Dr Andrew Swatland will deliver a talk entitled John Dickens and Imprisonment for Debt, examining the 19th-century practice of imprisonment for debt, with a particular focus on Charles Dickens’s own father John Dickens, who was imprisoned in the Marshalsea in 1824. The lecture will explore why people were imprisoned for debt, what life was like in a debtor’s prison and how debtors were able to obtain their freedom.