From sessions to newspaper? Criminal trial reporting, the nature of crime, and the London press, 1770-1800

London Journal

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 1-27

  Devereaux, Simon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CRIME; EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; PUBLISHING;

ENGLAND; EURASIA; EUROPE; LONDON [ENGLAND]; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 34347290342     PISSN: 03058034     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1179/174963207X172939     Document Type: Article

References (151)

1. References to the printed Proceedings in the records of the Corporation of the City of London, which are uniquely plentiful during the last quarter century of the eighteenth century, invariably refer to it as 'the Sessions Paper'.
2. For the pre-1770 Sessions Paper, see M. Harris, 'Trials and Criminal Biographies: A Case Study in Distribution', in R. Myers and M. Harris (eds), Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700 (Oxford: Polytechnic Press, 1982), 1-36;
3. A. McKenzie, 'Lives of the Most Notorious Criminals: Popular Literature of Crime in England, 1675-1775' (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1999), 234-50;
4. J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2001), 1-3, 373-4, 451-2;
5. J.H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford, 2003), 180-90.
6. Corporation of London Records Office (CLRO), City Lands Committee Journal 77, ff. 156-7 (14 Sept 1785).
7. CLRO, City Lands Committee Journal 77, ff. 129-30 (20 July 1785).
8. S. Devereaux, 'The City and the Sessions Paper: "Public Justice" in London, 1770-1800', Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), 466-503;
9. idem, 'The Fall of the Sessions Paper: The Criminal Trial and the Popular Press in Late Eighteenth-Century London', Criminal Justice History, 18 (2003), 57-88.
10. The one interesting exception to this rule is the Morning Post, which did not do even this until after 1795.
11. For an earlier, more wide-ranging discussion of court reporting in the London press, see J. Oldham, 'Law Reporting in the London Newspapers, 1756-1786', American Journal of Legal History, 31 (1987), 177-206.
12. A fifth daily, the Public Advertiser, is available for 1770 through 1790, but I have not yet had time to assimilate its contents into the source-base.
13. More problematic, however, are those instances in which large numbers of issues of one newspaper during a particular year have not survived (or are not available on microfilm). Of particular note here, most of the Daily Gazetteer for 1785 is missing from the 'Early English Newspapers', so the incidence of Old Bailey trials reported in it is undoubtedly much understated in Table 1. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the London Chronicle for 1800, though even that incompletely preserved/available paper reported more trials than three of the six other papers examined for that year.
14. F.S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), 320-1.
15. My thanks to the anonymous reader who brought this point to my attention through reference to J. Brewer, Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century (2004), 38.
16. These were the trials of: John Purcell, convicted of murdering his wife; Peter Conway and Michael Richardson, convicted of murdering two men; and Mary Taylor, acquitted on a charge of stealing a spoon in the royal palace of St James (Gazetteer, 16 & 18 July 1770, 29 Oct 1770).
17. Such reliance is explicit in The Gentleman's Magazine, 35 (1765), p. 475; 36 (1766), p. 83; 37 (1767), pp. 394-5, 514-15; and 45 (1775), p. 605.
18. CLRO, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen 171, pp. 158, 180-2 (3 & 10 Feb 1767).
19. The Gazetteer, 4 July 1770;
20. Lloyd's Evening Post, 1-4 June 1770, 9-11 Jan 1775, 17-20 Feb 1775, 24-26 April 1775.
21. By comparison, the writer-publisher of the Sessions Paper complained in 1792 that his obligation to produce a fully-detailed and complete account of Old Bailey trials in no more than two parts imposed such delays in the publication's appearance as 'excludes the hope of novelty, as much as it represses the ardour of curiosity. In the case of Murder, for instance, the man is absolutely forgot before his trial can be printed on this plan' (CLRO, City Lands Committee Journal 84, ff. 194-5 [19 Sept 1792]).
22. The days of publication for London tri-weeklies - Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays - were in fact timed in order to ensure their availability for the regularly scheduled posts out of London. See M. Harris, 'The Structure, Ownership and Control of the Press, 1620-1780', in G. Boyce, J. Curran and P. Wingate (eds), Newspaper History: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (Constable, 1978), 87-9 1;
23. idem, 'Print and Politics in the Age of Walpole', in J. Black (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 192-4;
24. and J. Black, The English Press, 1621-1861 (Stroud, 2001), 75-7.
25. J. Black, 'The Development of the Provincial Newspaper Press in the Eighteenth Century', British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14 (1991), 159-70;
26. H. Barker, 'Catering for Provisional Tastes: Newspapers, Readership and Profit in Late Eighteenth-Century England', Historical Research, 69 (1996), 42-61;
27. idem, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), ch. 4;
28. Black, English Press, ch 6.
29. General Evening Post, 8-10 July 1790.
30. For a detailed account of this case and its significance, see J. Bondeson, The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale (Philadelphia, 2001).
31. Lloyd's Evening-Post, 18-21 Sept 1795;
32. St James's Chronicle, 19-22 Sept 1795.
33. For this crime, see P. King, 'Gleaners, Farmers and the Failure of Legal Sanctions in England 1750-1850', Past & Present, 125 (Nov. 1989), 116-150.
34. General Evening-Post, 27-29 May 1800;
35. London Chronicle, 10-12 July 1800.
36. For the wider debate on marriage and adultery at this time, see L. Stone, Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 286-9, 328-39;
37. and D.T. Andrew, '"Adultery-à-la-mode": Privilege, the Law and Attitudes to Adultery, 1770-1809', History, 82 (1997), 5-23.
38. Harris, 'Structure, Ownership and Control of the Press', p. 87.
39. A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, c.1780-1850 (Home & Van Thal; reprint edn, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1973), p. 6 n5;
40. l. Asquith, 'The Structure, Ownership and Control of the Press, 1790-1955', in G. Boyce et al. (eds), Newspaper History, 99.
41. The appearance on the same day of identical trial accounts, or at least of accounts clearly derived from the same text, is much more extensively apparent amongst the tri-weeklies.
42. Much the same practice prevailed in the reporting of executions at Tyburn and (after 1783) Newgate Prison. Most London newspaper accounts of hangings during this period suggest a common text produced by one, and sometimes two witness-reporters at most.
43. CLRO, City Lands Minute Book 15 (entry 2 May 1787);
44. City Lands Committee Journal 84, ff.194-5 (19 Sept 1792); BL, Add MS 53815, f.60v.
45. CLRO, City Lands Committee Journal 82, ff.76-8 (5 May 1790);
46. Common Council Journal 72, ff.275-7 (21 Oct 1790).
47. For the work of Garrow and Knapp at the Old Bailey during this era, see A.N. May, The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750-1850 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003), esp. pp. 39-46.
48. For instance, the accounts of the trials of Nesby Walker, John Watkins and Jane Thacker, published in The Times for 14 Jan 1785, are all substantially more detailed than the account printed in the Sessions Paper.
49. In his pleas for further subsidization of the Sessions Paper by the City government, Hodgson explained how he employed assistants to enable him simultaneously to translate his shorthand notes of trial - read aloud by Hodgson himself - into text, one for publication as the Sessions Paper, the other for the use of the Recorder of London (CLRO, Small MSS Box 40, no.47/398). There is no reason why there might not have been another person present to copy the text for Walter, or who was simply allowed access to Hodgson's shorthand notes before Hodgson's own transcription of the sessions.
50. J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), ch 8;
51. R. Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France, 1620-1800 (1996), 42-50;
52. Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion, ch. 1.
53. See the discussion and accompanying references in D. Wahrman, 'Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and Languages of Class in the 1790s', Past & Present, 136 (Aug 1992), 86-91.
54. Black, English Press, ch 8.
55. A sharper distinction might be revealed, for instance, by a further distinction in cases of 100 to 500 words in length, here treated as a single, perhaps conspicuously large category.
56. For instance, of 48 Old Bailey trial accounts of greater than 500 words in length published in The Times in 1785, 1790, 1795 and 1800 combined, 35 (or nearly three-quarters) of them were published while parliament was in recess. By comparison, amongst trial accounts of about 500 words or less, only 111 of 174 (or just under two-thirds) appeared during the recess.
57. For the political orientation of these newspapers, see Aspinall, Politics and the Press, 69, 71-2, 74-8, 274-81;
58. I.R. Christie, Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century Politics, and Other Papers (1970), 311-58;
59. J. Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (1987), 16, 184-8;
60. and Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion, 43-6.
61. For the unprecedentedly high execution levels of the 1780s, see J.M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1986), 582-92;
62. D. Hay,'The Laws of God and the Laws of Man: Lord George Gordon and the Death Penalty', in J. Rule and R. Malcolmson (eds), Protest and Survival: The Historical Experience: Essays for E. P. Thompson (1993), 61-5;
63. and P. King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740-1820 (Oxford, 2000), 273-8.
64. Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press, 46-50;
65. Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion, ch. 2.
66. L. Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 - Volume One: The Movement for Reform (1948), pt v;
67. R. McGowen, 'The Image of Justice and Reform of the Criminal Law in Early Nineteenth-Century England', Buffalo Law Review, 32 (Winter 1983), 89-125;
68. R.R. Follett, Evangelicalism, Penal Theory and the Politics of Law Reform in England, 1808-30 (Basingstoke, 2001);
69. P. Handler, 'Forgery and the End of the "Bloody Code" in Early Nineteenth-Century England', Historical Journal, 48 (2005), 683-702.
70. V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford, 1994).
71. Wahrman, 'Virtual Representation', 85.
72. The total number of trials in the relevant years (as counted at ) was: 613 in 1770; 678 in 1775; 580 in 1780; 960 in 1785; 768 in 1790; 583 in 1795; and 913 in 1800.
73. In the case of the pre-eminently alarming criminal offences of the age - robbery, burglary and housebreaking - the largest number of Old Bailey trial reports provided by one of the newspapers examined here (The Times) was only 7 (of 164 cases) in 1785, 19 (of 111) in 1790, 8 (of 64) in 1795, and 22 (of 100) in 1800.
74. The Times, 1 March 1790;
75. General Evening Post, 15-17 July 1800;
76. Morning Post, 22 Feb 1800, 4 April 1800, 6 Dec 1800;
77. Lloyd's Evening Post, 29 Sept-1 Oct 1800, 5-8 Dec 1800.
78. Morning Post, 18 Sept 1800;
79. St James's Chronicle, 23-5 Sept 1800;
80. The Times, 25 Sept 1800.
81. D.T. Andrew and R. McGowen, The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London (Berkeley, Cal., 2001), ch. 5.
82. The Gazetteer, 24 Feb 1770;
83. Lloyd's Evening Post, 17-20 Feb 1775;
84. Morning Post, 16 Sept 1780;
85. The Gazetteer, 22 Sept 1790;
86. The Times, 16 April 1795.
87. The Gazetteer, 22 Sept 1790 (emphases in original). The word 'Gent.' is an interpolation; the microfilm image is smudged and darkened.
88. C. Hibbert, The Road to Tyburn: The Story of Jack Sheppard and the Eighteenth Century Criminal Underworld (Longmans, 1957);
89. G. Howson, Thief Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild (Hutchinson, 1970);
90. P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (2nd edn, 2003), ch. 1.
91. C.B. Herr-up, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987), 191-2;
92. J.A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550-1750 (2nd edn, Harlow, 1999), 215-37;
93. Beattie, Policing and Punishment, 52-62, 374.
94. From 1730 until 1789, robbery and burglary comprised between 61 per cent and as much as 81 per cent of all executions of Old Bailey convicts (excluding murder) per decade; figures derived from my paper, 'The Condemned of the Old Bailey 1714-1837: Some Statistical Perspectives', presented to the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, Austin, TX, 28-31 October 2004.
95. For the late-eighteenth-century critique of aristocratic 'vice', see the work of D.T. Andrew, most recently "Adultery-à-la-Mode"' (above at note 20).
96. These cases have been attracting a burst of interest recently amongst popular and scholarly historians alike. For the Perreaus, see S. Bakewell, The Smart: The Story of Margaret Caroline Rudd and the Unfortunate Perreau Brothers (2001),
97. and Andrew and McGowen, Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd (above at note 44).
98. For Dodd, see G. Howson, The Macaroni Parson: The Life of the Unfortunate Dr Dodd (Hutchinson, 1973),
99. and more recently, J. Money, 'The Macaroni Moment: or, Ritual, Replica, and Credit: John Wilkes, the Macaroni Parson, and the Making of the Middle-Class Mind', Journal of British Studies, 32 (1993), 358-95,
100. and P. Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot, 1999), ch. 6.
101. For Hackman, see Brewer, Sentimental Murder (above at note 10),
102. and M. Levy, Love and Madness: The Murder of Martha Ray, Mistress of the Fourth Earl of Sandwich (New York, 2004).
103. J.A. Sharpe, "'Last Dying Speeches": Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England', Past & Present, 107 (May 1985), 144-67;
104. P. Jenkins, 'From Gallows to Prison? The Execution Rate in Early Modern England', Criminal Justice History, 7 (1986), 51-71 (esp. 57-60);
105. P. Lake, with M. Questier, The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT, 2002), sect II;
106. K. Royer, 'Dead Men Talking: Truth, Texts, and the Scaffold in Early Modern England', in S. Devereaux and P. Griffiths (eds), Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900: Punishing the English (Basingstoke, 2004), 63-84.
107. P. Linebaugh, 'The Ordinary of Newgate and His Account' in J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England, 1550-1800 (Methuen, 1977), 246-69. The Account also forms the primary body of information underpinning Linebaugh's London Hanged (above at note 47).
108. The analysis presented here, though somewhat different in its emphases, is largely congruent with that given in A. McKenzie, 'From True Confessions to True Reporting?. The Decline and Fall of the Ordinary's Account', London Journal, 30 (1) 2005, 55-70.
109. The impact of war and its aftermath on Hanoverian crime levels has provoked lively debate. The major statements favouring a positive relation between the two - in my view, still essentially convincing - are D. Hay, 'War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: the Record of the English Courts', Past & Present, 95 (May 1982), 117-60;
110. and Beattie, Crime and the Courts, ch. 5.
111. But compare J. Innes and J. Styles, 'The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England', in A. Wilson (ed.), Rethinking Social History: English Society, 1570-1920 and Its Interpretation (Manchester, 1993), 208-15;
112. and King, Crime, Justice and Discretion, ch. 5.
113. For the exceptional character of the 1690s, see J. Childs, 'War, Crime Waves and the English Army in the Late Seventeenth Century', War and Society, 15 (2) (1997), 1-17.
114. P. King, 'War as a Judicial Resource: Press Gangs and Prosecution Rates, 1740-1830', in N. Landau (ed.), Law, Crime and English Society, 1660-1830 (Cambridge, 2002), 97-116.
115. L.B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1987), 191.
116. The analysis briefly sketched here will be presented at greater length in my forthcoming book, Convicts and the State: Criminal Justice and English Governance, 1750-1810 (forthcoming), ch. 3.
117. McKenzie, 'Lives of the Most Notorious Criminals', 458-60.
118. For an argument that the content itself of the late eighteenth-century 'Newgate Calendars', and not merely their format, suggests the emerging centrality of 'the notion of criminality as largely a function of class and of a particular socio-economic environment', rather than 'a failure of a moral order', see McKenzie, 'Lives of the Most Notorious Criminals', 458-97, 516-18 (quote at p. 461).
119. The Malefactor's Register; or, The Newgate and Tyburn Calendar (5 vols, Alexander Hogg, [1791]), v, supplement, pp.[93-4, 100].
120. P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 10;
121. G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992).
122. R. McGowen, 'A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in, Early Nineteenth-Century Britain', Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 312-34;
123. idem, 'The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England', Journal of Modern History, 59 (1987), 651-79;
124. idem, 'Revisiting The Hanging Tree: Gatrell on Emotion and History', British Journal of Criminology, 40 (2000), 1-13.
125. T.W. Laqueur, 'Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative', in L. Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Berkeley, CA, 1989), 176-204 (quote at p. 176).
126. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, especially part iii.
127. P. Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society in Britain, 1660-1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 183-97 (quote at p. 193).
128. See the discussion in Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 284-93.
129. S. Rogers, 'The Use of Royal Licenses for Printing in England, 1696-1760: A Bibliography', The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 7th series, 1 (2000), 133-92.
130. The Tyburn Chronicle; or, Villainy Display'd in All Its Branches (4 vols, J. Cooke, 1768), I, i-ii. The formal record of the license can be found at The National Archives, Secretary of State Papers (SP) 44/ 378, pp. 219-21.
131. Again, this theme will be examined in more detail in my Convicts and the State, ch 6.
132. M.J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830-1914 (New York, 1990), esp. chs 1-3.
133. T.C. Curtis and F.M. Hale, 'English Thinking About Crime, 1530-1620',
134. in L.A. Knafla (ed.), Crime and Criminal Justice in Europe and Canada (Waterloo, ON: Sir Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981; revised edn, 1985), 111-26;
135. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, chs 5-7 passim;
136. J.L. McMullan, The Canting Crew: London's Criminal Underworld, 1550-1700 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984);
137. C.B. Herrup, 'Law and Morality in Seventeenth-Century England', Past & Present, No.106 (February 1985), 102-23;
138. I.W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 6.
139. M. Thale (ed.), The Autobiography of Francis Place (1771-1854) (Cambridge, 1972), 57. In this passage, I have silently corrected several infelicities of Place's written expression that Thale's transcription leaves intact.
140. Morning Post, 2 Dec 1785.
141. S. Devereaux, 'Peel, Pardon and Punishment: The Recorder's Report Revisited', in Devereaux and Griffiths (eds), Penal Practice and Culture, 273-5 (quote at p. 275).
142. D. Philips, "'A New Engine of Power and Authority": The Institutionalization of Law-Enforcement in England', in V.A.C. Gatrell, B. Lenman and G. Parker (eds), Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (Europa, 1980), 155-89;
143. S.H. Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780-1850 (Cambridge, 1988);
144. R. Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (2004).
145. E.A. Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720-1830 (Basingstoke, 1998), ch. 8.
146. Some of that appeal, before the 1770s, was by no means even covert. The Sessions Paper frequently included lurid details of rape and sodomy trials (any account of which was wholly suppressed after 1796), as well as potentially comical renderings of ethnic speech-patterns amongst witnesses. See McKenzie, 'Lives of the Most Notorious Criminals', 236-9, 245-6;
147. and A. Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 (1987), 17.
148. It is perhaps especially striking that the overall volume of trial reporting in the dailies (see fig. 1) actually increased during the 1790s, when overall levels of criminal conviction at the Old Bailey were in fact at last declining, and when events in France only enhanced the usual pressure on space exerted by parliamentary reporting. Perhaps alarm regarding the nature of the problem of crime in the metropolis had become so well established in the public sphere that trial reporting no longer needed the compelling force of numbers to command regular attention from the papers.
149. The standard accounts are J.J. Tobias, Crime and Industrial Society in the 19th Century (B.T. Batsford, 1967) and K. Chesney, The Victorian Underworld (Temple Smith, 1970).
150. More recently, see T. Boyle, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism (New York, 1989), Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal (above at note 70) and
151. M.-C. Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham, NC, 1992).