century England’s insolvency laws.
However, recent cataloguing of the drawings for the Court in Sir John Soane’s Museum has revealed new information about the compromises involved in the building’s design and execution.