Chaucer's grave in Westminster Abbey

Writers are, perhaps, well-suited to understand concepts of debt now gripping the land. “Indeed,” writes Colin Burrow in a column for The Guardian, “British literature owes a lot to debt. It’s a curious fact that in the 16th century debts — real, monetary debts — were sometimes paid off at the tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey…. John Cleland finished writing Fanny Hill in 1748-49 while he was incarcerated in the Fleet prison for a debt of £840. He was a small-timer in comparison with Daniel Defoe, who in 1692 went bankrupt owing £17,000. Robinson Crusoe, the story of a thrifty adventurer who builds his own economy from scratch, was the best-known result of Defoe’s attempts to make himself solvent again. Even the unshakeable literary authorities of the age could be sent down for lack of money: Samuel Johnson was arrested for debt, and wrote against the arbitrary powers exerted by creditors over their victims. The credit squeeze and tumbling financial markets of 1826 brought down Walter Scott’s publishing house and left him with debts of more than £120,000. To those debts we owe the popular editions of Waverley.” (Note that he hasn’t even gotten to Charles Dickens yet.) In fact, Burrow goes on to consider how writers came to understand more subtle concepts of debt than that, such as in their coming to terms with early notions of being in debt to each other, and to other languages. “Richard Crashaw,” he notes, “praised John Donne after his death as someone who was so completely original that he paid for all the nation’s borrowing from classical (and foreign) writers.”