Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. an unlicensed pawnshop, specializing in lending very small sums on items that mainstream pawnbrokers reject; the usual rate of income was two (old) pence on the shilling, i.e. approximately 16.66%.

1857		Morn. Chron. 21 Dec. 3/4: The defendant’s shop had been notorious for a long time as a ‘leaving shop’ [...] ‘She keeps a “leaving shop” at 10, Golden-lane. I have been in the habit of pawning things occasionally’.
1862		E. London Obs. 26 July 3/6: Henry Jacobs, the proprietor of a leaving shop [...] near Stepney Old Church.
1865		Dickens Our Mutual Friend (1971) 406: Upon the smallest of small scales, she was an unlicensed pawnbroker, keeping what was popularly called a Leaving Shop, by lending insignificant sums on insignificant articles of property deposited with her as security.
1867		J. Greenwood Unsentimental Journeys 15: He [...] kept, besides the sausage-shop, a ‘leaving-shop’ in brick lane, St. Luke’s. Does the good reader know the nature of the ‘leaving’ business? It requires no shop; any back room, cellar, or hovel will suffice for it, and any rascal possessed of a few shillings can start in it. It is a business that can flourish and grow fat in the midst of the most appalling poverty — that does exist, and flourish, and fatten in a thousand alleys and ‘slums’ within the great city of London.
1870		Sportsman (London) 23 Apr. 4/1: A ‘leaving shop’ [...] is a place not licenced for pawnbroking, but where pawnbroking carried on defiance of the Excise.
1888		Spectator 7 July 942: The ‘leaving-shop’, or illicit pawnbroker, almost frustrates attempts at protective legislation for the poor.
1891		Manchester Courier 21 Sept. 8/3: The allegations [...] amounted to a charge of trading as a pawnbrokers without a licence [...] These shops are known among the poor people [...] as ‘leaving shops’.

2. the vagina.

1890–1904		Farmer & Henley Sl. and Its Analogues.
1896		Farmer Vocabula Amatoria (1966) 30: Baquet, m. The female pudendum; ‘the leaving shop’.