Samuel Johnson Response To Debtors Summary

During the mid-nineteenth century, residents in Britain who could not pay their debts were oftentimes sent to debtors’ prison.Well known English writer Samuel Johnson had sent a letter to a British lawmaker that was published to the public and had received comments of the matter. At the beginning of Johnson’s response he boldly responds to the comments by informing the people that the debtors in prison are not the problem at hand, the problem, at the time, was the confinement of twenty thousand in prison, the silence kept in the darkness and futile two thirds of an army that they chose as a defense.

Johnson establishes that even after a debtor is “dragged to prison, pitied for a moment, and then forgotten”, people do not have the right to uproar in rage when the debtors had failed their responsibilities of policy. He also mentions that these debtors aren’t in prison because they’ve chose to but that the nation “voluntarily sacrifices one in every three hundred”. Johnson even states that he fears “those who are best acquainted with the state of our prisons” because they will come to realization of the truth behind what he says. The needs of every human being are tucked away from the debtors when they’re placed in prison, says Johnson, that “one in four” lives are put to an end every year because of this. …show more content…
Johnson mentions this because he believed that “a hundred and fifty thousand” of every English generation would die in prison, and that with this great deal of numbers it was said to be greater than what had been damaged by “the pestilence and