Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London 9781472506856, 9781474210867, 9781472511904

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Tables
List of Graphs
List of Figures
Note on the Text and Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: ‘ Little News from England, but of Robberies
2 Contemporary Readings of Crime Literature: ‘All this is not Imagination, but Matter of Fact ’
3 Print Culture, Crime and Prosecution: Highway Robbery ‘Grows no Joke'
The crime problem anticipated in print
Sharp increases in crime reporting in the press
Increases in prosecutions for property theft
The negative representation of crime in the press
Th e Old Bailey Proceedings and the image of crime at mid-century
‘ Gangs of desperate villains ’ : Negative images of robbery in print
The prosecution wave and judicial decision-making
Conclusion
4 Print Culture and Policing: Th e Effi cacy of Empirical and Providential Detection
Print and the root causes of crime
Print and the policing of property crime
Conclusion
5 Print Culture and Punishment: ‘More Terror in it than Mere Hanging’
The mid-century panic about murder: An increase in prosecutions
The mid-century panic about murder: Robbery-murders
The mid-century panic about murder: Parricides
The centrality of hanging and deterrence by terror
Conclusion
6 Conclusion: Content, Causes and Consequences
Content
Causes
Consequences
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

History of Crime, Deviance and Punishment Series Editor: Anne-Marie Kilday, Professor of Criminal History, Oxford Brookes University, UK Editorial Board: Neil Davie, University of Lyon II, France Johannes Dillinger, University of Maine, Germany Wilbur Miller, State University of New York, USA Marianna Muravyeva, University of Helsinki, Finland David Nash, Oxford Brookes University, UK Judith Rowbotham, Nottingham Trent University, UK Academic interest in the history of crime and punishment has never been greater and the History of Crime, Deviance and Punishment series provides a home for the wealth of new research being produced. Individual volumes within the series cover topics related to the history of crime and punishment, from the later medieval to the modern period, in both Europe and North America and seek to demonstrate the importance of this subject in furthering understanding of the way in which various societies and cultures operate. When taken together, the works in the series will show the evolution of the nature of illegality and attitudes towards its perpetration over time and will offer their readers a rounded and coherent history of crime and punishment through the centuries. The series’ broad chronological and geographical coverage encourages comparative historical analysis of crime history between countries and cultures. Published: Policing the Factory, Barry Godfrey Crime and Poverty in 19th Century England, Adrian Ager Forthcoming: Rehabilitation and Probation in England and Wales, 1900-1950, Raymond Gard (2014) The Policing of Belfast 1870-1914, Mark Radford (2014) Deviance, Disorder and Music in Modern Britain and America, Cliff Williamson (2015) The Forefathers of Terrorism, Johannes Dillinger (2015) Crime, Regulation and Control during the Blitz, Peter Adey (2015) Private Policing in Modern America, Wilbur Miller (2016) Feminist Campaigns against Child Sexual Abuse, Daniel J. R. Grey (2016)

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London Richard M. Ward

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Richard M. Ward 2014 Richard M. Ward has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-0685-6 PB: 978-1-4742-7643-6 ePDF: 978-1-4725-1190-4 ePub: 978-1-4725-0711-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: History of Crime, Deviance and Punishment Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

For my parents

Contents List of Tables List of Graphs List of Figures Note on the Text and Abbreviations Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction: ‘Little News from England, but of Robberies’ Contemporary Readings of Crime Literature: ‘All this is not Imagination, but Matter of Fact’ Print Culture, Crime and Prosecution: Highway Robbery ‘Grows no Joke’ Print Culture and Policing: The Efficacy of Empirical and Providential Detection Print Culture and Punishment: ‘More Terror in it than Mere Hanging’ Conclusion: Content, Causes and Consequences

Notes Bibliography Index

viii

ix x xi xiv 1 33 51 113 157 205 221 277 309

List of Tables 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

Average number of crime reports printed in London newspapers, per issue, 1746–50 Crime and justice reporting as a percentage of the total newshole in the Whitehall Evening Post, March 1748–February 1749 Number of crime reports printed in London newspapers, per year, 1746–50 Categories of offence as reported in London newspapers and prosecuted at the Old Bailey, 1746–50 Categories of offence as reported in London newspapers, by title, 1746–50 Indictments for petty theft at the Middlesex sessions of the peace, and indictments for grand larceny at the Old Bailey, by year, 1747–54 Committals to Bridewell house of correction for social and moral offences, by year, 1745–54 Committals to Clerkenwell house of correction for social and moral offences, by year, 1746–55 Reports of ‘solved’ and ‘unsolved’ property crimes in London newspapers, by publication, 1746–50 Reports of ‘solved’ and ‘unsolved’ crimes in London newspapers, by category of offence, 1746–50 Detection methods as described in the Old Bailey Proceedings, 1748–55

69 71 76 80 83

104 129 131 138 139 143

List of Graphs 1.1 3.1 3.2

3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

4.1 4.2 5.1

Prosecutions at the Old Bailey, for all offences, by year, 1740–60 Number of crime reports printed in the General Advertiser, by month, January 1746–December 1750 Number of crime reports printed in the London Evening Post and the Whitehall Evening Post, by month, January 1746–December 1750 Number of crime reports printed in Old England, by month, January 1746–December 1750 Total number of crime reports printed in London newspapers, by month, May 1747–December 1750 Prosecutions at the Old Bailey for property theft, by session, January 1747–December 1749 Crime reports printed in London newspapers and prosecutions at the Old Bailey for property theft, June 1747–December 1749 Committals to Bridewell house of correction for social and moral offences, by month, January 1747–October 1753 Committals to Clerkenwell house of correction for social and moral offences, by month, July 1746–October 1755 Numbers of defendants prosecuted at the Old Bailey for murder, by year, 1720–59

28 64

65 66 67 73

74 130 132 170

List of Figures All figures are reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. 3.1 3.2 5.1

5.2 5.3

Newgates Lamentation or the Ladys Last Farewell of Maclean ([Place of publication and publisher unknown], 1750?) An Exact Representation of Maclaine the Highwayman Robbing Lord Eglington on Hounslow Heath (London: P. Angier, 1750) Eliz: Jeffryes & Jno Swan Condemn’d at Chelmsford-Assizes for the Murder of Mr Josh Jeffryes (London: [unknown publisher], 1752) William Hogarth, ‘Cruelty in Perfection,’ Plate 3 from The Four Stages of Cruelty (London: [unknown publisher], 1751) William Hogarth, ‘The Reward of Cruelty,’ Plate 4 from The Four Stages of Cruelty (London: [unknown publisher], 1751)

96 97

180 194 195

Note on the Text and Abbreviations Spelling and punctuation have been retained from the original, except for italics and capitalizations, which have been modernized. All dates are new style. The following abbreviations have been used.

Archives BL LMA TNA

British Library London Metropolitan Archives The National Archives

Online collections of primary sources British Museum Prints and Drawings http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/search.aspx In referencing prints and drawings from the British Museum’s online collections, I have used the following method of citation. First, the author(s)’ name(s); followed by the title of the work; the place, publisher and date of publication; the abbreviation British Museum Prints and Drawings; the date on which the online collection was accessed for referencing the item; and finally the item’s collection number (which can be inputted into the collection search engine at the above URL to quickly find the item). For example: James Gillray, The W-st-r Just-Assess a Braying-or-the Downfall of the E.O. Table (London: William Humphrey, 1782), British Museum Prints and Drawings [accessed 27 June 2013], 1868,0808.4879.

xii

Note on the Text and Abbreviations

House of Commons Parliamentary Papers http://parlipapers.chadwyck.com/home.do In referencing primary sources from this collection, I have used the following method of citation. Journals of the House of Commons included in the collection have been cited with the title House of Commons Parliamentary Papers; the date on which the website was accessed; followed by the abbreviated label ‘JHC’; the volume number of the journal; then the page number; and finally the date on which the particular issue was discussed in Parliament (as printed in the Journal). For example: House of Commons Parliamentary Papers [accessed 25 June 2013] JHC, 26, p. 515 (26 March 1752). House of Commons Sessional Papers included in the collection have been cited with the title House of Commons Parliamentary Papers; the date on which the website was accessed; followed by the abbreviated label ‘SP’; the volume number; and finally the page number. For example: House of Commons Parliamentary Papers [accessed 25 June 2013], SP, 9, p. 301.

London Lives, 1690–1800 London Lives 1690–1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis http://www.londonlives.org/ Primary sources included within this collection have been referenced using the following method of citation: first the title London Lives, 1690-1800; the version of the site used and the date on which the collection was accessed; the document title; followed by the date of the item recorded; and the project reference number for the document (which can be used to find the item quickly within the website). For example: London Lives, 1690-1800 [version 1.1, accessed 26 June 2013], St Clements Danes, Minutes of Parish Vestries, 17 January 1750 (WCCDMV362090035). Articles included on the website have been cited with the author(s)’ names; the title of the article; the heading London Lives, 1690-1800; and finally the version of the site and the date on which the article was accessed. For example: Tim Hitchcock, Sharon Howard and Robert Shoemaker, ‘Reformation of Manners’, London Lives, 1690-1800 [version 1.1, accessed 26 June 2013].

Note on the Text and Abbreviations

xiii

Old Bailey Proceedings Online The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674–1913 http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/ Trial accounts included on the site have been cited with the title Old Bailey Proceedings Online; followed by the version of the site used and the date on which the site was accessed; the date of the sessions at which the offender(s) was tried; the name of the offender(s); and the trial reference number used by the project (which can be used to quickly find the account). For example: Old Bailey Proceedings Online [version 7.0, accessed 26 April 2013], December 1748, trial of William Denny Fox (t17481207-49). Ordinary’s Account included on the site have been cited with the title Old Bailey Proceedings Online; followed by the version of the site used and the date on which the site was accessed; the title Ordinary of Newgate’s Account; the month the Account was published; and the reference number for the account used by the project. For example: Old Bailey Proceedings Online [version 7.0, accessed 7 May 2013], Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, October 1750 (OA17501003). Articles included on the website have been cited with the author(s)’ names; the title of the article; the heading Old Bailey Proceedings Online; and finally the version of the site and the date on which the article was accessed. For example: Clive Emsley, Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, ‘The Proceedings Publishing History of the Proceedings’, Old Bailey Proceedings Online [version 7.0, accessed 12 April 2013].

Acknowledgements In the process of producing this work I have received help of many kinds. I am extremely grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the financial assistance of a Ph.D. studentship, and to the Institute of Historical Research for a bursary supporting a research trip to the London Metropolitan Archives and the National Archives. Thanks also to the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice for awarding me the Herman Diederiks prize in 2012 which allowed me to present my research at the North American Conference for British Studies in Montreal, November 2012. Most recently, financial assistance from the Wellcome Trust has been invaluable in supporting further research and helping to bring this project to fruition. Many thanks also go out to the trustees of the Marc Fitch Fund for the award of a generous publication grant, without which readers would not be able to enjoy the fantastic images included within the pages of this book. I am also grateful for all the help I have received from the staff at various libraries and archives, including the British Library, the London Metropolitan Archives, the National Archives and the university libraries of Cambridge, Leicester and Sheffield. Figures included in this work are reproduced by the kind permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. Thanks too must go to the many people who have created the various online resources which I have relied so heavily upon in the course of this research. My thanks to those who have read earlier drafts of this work at various stages, including Mark Greengrass, Claire Griffiths, Elizabeth Hurren, Matt Neale, Mike and Janet Polack, Mary Vincent and two anonymous reviewers. I am particularly grateful to Karen Harvey, Pete King, Andrea McKenzie and Bob Shoemaker, all of whom read the full manuscript and provided extremely helpful comments and suggestions. Any errors, misinterpretations or omissions are of course my own. I have also profited from the thoughtful comments and questions of participants at the numerous seminars and conferences at which I have given papers. Joanna Innes, Bob Shoemaker

Acknowledgements

xv

and Esther Snell generously provided me with copies of their unpublished research. Thanks to all the staff and students at the Department of History at the University of Sheffield who provided such a fertile environment for research. Over the past two years the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester has been a friendly and supportive home, and I am particularly grateful for all the encouragement and help I have received from colleagues on the Wellcome Trust-funded project, Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse. Finally, my thanks to Emma Goode, Claire Lipscomb, Rhodri Mogford and all the staff at Bloomsbury for their patience and guidance in the completion of this work. I have also accrued a number of personal debts. Francis Newington kindly provided a place to stay and good company during my research trips in London. Likewise, many thanks go to Alison and Rupert Gardner for a roof over my head and (far more importantly) their friendship during some of this project’s most difficult times. Becky Polack’s love and companionship has also been a tremendous support throughout this long process. In recent years Pete King has been the source of invaluable encouragement, advice and fun – he never fails to raise a smile. I owe a huge debt too to my former doctoral supervisor, Bob Shoemaker. He first sparked my interest in the subject of eighteenthcentury crime and justice, and he has continued to provide enthusiasm and support from beginning to end. This work has benefitted enormously from his knowledgeable and insightful readings. Last but by no means least, my greatest debt of gratitude is to my family, especially my parents, Michael and Julia. Without their love and tireless care, achieving this goal would not have been possible. It is a pleasure to dedicate this work to them.

1

Introduction ‘Little News from England, but of Robberies’

Horace Walpole, the noted eighteenth-century politician, author and chronicler of his times, was at best ambivalent about the press. Newspaper reports ‘seldom fail to reach the outline of incidents’, he accepted. But ‘if a paragraph in a newspaper contains a word of truth’, he complained, ‘it is sure to be accompanied with two or three blunders . . . [the] papers published in the face of the whole town [are] nothing but lies, every one of which fifty persons could contradict and disprove’.1 On this occasion – as indeed on many others – Walpole exaggerated for effect. But his comment to Horace Mann in 1750 that there was ‘little news from England, but of robberies’ in this instance largely rang true. It certainly captured an essence of the times. For the years 1747–55 witnessed a vast increase in the volume of crime reporting published in London – in newspapers, criminal biographies, periodicals, prints, accounts of trials and the last dying speeches of executed offenders. Others besides Walpole were likewise struck by this surge in printed crime news. Undoubtedly with the ulterior motive of exaggerating the crime problem in order to support their calls for reform, commentators in pamphlets of social commentary remarked on the sudden increase in crime reporting, and suggested to their readers that this reflected a real increase in offending. Charles Jones, author of Some Methods Proposed towards Putting a Stop to the Flagrant Crimes of Murder, Robbery, and Perjury (1752), for instance, referred to the ‘weekly newspapers filled with such black catalogues of horrid crimes’ as evidence of what he considered to be the excessive ‘mildness’ of punishments – a ‘lenity’ which, he believed, only encouraged greater levels of criminality and brought more offenders to the gallows.2 The London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette at mid-century likewise referred to the ‘daily alarm with accounts of robberies,

2

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

burglaries, and murders’.3 ‘It is terrifying to hear of the frequent robberies, and to reflect upon the dangers one’s dearest friends are exposed to in the middle of the streets’, came Horace Mann’s reply to Walpole.4 Robbery, burglary, housebreaking and the myriad forms of theft were at the heart of the crime problem in the capital in the century after the Restoration, J. M. Beattie has argued, ‘in part because they formed the staple of the increasingly common reporting of crime news’ – not just in newspapers, but also in a raft of other publications which emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which formed part of a broader explosion in printed literature that wrought a major transformation in the way in which contemporaries learnt about, and conceived of, the world around them.5 The causes of that explosion in printed material were numerous, and it is worth briefly examining those causes here before considering the implications that this growth of print culture had for the nature of printed crime reporting in the capital. Not only were more texts printed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but there were also new and varied means to acquire them, as well as an increasingly literate population who voraciously consumed books, prints, periodicals, pamphlets and papers as part of an expanding universe of cultural products. Print culture underwent a radical transformation in this period, and this had important implications for the way in which news about crime was collated, interpreted and disseminated. A huge body of historical research has uncovered the many causes which lay behind the late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century explosion in printed material. While there are differences in emphasis within this work, a broad consensus has identified a combination of changes in both the production of, and demand for, print as crucial.6 Despite a virtual technological standstill in printing methods, other developments in the production and supply of print undoubtedly played a key role in fostering this increase in printed material. Changes were afoot well before the failure to renew the Licensing Act in 1695, which brought pre-publication censorship to an end.7 Rampant competition, a notably more entrepreneurial spirit among booksellers and accumulation of publishing copyrights within the hands of a few producers all encouraged greater levels of production in the second half of the seventeenth century, as did the expansion in printing presses from small printing houses to large workforces composed of paid employees.8 Improvements in roads and the post too facilitated more efficient modes of distribution from producer to

Introduction

3

consumer. These seeds of change were able to burst into life, however, following the lapse in government censorship in 1695, a watershed in the history of the English press which allowed for greater scope and ambition among printers and publishers.9 Producers were now more able, and, crucially, more willing, to increase the output of printed works and to diversify in the kinds of material published. Print thus diversified in form as well as increased in scale: new genres such as novels, periodicals, pictorial prints and newspapers joined older forms including books, pamphlets, sermons and ballads. Changes in demand too played an important role in fostering the proliferation of printed material, both in terms of the social expansion of the reading public and the increasing appetite for print among the already literate. There are problems with any attempt to accurately quantify literacy rates for the eighteenth century, not only because of the difficulties of the sources, but also because of the inherent issue of defining what exactly ‘literacy’ means, and the methodological problems that this poses.10 It does seem, nevertheless, that the ability to read – and perhaps even write – was increasing to relatively high levels, particularly in London, among the middling and upper sorts. At the apex of society, among the gentry, wealthy merchants and professional elite, virtually all were literate. Many, perhaps even a majority, of those in the broad middling ranks – shopkeepers, tradesmen, craftsmen and the like – could apparently read, while further down the social scale, and among women, literacy rates were lower.11 London in particular had higher rates of literacy than elsewhere, in addition to the fastest-growing market for print. The increasing accessibility of print and improving perceptions of the reading public moreover contributed to a favourable climate for the exercise of literacy, as important as the mere rate of literacy itself.12 Again, these opportunities for accessing print were greater in London than elsewhere, and particularly for the middling and upper ranks of the metropolis. Purchase, book clubs, circulating libraries, coffeehouses, taverns, borrowing and peddlers all provided greater access to print, especially for propertied Londoners.13 There were not only more texts in circulation than ever before, but also new and varied means to acquire them. A growing consumer culture and the establishment of books as a product of ‘taste’ – a marker of social status – moreover fostered greater demand for print.14 Increasing levels of disposable income among London’s middling sorts was spent on a profusion of cultural goods produced in the eighteenth century. Contemporaries began to define themselves by what they

4

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

read (and the fact that they read) as much as through any other product which they consumed.15 These developments in the production and consumption of printed literature enhanced the cultural role of print, providing contemporaries with new ways of seeing and understanding their world.16 As Bob Harris argues, ‘more and more people began to see themselves and the society of which they were a part through the medium of print; no society had hitherto chronicled its activities and changing habits with the eagerness with which Britons of the eighteenth century did’.17 Of course, we should not assume that the power of print was either uniform or absolute. Printed literature was not a monolithic entity which imposed a stable and unambiguous message upon readers. It could instead be engaged with in a number of different ways.18 There is no simple causal link between media attention and reader attitudes. Rather, as recent historical studies of reader response have made clear, meaning is constructed through a two-way relationship between text and reader.19 An equally valid question to the extent of print’s production, circulation and readership is thus its contemporary reception, that is, the cultural value of texts and reading practices.20 We will explore this subject in more detail in Chapter 2. But even with these caveats in mind, it would still seem that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, print established itself as a prevalent medium which helped to shape human experience. ‘Print culture’ as defined here, then, refers not only to the material produced – the tangible pages of print – but also, even more importantly, to the cultural role played by print in shaping representations, knowledge and perceptions.21 Indeed, it is the particular ways in which information about crime and justice was mediated through print in mid-eighteenth-century London, and the impact that this might have had on contemporary perceptions and behaviour, that are the primary focus of this study. Crime and justice was certainly a prominent theme of the late-seventeenthand eighteenth-century growth in print culture, featuring in almost every form of print – in traditional genres such as ballads and criminal biographies, as well as in a range of newer works such as novels and newspapers, and even in publications devoted solely to the subject of crime and the law in London.22 Why was crime and justice such a recurring theme in so many different forms of print in the century after the Restoration? Until more work is done on the

Introduction

5

interaction between public interest in crime and the demand and supply of print, this question cannot be answered with any precision. In part it might be explained by the fact that crime and justice was a convenient and relatively easy source of information for writers, editors and publishers looking to fill their expanding range of wares. This was, certainly, to some extent the case in terms of newspaper crime reporting. The open institutions of criminal justice such as magistrates’ offices, courts, prisons and public punishments all provided easy points of access to information, and victim reports, letters of correspondence and coffee-house gossip were cheap and regular sources of news. More important than this, perhaps, was that crime and justice was a topic of intense public interest which could sell in huge numbers, a topic which publishers latched onto for financial gain. Genres of crime literature such as criminal biographies, chapbooks and last dying speeches, for instance, had long been produced and purchased in large numbers even before the wider growth in print from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century onwards.23 But the prominent place of crime and justice within the expanding world of print in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not simply result from a natural human curiosity for all things strange or titillating. Rather, as Andrea McKenzie explains, people were also interested in such publications because their messages were seen to be of wider relevance and importance – the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account for instance was a far more mainstream publication with a broader appeal than previously acknowledged by historians who assumed that such publications catered to a socially as well as morally ‘low’ audience.24 Those who transgress social and moral boundaries have held a certain fascination across many periods and places, not least because they help societies to define the limits of what is ‘normal’, licit and accepted. Yet the developments which took place in crime literature in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that crime and justice was coming to be of more than just prurient interest. Rather, it was increasingly the subject of concern as a pressing social problem, as shown by the introduction and immediate success of two new publications in the later seventeenth century which took a more sober approach to crime and justice than anything else previously published, and – in combination with the development of newspaper crime reporting – contributed to the genesis of what might best be termed ‘crime news’. It is to the introduction and rise of those publications – the printed

6

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

accounts of trials held at the Old Bailey, and the lives of offenders executed at Tyburn – that we now turn. Beginning in the 1670s, a series of pamphlets were published describing a number of the trials conducted at the Old Bailey Sessions House, London’s central criminal court. Perhaps in recognition of what such publications could achieve, and in order to have some control over their content, the Court of Aldermen of the City of London in January 1679 ordered that such accounts of the proceedings at the Old Bailey could only be published by a single printer, licensed by the Lord Mayor.25 The accounts soon assumed a standard title: The Proceedings of the King’s Commission of the Peace and Oyer and Terminer, and Gaol-Delivery of Newgate, held for the City of London and the County of Middlesex, at Justice-Hall, in the Old Bailey. The Old Bailey Proceedings (or Proceedings), as they will hereafter be referred to, were soon joined by a sister publication produced by the ‘Ordinary’ (chaplain) of Newgate who, as a perquisite of his office, was granted the privilege of printing his report of the lives, crimes, last words and final behaviour of those capitally convicted at the Old Bailey and hanged at Tyburn.26 The publication of The Ordinary of Newgate’s Account of the Behaviour, Confession and Dying Words of the Condemned Criminals . . . Executed at Tyburn (hereafter the Ordinary’s Account or simply Account) also came under the control of the Lord Mayor, in 1684, and frequently sold in the thousands, netting the Ordinary up to £200 per annum.27 The precise dynamics of the introduction and early development of the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account have yet to be studied in detail. It may well be that the initial decision to publish such accounts resulted from a combination of interest in crime (whether prurient or earnestly serious) and the establishment of serial production as the primary publishing strategy of the London book trade.28 Early editions of the Proceedings were highly selective in the trials they chose to report, and many accounts were similar to earlier forms of literature such as chapbooks and dying speeches in their sensationalist and judgemental approach. Moreover, much of the focus of the Proceedings in the first decade of the eighteenth century continued to be on salacious and amusing content. Nevertheless, as Beattie argues, the emergence of the Proceedings and the Account also mark ‘a shift in crime publishing from heavily fictionalised tales of the daring pranks of highwaymen intended as entertainment to something more approaching

Introduction

7

a source of public information’.29 Their introduction, and the favourable reception they immediately received, suggests that there was a market for something more substantial and regular than the older genres of ballads and last dying speeches. It is evidence, perhaps, as Beattie has suggested, of the concerns that crime gave rise to in London.30 Indeed, from the turn of the eighteenth century, the Proceedings and the Account gradually increased in length and took on a more serious and respectable tone. The difficult social and political legacy of the Glorious Revolution, and the experience of the turbulent and violent decade of the 1690s – which witnessed an alarming crime wave – together generated greater interest in crime and related issues as serious problems in need of redress.31 The prominent place of crime in the rapidly developing London newspaper press of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries likely also contributed to, and reflected, the growing public interest in crime as a social problem. Reports of especially notorious crimes, and advertisements of proclamation rewards offered by the state for the prosecution of robbers, had been published throughout the later seventeenth century in the government’s official paper, the London Gazette. But following the emergence of daily newspapers and the growth of the London press more generally from the beginning of the eighteenth century, crime reporting gave greater attention to property crime in the round. Readers of the Proceedings, the Ordinary’s Account and newspapers were still occasionally treated to titillating fare, but the publication and development of these new forms of printed crime reporting suggest that readers were now seeking explorations of the real world, as much as diversions from it.32 The introduction and development of the Old Bailey Proceedings, Ordinary’s Account, and newspapers in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries produced substantial changes in the rhythm, scale, content and tone of printed crime reporting in the capital. In contrast to the ephemeral chapbooks, broadsides and ballads which dominated the literature of crime in the seventeenth century, these new genres were printed on a regular basis (eight times a year in the case of the Proceedings and the Account; daily, tri-weekly or weekly in the case of the newspapers), thereby revolutionizing the rhythm of printed news about crime. Events were now played out in the pages of the press soon after they took place. Cases could be followed from the initial commission of a crime, through to arrest, trial and punishment, taking

8

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

in all the twists and turns along the way. Actions unfolded within the same temporal horizon as the reader’s experience of their printed representation. By this closing of temporal distance, as Hal Gladfelder explains, the world of the reader became permeated by the threat of the criminal to a greater extent than ever before.33 Not only were more forms of crime literature published in the first half of the eighteenth century, these publications also covered the issue of crime and justice in an unprecedented level of detail. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, trial reports in the Old Bailey Proceedings for instance could run to some 48 pages per session, and the Ordinary’s Account provided extensive coverage of the lives and last dying words of executed offenders. Individual cases in many instances were now interpreted and re-interpreted across multiple forms of publication. The largely fictionalized and picaresque accounts of individuals that predominated in the seventeenth century came to be replaced in the following century by avowedly more factual accounts which addressed crime in the round, a product of hundreds and thousands of actions rather than the focus of particularly notorious malefactors. And whereas earlier forms of crime literature had primarily focused upon ‘God’s justice’ in the detection of offenders (via providential signs), new genres such as the Proceedings and the newspapers in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shifted the attention to the more secular forms of ‘Man’s justice’ in policing and the courts. Finally, as discussed below, the tone of printed crime reporting in London became more serious and staid with the introduction of the Proceedings, the Account and newspapers, particularly from the second quarter of the eighteenth century. More than ever before, crime was represented as a serious social problem as much as a form of entertainment. Together these changes in printed crime reporting established a new and unique form of crime news, a regularly updated (even daily) source of information on crime as a ‘social pathology’, part of a wider constellation of social problems peculiarly prevalent in the metropolis.34 This had important implications for the way in which crime and justice was represented, and for the way in which contemporaries engaged with the issue. It is these crime news genres which are at the heart of this study – namely newspapers, the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account, along with criminal biographies, social policy pamphlets and pictorial prints. These works were chosen because they (for the most part) provided contemporaries

Introduction

9

with a running commentary on crime and justice as a social problem in need of serious attention. They were also likely the most influential genres of crime reporting in shaping propertied Londoners’ perceptions of crime and justice as a social problem. This is not to argue that other (for the most part, fictional) forms of print which were also part of the explosion of printed material in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not shape attitudes to crime and justice. It is only to say that these unlikely acted in the same way of giving a commentary on crime as a social pathology. There is, for example, some evidence to suggest that contemporaries approached the representation of crime and justice in novels and plays in a very different way to the crime news genres, or at least, that readers had different expectations about the discourses that were appropriate to particular types of publication. Readers of the novel Amelia, written by the Bow Street magistrate Henry Fielding and published in December 1751, were shocked and disappointed by ‘the pictures of prison, tavern, and gibbet, of scoundrels deserving execution, gaolers deserving to hang, and magistrates to be pilloried, of which the work . . . is formed’.35 It might be that such disappointments arose from expectations of Fielding as an author specifically, rather than the genre of the novel as a whole. Certainly, the novels of Daniel Defoe in the first half of the eighteenth century were a great success, despite the ‘low’ content.36 Yet as Martin and Ruthe Battestin explain, Fielding’s readers ‘expected romance-writers to make them laugh or cry, not to prick their conscience or offend their ears with the speech of whores and turnkeys’.37 The stark realities of crime and punishment might be appropriate content for newspapers, trial accounts and criminal biographies which allowed contemporaries to engage with crime as a social problem, but such troubling images were evidently not suitable for all forms of print. A comprehensive study of the print culture of crime and justice in the eighteenth century would have to take account of the many and varied forms of crime literature (loosely defined) that were published in the period, but my focus is here confined to a specific set of genres which provided propertied Londoners with a regularly updated source of (at the very least purportedly) factual information on the state of crime and justice in the metropolis. In approaching this material I build upon a number of recent studies of eighteenth-century crime literature, and attempt to address three issues which have so far been relatively neglected.

10

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

A huge body of research has vastly extended our knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century crime literature: as a factual historical record about crime; an instrument of social control; a precursor to the novel; and as an inherently unstable medium which contains a multiplicity of voices and ideological positions. Initial attempts to mine crime literature for information on the realities of crime and the social background of offenders – as most fully explored in Peter Linebaugh’s use of the Ordinary’s Account to reconstruct a ‘sociology of the condemned’ – were both challenged for their assumption that this material accurately reflected reality, and increasingly gave way to studies influenced by postmodernism and literary theory.38 In the latter instance, studies sought to identify the influence of crime literature in the development of realist fiction and the novel.39 Particular attention has also been given to the ideological function of crime literature, of whether print served (as argued of the law more generally) ‘as an expression of ruling-class ideology or an instrument of social control’.40 Recent studies have questioned the extent to which early modern crime literature could so unequivocally fulfil its intended ideological functions as earlier studies by Lincoln Faller and J. A. Sharpe had argued.41 Emphasis has instead been placed on the instability and multiplicity of voices in crime literature, its ability to open up space for a range of ideological positions and interpretations with a profound ‘resistance to closure’. The work of Andrea McKenzie is indicative of the fruits of this new research, having taken us beyond conceptions of criminal biographies and the Ordinary’s Account as ‘records of truth’ to an in-depth understanding of how these sources were constructed; how cultural ideas could be appropriated by both authors and criminal subjects for their own ends; the complexities and moral ambiguities that printed accounts could throw up for contemporaries; and the changing cultural purchase of crime literature across the long eighteenth century.42 Historical research on eighteenth-century crime literature has recently extended beyond the more ‘literary’ genres of novels, criminal biographies, and the Ordinary’s Account (which had previously received the overwhelming majority of attention), to what were likely the most widely read (and certainly the most regularly published and detailed) forms of writing on crime and justice: newspapers and the Old Bailey Proceedings. We will talk in detail in subsequent chapters about some of the specific findings of this recent work,

Introduction

11

but here we might just identify a few broad points which are especially relevant for our purposes. In the first instance, whereas previous research had tended to focus on the representation of crime and criminals, recent work has usefully drawn our attention to the fact that eighteenth-century print also covered the issues of policing, prosecution and punishment in great detail.43 Printed crime reporting, it seems clear, was as crucial in shaping contemporary perceptions of the justice system as of criminality. Secondly, recent research has demonstrated the highly selective nature of printed crime reporting, and the many factors which could shape the decisions of authors, printers and publishers about what to print, not least, notions of ‘newsworthiness’ and the desire of those in power to present particular images of crime and justice. By manipulating the content of the Proceedings, both the printers and the City of London authorities were, for example, able to create an impression of ‘public justice’ which depicted the courts as fully capable of dealing with the crime problem, upholding the decisions made at the Old Bailey, and discouraging criticism of the judicial system. Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century, changes were made to the representation of crime and justice in the Proceedings in response to particular moments of social and political crisis. Delicate calibrations were constantly being made in what kinds of information and images should be fed to the public. The very fact that the Proceedings were manipulated in such ways highlights just how influential the City authorities considered the title to be in shaping public attitudes and maintaining social order.44 It has also become clear from recent work that newspapers deserve a more prominent place within studies of eighteenth-century crime literature than they have so far received from historians. Crime and justice formed a major part of both London and provincial newspaper content throughout the eighteenth century. As highly composite texts which drew on a wide range of sources of information, newspapers frequently offered readers diverse, and occasionally contradictory, messages about the prevalence of crime and the efficacy of measures to deal with it.45 This recent research has greatly pushed forward our understanding of printed crime reporting in the eighteenth century. Three important issues have, however, yet to receive adequate discussion, and these constitute central starting points for the following study. First of all, previous research has tended to analyse single genres of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

12

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

printed crime literature in isolation, going against what was the more likely contemporary practice of reading a range of genres together. Indeed, this is suggested by scattered comments in contemporary diaries, pamphlets and criminal biographies, as we will see in the following chapter. Horace Walpole, for instance, appears to have read a plethora of works on the subject of crime and justice, including newspapers, criminal biographies, social policy pamphlets and graphic prints. Londoners read a variety of different publications, each of which offered unique – sometimes distinctly contradictory – images of crime and justice. When contemporaries read the often brief and highly formulaic reports of violent thefts or burglaries printed in the newspapers, for example, they no doubt did so within the wider context of what they knew about such offences and the perpetrators through the lengthier accounts of trials and criminal biographies which they encountered in the Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account. Historians have so far underappreciated the broader crime literature context in which accounts were read. By focusing upon a narrow time period, namely the years 1747–55, in this book I aim to reconstruct a wider picture of printed crime reporting at a particular point in time which takes account of several of the key genres of crime literature in the eighteenth century. Secondly, there has been little attempt in previous work to analyse eighteenth-century crime literature within the context of actual judicial practice. This is due in part to the broader division in the historiography of eighteenth-century crime and justice between the study of the administration of the law as a social history of experience on the one hand, and the study of crime literature as a cultural history of representation on the other. Studies of printed crime reporting have largely ignored the social context in which texts were consumed. To give just one example, Lincoln Faller has provided a detailed and stimulating analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criminal biography, suggesting that this literature functioned as a societal coping mechanism for the guilt associated with a system of extreme penal severity. Yet it is difficult to assess how criminal biography served to palliate misgivings about hanging offenders because this literature has not been situated within the context of the fluctuating use and nature of capital punishment.46 By the same token, while a huge body of work has vastly improved our knowledge of the administration of the law in eighteenth-century England,

Introduction

13

we have less understanding of what shaped the attitudes of contemporaries which underpinned this judicial decision making.47 Thirdly and finally, my interests and approach differ somewhat from previous works on eighteenth-century crime literature. Most scholars who have written on the subject, particularly the genres of criminal biography and last dying speeches, have concentrated on the more Universalist messages of these publications, either (in the case of Lincoln Faller) as a means of palliating the guilt associated with a harsh capital code, or (in the case of Andrea McKenzie) as explorations of contemporary interest in criminality, sin and dying well (ars moriendi). While this work has valuably revealed the enduring fascination with crime literature, due to the messages which it offered contemporaries about issues far beyond the realms of crime and criminality alone, it should also be noted that beneath this enduring fascination with Universalist messages ran shifting currents of interest in the changing level of criminal activity. At one level, then, contemporary interest in crime remained static, for what it revealed about human nature more widely. On another level, however, contemporary interest waxed and waned in the short term in response to changing perceptions about the incidence and nature of criminal behaviour. And it was during moments of increased crime reporting and prosecuted criminality – such as the years 1747–55 which we are concerned with here – that contemporary interest in crime peaked. The shifting interest in crime, and the role of crime reporting in shaping these short-term fluctuations, has however yet to receive detailed historical research. In short, it might be argued, representations and practices have rarely been considered within the context of one another. Yet this is precisely what is needed if we are to have a complete understanding of either. And indeed, by doing so we can learn much about the interaction between criminality, printed representations of crime and justice, and the administration of the law. Recent studies of historical ‘moral panics’ have for instance highlighted the value of considering printed crime reporting alongside changes to the law and its administration.48 ‘The hitherto unknown conjunction of a broad-circulation press, the anxiety-driven middle-class public and regular parliamentary sessions’ in the eighteenth century, David Lemmings suggests, provided the ‘necessary ingredients for modern moral panics of the “law and order” variety’.49 Case studies of moral panics ranging from the Mohocks in 1712;

14

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

forgers and forgery; gaming; the ‘Monster’ in the early 1790s; and the London garrotting panics of 1856 and 1862, have revealed several similar features, most notably the significant impact of the media in creating and shaping panics through increased reporting of crimes, exaggeration, the distortion of events to fit a particular theme, the portrayal of rumours as fact and the creation of negative and fearful stereotypes. Such media-induced moral panics had a significant impact upon both official and private responses to crime – from tougher sentencing policies, the introduction of new legislation, increased policing resources and a redefinition of crimes, to efforts at self-protection and a greater vigilance among prosecutors and magistrates.50 Peter King in particular has provided a nuanced and suggestive account of how the press contributed to a moral panic over crime in the Colchester area in 1765 which persuaded ‘victims and committing magistrates to act less leniently in deciding whether or not to prosecute offenders’.51 Robert Shoemaker’s excellent recent study of the representation of women’s crime in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century moreover demonstrates the insights which can be gained from an exploration of the interaction between criminality (in terms of the offences that actually came before the courts), developments in print culture and printed discussions of crime. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, printed accounts of female thieves for the first time began to provide explorations of the ‘complex circumstances, motivations, and self-deceptions which led women to commit such crimes.’ While a dramatic increase in prosecutions of women for theft in the 1690s and 1700s was an important precipitant of this change, Shoemaker nonetheless argues that this ‘could only occur when print culture had evolved, through the development of new genres, to include more in-depth first-person narratives’.52 By considering developments in the print culture of crime and justice within the context of changes in prosecuted criminality and the creation of the law and its administration, we get a more complete understanding of each, as well as insights into their possible interaction. That is what the following study sets out to do, using the London crime wave of 1747–55 to address a number of specific questions about the representation of crime and justice in print, and its influence on perceptions and responses to crime. How were the issues of crime and justice represented in this period across the genres of newspapers, periodicals, prints, pamphlets of social commentary,

Introduction

15

criminal biographies, the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account? What implications did developments in print culture have for the images of crime and justice that were offered to contemporaries in print? How did the particular nature of print culture shape the way in which crime and justice was portrayed? How do these representations fit into the context of changes in the law and its administration? Finally, how might this press coverage have shaped contemporary perceptions and the practices of prosecution, policing and punishment? The London crime wave of 1747–55 is a useful case for exploring these questions, for significant changes took place in this period both in printed crime reporting and in the criminal law and its administration. Before going on to consider some of the specific changes which took place in the years 1747–55, however, it is first worth considering in more general terms the nature of crime, justice and print culture in eighteenth-century London. The offences prosecuted in London were not unique to the capital, as Beattie has shown, ‘but in their level, intensity, and range – encompassing as they did frequent reports of violent robberies on the one hand and irritatingly high levels of petty theft on the other – they presented problems that exposed more clearly than elsewhere the inadequacies of the law and the system of criminal administration’.53 Significant developments in the social, economic and cultural life of the metropolis in the seventeenth century created problems of poverty and vagrancy, increased the opportunities for theft, and generated anxieties about single women and the itinerant poor. Mass immigration into London and rapid demographic growth from the mid-sixteenth century onwards put strains on the labour market that left many at the bottom of society either unemployed or at least underemployed, as well as pushing the capital’s geographic development outside the ancient walls of the City, thus fragmenting the urban social fabric. Centres of extreme poverty arose on the outskirts of the City and in the burgeoning suburbs of Middlesex, most especially to the east. Developments in consumer culture – more shops, new commodities and the production of valuable goods which could be easily stolen and pawned – moreover created greater opportunities for property crime in the later seventeenth century. These social, economic and cultural changes doubtless helped to shape the offences brought before the London courts, the scale of which vastly outstripped anywhere else in the country, even when accounting for the disparities of population. By the second quarter of

16

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

the eighteenth century, around 500 defendants were tried each year at the Old Bailey for property offences, compared with less than 100 prosecuted in the relatively populous neighbouring counties of Surrey and Essex.54 There were other differences too. A particularly large proportion of those tried in London faced capital charges, many for especially threatening crimes such as robbery, burglary and housebreaking. Another notable – and, for contemporaries, alarming – feature of prosecuted crime in London was the large number of women accused of property offences.55 The crime problem appeared – indeed, was – greater in London than elsewhere. The institutions and practices that were developed in the capital to deal with crime were also very different from the provincial system of quarter sessions and assizes. Two separate jurisdictions of criminal justice were in force in London, each with its own clerical staff. In the City of London, much of the work of criminal justice was carried out by the 26 aldermen (elected for life), among whom one was chosen each year to serve as Lord Mayor. By midcentury, all of the aldermen were named as magistrates, and served in rotation at the Guildhall to deal with the day-to-day administration of justice in the City. Matters of policing were largely governed separately by each individual ward. In the county of Middlesex (including the City of Westminster), magistrates appointed to the commission of the peace dispensed justice at their own individual offices, and policing matters were for the most part determined at the parish level. We will have cause to examine the work of the magistrates in both jurisdictions in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4, particularly in relation to accusations of petty (non-capital) theft and morality offences, but suffice to say here that magistrates frequently dealt with such accusations summarily, by committing the offenders to a period of hard labour and/or whipping at the house of correction: at Bridewell for the City of London; the Gatehouse for Westminster; or at Clerkenwell for Middlesex. Sessions of the peace (sometimes referred to as ‘quarter sessions’) for the City of London (at the Guildhall) and for Middlesex (at Hicks’ Hall) were held separately for each jurisdiction eight times a year, as well as four times a year for the City of Westminster. In all three locations, the sessions of the peace commonly dealt with misdemeanours such as assault, cheating and adultery. By the mid-eighteenth century, the sessions for Middlesex and Westminster (although not the City of London) were also trying cases of

Introduction

17

petty theft, an offence which had not traditionally been prosecuted there, certainly not before the second quarter of the eighteenth century. As we will see, while the aldermen of the City continued to send petty larcenists to Bridewell house of correction in the 1750s, as they always had, at the same time magistrates in Middlesex virtually abandoned the use of summary justice in cases of minor theft, choosing instead to send the accused on for prosecution by indictment. For both the City of London and the county of Middlesex (including Westminster), serious offences were tried eight times a year at the gaol delivery sessions of the Old Bailey before the high court judges, City aldermen, the Lord Mayor and the recorder of London (although not the magistrates of Middlesex, who were not included in the commission of gaol delivery). This system of criminal justice in eighteenth-century London was marked by discretion, and created (as has been noted of England more generally) ‘an extensive range of decision-making opportunities for a wide range of social groups’, particularly for males of the middling and upper sorts.56 At all stages of the judicial process, discretionary choices were available which could fundamentally alter the outcome of an accusation.57 At some stages, decisions were limited to judicial officers, but in many other instances – as victims, witnesses, jurors and members of local government – private individuals significantly influenced the administration of justice in the capital. Propertied men enjoyed extensive discretionary powers at many stages of the judicial process, described by Peter King as ‘the main group that made things happen’, in addition to filling various roles of local governance and extra-governmental institutions.58 Householders served as local officials such as the constable and the beadle. Wealthier Londoners could serve on grand or petty juries. The broad middling ranks were also the most numerous group of prosecutors, and the decisions that they made could have an impact upon the number of offenders prosecuted, convicted and executed. Contributing to the parish and the state through taxation, many members of London’s middling and upper ranks showed a keen interest to engage with, and participate in, political culture, regularly voicing their ‘public opinion’. As the ‘reactive’ eighteenthcentury English state relied heavily upon people outside central government for information and local initiative, propertied Londoners thus had enormous influence on social policy.59

18

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

Crime and poverty were issues of some concern to propertied Londoners of the eighteenth century. Such problems directly impinged on the wealth of parishes and wards to which the middling sorts – professionals, shopkeepers, tradesmen, manufacturers and the like – and their social superiors frequently contributed funds and helped govern. Violent theft and other serious property offences which were personally threatening, such as burglary, were of particular concern. But vice, immorality, idleness, drunkenness, irreligion and a myriad of other morality offences were evidently also a source of anxiety, not least because contemporary explanations of crime were rooted in notions of a ‘slippery slope’ from minor moral transgressions to steadily more serious crimes, ending in rapes, robberies, murders and an ignominious end on the gallows. Propertied Londoners expressed these concerns through a number of forums, including parish committees, the press, clubs and societies. London’s rapid social and economic development in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century no doubt created problems of poverty, vagrancy and crime. But such problems were particularly visible in London. The courts met more frequently in London than anywhere else, ‘and the fact that several sessions every year would be followed by a hanging day at Tyburn – a day on which the condemned offenders would be carted across the city to be executed before a large crowd near what is now Marble Arch – could only have further sustained the impression of crime as a serious social problem in the metropolis’.60 Moreover, the institutions of criminal justice in the capital, such as prisons and the courts, were largely open to the public, and were regularly pushed to breaking point in the eighteenth century. And perhaps even more importantly, the accelerated production and consumption of print in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries highlighted social and economic issues, thereby shaping ‘the public’s sense of crime as a growing social problem.’61 To be sure, from the earliest days of the emergence of crime news in the Proceedings, Ordinary’s Account, newspapers and other publications, occasional comments suggest that printed crime reporting heightened contemporaries’ awareness of the crime problem. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the anonymous author of Hanging, Not Punishment Enough (1701) referred to the ‘sessions-papers monthly [the Proceedings], and the publick [sic] news daily full of so many relations of robberies and murthers [sic]’ in support of his observation of ‘the lamentable increase of

Introduction

19

highwaymen, and house-breakers among us’.62 The level of printed crime reporting dedicated to crime in the metropolis was far greater than that of anywhere else. And much of that material was directly aimed at propertied Londoners looking for serious explorations of the crime problem. Indeed, the main audience for much of the printed material surveyed here seems to have been the urban middling and upper sorts, or as one criminal biographer termed it, the ‘citizens’ and those of ‘tolerable fashion’. We have little direct evidence of the market for crime literature in the eighteenth century. Indirect evidence does however suggest that propertied Londoners constituted the primary audience for newspapers, magazines, the Proceedings, Ordinary’s Account, pamphlets of social commentary, criminal biographies and graphic prints. The costs of this literature alone would have confined its sale to the relatively wealthy. And the nature of the material too required literacy skills which the majority of poorer Londoners would not have had. The Proceedings, Account, criminal biographies, pamphlets of social commentary and graphic prints were all regularly advertised in newspapers and sold for about the same price, suggesting a common readership. This was an audience with a voracious appetite for print, willing to pay by no means inconsiderable sums of money for accounts of crime news, trials, criminal lives, executions and disquisitions on the crime problem. Of course, buying and reading audiences should not be taken as one and the same. The genres of crime literature which are the focus of this study were certainly not beyond the reach of artisans or labourers. Texts were available to read in coffeehouses and were liable to be passed around or read out loud. But by and large the explosion of printed crime news was fed by the demand of London’s propertied middling and upper sorts who were extremely concerned about the issue of crime and justice in the metropolis. A greater amount and variety of material on crime and justice was published between the late seventeenth and the mid eighteenth century than ever before (or indeed perhaps since), and this material found a receptive audience among propertied Londoners looking for (among other things) regularly updated sources of factual information about crime as a social problem. Indeed, the period between the emergence of the Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account as established publications in the final decades of the seventeenth century and their decline in popularity in the 1770s was something of ‘a golden age of writing about crime, in which crime was a key theme in print culture, even

20

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

amongst that consumed by elite readers’.63 Indeed, that this was a golden age for crime literature aimed at propertied readers is suggested by the fact that nineteenth-century novelists would come to look back with some relish at the criminal celebrities of the early eighteenth century. In short, the period c. 1670–1770 can with some justification be seen as a time when propertied Londoners engaged with a greater variety of printed crime reporting than at any other time before or since. Before going on to consider the specific changes which took place in printed crime reporting during the London crime wave of 1747–55, it is first worth sketching some of the broader developments which took place across the first half of the eighteenth century in the genres we will be concerned with in this study. Three of those developments are particularly relevant for our purposes. First, the scale of crime news genres expanded significantly over the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in terms of both the space devoted to crime reporting within individual publications and (although this is harder to accurately measure) the print runs of those publications. The surviving evidence for newspaper circulation in early eighteenth-century London is patchy and in some cases unreliable, but from the fragmentary and admittedly problematic evidence that does exist, it seems that there was a notable increase in titles and production figures in this period.64 In 1712, around 12 papers were published in London, rising to 18 by mid-century.65 Annual newspaper circulation figures for England increased dramatically from an estimated 2.3 million copies in 1704, to perhaps 2.4 million in 1712, and then to 7.3 million in 1750. London was at the heart of this rapid development.66 Total weekly sales of newspapers in the capital had increased to around 100,000 by 1750, up from an estimated 44,000 at the beginning of the century, a significant rise even when considering the growth in London’s population over the same period.67 From sales of around 800–1,000 copies a day in the first decades of the eighteenth century, by mid-century some London dailies were selling in excess of 5,000 copies per issue.68 Tri-weeklies and weeklies likewise sold well: perhaps in the region of 2,500 and 3,500 copies per issue, respectively. The actual format of newspapers, by contrast, changed relatively little in the eighteenth century. Except for a brief period between 1712 and 1725 when titles were published in six pages – in order to evade stamp duties – after that time and certainly up to the 1750s, newspapers

Introduction

21

for the most part appeared in four pages per issue, with three columns of text per page.69 Until detailed work on the subject is carried out, it is difficult to ascertain how much of this newshole was taken up by the issue of crime and justice, and how the level of crime reporting fluctuated over the first half of the eighteenth century. Items of news about crime and varied aspects of criminal justice certainly seem to have been staples of newspaper production since the rapid rise of the genre from the beginning of the eighteenth century.70 During the 1720s, crime had become a subject of particular emphasis in some papers, most notably in John Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal. According to Michael Harris, even when the newspapers were curtailed in length after 1725, ‘current crime evidently remained a necessary ingredient of the news . . . providing an effective mixture of news and information, instruction and entertainment’.71 If crime reporting in the provincial Kentish Post is indicative of that in the London press – not unlikely, since 98 per cent of the Kentish Post’s total content was taken from London newspapers and newsletters – then by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, crime and justice was an established and prevalent feature of printed news in the capital: between 1729 and 1753, crime reports consistently accounted for some 20–30 per cent of the total reporting in the Kentish Post.72 It is unknown to what extent print runs for the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account fluctuated over the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is likely that they both continued to be printed in the thousands, but a more precise calculation is not possible. What is clear, however, is that the length of both publications increased substantially over this period as a result of changes in demand and the influence of the editors, publishers and the City of London authorities who controlled their production. In the face of competition from daily newspapers and rival compilations of trial accounts, the Proceedings were subjected to a number of changes after December 1729 in order to make them more attractive to readers. From the four to nine pages of mostly third-person accounts typical of the first decade of the eighteenth century, after 1730 the Proceedings expanded to some 24 pages and included a much greater amount of verbatim testimony.73 While first-person accounts were largely confined to the more sensational and interesting cases, and although much of what was said at court was left out, nevertheless from the second quarter of the eighteenth

22

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

century the Proceedings covered more trials at greater length than ever before. At the very least, a report (however brief) was provided of virtually all the cases tried at the Old Bailey. From the 1730s, the Proceedings also began to be issued in two parts for each individual session, and thus many more trials were covered at greater length.74 The Ordinary’s Account likewise expanded. Much like the newspapers, the Account increased from four to eight pages after the introduction of the Stamp Act in 1712 but reverted to the standard four-page format in 1725 when the loophole for evading the tax was closed. After December 1730, and particularly under the editorial control of John Applebee from 1735 to 1744 (also printer of the Original Weekly Journal), the Account lengthened dramatically, often to over 20 pages. At the same time, an ‘Appendix’ was frequently added to the Account, sometimes as long as 40 pages, containing additional material on the convicts. The dismissal of Applebee as printer of the Account in 1744 and the subsequent removal of James Guthrie as Ordinary in 1746 however produced an important shift in the publication. From then on, Applebee’s picaresque ‘Appendix’ was discontinued and the length of the Ordinary’s Account was scaled back to between 12 and 20 pages.75 Crime and justice also found expression in a growing number of pictorial prints and pamphlets of social commentary published over the first half of the eighteenth century. Little systematic information exists on the production and circulation of graphic prints in this period, but anecdotal evidence suggests that printed visual images were ubiquitous in London, ‘distributed to overflowing print shops and boisterous coffeehouses, pinned up in cluttered street windows, scattered across crowded shop counters and coffee tables, and then passed from hand to hand, or hung in framed glass, or pasted in folios’.76 Prints were published on a vast scale: the British Museum’s Catalogue of Prints and Drawings lists over 200 items for the year 1756 alone.77 This does not include the much larger number of images which were printed within the pages of books, pamphlets and single-sheet broadsides and ballads, items which have unfortunately survived in an inverse ratio to their level of production.78 Criminals, punishments, peace officers and legal professionals were a recurring theme in this visual print culture, appearing in a variety of formats divided by the wider schism between ‘popular’ prints produced by woodcut – for the most part inserted in such texts as execution broadsides,

Introduction

23

criminal biographies and chapbooks – and ‘higher’ forms of graphic art such as social satires produced by copper-plate engraving and sold as stand-alone products. J. A. Sharpe has provided the most extensive analysis of crime and the law in eighteenth-century satirical prints to date, concluding that while crime proper attracted little attention, they contained ‘a celebration of the English law and its place in the post-1688 constitution; and a steady stream of satires lampooning the rapacity and diabolical tricks of lawyers’. This was an overwhelming reinforcement of the conventional wisdom about crime and the law than a challenge to it, reflecting opinion rather than seeking to change it.79 Many of these themes were also addressed at length in a raft of social policy pamphlets which were printed at this time, often in runs of between 500 and 1,000 copies per edition. Indeed, in these works – ‘all too often the instrument of the propagandist’, as Ruth Paley notes – commentators frequently reiterated many of the stereotypes about crime, the law and its administration which were propagated by pictorial prints, no doubt in order to justify their calls for changes in policy.80 Although such pamphlets were printed in relatively few numbers, they apparently sold well, and by delving into crime and related social problems in more depth than any other form of print they helped to sharpen contemporary understandings of criminality and the measures available to deal with it, as well as keeping these issues at the forefront of public consciousness. A second notable development in printed crime news over the first half of the eighteenth century is its increasingly serious tone. To be sure, picaresque and titillating accounts which shied away from the grim realities of crime continued to appear throughout this period and beyond. For instance, trials for everyday crimes continued to be passed over in the Proceedings to make way for sensational cases and those which included either sexually explicit or scandalous content. But these seemed to have declined by the middle of the eighteenth century, and there are signs of a more respectable and sober representation of crime over time across all of the genres which we are concerned with. The publishers of the Proceedings were chastised by the City of London authorities in 1725 for the ‘lewd and indecent’ manner in which a trial was reported featuring a phonetic account of the testimony given by a drunken Irishman.81 The growing respectability (and possibly declining readership) of the Proceedings is also suggested by the decreasing numbers of advertisements

24

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

which were printed for medical wares such as ‘a speedy cure for the itch’ and ‘the true essence or spirits of scurvy-grass, both purging and plain’.82 The dismissal of Applebee in 1744 also marked a move towards a more serious and staid style to the Ordinary’s Account. According to Guthrie, Applebee had been dismissed on the grounds that the content and tone of the paper had deteriorated, ‘being published in a stile [sic] and language a little too gross and indelicate for the better kind of readers’.83 Not only was Applebee’s ‘Appendix’ abandoned – ‘a silly paper . . . stuff ’d with a number of incredible stories and robberies, of which nobody knew but himself ’, as Guthrie described it – but the sermons were also now generally omitted or replaced with essays or editorials on moral and social issues, and more attention was afforded to the crimes and trials of the condemned rather than their confessions.84 Indeed, by mid-century, the Ordinaries and publishers of the Account – as well as the authors of other criminal biographies – frequently apologized for the publication of ‘vulgar’ or ‘mean’ content, justifying such material on their intention to ‘faithfully and ingenuously’ report the words and crimes of their subjects. This shift can be explained in large part by an increasing reluctance among the better sort of readers to see the executed criminal as an ‘everyman’ whose fate could befall anyone who took the first small step onto the slippery slope from minor moral failings to death at Tyburn.85 The increasingly serious tone of crime reporting and the concomitant decline in more sensationalist and didactic forms of crime literature might also be explained by the expansion of detailed information provided by newspapers and competing accounts of trials and criminal biographies in the early-eighteenth century, which rendered such sensationalist and didactic accounts increasingly implausible.86 Respectable readers were thus perhaps beginning to withdraw from traditional representations of the criminal as ‘everyman’ by the middle of the eighteenth century. Elite interest in the lives of ordinary criminals was certainly waning by the final third of the century, when the Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account lost their traditional audience. By the 1770s, the Account ceased to be published regularly, and such was the fall in demand for the Proceedings – in combination with the pressures of competition from newspapers and the increasing burden placed by the City authorities on the publishers to provide fuller accounts of trials – that in 1787 a subsidy had to

Introduction

25

be paid by the City to ensure their continued publication.87 Yet this waning interest among London’s respectable and wealthy inhabitants seems to have occurred in earnest from the 1760s onwards. Indeed, while the seeds of disinterest may have been sown by the 1750s, there is evidence to suggest that propertied Londoners continued up to that time to have a significant appetite for printed accounts which addressed ordinary criminals and their crimes as a social problem (and not just forgers and other typically elite offenders, who gained increasing attention in the final third of the century).88 As we will see, editors of the huge volume of newspapers which were printed at mid-century clearly placed some stock in murders, robberies, burglaries and lesser forms of property theft as subjects which sold. Although accurate sales figures are not available, the enduring demand for criminal biographies – of robbers, murderers and the like – is indicated by the multiple editions which many such works went into at mid-century, as well as the continued efforts of authors to puff their own works and highlight the deficiencies of rival accounts. On 20 June 1746, for instance, the editors of the General Advertiser noted to readers that William Russel had, just before his execution for highway robbery, delivered a paper to John Nicholson, a printer in the Old Bailey. It would be printed, the newspaper announced, at noon the next day, ‘at the price of four pence, and may be had at any of the pamphlet-shops, or of the news carriers . . . and anything that may be printed relating to these malefactors (except this genuine account) will be impositions on the publick [sic]’.89 Expensive compilations of trials and criminal biographies of ordinary offenders recently brought to justice moreover continued to be produced up until the 1760s, after which time such compilations tended to focus on criminal cases from earlier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The genres of printed crime reporting which we are concerned with continued into the 1740s and 1750s to be priced at a level which would have limited its sale for the most part to the middling and upper sorts. Most newspapers by the middle of the century cost either 2 or 3 pence, while the Account was charged at 6 pence per copy, and the Proceedings at 4 or 6 pence per issue (which meant that an entire sessions could cost up to one shilling). Criminal biographies, social policy pamphlets and graphic prints as a rule were even more expensive, generally in the region of 6 pence or even 1 or 2 shillings. This was a considerable outlay for skilled artisans, let alone the

26

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

labouring poor. The 1757 price of 2½ pence for a newspaper, for instance, constituted about 2 per cent of a London artisan’s weekly wage, and as much as 5 per cent of that of a labourer. The fact that there was such an outpouring of this crime literature in the years 1747–55 suggests that there was still a market for printed news among large sections of London’s wealthier inhabitants, particularly during periods of intense concern about crime. In retrospect, the 1750s was perhaps the twilight of the golden age of writing about crime, when propertied Londoners voraciously consumed a wide range of forms of printed crime reporting which had emerged with the rapid development of print culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It is to those events of 1747–55 that we now turn. The years immediately surrounding the end of the War of Austrian Succession in 1748 witnessed a remarkable crime wave in print and prosecution wave in the courts in London – a huge increase in printed crime reporting accompanied by a dramatic rise in the numbers of property offences brought before all levels of the justice system. In the wake of these developments, contemporaries expressed considerable anxiety about crime, and extensive – even unprecedented – efforts were taken to deal with the problem. Several historians (Bob Harris and Nicholas Rogers in particular) have provided detailed narratives of the mid-century crime wave, and have addressed the representation of crime in print (primarily in London newspapers) and some of the changes to policing, prosecution and punishment that took place in this period.90 It is not my intention in this study to offer the same kind of detailed narrative of the mid-century crime wave that other scholars have. My aim, rather, is to use the period as a case study for how crime and justice was represented in a range of crime literature genres, and to situate this within the context of changes in the law and its administration. More broadly, I want to use the mid-century London crime wave to explore how the development of print culture in the eighteenth century influenced the messages about crime and justice that were offered to Londoners in print, and to think about the possible impact that such messages had upon contemporary attitudes and actions. In carrying out this analysis, a range of printed and unpublished sources have been drawn upon. Issues relating to specific sources and methodological problems will be addressed at relevant points in the subsequent chapters. But it is worth

Introduction

27

considering here briefly the range of sources consulted and some of the broad issues of analysis. A quantitative analysis has been carried out on a sample of four London newspapers – the General Advertiser, London Evening Post, Whitehall Evening Post and Old England – for the years 1746–52 to uncover patterns of crime reporting in the metropolitan press. This has been supplemented by a qualitative reading of these and other titles for the wider period 1744–55, demonstrating that the qualitative representation of crime and justice in the London press also underwent significant changes at this time. As the most detailed source of information available to contemporaries on the issue of crime and justice, the Proceedings must have played a key role in shaping perceptions during the mid-century crime wave. All 88 editions of the Proceedings published in the years 1745–55 have been examined here. The dramatic increase in prosecutions for property theft which took place at the Old Bailey in the years after 1748, in combination with impositions placed on the publisher by the Lord Mayor, resulted in important changes to the way in which trials were reported in the Proceedings. In Chapter 3 we will think about what effects those changes might have had on contemporary perceptions of crime and justice, particularly in conjunction with the developments which were taking place in newspaper crime reporting at the same time. Other genres of print must furthermore have served to shape contemporary perceptions of the mid-century crime wave. At least one hundred editions of the Ordinary’s Account and some 50 other titles of criminal biography were published in the years 1740–60 (all of which have been analysed here), providing contemporaries with unparalleled access to the voice of the criminal at a time of mounting prosecutions and serious concern about crime. Stand-alone graphic prints and images printed within criminal biographies also addressed the issue of crime and justice during the crime wave – most famously those by William Hogarth, but also a host of other engravers. These are particularly important for their representations of criminals and punishment, and 30 such prints have been studied here. All these publications offered contemporaries messages about the efficacy of prosecution, policing and penal practices in dealing with the crime problem, but this was discussed at greatest length in social policy pamphlets. An unprecedented number of such works were published in the capital in the years 1740–60, covering crime as well as related social problems

28

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

such as poverty, unemployment and drunkenness. Fifty such pamphlets have been examined here. Prosecutions in London also increased dramatically in the years after 1747. At the Old Bailey, prosecutions for all offences (over 90 per cent of which were for property crimes) rose from 369 in 1747 to 611 in 1749, an increase of some 66 per cent, and remained at a relatively high level until 1754 (see Graph 1.1). From the fragmentary evidence that is available, it also seems that increasing numbers of petty thefts were prosecuted in the metropolis in the years 1747–55. And at all levels of authority, from the wards and parishes of the metropolis, to the magistrates, aldermen and Members of Parliament, reforms were discussed and significant changes to the law and its administration were initiated in an attempt to deal with the seemingly pressing problem of crime at mid-century. The primary sources that I have drawn upon to uncover these patterns of prosecution and the changes in 650 600 550 500

Prosecutions

450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 1760

1759

1758

1756 1757

1755

1754

1752 1753

1751

1750

1748 1749

1747

1746

1744 1745

1743

1742

1740 1741

0

Year

Graph 1.1 Prosecutions at the Old Bailey, for all offences, by year, 1740–60. Source: Old Bailey Proceedings Online [version 7.0, accessed 19 June 2013], ‘Statistics Search’, tabulating year, for all offences, between 1740 and 1760, and counting by offence.

Introduction

29

the law and its administration during the mid-century panic about crime include manuscript judicial and government records. Again, we will examine the particular difficulties of using these sources at relevant points in the subsequent chapters. In general terms, however, it should be noted that a huge amount of research has examined the problems and possibilities of using manuscript judicial sources (such as indictments) for information on crime and justice in the eighteenth century.91 It seems clear that while these sources tell us relatively little about the realities of crime, they reveal much about the administration of the law. House of correction calendars for the City of London, Middlesex and Westminster have been used to quantify the number of people subjected to summary justice for petty theft and morality offences. The City of London sessions books, the Westminster sessions rolls and the process register of indictments for the Middlesex sessions of the peace have moreover demonstrated how many people were prosecuted for such offences in the lower courts of the metropolis. For evidence of how magistrates responded to crime at mid-century, I have relied upon the Guildhall justice room minute books and the repertories of the Court of Aldermen for the City of London, as well as the sessions papers for Westminster and Middlesex. Finally, the State Papers Domestic (held at the National Archives); the Hardwicke and Newcastle papers (held at the British Library); and the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (accessed online) have been analysed for information on the attitudes and decision making of judges and the central government. I have made extensive use of the recent wave of projects which have digitized and made available online many of the printed and unpublished sources which are at the centre of this study, most notably the Old Bailey Proceedings Online; London Lives, 1690-1800; British Newspapers, 1600-1900; Eighteenth-Century Collections Online; and House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online. By providing instant access to vast collections of material and new methods of analysis, these projects are of huge value to scholars.92 Without them, much of the research for this study simply would not have been possible. Yet it should also be said that for all the benefits that they offer, these online resources do pose potential pitfalls.93 Even seemingly simple actions such as keyword searches have limitations and challenges. Inaccurate rekeying in the digitization process or poor-quality OCR text recognition can in some instances substantially reduce the success rate of keyword searching.

30

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

Keyword searching can also, of course, result in reading snippets of primary sources out of context. In order to overcome these problems, when undertaking keyword searching I have used alternate spellings, Boolean commands and fuzzy searching to improve the success rate of keyword identification. I have also read search results within their broader context, for example, in reading specific newspaper crime reports within the context of the entire issue. The Old Bailey Proceedings Online in particular has made it possible to quickly compile patterns of prosecution, verdicts and sentences at the Old Bailey upon the basis of the information recorded in the Proceedings. This is of immense value to historians, and I have made extensive use of it in this study. Again, however, it is important to be clear about what exactly this entails and what the potential problems are. Counting through the Proceedings is not the same as counting bills of indictment (the traditional means by which historians have compiled patterns of prosecution and decision making). For instance, the printed trial reports in the Proceedings in a relatively small (although still significant) number of cases do not include enough information to place the offence within the specific category of grand or petty larceny, and this can influence counts of offences. Moreover, as we will see in Chapter 3, there are serious problems in using the ‘Statistics search’ function of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online without also paying attention to the broader processes of prosecutorial decision making that are evidenced by manuscript judicial records such as indictments. In short, as the project developers behind the Old Bailey Proceedings Online note, it is important to query the statistics that are produced by examining the qualitative nature of the results, and by thinking carefully about how the numbers might have been influenced by wider processes which are evidenced by other sources.94 The same thing goes, of course, for compiling statistics through manual analysis of manuscript judicial records. Through an analysis of this range of printed crime literature and unpublished judicial records, and using the mid-century London crime wave of 1747–55 as an illuminating case, the following study aims to explore how crime and justice was represented in print, and to place those representations within the context of changes to the law and its administration, in order to think about how crime literature might have shaped propertied Londoners’ perceptions of, and responses to, crime. It does so across four substantive

Introduction

31

chapters. Chapter 2 provides a brief examination of how contemporaries of the eighteenth century read the genres of crime literature which we are concerned with in this study, and situates this within the broader context of the various means by which public knowledge about crime and justice was constructed. Using the mid-century period as a case study, Chapter 3 then undertakes a detailed investigation of the role played by printed crime reporting in post-war panics about crime that were a recurrent feature of eighteenth-century London. Chapter 4 shifts the attention from printed representations of crime to the messages about policing that were disseminated by mid-century crime literature, in order to think about what contemporaries might have learnt from print about the causes of crime and the efficacy of the justice system in bringing offenders to condign punishment. Print culture, parliamentary investigations into crime and justice, and the making of the criminal law are the focus of Chapter 5, the final substantive chapter of the book. It explores the ways in which printed crime reporting contributed to a moral panic about homicide in the early 1750s which provided a crucial context for the introduction of the Murder Act in 1752, one of the most severe pieces of penal legislation to come out of Parliament in the eighteenth century. Chapter 6, finally, provides some overarching conclusions centred around the content, causes and consequences of mid-century crime literature, and suggests some of the implications that this might hold for the developing historiography of crime and justice in eighteenth-century England, and for our perspective on the modern relationship between the media, crime, perceptions and justice policy.

2

Contemporary Readings of Crime Literature ‘All this is not Imagination, but Matter of Fact’

Which genres of crime literature did propertied Londoners of the eighteenth century read? How, in particular, did they read the genres which we are concerned with? What did they learn about crime upon the basis of this material? And in what other ways could they learn about crime and justice? These questions have received little attention from scholars, even in detailed studies of eighteenth-century crime literature. This has left them open to the charge – as we will see – that contemporaries in fact learnt relatively little from print, and that, if anything, they viewed crime literature as unreflective of crime and justice in the round. Norma Landau in particular has recently challenged the argument made by Peter King and Esther Snell (among others) that since very few inhabitants of eighteenth-century London would have had extensive first-hand experience of crime or criminal justice institutions, a large proportion of the population would thus have gained most of their knowledge about the prevalence of crime, the effectiveness of policing and the nature of justice from printed sources, and especially from the newspapers.1 Instead, Landau has asserted, more people had experience of crime than King and others have assumed, experience which readers set against crime reporting in the press.2 Landau’s recent challenge is an important one which needs to be recognized. Her argument should make us think more carefully about the social context within which contemporaries read printed crime reporting, and recognize the other means by which public knowledge about crime was constructed. As I hope to show, however, the basic assumption that the majority of contemporaries had little direct experience of crime almost certainly still holds true. Moreover, the evidence of diaries suggests

34

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

that, particularly in terms of the most serious offences, many contemporaries undoubtedly based their perceptions of the nature of crime at least in part upon what they read in print. And in combination with other sources such as the internal evidence of crime literature – for example, in the directions given by authors to readers as to how their works should be read – diaries allow us to address some of the fundamental questions laid out at the start of this chapter. This evidence is certainly limited and not without problems. But it is essential that we engage with this material and the questions posed earlier (however difficult that might be) in order to build up a basic sense of what role print had to play in the construction of public knowledge about crime. One way in which eighteenth-century Londoners could learn about crime was through their own direct experience as either victims or witnesses. But gauging the scale of crime in this period is an extremely difficult task, given the lack of sources. The absence of any kind of centralized police force in the eighteenth century – not to mention the fact that the onus of finding and prosecuting criminals was placed squarely on the shoulders of the victim – means we have no such thing as bureaucratically organized victim surveys from which to compile levels of offending. Crimes prosecuted in the courts represent just a fraction of the level of ‘real’ crime committed – the problem is that we have no sense of just how extensive the ‘dark figure’ of unprosecuted crime was. In an effort to provide a new means of gauging crime in eighteenthcentury London (instead of counting indictments), Norma Landau has counted the crimes which were committed against 65 metropolitan Justices of the Peace in the years 1768–93 as evidenced by London newspapers and the Old Bailey Proceedings.3 This count of reported crimes revealed a total of 25 offences committed against the Justices. On average, therefore, about 2.2 of every 100 metropolitan magistrates were the victims of crime each year in the later eighteenth century. Five of the sixty-five Justices sampled were victims of street or highway robbery: a rate of 4.4 victims per 1,000 JPs. This level of victimization, Landau states, is much higher than that experienced by propertied Americans in the late twentieth century.4 Moreover, given that many other crimes committed against the Justices likely went unreported – although Landau is unable to say precisely how many – this is almost certainly an underestimation of the total level of offending experienced by the London magistrates. In Landau’s words, this evidence ‘suggests that substantial

Contemporary Readings of Crime Literature

35

residents of London – readers of its newspapers – were familiar with crime. They had been victims of crime, or witnessed crime, or knew someone who had.’5 It also throws doubt, she argues, on the premise that many recent studies of eighteenth-century newspaper crime reporting have started from – namely (to quote Peter King), that ‘since most individuals rarely have any personal experience of crime or riot, news coverage of these events will often be the main element that shapes their perception of the prevalence and nature of crime and disorder in their locality’.6 Instead, Landau argues, propertied Londoners of the eighteenth century read crime literature in a context in which violent crime was a very real and prevalent threat, and in which social tensions between rich and poor could frequently boil over into popular unrest. Landau’s argument is important, not least in highlighting the fact that recent studies of crime literature have largely failed to interrogate the ways in which contemporaries could learn about crime besides print. But if Landau’s findings should make us more aware of the social context of contemporary readings of crime literature, they do not, I would argue, undermine the assumption that relatively few contemporaries would have been a victim of crime, certainly not the more serious forms of lethal violence, robbery and burglary which were the primary focus of printed crime reporting and which generated considerable anxieties. Even when allowing for the fact that Landau’s count of crimes against the London Justices is conservative, the rate of victimization (2.2 per 100) is still relatively low. The figure of 4.4 Justices per 1,000 who were a victim of robbery in Landau’s count likewise equates to a rate of victimization of less than 0.5 per cent. Even if we were to assume that just 10 per cent of the robberies committed against metropolitan Justices actually resulted in a report in the newspapers or a trial at the Old Bailey, then this would still only equate to an estimated one in every 20 magistrates being a victim of violent theft each year. And as we will now see, the evidence of diaries moreover suggests that while the propertied classes likely had some experience of low-level property appropriation – such as pilfering, theft by servants and burglaries of outbuildings and the like – they seem to have had much less experience of the kinds of serious and personally threatening crimes which made up the majority of newspaper crime reporting. Most Londoners were unlikely to have been the victims of serious crimes of violence and property theft. And as discussed in Chapter 3, printed crime reporting offered

36

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

a heavily distorted image of the nature of crime as prosecuted in the courts and, by extension, the nature of criminality as a whole. We will examine the particular issues relating to specific diaries used in this chapter at relevant points in the following discussion. But it is here worth considering in more general terms how the nature of eighteenth-century diaries and their writers could influence the kinds of information that they recorded, and to think about the implications that this might hold for our purposes. By the seventeenth century, diary writing had become an established mechanism for keeping personal records, and in the early modern period there was a rapid expansion in the form.7 The religious upheavals of the sixteenth century had hastened the development of the spiritual diary as an independent form of writing.8 A growing focus on the individual and the importance of self-examination which emerged from the English Reformation, along with the Puritan emphasis on a direct relationship between the individual and God, all promoted diaries as a means not just of keeping one’s accounts, but of keeping an account of oneself.9 There seemed to be an inexorable drive among many ‘to put their thoughts to paper as a means of cultivating the holy life by techniques of self-examination and self-revelation’.10 The seventeenth century also witnessed an expansion in the diary as a form of systematic observation, a means to order, systematize and render the world known. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in particular, the private diary as a record of daily events flourished as part of a broader stream of objects and practices such as clockdials, minute-hands and newspapers which ‘were new precisely in that they called attention away from the endpoints and invested it in middles – of the current hour, of the on-going life – that were sharply defined and indefinitely extended’.11 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, both of these two developments – of diaries as a form of spiritual accounting and as a running, day-to-day record of events – are often evident within individual diaries.12 Indeed, many of the diaries which we will survey combined personal introspection with an outward-facing interest in local and national events. They are also indicative of the typical social status of eighteenth-century diarists more generally. Advances in education and literacy doubtless contributed to the social expansion of diary writing in the early modern period – many examples exist of diaries written by members of the lower-middling sorts.13 But even when accounting for the fact that diaries of the upper-middling sorts and the

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37

gentry are more likely to have survived, it would still seem that diary-writing was a practice which, although not confined to the social elite, nevertheless was more prevalent among that social group than any other. The evidence which can therefore be gleaned from eighteenth-century diaries is heavily weighted towards the upper ranks of society. It is also influenced by the motivations of the diarists themselves. As Ralph Houlbrooke argues, it seems unlikely that diaries were ever kept by more than a minority of people, even among the propertied.14 Why then did some keep diaries and others not? The motivations were of course numerous, but among many diaries there does seem to be an overarching theme of separation – either physical or psychological – and even inner turmoil. This, too, is a marker of some – although by no means all – of the diaries we will come across. Much of the recent work conducted on early modern diaries has stressed the extent to which these documents are culturally constructed and not a simple, unmediated record of fact.15 Diaries are both historical and literary documents – however trivial or personal a record the diary may be, it is also a constructed form which is influenced by cultural concepts and other genres of writing, through which the diarist’s perceptions are filtered and by which they are shaped. Diaries are moreover intensely personal, and idiosyncratic, documents.16 The historical evidence which diaries provide should certainly not be automatically taken as representative of ideas or practices more widely. We need to be sensitive to the tensions between the individual who wrote the diary and the wider aspects of society which we are trying to recover through these documents.17 They are certainly not unproblematic as a source, but as we will see, diaries often provide evidence about eighteenth-century contemporaries’ experiences and perceptions of crime and justice which cannot be found elsewhere. Through diaries we can gain interesting and valuable flashes of light into the darkness of how public knowledge about crime was constructed in the eighteenth century. In the eight provincial diaries of the eighteenth century analysed by Peter King, covering a total of 132 years, some 43 property offences were recorded as being committed against the household of the diarist. These households therefore experienced, on average, a minimum of three property appropriations per decade. The vast majority of such crimes, however, were for offences which did not pose a personal threat of violence to the victims.18

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

My own analysis of 17 published eighteenth-century London diaries suggests much the same – references to the direct experience of crime as victims are rare, even among diarists who kept relatively systematic records of day-to-day events.19 There are certainly cases in which London diarists noted witnessing serious crimes. On 1 November 1773, a barrister of the Middle Temple named John Baker recorded in his diary that a neighbour’s house had recently been broken into between five and six o’clock in the morning. Most disturbingly of all, Baker noted that as one of the inhabitants of the house cried out ‘thieves’ from the window, the offenders had apparently threatened to shoot her.20 Two highwaymen came off rather worse in Sylas Neville’s diary account of the robbery he witnessed in September 1782: after stopping a coach in Epping Forest, one of the malefactors was shot by a gentleman in the carriage, and the other was ‘dangerously wounded and taken’.21 Such accounts as these are relatively scarce in eighteenth-century diaries. Far more common, however, are instances in which London diarists mention their experiences of attending the various public forums of criminal justice in the capital, particularly trials at the Old Bailey, visiting prisoners held in Newgate and witnessing executions at Tyburn. Again, this provides another crucial context which we need to consider before moving on to the role which print had to play in the construction of public knowledge about crime and justice. It is not my intention to undertake a detailed – let alone comprehensive – discussion of the experiences which eighteenth-century London diarists had of attending the various public forums of criminal justice. This would certainly be a worthwhile subject of investigation. My aim, rather, is simply to highlight, through a few brief examples, that contemporaries would have read crime literature within the context of what they also knew about crime and justice through witnessing examinations, trials and punishments. Throughout the century, importance continued to be placed on the public nature of criminal justice. Access to the judicial process remained open to Londoners as spectators (although of course this could vary according to the particular situation and the persons involved). Many London diarists of the mid- to later eighteenth century certainly took up these opportunities. The pre-trial examination sessions first introduced by the Bow Street magistrate Henry Fielding as early as 1750, and significantly extended by his half-brother John from the later 1750s onwards, provided Londoners with at least one such means of

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witnessing crime and justice directly.22 In his first few weeks in exile in London, the American loyalist, Samuel Curwen, set out on Wednesday, 23 August 1775, ‘to Sir John Fielding[’]s office in Bow Street, in order to attend the process and examination of the prisoners for thefts and robberies, housebreakings, assaults, etc.’ At the session, Curwen saw ‘six or eight culprits [who] were brought to the bar in chains all but one being remanded back to take their trial at the next assizes, only one being allowed to give bail’.23 Curwen also attended criminal trials at the Old Bailey, as did John Baker, a barrister of the Middle Temple. In an entry for 23 May 1776, Baker noted in his diary: ‘went Old Bailey – heard trials of one Storer, a farrier’s man, for poisoning a horse of Mr Whitebread, a brewer – (on the Black Act which makes it death.) Jury went out. Little boy of 11 or 12 began to be tried for stealing six table spoons, but I came away.’24 But it was the law’s most awesome spectacle of all that London diarists mentioned witnessing more than anything else: executions at Tyburn.25 On 6 June 1781, Samuel Curwen rose earlier than usual in order to see six criminals being carted to execution, the ‘first phenomenon [sic]’ of the kind he had witnessed since coming to London. Holborn was, as usual, ‘filled with eager eyed spectators’. After watching the procession pass by, Curwen wandered over to Tyburn and saw the offenders ‘turned off amidst a vast throng’.26 ‘Tis a melancholy consideration’, Curwen noted some few months later following the execution of 12 more offenders at Tyburn, ‘that robberies have of late greatly increast [sic] in case of executions manifest, as indeed thieving of all kinds, here, meaning the metropolis, rapidly increases.’27 Eighteenth-century Londoners could, then, learn about crime and justice through direct experience as victims and witnesses of crime, or as spectators at the various open forums of the justice system. This provides a crucial, if underappreciated, context for understanding how contemporaries read crime literature. Until more detailed work is carried out, we will have little precise sense of how Londoners (and Britons more widely) learnt about crime and justice, and what role print had to play in this regard. Eighteenth-century diaries and correspondence, as well as the internal evidence of crime literature itself, certainly provide a tentative suggestion that contemporaries read a wide range of printed material on the subject of crime, that they engaged with this material critically, and that in many instances they came to anxious conclusions about the state of crime upon the basis of what they read in print.

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Reading practices could be just as specific to the individual as they are today. The evidence of diaries and correspondence must thus be treated with some caution, as should the internal evidence of crime literature, for authors often had particular agendas in mind – not least, marketing strategies – when advising their readers on how to approach texts. But it is essential that we pay attention to the admittedly fragmentary and problematic evidence of how texts were read in order to develop a better understanding of what impact they had on individuals and society as a whole.28 It is, as historical studies of reader response remind us, the reader who invests texts with meaning.29 And reading practices were certainly undergoing some change in the eighteenth century with the huge growth of print culture. This change in reading practices was less a wholesale shift from ‘intensive’ to ‘extensive’ reading, but rather, to more varied reading, ‘ranging from repeated and careful examination of some texts to the perfunctory perusal of others’.30 The method of reading used could vary according to genre, although not necessarily in ways we might expect. By examining the various ways in which crime literature could (and, as it was advocated by authors, should) be read, we can at least think about the potential impact of printed representations upon contemporary perceptions of crime, even if we cannot recover individual reader responses to particular texts.31 The genres of crime literature which were primarily aimed at the middling and upper sorts, and which we are concerned with – namely newspapers, the Old Bailey Proceedings, Ordinary’s Account, criminal biographies, social policy pamphlets and graphic prints – were seemingly read for a number of different purposes, not all of which were necessarily mutually exclusive. Some publications, such as the Proceedings, Account and criminal biographies, were frequently touted as appropriate instruction material for the young. Samuel Richardson believed that the Proceedings and dying speeches of criminals should ‘inform the inconsiderate youth, by the confessions of the dying malefactors, how naturally, as it were step by step, swearing, cursing, profaneness, drunkenness, whoredom, theft, robbery, murder, and the gallows, succeed one another!’32 Similar claims were to be made throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century and after. A four-volume compendium of criminal biography, The Tyburn Chronicle: or, Villainy Display’d in all its Branches (1768), printed the text of the royal licence granted to the publisher which was issued, it was claimed, from a belief that the work would ‘be of the

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utmost advantage to our subjects in general, and more especially to the youth of these kingdoms; as by exhibiting the gradations of vice, and shewing the picture in its native deformity, it will effectually advance the cause of religion and virtue’.33 Eight lines of verse printed on the title page provided a similar message, if in a rather more dramatic style: How dreadful the fate of the wretches who fall, / A victim to laws they have broke! / Of vice, the beginning is frequently small, / But how fatal at length is the stroke! / The content of these volumes will amply display / The steps which offenders have trod: / Learn hence, then, each reader, the laws to obey / Of your country, your king, and your God.34

Printed criminal lives were likewise touted as appropriate moral instruction for the young in another – highly successful – compendium first published in 1779 under the tile of The Malefactor’s Register: or, the Tyburn and Newgate Calendar. A frontispiece to the publication depicts a mother of evidently genteel status handing the five-volume work to her son, ‘and tenderly intreating [sic] him to regard the instructions therein recorded’.35 At the very least, some wealthy and respectable parents did not consider the kinds of immoralities, indecencies and shocking crimes which were such a feature of printed accounts of trials and criminal lives as unsuitable material for their children. In the 1770s, John Baker’s young daughters regularly read printed accounts of trials for abductions, murders and adulteries.36 Yet others certainly were concerned that criminal lives might in fact have a destructive effect on the young. One author accepted that some people might wonder whether ‘the memoirs of such abandoned wretches have a quite contrary effect, and be an incitement, rather than a curb, to the licentiousness of our youth, already too much depraved, and, in general, more apt to follow the worst [sic] than the best examples?’37 Newspapers, criminal biographies and the Proceedings also presented themselves to readers as sources of information on, and therefore guides on how to avoid, prevalent criminal practices. Biographers assured readers that their accounts would prove useful in themselves for preventing crime. ‘The many robberies and murders which have of late been committed by servants,’ one author asserted to masters, ‘may justly alarm you, and raise some uneasy apprehensions in your breasts,’ yet assured his readers that his ‘little piece points out a remedy for those fears.’38 An account of the executed offender

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Charles Speckman advertised its ‘several maxims, hints, and remarks, by way of caution to the public, to prevent or detect the designs of sharpers and thieves from being carried into execution’.39 Warnings about criminal techniques were moreover printed in the London press. The Whitehall Evening Post reported in November 1749 that ‘a gang of fellows have made a practice of snatching off people’s hats, at the ends of alleys, and places little frequented, and running off with them,’ which, the editor noted, ‘we mention to put people on their guard’.40 Advice on crime prevention was also offered. After a number of iron grates were taken away from gentlemen’s houses in 1757, it was reported that ‘Mr [John] Fielding recommends it to all families to direct their servants to examine these grates at the same time they examine the fastenings of the door before they go to bed, and to give charge to their own watchmen to examine them hourly as they pass.’41 Such claims to public utility at other times appear to have been a thin veil for the inclusion of diverting material. Readers of The Discoveries of John Poulter, alias Baxter (1754), a 47-page pamphlet which went through at least 11 editions in its first 2 years of publication, may well have gained instruction from its (among other things, according to the title page) ‘directions to secure houses from being broke open,’ the ‘useful cautions to tradesmen and others who travel the roads, to prevent their being robbed,’ and the manner in which ‘shopkeepers are cheated by shoplifters,’ all so fully described ‘that everyone who reads the book, may certainly know them at any time, and so be upon their guard against being cheated by them’. But the work’s primary purpose seems to have been regaling readers with canting terms, as well as ‘a full account of all the robberies [Poulter] has committed, and the surprising tricks and frauds he has practised for the space of 5 years last past, in different parts of England’.42 For some contemporaries, such works were believed to act less as guides for the honest on how to avoid crime than as means by which the criminal fraternity might learn techniques for committing offences.43 Others likewise worried that the publication of trial accounts such as that provided in the Proceedings – particularly accounts of acquittals – might also provide offenders with ‘tricks and alibis that would allow them to avoid conviction should they be put on trial’.44 This is not to say that instruction could not be joined with entertainment. Indeed, as Andrea McKenzie has demonstrated, authors of crime literature frequently promoted their works in open-ended terms to attract the widest possible readership, and proclaimed the judicious combination of instruction

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and amusement as a means of both moral insulation and denigrating the competition.45 Many criminal biographers were careful to assure readers that diverting content came as a natural result of the unembellished ‘truth’ which they reported. Some spoke in highly defensive tones, loftily arguing that crime literature for entertainment’s sake alone was highly frowned upon, if not ‘criminal’ in itself. ‘Our reflections, when we make any,’ one compiler of criminal biography noted, ‘shall be just, and naturally arising from the story, whether they are calculated to raise a smile or a serious thought; for occasions of both kinds will frequently offer themselves in a work of this nature.’46 A mid-century author of trial accounts likewise believed his ‘little histories will afford the curious peruser, not only instruction, but an agreeable amusement’.47 ‘I would not have my readers imagine,’ declared one compiler of criminal biography, ‘that because I talk of rendring [sic] books of this kind useful, that I have thrown out any part of what may be stiled [sic] entertaining.’48 Newspaper editors too adopted the tactic. In February 1746, the editor of the General Advertiser puffed the ‘uncommon encouragement’ that the paper had received from the public, sales having apparently doubled over the previous 6 months, to such an extent that the proprietors would now be publishing a second edition each morning at 9.00 a.m. Such success, he believed, was due to ‘the utmost pains [that] are constantly taken, to give the most material and early intelligence, both foreign and domestick [sic]; and that no expence [sic] will be spared, in the procuring of every other article that can make a daily paper useful and entertaining’.49 Readers were regularly encouraged to read printed accounts of crime critically. Criminal biographers frequently called on readers to ‘judge for themselves,’ by comparing their more ‘authentic’ accounts against other ‘fictitious trials, or rather incoherent accounts.’50 On many occasions, the public were also invited to view original material at the printing house as proof of the veracity of the accounts. ‘If any should doubt the authenticity of the facts herein related,’ declared the publisher of a mid-century biography of the highwayman Dennis Neale, ‘we can only say, that the curious may, if they please, see the original manuscript as wrote by himself, and delivered to us.’51 Similar calls to ‘let the reader judge’ were moreover regularly voiced in the reviews of social policy pamphlets which were printed in monthly magazines. In 1753, the Monthly Review provided an analysis of Henry Fielding’s account of the notorious case of Elizabeth Canning by comparing it to rival works

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including Dr Hill’s The Story of Eliz Canning Considered (1753), which, it was argued, ‘seems to have the advantage in the dispute, from [its] more intimate acquaintance with the opposite side of the question to that on which Mr Fielding has engaged’.52 Three years previously, the Monthly Review had justified its detailed review of The Right Method of Maintaining Security in Person and Property (1751), written in opposition to Fielding’s Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), in order ‘that our readers may be able to judge for themselves, which of the two deserves the preference’.53 Suspicions of almost all accounts would have been fostered amidst the constant attacks on competing works and the seemingly endless claims and counter-claims to ‘truth’.54 In the face of competing and sometimes contradictory accounts of crime, in many instances readers would have had little choice but to engage critically with texts, to weigh up the respective merits and defects of individual works. Printed crime reporting in the types of publication we are concerned with were evidently read by some with a sceptical eye. Midcentury pamphlets on criminal justice policy could for instance come in for substantial criticism in the periodical press. Some criticized works for glaring omissions, the Magazine of Magazines in 1751 expressing bewilderment at Henry Fielding’s neglect of streetwalkers and bawdy houses in his Enquiry.55 Others complained of inaccuracies, the Monthly Review claiming that the High Constable of Holborn, Saunders Welch, in his Observations on the Office of Constable (1758) had ‘made distinctions which are neither founded in law or justice’.56 Even the central arguments of social policy pamphlets were challenged. Henry Fielding’s disparagement of the lower orders and indifference to the vices of the great attracted criticism in a number of periodical essays: ‘to prevent by law the enjoyment of any pleasure, or in the indulgence of any vice, amongst those of inferior rank, whilst it is made fashionable by the practice of the great among us,’ a contributor to the London Magazine commented of Fielding’s Enquiry, ‘I shall always look on as a chimerical project.’57 Explanations for these perceived omissions, inaccuracies and one-sided arguments could be found in the biases of their authors, it was argued, suggesting that readers may have been aware of the personal motives behind the production of pamphlets. ‘At a loss’ in accounting for Henry Fielding’s neglect of streetwalkers and bawdy houses in his Enquiry, a writer in one periodical believed it had two causes: ‘one of which is, that the author being, as I am informed, not only a

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trading justice, but a trading author, he has not lately perhaps had time to read anything but what he writes himself ’; and secondly, the allegation of which the reviewer hoped was not true, ‘that not only many of our constables, but many of our justices, derive great advantages from our street-walkers and publick [sic] bawdy-houses, by laying them under annual or casual’ payments.58 Another contributor to the Monthly Review blamed the ‘frequently trivial and needless, and sometimes erroneous’ observations made by John Fielding in his pamphlet, Extracts from Such of the Penal Laws, as Particularly Relate to the Peace and Good Order of this Metropolis (1761), upon ‘partiality to his office’.59 Such criticisms were often written by those with a personal axe to grind, yet they at least suggested to readers that social policy pamphlets – even those written by prominent criminal justice figures – should be read critically. Nor were accounts of trials and criminal lives accepted without question. Successive Ordinaries of Newgate felt compelled to defend both themselves and their Account from the imputations of others who pointed to the corrupting influence of the money which the chaplain stood to make from the title, or from the claims that the Account was published before the malefactors were actually hanged.60 Horace Walpole for one considered the ‘prints that are published of the malefactors, and the memoirs of their lives and deaths,’ as well as the Ordinary’s Account, as nothing more than ‘trash’. A ‘new edition of the history of highwaymen,’ was, he further complained, inaccurate, for ‘as truth lies at the bottom of a well, the first who dip for her, seldom let the bucket low enough’.61 According to Robert Shoemaker, ‘many Londoners read the Proceedings carefully and were not reluctant to complain about errors or omissions’. While the Gentleman’s Magazine, for instance, at times treated the Proceedings as authoritative, it published at least two complaints about inadequate reporting in the 1760s, indicating that readers were aware of the tendency towards selective reporting.62 The publication of alternative accounts of trials would in some instances have allowed readers to critically assess those that were printed in the Proceedings. While contemporaries were able and willing to read crime literature (in the forms we are concerned with) critically, tentative evidence does suggest that in some instances they took printed crime reporting at face value, coming to anxious conclusions about the state of crime. Commentators in social policy pamphlets frequently referred to newspapers and accounts of trials

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and criminal lives as accurate reflectors of the crime problem. Many such references were doubtless made in order to support their calls for reform. But it is nonetheless interesting that commentators at least suggested to readers that printed representations of crime and justice in the newspapers, the Proceedings and criminal biographies were faithful mirrors of the nature of crime. It seems unlikely that commentators would have made such claims unless contemporaries put a measure of faith in crime reporting. Several pamphleteers pointed to printed reporting as evidence that crime was on the rise. One anonymous author believed that much credit should be given to the recently published Discoveries of John Poulter (1754), taking it as proof of a ‘late increase [sic] of public robberies’.63 More than anything else, social commentators referred to crime reporting in the newspapers. As noted in the previous chapter, as early as 1701 the author of Hanging, Not Punishment Enough highlighted ‘the publick [sic] news daily full of so many relations of robberies and murthers [sic]’ as a chilling indication that the roads had become ‘dangerous and unsafe’.64 At mid-century, another pamphleteer, in arguing that bands of smugglers had recently established themselves as highwaymen – to such an extent that the public would soon ‘not to able to go three miles out of town, without running the hazard of being knock’d down and robbed’ – avowed that ‘all this is not imagination, but matter of fact, and such as we see every day before us; for I can’t read a news-paper without meeting with such like robberies in town and country.’65 Some readers might have been left in a state of some confusion about the reliability of crime reporting in the press following Henry Fielding’s comments published in his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). In reflecting upon his efforts against marauding gangs of robbers in 1753, Fielding ‘had the satisfaction’ to find that the endeavours had been attended with such success, that this hellish society were almost utterly extirpated, and that, instead of reading of murders and streetrobberies in the news, almost every morning, there was, in the remaining part of the month of November, and in all December, not only no such thing as a murder, but not even a street-robbery committed.66

Yet having pointed to the fidelity of the press, Fielding admitted that some such reports of crimes had in fact been ‘mentioned in the public papers,’

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and in a rather weak attempt to reconcile the issue, he declared that such reports ‘were all found, on the strictest enquiry, to be false’. The famous prison reformer Jonas Hanway too showed a mixed attitude to newspaper reporting. In his pamphlet on The Defects of the Police (1775), Hanway claimed that the press had produced ‘volumes of falsehoods and nonsense, as well as truth and reason . . . for forty years past’. Later in the same tract, however, he placed more faith in crime reporting as an accurate reflection of the state of crime: ‘our newspapers are full of accounts of robberies, examinations of robbers and execution . . . if we go on, shall we not become fearful of our own domestics, or our children, and yet more terrified at the faces of each other, when we meet in the streets or roads, even under a meridian sun?’67 Some social commentators based their explanations of the causes of crime upon what they read in crime literature, particularly printed accounts of trials and criminal biographies. At several points throughout his short tract on the means to impede ‘the present reigning, and almost epidemical crimes of murder, robbery, perjury, and gaming’ – humbly addressed as ‘a letter to a right honourable Member of Parliament’ – Charles Jones in 1752 identified newspapers, last dying speeches and the Account as telling evidence of the rise in crime and its causes. ‘If the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account be true,’ he exclaimed, ‘there is scarce an execution that does not furnish us with examples of wretches, who place the principal cause of their calamities to gaming and bad company.’68 Almost certainly referring to the Ordinary’s Account or other forms of criminal biography, the barrister Joshua Fitzsimmonds in a sober and relatively detailed analysis of the ends, execution and defects of aspects of the criminal and civil law – written, so the author claimed, with a sincere desire to promote the happiness of his country – declared that ‘as far as we have any account of the former lives, manners, and dispositions of the criminals executed at Tyburn,’ the proper solution to the mid-century crime wave would be an attack on the roots of want, idleness, ignorance, extravagance and bad company.69 Others traced the causes of crime through the Proceedings. In an attempt to encourage a reformation of manners campaign, one anonymous mid-century writer complained that ‘such horrid wretches, who, from a life of looseness and debauchery, become a scandal to the name of woman’ could ‘urge the heart of man to perpetrate such daring mischiefs as every sessions paper [Proceedings]

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treats of ’.70 ‘While we are daily alarm’d with accounts of robberies, burglaries and murders,’ commented the London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette in July 1751, it is excusable, at least, to suggest whatever remedies occur, in hopes they may prove useful. Amongst these, the following seems obvious and practicable, viz. to restrain the number of alehouses, shuffle-boards and skittle-grounds, which are so many seminaries (as the sessions paper shew) for thieving.71

If such comments were frequently motivated by the desire of social reformers to exaggerate the crime problem and blacken the justice system in order to promote their own schemes, it is noteworthy that others who lacked such agendas also seem to have taken crime reporting as accurate reflections of the state of crime. Occasional comments made in the private writings of diaries and correspondence provide some fragmentary and tentative evidence on this. Of course, we still need to be sensitive to other factors which may have influenced the conclusions which diarists and letter-writers came to, but it is nevertheless the case that they had less overt agendas in mind. Several eighteenth-century diarists certainly learnt about crime through the London press. In the 1720s, Thomas Hearne copied out reports of shocking crimes printed in Mist’s Weekly Journal directly into his diary.72 A prisoner’s escape from Newgate in April 1716 came to the attention of Mary Cowper, lady of the bedchamber to the princess of Wales, after she had read about it in the morning news.73 For some London diarists, printed reporting shaped their sense of crime within their particular localities. Spencer Cowper, the Dean of Durham and youngest son of the former Lord Chancellor, Sir William Cowper, who spent the majority of the year either in Hertfordshire or London, in October 1747 wrote to his brother the second Earl Cowper, ahead of the latter’s visit to Spencer’s home in Grosvenor Square in the capital’s fashionable west end. ‘I see by the papers they have robb’d all along that road [Kensington],’ Spencer warned his brother, ‘so have reason to desire you would keep your servants about you all the way.’74 A search of surviving London newspapers for that month has not revealed any specific reports which might have led to Cowper’s concerns. But the crime reports referred to by Fanny Boscawen, the wife of Admiral Edward Boscawen, in a letter to a friend on 29 January 1748 did cause a great stir in the press in the early months of that year. ‘You will see by the papers,’ Fanny noted,

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that notre quartier [Mayfair] is come into great disgrace, there having been a robbery over against our chapel [Grosvenor chapel, South Audley street], by highwaymen on horseback. There have been two since in Grosvenor Square, but they have not been half so much talked about as ours, which, being the first, surprised the more, and the loss was much the greatest, a West Indian woman and her daughter losing jewels to the value of £400. They had been visiting in Park Street and, returning into our street, met these new-fashioned gentry [highwaymen] before ten o’clock.75

Reports of the robberies appeared in several newspapers.76 According to the Jacobite’s Journal, the events had ‘so alarmed the gentry in those parts, that many design to take their residence nearer to London’.77 The case was made even more newsworthy after it came to light that William Newberry, coachman to Elizabeth Barham (one of the ladies robbed), had orchestrated the robbery in collusion with the highwaymen who held up the coach. Although she did not mention it in her own diary which she kept at midcentury, Gertrude Savile was likely aware of this series of robberies committed against the eminent ladies of Grosvenor Square, for she was an avid reader of the London press, as well as the Proceedings, criminal biographies and other forms of crime literature. A well-bred and piously puritan woman, the daughter of a Yorkshire rector and the portion-less sister of a Nottinghamshire baronet, Savile had secured her independence from the chains of her brother’s ‘bounty’ in October 1743, moving to a new home in Great Russell Street in London’s west end. Her diary and her detailed expense accounts demonstrate the wealth of printed material that she read, from comedies and tragedies, to plays, sermons, operas, natural histories, novels, epistles, periodicals and poetry.78 Crime literature too features among her reading. In May 1728 she read ‘the life, robberies etc. of Dalton, [A Genuine Narrative of all the Street Robberies committed since October last, by James Dalton] an evidence against several of the robers [sic] which are to be hang’d,’ although she does not mention what she thought of it.79 Nor does she comment on another criminal biography which she read in the same year, that of Richard Savage, condemned (but subsequently pardoned) for murder.80 Evidently with some interest in the lives and crimes of ordinary criminals, Savile also regularly spent a shilling or more at a time for copies of the Old Bailey Proceedings. Again, there is little sense of how she read the accounts of trials, at least in qualitative terms.

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In a typical example, her diary often simply states, ‘read the news and sessions paper [the Proceedings]; 29 condemn’d, of which 10 were repreev’d [sic] for transportation’.81 Her perceptions of the crime problem were thus based in part upon the numbers prosecuted, and particularly the numbers convicted and sentenced to death. She also expressed concerns about the crime problem on the basis of crime reporting in the press. In August 1728, her diary notes: ‘read the news and sent it to brother; abundance of street robberies again’.82 When reports of robberies again filled the pages of metropolitan newspapers in September 1744, she wrote that ‘never were known so many and such bold roberys [sic] in the streets of late’.83 Six years later, in December 1750, and in almost exactly the same terms, she worried that ‘never were so many, so bold and such various kinds of robberys [sic] as this winter, as indeed tis observed they increase every year’.84 A wealthy and well-connected gentlewoman named Mary Delany was similarly disturbed by the increase in crime reporting at mid-century. In a letter of March 1752, she complained of ‘what shocking robberies, murder, duels etc. are constantly in the papers! Does that not too plainly show the growth of infidelity?’85 It is to the developments in printed crime reporting that took place in the years 1747–55 and which, as we have seen, generated some concerns among Londoners, that we now turn.

3

Print Culture, Crime and Prosecution Highway Robbery ‘Grows no Joke’

In Georgian London every outbreak of war led to a fall in prosecutions at the Old Bailey for property theft while the return to peacetime produced a rapid increase in indictments. Indeed, in the immediate months leading up to, and following, the conclusion of major wars in 1713, 1748, 1763, 1783 and 1814, there were sharp up-turns in levels of prosecution in the capital for property appropriation, accompanied by waves of crime reporting in the press and expressions of concern among contemporaries about the problem of crime.1 In virtually every instance, the sharp rises in property theft indictments which attended the end of war was followed by consistently high levels of prosecution during the years of peace until the coming of war again, which brought falls in the number of criminal trials. These immediate post-war periods often produced short-term panics about crime which could lead to substantial changes in the law and its administration, the effects of which could outlive the period of alarm. There has been substantial debate about what caused these spikes in prosecution at the conclusion of wars and the generally higher levels of indictments during peacetime. A number of detailed studies have suggested that the explanation might be found in the increases in law breaking which resulted from the social and economic dislocations of demobilization and the return to peacetime.2 There is insufficient space here to examine these points at length, but we might just consider some of the key issues. In the first instance, scholars have pointed to the rapid demobilization which unleashed thousands of soldiers and seamen into the capital, men who were frequently brutalized or physically broken by war. The scale of demobilization could be huge: an estimated 79,000

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men were demobilized in the immediate years after 1748 (and this was in fact the lowest number of any return to peace in the eighteenth century).3 For many such servicemen the prospects were bleak. The disabled stood little chance of finding work. Even those physically unscathed by war faced the prospect of glutted labour markets. Many sailors, either fit or hurt, had to wait around to get their wages or prize money. Few efforts were made by the authorities to cushion the seaman’s return home. Servicemen were left to compete with thousands of others for an alternative source of employment in what was at the best of times a precarious London labour market. The unskilled work that many were reliant upon was notoriously irregular, and often seasonal, in supply. Any economic opportunities that accompanied war were lost at its end, and were not necessarily replaced by increases in peacetime activity, such as work in the shipping or exports industries. Moreover, the enlistment campaigns which took place during war and removed a large portion of London’s unskilled workforce – thus leaving more opportunities open to those who remained – were brought to a close at the return to peace. In short, historians have examined the problems caused by rapid demobilization within the context of an already precarious labour market in the capital which must have thrown many into desperate hardship, and for at least some, theft may have been a means to keep their heads above water. This probable increase in offending, some historians have therefore argued, is reflected in greater levels of prosecution during peacetime. Other scholars have pointed to changes in the prosecutorial options which were open to victims and magistrates in the transition between war and peace as an explanation for the fluctuations in theft indictments. First, enlistment in the armed forces as an alternative to formal prosecution in the courts for accused offenders was closed off as a judicial option at the conclusion of war. Thus, many of those who during war might have escaped a jury trial were in times of peace put before the courts, thereby increasing indictment rates.4 Secondly, as Peter King explains, during wartime those who fell victim to theft by soldiers could avoid the expense and trouble of a criminal prosecution by giving the accused up to military law. Many chose to do so, and at the return to peacetime this practice – which served to depress indictment levels during years of war – was likely closed off.5 These changes in prosecutorial options could have a proportionally greater influence on levels of prosecution than changes in law breaking.6 As noted in the previous chapter, the number of

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property crimes that were brought before the courts in eighteenth-century London represents only the very tip of the iceberg of all the offences that were committed in the metropolis.7 While we have no means to accurately quantify the levels of ‘real’ crime committed, in all probability it is likely to have been far greater than the relatively few numbers of indictments tried before the courts – contemporary estimates put the ratio of offences prosecuted against those actually committed as great as one in ten, in some instances even as much as one in a hundred.8 Since few offences ever made it to the courts, this means that small changes in prosecutorial behaviour could produce as much fluctuation in prosecution rates as could much greater changes in levels of criminality.9 In order therefore to understand what caused the sudden upsurges in prosecution rates at the conclusion of every major war in eighteenth-century London, we need to pay attention to the responses to crime, for these are likely to have had a disproportionately large impact upon indictment levels. Indeed, it has also recently been suggested that the upsurges in crime reporting which attended the conclusion of war in the eighteenth century may have inflamed contemporary concerns about crime which led to changes in prosecutorial behaviour and thus increases in indictment rates.10 In Clive Emsley’s words, ‘when peace came the newspapers found themselves with space to fill because of a decline in exciting, foreign, war news: crime stories were exciting and possibly increased reporting of crime helped to generate increased fears which, in turn, generated decisions to launch prosecutions against offenders as a warning to others’.11 Even those who have explained postwar upsurges as a direct product of increases in offending brought about by the social and economic dislocations of a return to peacetime have also pointed to the influence of crime reporting in fostering fears and more stringent prosecutorial behaviour.12 Nicholas Rogers has for example provided a detailed discussion of the demobilized seaman’s plight at mid-century, suggesting that this produced an increase in criminality which accounts for the sharp up-turn in theft prosecutions at the Old Bailey after 1748. But Rogers also argues that London newspapers exaggerated the vulnerability of the wealthy to robbery, ‘and helped to produce something of a moral panic in London,’ a fear of violent street crime which was ‘disproportionate to the reality’.13 While the social and economic problems attending demobilization have been well studied, the role of printed crime reporting in creating fears about

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crime at the end of war has however received much less attention, despite the fact that scholars who point to the influence of changes in criminality have also recognized the possible influence of print in producing moral panics. Indeed, aside from Peter King’s excellent work on the conclusion of the War of American Independence in the early 1780s, there has been no study of the precise dynamics of crime reporting at the return to peace time. Could it be, King asks, that ‘as the newspapers and the reactions of the government focused attention on law and order issues in the last months of peace, did they also kick-start a moral panic and thus initiate a feedback mechanism of increasing fear, more intense prosecution, rising indictments, and further anxiety, which could have been as important as demobilization itself in creating the large and immediate rises in indictments observable at the end of every war?’14 Given the extreme sensitivity of prosecution rates to changes in the behaviour of victims, witnesses, watchmen, constables, magistrates and a whole host of other actors who were involved in the pre-trial process, and that printed crime reporting had a significant impact upon propertied Londoners’ perceptions of crime and justice, it is certainly an issue worthy of more study than it has so far received. This is not in any way to put forward a mono-causal explanation for the post-war increases in prosecution rates in eighteenth-century London based solely upon the influence of print. Increases in law breaking brought about by the socio-economic dislocations of demobilization and a return to peacetime undoubtedly contributed to the sharp rises in indictments (although we cannot say to precisely what extent). Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 2, contemporary perceptions of crime and justice were also shaped by direct experience as victims or witnesses of crime, and through attending the public forums of criminal justice. However, while the problems caused by demobilization have been well studied, and while it has recently been suggested that crime reporting may have been influential, the precise role played by print in post-war panics about crime has yet to be fully explored. If – as has been suggested – surges in crime reporting did have a role to play in generating post-war panics about crime, what, then, were the precise dynamics of the crime wave in print during the mid-century London crisis about crime? Rogers has offered a valuable analysis of levels of crime reporting in two London newspapers in the immediate years after 1748 – the Whitehall Evening Post and the General Advertiser – as well as a discussion of the

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qualitative representation of crime in the press. But important questions still remain. How might print have helped to prime contemporary attitudes against the increases in offending which attended demobilization? What was the precise timing and nature of the changes in crime reporting in London newspapers at mid-century? How do patterns of crime reporting in the Whitehall Evening Post and the General Advertiser compare to other titles, for example weekly papers? How was crime represented in other forms of print at mid-century besides newspapers – particularly the Proceedings, Ordinary’s Account, criminal biographies and pictorial prints? Are the kinds of developments which King has identified for the post-war panic of the 1780s also evident at midcentury? And how might the representation of crime in print have influenced contemporary attitudes which underpinned the judicial decision making that had such a proportionally large effect on levels of prosecution? Our primary aim in this chapter, then, is to rethink the crime wave in print in the lead up to, and, immediately following, the end of war in 1748, and to situate this within the context of the prosecution wave in the metropolitan courts. We begin by examining the ways in which printed commentary in the immediate months preceding the peace treaty of 1748 anticipated a growing crime problem and warned of the damaging effects that demobilization would bring. We will then consider how the sudden and large increases in levels of crime reporting in the London press in 1748 might have served to confirm those concerns. This is followed by an analysis of the qualitative representation of crime in various forms of crime literature in the years 1748–55. Having discussed the midcentury crime wave in print, we will then consider the changes in prosecutorial decision making which took place during the post-war panic about crime.

The crime problem anticipated in print Concerns were voiced in the press about the level of robberies in London well before the War of the Austrian Succession drew to a close. The coming of peace in the second half of 1748 and the anxieties about the anticipated effects of demobilization that this brought were preceded by frequent complaints over the previous 2 years about the threats to life and property faced by Londoners. ‘Robberies begin again to be so frequent in different parts of the town,’ the

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General Advertiser complained as early as 11 April 1746, ‘that scarce a night passes but we have accounts of them.’ It was therefore hoped, the paper continued, that magistrates and other officers would exert themselves to ‘prevent an evil that must otherwise be of very bad consequence; as was lately exemplified in the Black Boy Alley Gang’.15 Evidently the moral panic about robberies which had erupted in the autumn and winter of 1744 – attributed by contemporaries to a particularly violent and insolent gang of offenders operating from a base in Black Boy Alley, off Chick Lane, in the ward of Farringdon Without – still lingered heavily in the minds of Londoners 15 months later. The panic of 1744 had been played out in extensive detail through the pages of the press and in the accounts of the trials and executions of notorious members of the gang that were published in the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account. Several papers – the Daily Advertiser in particular – latched onto the subject of robberies in London in the later months of 1744 due to a ‘dearth’ of foreign news. Reports of violent attacks, daring rescues and impudent offenders quickly became established tropes of the press coverage. And such was the concern generated by the panic that many inhabitants took up the opportunity offered by the editor of the Daily Advertiser that any schemes sent in to the paper to eradicate the crime wave would be published without impartiality or any cost to the writer.16 In short, the crime wave of 1744 left a bitter legacy which perhaps fed into the post-war panic some few years later. Further complaints about robberies were printed in the General Advertiser throughout 1746 and 1747. ‘We have frequent accounts of robberies being committed in different parts of town,’ the paper reiterated in October 1746, and in anticipating that the problem was surely only to increase over the winter – the season ‘which most favours [robbers’] villainies’ – the magistrates and constables were again called on to be vigilant.17 A year later the Whitehall Evening Post and other papers confidently declared that ‘robberies are as frequent in about the City, as has been known for many years, scarce a night passing but some villainy is transacted, even in publick [sic] places’.18 Upon what basis did newspapers cite their authority for such claims? Very few actual reports of robberies were printed at this time. As we will see, there were some increases in the number of crime reports printed in the London press in the final months of 1746. But the levels were still relatively low, particularly when considering the numbers printed in each issue rather than by month.

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In 1746, the General Advertiser published an average of about 10 to 15 reports of property crimes each month, equating to about one or two reports per issue. Monthly totals were even lower in the tri-weekly London Evening Post and the weekly Old England (Graphs 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3). Nor were prosecutions at the Old Bailey running at high levels at this time, particularly for violent thefts. In short, editors justified their complaints to readers on the basis of the ‘frequent accounts of robberies’ that they apparently ‘continually’ heard of. If editors were being inundated with reports of crimes committed – as they themselves declared – then in the years 1746 and 1747 they seemingly chose not to print such accounts. In several instances it was argued in the press that the apparent increases in robbery in 1746 and 1747 were due to a notorious band of smugglers who had been terrorizing the inhabitants of Kent and Sussex, and who now appeared to be committing depredations in the capital. ‘It is generally believed,’ the General Advertiser reported in November 1747, ‘that the persons who have so lately infested the roads for many miles, in and about this City, are chiefly smugglers that are out-law’d, and for whom a reward of £500 a man is offered for apprehending them.’19 It was widely perceived in the 1740s that smuggling was out of control, characterized by violent and insolent behaviour, and in dire need of central government action.20 But while much of the press coverage in the earlier part of the decade had concentrated on the smugglers’ activities in running contraband goods on the south-east coast, by 1747 the press regularly linked smugglers to violent property crimes committed in London against private persons and not just offences against the state. Indeed, the Ordinary of Newgate decried the smugglers on this very basis in his Account. An edition from July 1747 for instance claimed that among the smugglers, ‘murder, rapes and robberies are with them but as frequent, as they conduce to their interest’.21 In his social policy pamphlet printed some few months later, the pseudonymous writer Nicholas Machiavelli likewise condemned the ‘notorious gang of smugglers, whose insolence is become quite insupportable’.22 ‘ ’ Tis not only the government that may suffer great damage by them, but the public, and even every individual person’ he declared, for (as we have observ’d) these desperate fellows are join’d daily by all the vagabonds of the country: and as it is impossible to maintain all their apprentices, and admit them into partnership, they grant them protection,

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

and tell them, that in order to maintain themselves till such times as they can reap the benefit of the trade, they may go to rob on the highway; by which means, they make their apprentices as desperate as themselves.23

Thus it could only be expected, the writer continued, ‘that in time these highway-men will be in such a great number, that we shall not be able to go three miles out of town, without running the hazard of being knock’d down and robb’d’. As noted in the previous chapter, his perceptions of smuggling were largely informed by the press: ‘all this is not imagination, but matter of fact, and such as we see every day before us,’ he argued, ‘for I can’t read a news-paper without meeting with such like robberies in town and country.’24 The detection, trial and execution of Arthur Gray – one of the most notorious smugglers belonging to the Hawkhurst gang – gained particularly extensive coverage in the later months of 1747. Contemporaries were certainly aware of the links between smuggling and personally threatening crimes such as robbery and murder. In a diary entry of March 1750, the Sussex schoolmaster Walter Gale noted the execution of several smugglers for the murder of two custom-house officers, and that others had been executed for highway robbery, complaining that the ‘celebrated’ Hawkhurst gang of smugglers were a ‘terror’ to society.25 Indeed, it may well be that smugglers lost any community support they might have once had as they began to target ordinary inhabitants and not just the authorities. Complaints about robberies in the capital continued to grow apace throughout late 1747 and early 1748, well before the formal cessation of war and the huge increases in crime reporting and prosecutions which took place in the latter half of 1748. In October 1747, the London Evening Post notified to its readers that in one week there had been nine robberies committed near New-Cross Turnpike, and desired that this would ‘be a caution for people that have any valuable effects about them, not to be out late at night by themselves.’26 Reiterating the complaints that had been intermittently aired over the previous 2 years, at the beginning of 1748 the Penny London Post or Morning Advertiser (among others) declared that ‘robberies are so frequent on the roads near London that it requires the utmost resolution and diligence in the magistrates to curb the insolence of the villains who commit them: who are grown so audacious, that they rob even within sight of the turnpikes’.27

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There are signs too that the press began to take a greater interest in the subject of crime in the final months of 1747 and the first half of 1748, before the beginning of peace preliminaries. On 23 January 1748, the Westminster Journal introduced a new section in the paper headed ‘Robberies and Commitments’, which not only drew together disparate crime reports, but more importantly served to highlight crime as a topic of especial attention and concern. The Whitehall Evening Post and the Remembrancer also developed special sections devoted to crime at this time. In the absence of foreign news following the gradual return to peacetime, and a subsequent shift to domestic affairs, the issue of crime grew in prominence, as editors could now devote even more newsprint (and presumably resources also) to reports of crime. Trials and particularly heinous crimes on occasion received relatively detailed coverage in the years 1746 and 1747. The more sensational aspects of crime and justice evidently remained a topic of interest even when there was plenty of war news to report. In April 1746, the London Evening Post devoted a whole column to a recent murder, and the General Advertiser covered a series of shocking robberies in September the following year. Several London papers moreover took an interest in the efforts made by the inhabitants of Hampstead in October 1747 to raise a subscription for paying rewards to anyone apprehending an offender who committed a theft over the value of 5 shillings, ‘in order to prevent felonies or robberies being committed in their parish,’ the General Advertiser reported.28 These complaints were followed by expressions of concern in the press about the anticipated effects of demobilization, in many instances voiced before the mass of soldiers and seamen had even arrived home.29 In the absence of month-by-month figures, the precise timing of demobilization is difficult to gauge. Peace preliminaries began in April 1748, hostilities had effectively ceased by July, and the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle which formally ended the War was signed in October of the same year.30 Some men had evidently been disbanded by the first months of 1748 when a party of sailors waited on the King for the payment of prize money owed to them. Nevertheless, in late 1747 about 60,000 seamen, marines and soldiers were still being mustered, only falling to 20,000 by the end of 1748, and then to 15,000 at the end of 1749.31 Demobilization seems to have occurred in earnest in the year after July 1748 when some 40,000 men arrived home, with perhaps 70,000 discharged

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

in total by 1751. Even as late as September and October 1748, just prior to the formal cessation of war, ships were still in battle off the coast of Havana. Reports continued to appear in London newspapers throughout August and September 1748 of ships returning to British ports. Moreover, while it is an imperfect measure, comments in the press at least intimate that demobilization began to take place in full following the effective end to hostilities from July 1748 onwards. In November 1747, almost half a year before the beginning of peace preliminaries, the pseudonymous pamphletwriter Nicholas Machiavelli warned that ‘in time of peace the soldiers that we have now, when discharg’d, know not where to go, and having no inclination to work, (as they have been us’d to an idle life) they turn pickpockets, and street-robbers’.32 The point was also made in the press – in a letter printed in the General Evening Post in May 1748, one reader expressed concern that ‘the tribe of collecting gentry’ were ‘likely to recruit and increase [sic] pretty fast upon us after the peace,’ for ‘disbanded soldiers, every boy knows make excellent highwaymen’. If demobilization could be properly managed, the reader proposed, then a ‘deal of work will be saved at the Old Bailey and country Assizes’.33 Another author in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1748 believed that the approach of peace and the return of servicemen had raised ‘terror in many private gentlemen’ and those in public stations, for ‘as half these poor men will not be able to get employment there is great, and just apprehension, that necessity will compel them to seize by violence what they can see no method to obtain by honest labour’.34 Such fears about the anticipated effects of demobilization were later to be lamentably confirmed by newspaper crime reports printed after the return to peacetime. Upon the evidence of newspaper crime reporting, which he took as accurately reflective of the state of real crime, one correspondent in the London press in November 1748 expressed dismay that demobilization was indeed leading to an increase in crime as he had anticipated: I am alarmed every post with some melancholy account of excesses and outrages already committed by that handful which have been discharged from the few ships that have been paid off, as an earnest of what we are to look for when all the squadrons are called home, and the disbanding of ten regiments of marines, and other useless corps, has taken place. I do not pretend to nicety in these matters, but I believe everybody will agree, that upon the most moderate calculation, the reduction in the navy and army

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will turn loose upon the nation twenty thousand six-pence-a-day-heroes, with perhaps a crown in their pockets, and very little inclination to starve for want of recruiting out of other people’s property.35

As we will now see, there was indeed an explosion in crime reporting in the London press from mid-1748 onwards which must have been patently obvious to readers and likely served to confirm their anxieties about the anticipated effects of demobilization. Examining these patterns of crime reporting moreover suggests that the increases were largely due to editorial imperatives rather than to possible changes in criminal activity.

Sharp increases in crime reporting in the press What was the precise timing of the increases in crime reporting in the London press in the immediate years surrounding the peace of 1748? What was the scale of the increase, both in terms of the absolute numbers of crime reports printed and the newshole devoted to the issue of crime? How did the levels of crime reporting differ between individual titles? How evident would this increase have been to readers? And, finally, how does the timing of the increases in crime reporting compare with changes in prosecution rates that were also taking place at this time? Four London newspapers have been quantitatively analysed for the years 1746–50 to provide some initial answers to these questions. The papers were chosen primarily because – unlike many other mid-century London newspapers – they have survived in virtually full runs for the period in question. While the titles were therefore picked largely because of record survival, they do however cover a range of publishing formats and political stances. The sampled papers include one daily (the General Advertiser), two tri-weeklies (the London Evening Post and the Whitehall Evening Post) and one weekly (the Old England). In order to gain some sense of how typical these publications were in terms of crime reporting, where possible I have analysed crime reporting in other titles (which unfortunately have not survived in full yearly runs) for specific months in the period of transition between war and peace in 1748. In short, while the sample is by no means comprehensive, the breadth of coverage is sufficient enough to provide valuable findings. Moreover, as the sample includes some of the most widely

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

read and successful titles of the mid-eighteenth century, we can be confident that crime reporting in these publications would have reached a wide audience, both in London and the provinces, given the wide geographical distribution of the London tri-weeklies in particular, along with the fact that much of the content of the provincial press was taken directly from London papers. Before going on to consider the patterns of crime reporting at mid-century, it is first worth just briefly considering the nature of our sample publications. The General Advertiser succeeded its predecessor the London Daily Post and General Advertiser in March 1744. Of its four folio pages, the first was devoted to news, both foreign and domestic, while the remaining three pages were in general given over to advertisements. On occasion this might vary slightly: news sometimes crept onto the second page, and in a few instances, perhaps in the absence of news to report (as we will see later), advertisements even extended onto the front page. At certain times, then, news might constitute less than a quarter of the content of any particular issue of the General Advertiser. According to the proprietors, the paper was extremely successful. From February 1746 onwards, the paper was printed in two editions each day, one at 6.00 a.m. and the other at 9.00 a.m., apparently due – so the publishers claimed – to sales of the paper having doubled over the previous 6 months. Indeed, in 1746, the General Advertiser had a circulation of around 2,000 copies per day. Evidently successful, the paper was succeeded by the Public Advertiser in December 1752, in hopes, so the publishers said, of ‘attempting still more to deserve a general encouragement’. Like other London tri-weekly evening papers, the immensely successful and long-standing London Evening Post was printed on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays in order to coincide with the post for distribution throughout the provinces. And like many of its immediate rivals, much of the title’s content was taken from the daily and tri-weekly morning papers. By mid-century, the first of the London Evening Post’s four folio pages was given over to news, with the second and third pages dedicated to advertisements, and the back page a mixture of both, the balance of which fluctuated between individual issues. We will have cause to examine the political persuasion of the London Evening Post in more detail in the following chapter, but here we can simply note that while the title cannot be described as Jacobite, it undoubtedly had oppositionist tendencies, providing a medium for those with dissident voices.36 This had

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important implications for the qualitative representation of crime in the paper, not least in the explanations that were given for the crime wave which seemed to be sweeping over the capital at mid-century. In contrast to the London Evening Post, the tri-weekly Whitehall Evening Post was decidedly pro-ministerial in its outlook. Established in February 1746, the title quickly established itself in a competitive market where many others had failed, and continued to be published until 1802. Two of its four folio pages were usually devoted to advertisements, although on many occasions that might be reduced to make room for more news. The Whitehall Evening Post certainly gave over more space to news than any of its rivals, which may go some way to explaining why the paper included such a greater amount of crime reports than any of the other sample papers analysed here. Crime reports in the paper were listed under the headings ‘Robbed’ and ‘Committed’, and frequently spilled out into other sections. Even accounting for the fact that the influential oppositional essay paper Old England was published weekly, nevertheless it carried far fewer reports of crimes than the dailies or tri-weeklies. Typically, the paper devoted its front page to an essay, with the back page purely for advertisements, and the two pages in between given over to a fluctuating mix of news and advertisements. As we will now see, reports of property crimes increased across all four sample publications in the months immediately prior to, and following, the peace of 1748, although numbers differed substantially between each publication. The mid-century crime wave in the press would have been far more conspicuous in some papers than others. ‘Crime reports’ have here been counted as accounts which mention that a specific property crime had been committed in the metropolis. This count of crime reporting therefore does not include reports of crimes committed outside London, or reports of trials, punishments or commentaries on the subject of crime. Nor does it include instances in which reports mentioned that ‘several robberies’ had been committed (or similar open-ended phrases). Our count is limited to reports of specific property crimes carried out in the metropolis, and thus represents just one aspect of the much larger issue of crime and justice reporting in the press. This is not to suggest that contemporaries read newspapers in such abstractly quantitative ways, nor that their sense of the state of crime was generated more by reports of specific offences committed, rather than, say,

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the lengthy commentaries on crime and justice that were regularly published in the London press. But for many contemporaries like Spencer Cowper, Gertrude Savile and Mary Delany (discussed in the previous chapter), newspapers influenced their perceptions of crime and the sheer number of crime reports printed in the press must have acted as something of a barometer of crime for many readers. If – as seems likely – this was so, readers of the London press would have been struck by the upsurge in crime reports printed in 1748. In all four of the sample publications, there were some initial increases in the number of crime reports printed before the beginning of peace preliminaries in April 1748 (Graphs 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3). The number of crime reports printed in both the General Advertiser and the London Evening Post increased in the final months of 1746 and the first quarter of 1747 (Graphs 3.1 and 3.2). This may well have been due to the absence of other news to report, particularly on the subject of the Jacobite rebels. Throughout July and August 1746, much of the London press was taken up by reports of the trials and brutal executions of the Jacobites Francis Townley, Thomas Deacon and Thomas Syddall. But 60

General Advertiser 3 per. moving ave.

50

Crime reports

40

30

20

10

Jan 1746 Mar 1746 May 1746 Jul 1746 Sep 1746 Nov 1746 Jan 1747 Mar 1747 May 1747 Jul 1747 Sep 1747 Nov 1747 Jan 1748 Mar 1748 May 1748 Jul 1748 Sep 1748 Nov 1748 Jan 1749 Mar 1749 May 1749 Jul 1749 Sep 1749 Nov 1749 Jan 1750 Mar 1750 May 1750 Jul 1750 Sep 1750 Nov 1750

0

Month

Graph 3.1 Number of crime reports printed in the General Advertiser, by month, January 1746–December 1750. Source: General Advertiser.

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65

following the hanging, beheading and evisceration of these three men on Kennington Common at the end of July and the Young Pretender’s escape to France 2 months later, the subject appears to have increasingly dried up as a topic of interest in the press. It may well have been that there was little now to report. Whatever the case, it seems that editors looked to crime for replacement copy, for the number of crime reports printed in October and November 1746 increased markedly. While these initial increases did not reach the heights of the latter half of 1748 and after, this was perhaps significant enough for editors to claim in the final months of 1746 – as we have seen – that ‘robberies are now become as frequent as ever,’ thus requiring the diligence of magistrates and peace officers ‘to bring the offenders to justice’.37 There were also increases in crime reports in both the Whitehall Evening Post and Old England in the late autumn and winter of 1747 (Graphs 3.2 and 3.3). The average number of crime reports printed each month in the former doubled from less than 20 to nearly 40 between 140 120

London Evening Post Whitehall Evening Post 3 per. moving ave. (LEP)

Crime reports

100

3 per. moving ave. (WEP)

80 60 40 20

Jan 1746 Mar 1746 May 1746 Jul 1746 Sep 1746 Nov 1746 Jan 1747 Mar 1747 May 1747 Jul 1747 Sep 1747 Nov 1747 Jan 1748 Mar 1748 May 1748 Jul 1748 Sep 1748 Nov 1748 Jan 1749 Mar 1749 May 1749 Jul 1749 Sep 1749 Nov 1749 Jan 1750 Mar 1750 May 1750 Jul 1750 Sep 1750 Nov 1750

0

Month

Graph 3.2 Number of crime reports printed in the London Evening Post and the Whitehall Evening Post, by month, January 1746–December 1750. Sources: London Evening Post; Whitehall Evening Post. Note: Issues of the Whitehall Evening Post are not available for the period before May 1747. Issues for the months of July and August in 1748 are also missing.

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London 30

Old England 3 per. moving ave.

25

Crime reports

20

15

10

5

Jan 1746 Mar 1746 May 1746 Jul 1746 Sep 1746 Nov 1746 Jan 1747 Mar 1747 May 1747 Jul 1747 Sep 1747 Nov 1747 Jan 1748 Mar 1748 May 1748 Jul 1748 Sep 1748 Nov 1748 Jan 1749 Mar 1749 May 1749 Jul 1749 Sep 1749 Nov 1749 Jan 1750 Mar 1750 May 1750 Jul 1750 Sep 1750 Nov 1750

0

Month

Graph 3.3 Number of crime reports printed in Old England, by month, January 1746–December 1750. Source: Old England.

August 1747 and the beginning of 1748, and more than trebled in the latter over the same period from less than 5 reports per month to close to 15. Again, this may have provided the impetus for such complaints as made by the General Advertiser in the first days of January 1748 that ‘robberies are so frequent on the roads near London that it requires the utmost resolution and diligence in the magistrates to curb the insolence of the villains who commit them’.38 Increases in crime reporting were, then, taking place in the London press from as early as 1746 in some publications, and from later 1747 in others. Yet the level of crime reporting in all four sample publications (less so in the case of the Whitehall Evening Post) decreased in the first half of 1748, doubtless as a result of the greater interest in news relating to the peace preliminaries. Indeed, at just the same time as discussions of peace began to take place in April and May 1748, the numbers of crime reports printed in the press suffered something of a dip. In the case of the General Advertiser and the London Evening Post, the monthly totals were the lowest for at least 2 years (Graphs 3.1 and 3.2). After increasing substantially in the second half of 1747, crime reporting in the Old England likewise dwindled steadily from that point on until May 1748 (Graph 3.3).

Print Culture, Crime and Prosecution 300

67

Total all publicaons 3 per. moving ave.

250

Crime reports

200

150

100

50

May 1747 Jul 1747 Sep 1747 Nov 1747 Jan 1748 Mar 1748 May 1748 Jul 1748 Sep 1748 Nov 1748 Jan 1749 Mar 1749 May 1749 Jul 1749 Sep 1749 Nov 1749 Jan 1750 Mar 1750 May 1750 Jul 1750 Sep 1750 Nov 1750

0

Month

Graph 3.4 Total number of crime reports printed in London newspapers, by month, May 1747–December 1750. Source: Newspaper Sample – all available issues of the General Advertiser, the London Evening Post, the Whitehall Evening Post and Old England for the years 1746–50 inclusive.

Analysis of another weekly which has survived for the first half of 1748 suggests the same: very few crime reports were printed in the opposition essay paper the Remembrancer in April 1748, and virtually none published in the paper in May of that year. In retrospect, however, this was merely the calm before the storm, for there was an explosion in crime reporting in the London press in the second half of 1748 as the peace preliminaries came to a head and as hostilities effectively ceased. Taking all four sample publications together, there was close to a fivefold increase in crime reports, from just over 50 per month in the first half of 1748, to an initial peak of nearly 250 in January 1749 (Graph 3.4). The upsurge in crime reporting was both rapid and large. In some publications the rise was greater than in others. The London Evening Post in particular printed seven times more crime reports by January 1749 compared to the first half of 1748. In terms of the absolute number of crime reports printed, the Whitehall Evening Post far outstripped any of its rivals. In the month of January 1749, the title printed over 100 reports of property offences committed in the capital, in

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

contrast to 70 reports printed in the London Evening Post in the same month, and 48 printed in the General Evening Post (another metropolitan tri-weekly) in December 1748. There were slight variations too in the timing of the changes. Increases seem to have taken place marginally earlier in the Whitehall Evening Post than in other London newspapers. But perhaps even more striking are the similarities in the patterns of crime reporting between London newspapers, especially in terms of timing. Increases in crime reports took place across all publications in the second half of 1748, reaching an initial peak in all titles in January 1749. Indeed, the relative levels of crime reporting fluctuated with some degree of similarity between titles, even if the absolute numbers of reports printed differed greatly. A comparison of the Whitehall Evening Post and the London Evening Post demonstrates this most clearly (Graph 3.3). The similarities in terms of timing and relative levels of change are likely explained by the fact that individual publications frequently ran the same reports which had been pillaged from the morning papers. As noted earlier, it is unlikely that contemporaries read the London press in such a strictly quantitative way. Certainly there were huge relative increases in levels of crime reporting, as shown by the London Evening Post, which registered a seven-fold rise over the second half of 1748. But would readers of the London press have noticed these increases? Would crime have seemed such a pressing and prominent issue with this surge in reporting? An analysis of the numbers of crime reports printed per issue (rather than monthly totals) and of the newshole devoted to crime can help us think about this in more detail. While all publications produced huge monthly increases in the numbers of crime reports printed over the second half of 1748, this would have been far more conspicuous in the tri-weeklies and the weeklies than the dailies (Table 3.1). Indeed, although the monthly totals of reports went up significantly in the General Advertiser between April 1748 and January 1749, when we account for the fact that the paper appeared daily, this increase equated to only one or two more crime reports printed per issue. In the same period of April 1748 to January 1749, the average number of property crimes reported in the General Advertiser increased modestly from 0.2 to 1.6. Unless readers were paying particularly close attention, it is unlikely they would have

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Table 3.1 Average number of crime reports printed in London newspapers, per issue, 1746–50

General Advertiser

London Evening Post

Whitehall Evening Post

Old England

All publications

Jan–Jun 1746

0.5

0.5

–

0.5

0.5

Jul–Dec 1746

0.6

0.9

–

0.7

0.7

Jan–Jun 1747

0.7

1.2

–

0.8

0.9

Jul–Dec 1747

0.5

1.3

2.1

1.2

1.3

Jan–Jun 1748

0.5

1.1

2.8

1.3

1.4

Jul–Dec 1748

0.8

1.7

5.1

1.9

2.3

Jan–Jun 1749

0.9

3.2

6.0

2.8

3.2

Jul–Dec 1749

1.7

3.5

8.1

3.6

4.2

Jan–Jun 1750

0.9

2.5

6.3

2.6

3.1

Jul–Dec 1750

1.1

3.8

6.8

3.2

3.7

Average 1746–50

0.8

2.0

5.3

1.9

2.5

6-month period

Source: Newspaper Sample. Note: Issues of the Whitehall Evening Post are missing for the months of July and August 1748. The figure for the 6-month period July to December 1748 is therefore calculated from the remaining months of September, October and December only.

noticed an extra one or at most two crime reports in each issue. By contrast, readers of tri-weeklies such as the London Evening Post and the Whitehall Evening Post were more likely to have noticed a change. Whereas an average of one or two property crimes were reported in either paper in the first half of 1748, by the beginning of the following year the London Evening Post carried an average of five such reports per issue, and the Whitehall Evening Post was regularly printing seven or eight per issue. The increase was also likely to have been noticeable in weeklies such as Old England, although less marked than in the tri-weeklies. By January 1749, the Old England regularly included four or more crime reports per issue, up from about one per issue in the first half of 1748. How might we explain these patterns of reporting as laid out in Table 3.1? Partly it was to do with available space. The General Advertiser limited foreign and domestic news to its front page alone, thus leaving the other three pages

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

to advertisements. Weekly essay sheets such as the Old England too had relatively little space to devote to crime news. By contrast, foreign and domestic news regularly filled two or more pages of such tri-weeklies as the London Evening Post and the Whitehall Evening Post. Reports of crime thus had a better chance of appearing in issues of the tri-weekly press. But aside from this, the differences in the number of crime reports printed per issue could be explained by the nature of the publications themselves. This is a subject which we will return to at various points throughout the following study. It could be, for instance, that editors of the tri-weeklies were in a much better position than the editors of dailies in being able to selectively pick and choose which crime reports to print, and to amalgamate reports which had appeared in the morning papers over the previous few days. Editors of dailies such as the General Advertiser were more concerned with securing one or two crime reports each day to satisfy public interest but probably more importantly to fill the relatively small space available for news. As we will see in the following section, this may explain why the General Advertiser printed relatively more reports of minor property crimes which magistrates encountered on a daily basis in the capital. On the other hand, editors of the tri-weeklies were perhaps under less pressure – certainly on a daily basis – to find material to fill the newshole, and were also in a better situation to select only the more sensational crimes for publication. Even if the huge increases in the absolute numbers of crime reports printed in the London press over the second half of 1748 went unnoticed, it is difficult to believe that even the least observant readers did not detect the growing amount of space given over to the subject of crime in metropolitan newspapers, particularly the tri-weeklies. In the months of March, April and May 1748, crime and justice reporting as a whole – not just reports of property crimes alone – took up about 3.6–4.9 per cent of the available newshole in the Whitehall Evening Post (that is, the space not given over to advertisements). By contrast, crime and justice accounted for 10.6 per cent of the paper’s newshole in December 1748, and this increased to 15.4 per cent in January 1749, and then to 15.9 per cent in the following month (Table 3.2). Interestingly, crime and justice accounted for a similar proportion of the newshole of the Ipswich Journal in the early months of 1783, following the end of the War of American Independence.39

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Table 3.2 Crime and justice reporting as a percentage of the total newshole in the Whitehall Evening Post, March 1748–February 1749 Number of lines of crime and justice reporting

% of newshole

March 1748

244

3.6

April 1748

266

4.3

May 1748

303

4.9

December 1748

713

10.6

January 1749

963

15.4

February 1749

915

15.9

Month

Source: Whitehall Evening Post.

A couple of specific examples can give us a sense of just how great the change had been over the second half of 1748. Whereas an average of two or possibly three reports of property crimes were printed in each issue of the Whitehall Evening Post in the spring of 1748, the issue for 29 December in the same year dedicated a whole column (some 80 lines of text) to accounts of crimes printed under its ‘robbed’ and ‘committed’ section. And even more emphatically, over half of the entire newshole of the paper was given over to crime and justice in the issue for 18 February 1749. By the beginning of 1749 at the latest, it must have been patently clear to readers of the London press that crime was a pressing problem. This would have been especially clear to the particularly large number of readers of the Whitehall Evening Post’s issue of 21 January 1749. That issue had included, at the top of the front page, in pride of place, an engraving depicting Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni’s magnificent structure and the fireworks display which was soon to be conducted to celebrate the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Such had been the ‘extraordinary demand’ for the paper, ‘and not being able to supply the number wanted,’ the printer of the Whitehall Evening Post explained, the image was thus republished in the following issue of 24 January.40 What is significant for our purposes is that if any of the ‘extraordinary’ numbers of buyers of the Whitehall Evening Post for 21 January had turned their eye from the engraving at the top of the page to the article immediately below, they would have encountered a letter to the paper from a correspondent signing themselves ‘A.B.’, thanking the

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printer for his ‘commendable readiness to publish any probable scheme for suppressing the villains, that so audaciously infest every part of the town, to the great terror of passengers.’41 In the months leading up to, and immediately following, the peace of October 1748, then, crime reporting in the London press increased enormously, to such an extent that contemporaries must have been well aware of the change. This must surely have served to confirm the fears which had been expressed about the problem of robbery in the capital and the anticipated effects of demobilization. How do these patterns of crime reporting in the transition from war to peace compare with the other major contemporary barometer of the state of crime – the patterns of prosecution at the Old Bailey?

Increases in prosecutions for property theft Increasing numbers of indictments for property thefts were being generated in London before the beginning of peace preliminaries in April 1748 and before the mass of servicemen had arrived home (Graph 3.5). Prosecutions for theft at the Old Bailey increased appreciably over the latter half of 1747, from a low of 30 prosecutions in June 1747 to 51 in February 1748. A more substantial rise thereafter led to significantly higher numbers of trials in the final few months of 1748, with a particularly sharp upturn from the beginning of 1749 to a peak of 97 property thefts tried at the sessions of December 1749.42 This provides an interesting comparison with the patterns of crime reporting in the London press discussed earlier (Graph 3.6). While there were clearly a number of factors involved, and although it is difficult to identify any direct points of interaction, we can perhaps offer a suggestive narrative of the changes that were taking place in the press and the courts, and to think about the impact this may have had upon contemporary perceptions of crime during what was a tumultuous period in the transition from war to peace. In the first instance, initial increases in both crime reporting and prosecutions at the Old Bailey were taking place from as early as the second half of 1747, well before the return of peace. The rise in crime reporting at this time was certainly modest, and readers of the London press may not have noticed the change in the absolute numbers of property crimes printed (given that this equated to relatively

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73

Theft prosecutions

90

Prosecutions

80 70 60 50 40 30

Jan 1747 Feb 1747 Apr 1747 Jun 1747 Jul 1747 Sep 1747 Oct 1747 Dec 1747 Jan 1748 Feb 1748 Apr 1748 May 1748 Jul 1748 Sep 1748 Oct 1748 Dec 1748 Jan 1749 Feb 1749 Apr 1749 May 1749 Jul 1749 Sep 1749 Oct 1749 Dec 1749

20

Old Bailey session

Graph 3.5 Prosecutions at the Old Bailey for property theft, by session, January 1747–December 1749. Source: Old Bailey Proceedings Online [version 6.0, accessed 19 June 2013], ‘Statistics Search’, tabulating total where offence categories are theft and theft with violence, by session, and counting by offence.

few extra reports printed per issue, even in the tri-weeklies). Nevertheless, comments regularly appeared in London papers at this time to the effect that ‘robberies are as frequent in and about the City, as has been known for many years’.43 Indeed, such was the problem – so it was claimed in many reports in the final months of 1747 and the beginning of 1748 – ‘that it requires the utmost diligence in the magistrates to curb the insolence of the villains who commit them’.44 Magistrates were also coming under growing pressures from those in higher levels of authority. A letter from Whitehall to the chairmen of the Middlesex and Westminster sessions of the peace in September 1747 expressed the King’s great concern ‘at the notorious immoralities and vices daily committed, and at the robberys [sic] and disorder which so often happen in the streets of London and Westminster and parts adjacent’.45 If the Justices, constables, watchmen and other officers responded to such calls for greater diligence in searching out

74

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London 260

100

Crime reports Theft prosecutions

240

90 220 200

80

Crime reports

70 160 140

60

120 50

Theft prosecutions

180

100 80

40

60 30 40 20 Oct 1749

Jul 1749

Sep 1749

Apr 1749

May 1749

Jan 1749

Feb 1749

Dec 1748

Oct 1748

Jul 1748

Sep 1748

May 1748

Apr 1748

Jan 1748

Feb 1748

Oct 1747

Dec 1747

Jul 1747

Sep 1747

Jun 1747

20

Month/Old Bailey session

Graph 3.6 Crime reports printed in London newspapers and prosecutions at the Old Bailey for property theft, June 1747–December 1749. Sources: Newspaper Sample; Old Bailey Proceedings Online [version 6.0, accessed 19 June 2013], ‘Statistics Search’, tabulating total where offence categories are theft and theft with violence, by session, and counting by offence.

thieves (as they were frequently told to do), this may have contributed to the rise in theft prosecutions at the Old Bailey over the same period. Indeed, while there are problems with compiling patterns of theft accusations at the lower courts and in summary justice in London – not least because of patchy record survival and the relatively low absolute numbers of accusations – it does seem that more petty larcenists were also being brought within the bounds of the metropolitan justice system in the latter half of 1747, before demobilization had begun in earnest. As discussed in the penultimate section of this chapter, an increasing number of petty thieves were punished with whipping or hard labour at the Bridewell house of correction in the final few months of 1747 than earlier in the year.46 A similar pattern is also evident in the rate of petty

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larceny cases which were prosecuted by indictment at the sessions of the peace both in Westminster and Middlesex at this time.47 Anxieties about the level of robberies in London were therefore being voiced in the press from as early as 1747, and there were anticipations about the damaging effects which the approaching peace would bring. Some increases in crime reporting and theft prosecutions were taking place in the final few months of 1747, yet contemporaries do not seem to have noticed the increases. Certainly not in the case of prosecutions: despite previous reports of gangs of criminals terrorizing neighbourhoods, the General Evening Post in January 1748 could nevertheless report that ‘the ensuing sessions, which begins tomorrow at the Old-Bailey, will be one of the smallest known for some time past, there being but 12 prisoners to try on the London side, and about 30 on the Middlesex, and but few of them for capital offences’.48 However, by the close of 1748, the explosion in crime reporting in the press and the substantial increases in prosecutions made it blatantly obvious that crime was now a very real and pressing problem. In contrast to its positive report of low levels of prosecution in January 1748, by December the General Evening Post complained that the upcoming sessions of the Old Bailey would ‘be the largest known for some years, there being upwards of 140 prisoners to try, several of whom are for capital offences’.49 For readers of the London press, the anxieties which had been roused in the later months of 1747 must have been starkly confirmed and reinforced by the massive surge in crime reporting from mid-1748 onwards, along with the increases in prosecutions. If, as seems likely, the press had an important role to play in generating and then confirming concerns about the effects of demobilization and expectations that crime could only get worse, newspapers and other forms of crime reporting were also influential in reinforcing the panic after 1748. It is to this issue that we now turn.

The negative representation of crime in the press Following the return to peacetime in the immediate years after 1748, how was crime represented in London newspapers and other forms of printed crime reporting, and what might have been the effect of these representations

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on contemporary attitudes? A comprehensive examination of the numerous changes which can be identified in the printed discourses of crime during the post-war crime wave is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, we shall concentrate on a select few of the major developments in order to rethink the role played by crime literature in reinforcing the concerns of propertied Londoners about crime at mid-century. Nicholas Rogers has identified the ‘conspicuous reporting of crime in the press’ as part of the explanation for the public anxieties about offending in the late 1740s and early 1750s.50 Certainly there were important changes in the quantitative and qualitative nature of crime reporting in London newspapers in the immediate post-war years, some of which – although not all – have been flagged up in recent works. In the first instance, the explosion in the number of crime reports printed in the London press which began in the latter half of 1748 continued – and in some instances even increased – until at least the first months of 1751 (Table 3.3). Indeed, in all four of the titles sampled here, large numbers of reports of property offences were printed throughout 1749 and 1750. The increase was huge: the number of crime reports printed in the pages of both the London Evening Post and the Whitehall Evening Post more than doubled between 1748 and 1749, remaining at a high level in 1750. The Whitehall Evening Post in particular ran over 1,100 crime reports in the year 1749, at an average of about 93 per month, or 7–8 per issue. At its peak the paper printed over 130 reports of property offences in the month of November 1749 alone. We might compare this to the second half of 1747, when an average of 25 property crime reports were printed each Table 3.3 Number of crime reports printed in London newspapers, per year, 1746–50

Year

General Advertiser

London Evening Post

Whitehall Evening Post

Old England

1746

173

90

–

38

1747

187

163

196 (May–Dec)

68

1748

208

173

492

155

1749

397

445

1,107

123

1750

307

410

1,026

146

Source: Newspaper Sample.

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month. Nor, it should be remembered, does this count include reports of offences other than the appropriation or damage of property, and nor does it include other aspects of crime and justice reporting such as accounts of trials, punishments or editorial commentaries. The increasing amount of newshole given over to crime in the early months of 1749 was filled not only by a rise in reports of property offences, but also by another significant development which took place in the style of crime and justice reportage at this time: namely, the publication of letters and commentaries from readers and reformers on the state of crime. The Whitehall Evening Post took the lead in this as early as 17 January 1749, when it printed the following notice to readers: The frequency of audacious street robberies repeated every night in this great metropolis, call aloud on our magistrates to think of some redress; for, as the case is now, there is no possibility of stirring from our habitations after dark, without the hazard of a fractured skull, or the danger of losing that property people are sometimes obliged to carry about them, which an honest industrious family may be some months, if not years, working for again. These villains now go in bodies, armed in such a manner, that our watchmen, who are generally of the superannuated sort, absolutely declare, they dare not oppose them. If, therefore, any person can think of a proper scheme for the preservation and safety of his fellow subjects, which carries with it any air of probable success, and will send it to our publisher, it shall be inserted in this paper.51

Many readers took up the opportunity with thanks. Just 4 days later, a letter from a self-declared ‘person of no power’ appeared in the paper, calling for an extension to the payment of prosecutor’s costs in cases of pickpocketing, shoplifting and petty theft, as well as parish rewards for ‘apprehending and bringing to justice villains of a more dangerous degree’.52 ‘Your generous invitation, and the love of my fellow subjects,’ another writer declared in a letter to the editors, ‘has induced me to spend a leisure hour, to fling in my mite, which is submitted to your consideration.’ It seemed to him that the ‘bare-faced thieves, who triumph in so many murders and robberies, and carry with them such terror, that there is no stirring abroad without danger,’ should be brought to the attention of the legislature in order to ‘impose the pains and penalties, in the most severe manner’.53

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

The fact that half of the newshole of the 18 February 1749 issue of the Whitehall Evening Post was given over to crime and justice reporting was due in large part to the publication of two letters on the subject from correspondents which took up most of the front page. In the leading article, one reader avowed it was ‘the begging tribe that is the nursery, which sends yearly to town a supply of overgrown boys, who keep up the number, chiefly, of our street robbers, as fast as they are cut off by the law, or transported’.54 Other papers later followed suit. A number of letters from correspondents on the causes of crime appeared in both the London Evening Post and the Public Advertiser in 1753.55 The publication of such letters had a significant impact on the way in which crime and justice was represented in the press during the post-war crime wave. In the first instance, the frequently apocalyptic tone of the commentaries offered alarming and almost certainly exaggerated disquisitions on the crime problem. They also served to broaden the crime wave out as resulting from a constellation of wider social problems, not least luxury, vice, idleness and immorality – the traditionally understood ‘root’ causes of crime which we will consider at more length in the following chapter. The invitations to readers to send in letters and the publication of these commentaries moreover likely encouraged readers to engage with the crime problem on a deeper level. In many ways, by publishing letters from correspondents, editors created a dialogue within the press, even if only implicitly. But on several occasions letters were printed which offered directly opposing views of the causes of the crime wave or ideas about how best to deal with the problem. In this instance, crime and justice was presented to readers as a subject for critical debate. Another conspicuous feature of the London press in the immediate years after 1748 was the overwhelming focus on serious, violent offences, particularly robbery – an image that severely distorted the prevalence of such offences in comparison to that suggested by prosecutions in the courts. Much like the eighteenth-century metropolitan and provincial press more widely – indeed, even the twentieth-century press – mid-century London newspapers, if taken at face value, ‘would have given an almost entirely false picture of crime, one that focused primarily on offences involving violence to persons or property’.56 Taking all four of our sample mid-century London newspapers together, accounts of violent thefts (street and highway robbery) constituted over half of all the reports of felonies printed in the years 1746–50.57 By contrast, as Table 3.4 demonstrates,

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thefts without the aggravating circumstances of violence (although, it must be noted, this does include a very small number of burglaries and housebreakings in which the victims were put in fear) accounted for just over a third of crime reports. Reports of homicide moreover made up a significant proportion – around 6 per cent – of crime reporting in the same period. While there are definitional problems, this does have interesting and suggestive similarities with data from other recent studies. Reports of robberies likewise accounted for half of all the crime reports printed in late-eighteenth-century London newspapers. Homicides too constituted a similar proportion of crime reporting both at mid-century (6 per cent) as in the 1780s and 1790s (5 per cent).58 Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the vast majority of its content was taken from London newspapers, stories of violent crime also predominated in the provincial Kentish Post across the middle decades of the eighteenth century.59 Although we cannot know how these figures compared to actual criminal activity or the contemporary experience of crime, they do contrast markedly with the patterns of prosecutions at the Old Bailey (Table 3.4). In the years 1746–50, cases of highway and street robbery accounted for only 8 per cent of all prosecutions in the metropolis, yet such offences constituted over half of all crime reports in the newspapers. Violent thefts were thus six times more prominent in press reporting than in the courts. Reports of homicides too were around three times better represented in newspapers than in Old Bailey indictments. And despite the fact that thefts without violence made up the vast bulk of criminal trials in London in this period (some 83 per cent of all prosecutions), offences within this category represent a much lower proportion (35 per cent) of crime reporting in the press. While we cannot recover the nature of criminality or the contemporary experience of crime, it is extremely unlikely that this matched the patterns of newspaper crime reporting. In short, the press in all likelihood exaggerated the relative threat of violent theft which readers faced. At the very least, for those who did not have direct experience of crime, press reporting provided a distinctly skewed image of crime compared to that suggested to contemporaries by the profile of indicted felonies. Three caveats with this analysis need to be considered, although these need not undermine our findings. First of all, it should be noted that this analysis does not provide a comprehensive picture of crime reporting in the mid-century London press. The count of reports is limited to felonies (those

80

Source

Deception

Killing

Royal offences

Sexual offences

Theft

Violent theft

Total

Crime reports (N)

123

415

209

80

2,256

3,271

6,354

(%)

1.9

6.5

3.3

1.3

35.5

51.5

100.0

Prosecutions (N)

52

53

58

32

2,019

193

2,407

(%)

2.2

2.2

2.4

1.3

83.9

8.0

100.0

Sources: Newspaper Sample; Old Bailey Proceedings Online [version 6.0, accessed 19 June 2013], ‘Statistics Search’, tabulating year against offence category, between 1746 and 1750, and counting by offence.60

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

Table 3.4 Categories of offence as reported in London newspapers and prosecuted at the Old Bailey, 1746–50

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crimes which would have likely been prosecuted at the higher courts of the Old Bailey), and it does not include misdemeanours which contemporaries likely considered within the broad ambit of crime, and which were liable to prosecution at the lower courts (such as assaults, verbal violence, frauds and cheats).61 These crimes were evidently newsworthy in their own right, and would often have provided readers with useful knowledge about petty offenders in their own community.62 Yet it would seem that misdemeanours were less likely to be reported than felonies.63 The absolute number of reports of felonies was certainly large. Secondly, we should be careful not to assume that the quantitative patterns of crime reporting analysed here automatically matched the messages which contemporaries might have gained from the qualitative nature of crime reporting. In the case of homicides and sexual offences, for instance, while these made up a lower proportion of the total numbers of crime reports printed, they often received extensive attention. And the way in which those crimes were reported could also serve to make violent crime more alarming, as we will see in Chapter 5 in the case of reports of murder. Finally, the brief and occasionally vague nature of newspaper crime reports can make it difficult to categorize offences, especially when distinguishing between thefts with and without the use of violence. Indeed, when press reports can be linked to Old Bailey trials, crimes which were presented in the press as instances of robbery were in fact indicted as thefts without the aggravation of violence. However, this poses a problem in only a small number of cases: for the most part, reports include enough information to be confident about our categorization of the offences. Indeed, what is interesting is that in several instances the newspapers intimated to readers that victims of property theft had been put in fear, when in fact – from the evidence given at the Old Bailey at least – this had not been the case. What the data in Table 3.4 does not reveal is that there were subtle but important differences in the reporting of crime across each of the four newspapers in our sample. On the whole, the patterns between publications were very similar, but paying attention to the variations helps us to think in more detail about how crime reporting was shaped by the particular nature of each publication and the exigencies of the newshole. Moreover, it should make us cautious of treating crime reporting in the London press as homogenous. In fact, the precise image of crime that readers encountered could depend on

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the specific publications that they read. Table 3.5 demonstrates that – for our sample at least – violent thefts formed a larger proportion of crime reports in the tri-weeklies and weeklies than in the dailies. Indeed, of all the crime reports which readers of the weekly essay paper Old England might come across, a third more would include street and highway robbery than that in the daily General Advertiser. Of course, this should not be confused with the absolute numbers of reports: readers of the General Advertiser were still fed numerous reports of violent thefts. And in the years 1746–50, more reports of violent thefts appeared in that paper than in the Old England for the same period. But it is nevertheless interesting that the weeklies and tri-weeklies presented a more distorted image of crime than the dailies, with proportionally more reports given over to the most serious offences. The same was true for reports of homicides – this offence formed a larger percentage of all crime reports in the tri-weekly London Evening Post and the weekly Old England than in the General Advertiser. What this suggests, we might argue, is that the format of publication itself could shape the content of crime reporting. It could well be that tri-weeklies and weeklies were able to carry out a filtering process which was less available to the editors of daily titles. By appropriating material directly from the morning papers, editors of tri-weeklies and weeklies could pick and choose the more sensational (and therefore perhaps newsworthy) reports which had appeared in other titles. Editors of the dailies were in less of a position to do this, and were perhaps more reliant on sources such as magistrates’ offices and jails for crime reports. This is tentatively suggested by the nature of crime reporting in the General Advertiser. In many issues of the title at mid-century, several consecutive reports were printed of offenders committed to jail by a particular Justice at his office. Given the pressures of time that editors of the dailies worked under, it seems highly likely that they relied upon reporters stationed at particular locations for day-to-day information of crime. The result of this, as the data in Table 3.5 shows, was that a greater proportion of the crime reports in the General Advertiser were for non-violent thefts – the types of offence which constituted the majority of the felonies dealt with by Justices in their offices and the offenders committed to jail – than any other title in our sample. A similar pattern is evident in crime reporting in the lateeighteenth-century press. The Times, one of the most successful daily titles

Table 3.5 Categories of offence as reported in London newspapers, by title, 1746–50 Title

Killing

Royal offences

Sexual offences

Theft

Violent theft

Total

GA (N)

37

58

36

15

687

555

1,388

% of reports

2.7

4.2

2.6

1.1

49.5

40.0

100.0

LEP (N)

24

154

47

18

472

775

1,490

% of reports

1.6

10.3

3.2

1.2

31.7

52.0

100.0

WEP (N)

45

144

113

34

986

1,539

2,861

% of reports

1.6

5.0

3.9

1.2

34.5

53.8

100.0

OE (N)

17

59

13

13

111

402

615

% of reports

2.8

9.6

2.1

2.1

18.0

65.0

100.0

Total (N)

123

415

209

80

2,256

3,271

6,354

% of reports

1.9

6.5

3.3

1.3

35.5

51.5

100.0

Print Culture, Crime and Prosecution

Deception

Abbreviations: ‘GA’: General Advertiser; ‘LEP’: London Evening Post; ‘WEP’: Whitehall Evening Post; ‘OE’: Old England. Source: Newspaper Sample.

83

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

of the later eighteenth century, derived more of its crime and justice stories from the courts and from Justices’ offices than did its tri-weekly competitor The London Chronicle, which relied to a greater extent upon victim reports of crimes committed (which more often than not were for highway robbery).64 Of course, contemporaries likely read a range of different newspaper titles at mid-century, particularly when perusing through the papers in one of London’s many coffeehouses. But it is important to note that the particular messages about crime which readers came across could depend on the types of publication that they read. There were differences, then, in the particular representation of crime between individual newspaper titles at mid-century. On the whole, nevertheless, the press offered an exaggerated image of crime in comparison to the patterns of offences prosecuted in the courts. What is particularly striking is that even as the absolute levels of crime reporting in the press increased massively from mid-1748, nevertheless the balance of reporting according to categories of offence remained remarkably stable. The number of crime reports printed in our sample publications doubled between 1748 and 1749, yet this did not entail a change in the proportions of each type of offence. Throughout the years 1747 to 1750, the proportion of reports of thefts without the use of violence virtually did not change at all. Similarly, reports of violent thefts continued to account for almost half of all crime reports printed in the London press, with very little fluctuation. This necessitated a huge increase in the absolute number of violent theft reports printed in the press at mid-century. In 1750, the Whitehall Evening Post printed 568 reports of street or highway robbery, an astounding number, especially when we consider that only 74 such offences were prosecuted at the Old Bailey in the same year. In other words, as the scale of crime reporting within the London press increased from 1748 onwards, editors surely had to go to great lengths to acquire extra reports of violent thefts in order to maintain their existing templates of reporting. It is impossible to know precisely what items of information editors had access to, and of those sources what they chose not to report. We certainly have no record of all the reports sent in to newspapers by victims of crime which were ultimately not published. The huge increases in reports of robberies which filled the pages of the London press in 1748 and after may have accurately reflected an increase in criminality. Certainly the dislocations of demobilization must have

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produced some extra offending, although we cannot say precisely how much. We can however be more certain that changes in patterns of crime reporting in the press at mid-century are unlikely to be reflective of the changing levels of criminal behaviour. By definition, crime reports must have had their basis in crimes which were actually committed.65 Yet the particular nature of crime reporting patterns at mid-century indicate that editorial selection processes were perhaps more influential. It is unlikely, for instance, that – as was the case in patterns of crime reporting – robberies increased in such greater numbers than thefts without the use of violence. Editors almost certainly filtered out more minor crimes (which in all probability made up the majority of criminal activity) and simultaneously prioritized serious, violent offences. And by doing this, as Peter King explains, they likely discouraged victims of minor theft from sending in reports in the first place.66 The mid-century crime wave in the press was certainly one of robberies, with a striking emphasis on the threat of violence. Readers encountered countless more reports of robberies in newspapers in the immediate years after 1748 than before. In its seemingly relentless reporting of the threats to life and property and its consistently negative (and distorted) image of criminality, the London press must have played a key role in fostering the mid-century panic about crime. Nor did the press reports of proceedings at the Old Bailey even provide anything close to a comprehensive picture of the kinds of offences prosecuted at court in the immediate post-war period. Rather, London newspapers again overstated the prevalence of the more serious and threatening offences. Unlike the late-eighteenth-century London press, newspapers in the early 1750s almost never provided accounts of individual trials. Reports of specific cases that stretched to more than a few lines were uncommon, and the kind of verbatim trial reporting found in the Old Bailey Proceedings was simply non-existent. In a rather exceptional case, in September 1750 several London papers reported the speech given by William Smith when receiving the sentence of death at the bar. Facing the judge, Smith declared that his earlier confession for the crime of forgery on which he was tried, arose ‘from a sincere compunction of heart in abhorrence’ of his crime. He therefore hoped the King, in consideration of his ‘unfeigning sorrow and penitence,’ would be most gracious as to pardon him.67 This was unusual, at least in part as a result of the atypical nature of the case itself – a genteel defendant condemned for a recently capitalized offence. More often,

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

newspapers pointed to the publication of accounts of trials in the Proceedings, or in specially produced accounts of notorious provincial cases. In March 1752, the London Evening Post reported that the Oxfordshire courthouse at the recent trial of the infamous murderess Mary Blandy (explored in more detail in Chapter 5) was so filled with eager-eyed spectators that some were forced to climb in through the open windows to get a glimpse. The paper did not reproduce any of the court proceedings, but instead noted to readers that the trial ‘was taken in court by permission of their lordships the judges of the assize, and will be publish’d under their lordship[’]s inspection with all convenient speed by John and James Rivington, booksellers, in St. Paul’s church-yard’.68 In fact, until 1775, London newspapers and magazines appear to have largely relied upon the Proceedings for their own, usually briefer, accounts of the few Old Bailey trials that they chose to report. And in some such instances, the Proceedings-based account appeared some weeks or months after the trial as an appendage to an account of the offender’s execution.69 Mid-century London newspapers provided little in the way of individual trial accounts. Instead, editors included skeleton summaries of the business conducted at the sessions as a whole. Reports simply noted the total number of persons tried on a particular day, occasionally naming those sentenced to death and the numbers sentenced to other forms of punishment. Such accounts could run to some length, perhaps three-quarters or even a full column at times. But this offered nothing in terms of the conduct of the trials themselves. The interest instead lay in the numbers capitally convicted. Comments on the numbers of offenders acquitted rarely appeared. This had the effect of providing a running commentary on conviction levels at the Old Bailey, and again it served to focus attention on the more serious and threatening offences which resulted in sentences of death. As we have seen, some contemporaries clearly took an interest in the numbers prosecuted and convicted in the courts. In her diary, Gertrude Savile frequently recorded the numbers condemned to death or reprieved on condition of transportation after reading the Proceedings. For some readers such as Savile, then, the summaries of court proceedings which were printed in the London press at mid-century must have reinforced the perception that crime was an increasingly pressing problem. As the newspapers’ lists of those capitally convicted lengthened in the years after 1748, the press publicized the increases in trials and convictions which were reported

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in detail in the Proceedings. In fact, the representation of crime and justice in the Old Bailey Proceedings itself also underwent significant changes at this time. In many ways these developments led to a more alarming image of crime, and certainly an increasingly distorted one in comparison to the number and nature of offences prosecuted at the Old Bailey as a whole.

The Old Bailey Proceedings and the image of crime at mid-century In the first six decades following its emergence as a regular publication in the 1670s, trial reports in the Proceedings rarely amounted to more than 130 words. But from the 1720s onwards many trials were reported at greater length, often with verbatim testimony facilitated by the use of shorthand note takers. By the 1730s, the Proceedings provided at least a bare notice of virtually all the trials conducted at the Old Bailey. This did not mean that the Proceedings provided anything like a complete transcript of what was said in court. Given the constraints of space, much was omitted, particularly testimony relating to the defence case and courtroom interactions. Nor did it mean that all trials were covered at length. Many trials were reported briefly in ‘squibs’ – little more than a mention of the accused’s name, the crime and the verdict.70 Nevertheless, by the 1740s, the Proceedings were providing more detailed accounts of trials than at any time previously.71 In the years immediately prior to 1748, each session of the Old Bailey was covered by the Proceedings in two, 24-page pamphlets, at a cost of 6 pence per pamphlet, and therefore 12 pence for an entire session. Since relatively so few prosecutions were being brought before the Old Bailey in the mid-1740s, the printer of the Proceedings was able to produce many reports at length. With an average of just 44 trials to report for each session in the year 1747, and with some 48 pages to fill, very few reports were abridged. Indeed, only 21 per cent of all the trial reports printed in the Proceedings in 1747 were ‘abridged’, meaning that either no account of the trial was given beyond a note of the indictment or the verdict, or that the trial was condensed into a third-person account without including any first-person testimony. Many trials were instead reported at length, including even relatively minor, conventional and seemingly mundane property thefts.

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This situation continued until December 1748, when a note at the beginning of the Proceedings informed readers that during Sir William Calvert’s tenure as Lord Mayor of London (which had begun the previous month) the ‘sessionsbook’ would from now on ‘be constantly sold for four-pence, and no more, and that the whole account of every sessions shall be carefully compriz’d in one such four-penny book, without any farther burthen on the purchasers’.72 Now with a maximum of only 24 pages available, and with a rapidly increasing number of trials to report, the publisher of the Proceedings was forced to make some severe editorial changes, summarizing an increasing number of trials in minimal detail, while choosing a select number of trials to reproduce at length. The scale of the challenge should not be underestimated: the 86 trials which took place at the Old Bailey in December 1748 was twice the number typically conducted at each session in 1747, yet the publisher now had half as much space available. This had important implications for trial reporting in the Proceedings. In the four editions printed between January and May 1750, for example, 62 per cent of trial reports were abridged to squibs or thirdperson accounts, with nearly three-quarters of all trial reports in the edition of February 1750 likewise summarized in this way. Relatively minor thefts were underemphasized, while cases of robbery, forgery and murder dominated the Proceedings between December 1748 and July 1750, to an even greater extent than usual. Almost all accounts of non-capital theft trials were severely abridged, especially those which resulted in acquittals. Even some crimes that would normally have been covered at length (such as housebreaking) were summarized in bare detail. The trial of the notorious smuggler William Denny Fox in December 1748 was, for instance, afforded nothing more than a bare mention of the trial, despite the fact that he had generated much discussion in the newspapers throughout that year.73 Implicitly recognizing the imposition that the constraints of space had placed on the Proceedings’ ability to provide substantial accounts of trials, a message at the end of the trial of Edward Clark for murder in April 1750 noted to readers that ‘as the above trial is obliged to be abridged to make room for the other trials, by permission [of the Lord Mayor, Samuel Pennant], this trial will be published at large, with the prisoner’s defence, by itself ’.74 An extra sheet was also added to the Proceedings for July 1749, at no extra cost to the purchaser, so that ‘the publick [sic] might have the fullest account,’ there having been over a hundred prisoners tried at the

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sessions.75 Trials which did receive longer reports tended to be either serious forms of theft, cases resulting in sentences of death, or particularly unusual offences. The latter included an uncommonly detailed report in 1750 of the trial of eight infamous thief-takers for an outrageous attempt to break an offender out of the Gatehouse prison.76 Why was this change introduced in December 1748? We have no definitive evidence on this point, but we can explore some possible factors. It seems on balance that the decision was likely taken by the Lord Mayor, Sir William Calvert, rather than by the printer and publisher of the Proceedings, Mary Cooper. The latter had taken over from John Hinton as printer of the Proceedings in December 1747, and had continued the practice of publishing the work in two separate issues for each session at a total charge of 12 pence (6 pence per issue). Cooper had also previously acted as printer of the Ordinary’s Account between June 1745 and June 1746, and during that time had seemingly not made any effort to reduce the price of the title. The wording of the announcement to readers at the head of the Proceedings for December 1748 which brought about the change in policy moreover suggests that it came from the Mayor’s office rather than from Cooper. It specifically noted that it was to be during Calvert’s mayoralty that the Proceedings would be produced in a single four-penny booklet. The timing too is suggestive: the change came at the beginning of Calvert’s term as Lord Mayor. Although initially a supporter of the opposition, by 1747 Calvert was an adherent of the administration, having served as an alderman and sheriff of London in the early years of the 1740s. If Calvert was the driving force, what might have encouraged him to do this? By December 1748, crime was clearly an issue of some interest and concern. Crime reporting in the newspapers had reached a substantial peak, and prosecutions at the Old Bailey too were at their highest for some time. It may well be that Calvert (or Cooper, or even both) saw an opportunity to capitalize on the public interest in crime by making the Proceedings more affordable and attractive to a wider audience. On the other hand, the change might have been made in order to demonstrate more emphatically that – in the face of an impending crime problem – justice was being done, and to convey this message to a wide audience. Forty years later, in the wake of an intense panic about crime in the capital, in 1790 the City authorities ordered that reports of acquitted trials be excluded altogether from

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the Proceedings, a policy that continued for 2 years.77 Part of the rationale for that decision, as Simon Devereaux explains, was that ‘first and foremost, the [Proceedings] ought to show the guilty receiving their just deserts at the hands of legitimate authorities – authorities whose legitimacy was in turn reinforced by the existence of the Sessions Papers as a public record of their activities’.78 The changes implemented in December 1748 certainly did result in much less space devoted to acquittals, and this may have been an aim of Calvert when faced with the pressing issue of crime in the first days of his mayoralty. While the reasons for the change are unclear, we can be more certain about the effects that this had upon the image of crime and justice that the Proceedings offered to readers. On the one hand, as the Proceedings were restricted in length after December 1748, the title to an even greater extent than usual represented crime as violent, threatening and serious, and aimed primarily against wealthy victims. Constrained to pick only a handful of trials to reproduce in detail, the printer must have been encouraged to choose those crimes which were deemed to be of greatest interest to consumers. What is notable is that the crimes the Proceedings now reported in greatest detail were those that dominated other forms of mid-century print such as newspapers and criminal biographies. The Proceedings thus contributed to a distorted representation of the prevalence of violent personal and property crime, an image which must have served to heighten anxieties. On the other hand, however, the Proceedings now offered an image of justice which focused overwhelmingly on cases which resulted in guilty verdicts and death sentences.79 By focusing upon trials which resulted in guilty verdicts and sentences of transportation and death, and by largely ignoring trials that resulted in acquittals (including violent thefts), the Proceedings perhaps reassured readers that while the crime problem was now a particularly serious threat, the justice system was succeeding in securing, convicting and punishing offenders. Samuel Pennant had succeeded Calvert as Lord Mayor of London in November 1749, and had continued the practice of limiting the Proceedings to a single, 24-page pamphlet priced at 4 pence. Again the front cover of the Proceedings advertised to readers that this would remain the case during Pennant’s ensuing term.80 A devastating outbreak of typhus in Newgate and at the Old Bailey sessions house in April 1750 (what would come to be known as the infamous ‘Black Assizes’) however led to Pennant’s untimely death, along with

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over 40 other people, including several judges and jurymen.81 John Blachford consequently assumed the office of Lord Mayor in May 1750 following Pennant’s sudden death, and he quickly rescinded the limitations on the length and cost of the Proceedings which had been in place since December 1748. In July 1750 (the second sessions of the Old Bailey during Blachford’s mayoralty), a note appeared in the Proceedings at the bottom of the 24th page – what had so far been the final page of the publication over the previous 18 months – that ‘as above 80 prisoners were tried [at the sessions], some of which trials being long and very remarkable, we thought it would be more agreeable to our readers (who we shall at all times be desirous of obliging) to have as full an account as possible, so shall print the whole in two four-penny books’.82 Now with more space to fill, the amount of trials reported at length increased immediately as a result. In the four editions of the Proceedings subsequently printed between July and December 1750, 35 per cent of reports were abridged to squibs or purely third-person accounts, compared to 62 per cent in the previous four editions. More cases of relatively serious thefts which resulted in sentences of transportation were now reproduced at length, while minor thefts and cases resulting in acquittals continued to be passed over in squibs with little or no verbatim testimony. Capital crimes which resulted in successful convictions and sentences of death thus continued to dominate reporting in the Proceedings, even after they had reverted to being published in a two-pamphlet format. Again, it is unclear who made this decision and for what reasons. Commercial considerations likely played a role, as suggested by the printer’s tactics in July 1750. The edition of the Proceedings for that session of the Old Bailey included a report of the trial of Anthony Barnes, charged with the rape of an 11-year-old girl named Elizabeth Hodgkin. The first book of the sessions was (undoubtedly deliberately) brought to an end at the peak moment of suspense in the trial, just as Hodgkin recounted the events of the rape: ‘he [Barnes] threw me down on the bed, and pull’d up my coats, covered my eyes, and stopp’d my mouth . . . he hurt me very much, he pull’d down his breeches. . . .’ Here the reader was left hanging, with a note from the publisher that they could soon find out what happened when the second issue of the Proceedings came on sale some few days later. With their interest sufficiently whetted, readers might have gladly accepted the ‘farther burden’ (as the note printed on the front page of the Proceedings in December 1748 had termed it) of paying 4 pence for a second issue.

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‘Gangs of desperate villains’: Negative images of robbery in print In purely quantitative terms, therefore, accounts of robberies and murders (and in some instances, murders committed in the course of robberies) constituted the vast majority of printed trial reporting in London in the immediate years after 1748, to an even greater extent than usual. As we have seen, such crimes likewise formed the bulk of crime reporting in the London press at midcentury. Indeed, even as the scale of crime reporting increased massively after 1748, violent thefts continued to account for half of all the reports of felonies printed in the press. This entailed a remarkable rise in the absolute number of robberies reported in London newspapers. Together the Proceedings and London newspapers provided a severely distorted picture of the extent of violent crime as it was prosecuted in the courts (and almost certainly too the nature of actual criminal behaviour and the threat which readers faced). These changes in patterns of crime and trial reporting were undoubtedly to some extent influenced by developments in law breaking. Reports were based on real offences committed. Yet it seems that editorial policies were more influential in bringing about the changes in reporting we have identified. The increasing emphasis on violent theft in 1748 and after was fundamentally shaped by the decisions of editors, printers and publishers which brought about changes in the reporting of crimes and trials. As anxieties about crime took hold in 1748, the panic must surely have been reinforced and further perpetuated by this exaggeration of the scale of violent crime (robbery especially). Contemporaries were deeply disturbed by this foregrounding of robbery and murder in print. But, we might ask, if the quantitative scale of reports of robberies increased substantially after mid-1748, was there also a change in the qualitative representation of violent theft at this time, and if so, how might this have contributed to the mid-century panic? In order to gain a clearer sense of how propertied Londoners might have perceived the crime wave, it seems crucial to understand the messages which printed crime reporting offered about the nature of robbery in the years after 1748. The depth of coverage varied, and the messages could on occasion be mixed. But it seems that violent theft was depicted in particularly negative terms in the immediate post-war period, in ways that left little space open for sympathetic engagement with offenders. It is to this subject that we now turn.

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Printed representations of robbery were not entirely negative during the mid-century crime wave, it should be recognized. Some relatively positive, idealized and entertaining accounts appeared which did not emphasize the grim realities of crime.83 Picaresque accounts of criminal lives had long been a staple of crime literature, stretching back into the seventeenth century and earlier. While the more outrageous aspects of these works had been largely toned down by the early eighteenth century, criminal biographies continued to appear which detailed the adventures and amours of a select number of highwaymen, with little description of their ultimate subjection to the criminal law. Several such works were printed during the height of the mid-century panic about crime, at a time when newspapers especially were decrying the actions of all classes of robbers, whether highwaymen or footpads.84 Yet there was also a notably negative and troubling undercurrent even to these relatively more light-hearted accounts. This no doubt reflects a broader decline in public interest in (and engagement with) the printed accounts of the lives and last dying words of ordinary property offenders. Changing religious and cultural beliefs served to undermine the significance and metaphysical meanings of the criminal’s life and his behaviour at the gallows. They no longer spoke the same kind of universal truths which they once had. The criminal too lost his/ her cultural purchase as an ‘everyman’, a seamark by which all readers might be warned of the fate that could await them if they followed similar courses. Rather, as Andrea McKenzie has argued, from the 1740s onwards a greater distinction came to be made between the ‘meaner sort’ to whom the moral lesson of the executed malefactor was directly pertinent, and the ‘better kind of readers’ to whom the lesson appeared increasingly irrelevant.85 But the negative undercurrent evident in many of the more light-hearted mid-century criminal biographies also reflects, I would argue, specific concerns which arose in the context of the mid-century panic about crime. While criminal lives were increasingly viewed with distaste from the 1740s onwards, this is most notable in the 1760s and 1770s. In short, while broader processes were underway, we might ascribe the negative (or at least ambiguous) character of criminal biographies in the early 1750s more to the upsets of the London crime wave. Whatever the precise causes, certainly during the years 1748–55, both criminal biographies and other forms of printed crime reporting provided especially negative images of robbery.

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Even ostensibly light-hearted biographies of highwaymen contained a disturbing streak. A biography of the executed highwayman Dennis Neale, Memoirs of the Life and Remarkable Exploits of the Noted Dennis Neale, alias John Clark, otherwise called the Second Turpin (1754), provides one such example. The ‘gentle reader’ should expect ‘neither eloquence nor elegance in this performance,’ the publishers declared in their opening preface, ‘for we have contented ourselves with doing no more than faithfully communicating to the publick [sic] the narrative left, by this unhappy criminal, in our hands for that purpose; without any further addition or embellishment than was absolutely necessary to render it fit for the press’.86 Born into an ‘antient [sic] and honourable family’ in Ireland, ‘who were formerly distinguished for power and riches in the North of that Kingdom,’ Neale’s slide into criminality is glossed over quickly with little explanation, aside from a brief comment that he had travelled over to London in order to seek his fortune, and that he had spent most of his money on ‘cloaths [sic], and other appurtenances, to render [his] appearance agreeable to women’.87 The biography then describes a series of robberies committed by Neale and his accomplices, interspersed with cant and picaresque tales of disguise and Neale’s efforts to set himself up as a ‘compleat [sic] gentleman highwayman’. But distinctly negative details and commentary also emerge. At one point, Neale recounts how he managed to fend off two armed footpads who had attempted to rob him in Stepney Fields. In a superscript note added to the text, however, the editors took this as evident marks of ‘Neale’s vanity in this and other parts of his narrative, in which he is very fond of setting forth his own valour and bravery; sometimes, it is to be feared, at the expence [sic] of truth’. And in many instances, Neale’s conduct was depicted as far from brave or gentlemanly, having threatened to ‘blow the brains’ out of one victim. The editors too noted that at the place of execution Neale had acknowledged murdering a carrier on the Uxbridge road, ‘whom he had the inhumanity to shoot’.88 As Robert Shoemaker has demonstrated, robbers with pretensions to gentility – such as Neale – in the middle decades of the eighteenth century were able to exploit the power of print and the language of civility to cultivate a conception of themselves as polite, gentlemen highwaymen who stood in contrast to their lesser brethren, the street robbers (or footpads, typically those who robbed on foot in the streets and lanes in the heart of the metropolis).89 In reality, the distinction was largely artificial. But many perceived it otherwise.

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Certainly, by mid-century, one author saw the two classes of criminals as manifestly opposed: street robbers ‘are the most desperate, blood-thirsty, lowlived villains imaginable,’ he wrote, and are generally the offspring of poor careless drunken parents, who neither put them to work, or give them education’. Highwaymen, by contrast, ‘are looked upon by most people as the first class of thieves,’ men who ‘seldom abuse, wound or murder the people they rob’.90 Many highwaymen were therefore able to promote a more positive image of themselves at mid-century.91 But it nonetheless seems that during the crime wave of 1747–55, attitudes to such gentlemen highwaymen were decidedly mixed. Indeed, even the most famous gentleman highwayman of the period, James Maclaine, attracted ambiguous feelings.92 In November 1749, Maclaine gained public notoriety when he and an accomplice robbed Horace Walpole in Hyde Park, during the course of which Maclaine’s pistol accidentally went off, scorching Walpole’s face. His robbery of the Salisbury stagecoach and Lord Eglington on Hounslow Heath on the night of 26 June 1750 also received extensive attention in the press, and his later arrest, trial and execution were covered in a raft of publications. According to Walpole, there were ‘as many prints and pamphlets’ about Maclaine as the earthquake which had shaken London some months previously.93 Indeed, at least four prints and three criminal biographies of Maclaine were published in 1750, not to mention extensive coverage in the London press, the Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account.94 The son of a Presbyterian minister of ‘very honourable’ Scottish descent, Maclaine robbed, so he said, in order to maintain his gentlemanly lifestyle. Through his clothing and demeanour, many printed representations affirmed Maclaine’s genteel status, and promoted him as a ‘ladies’ hero’, drawing tears of compassion from his tender-hearted female admirers, deserving none of the detestation poured upon ‘lower’ footpads.95 Such was the level of interest in Maclaine that thousands thronged to Newgate to get a glimpse of the nation’s most famous gentleman highwayman following his condemnation in September 1750. Newgates Lamentation or the Ladys Last Farewell of Maclean (1750) depicts this affecting scene as Maclaine’s well-heeled fans take final leave of their hero, who stands centre stage, hand-on-heart (Figure 3.1). A broadside engraving, James Macleane, the Gentleman Highwayman at the Bar (1750), complete with an account of the trial, likewise presented Maclaine in fine attire standing before a gallery at the Old Bailey filled with well-to-do female admirers.96

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Figure 3.1 Newgates Lamentation or the Ladys Last Farewell of Maclean ([Place of publication and publisher unknown], 1750?), British Museum Prints and Drawings [accessed 27 June 2013], 1851,0308.411.

Yet even as the crowds gathered and as positive accounts circulated, doubts were raised about Maclaine, and printed works highlighted the more negative aspects of his character and his profession. In his Account, the Ordinary of Newgate, John Taylor, commented that while Maclaine ‘has been called the gentleman highwayman, and his dress and equipage very much affected the fine gentleman, yet to a man acquainted with good breeding, that can distinguish it from impudence and affectation, there was little in his address or behaviour, that could entitle him to that character’.97 For some, Maclaine was a warning to those in humbler walks of life not to assume tastes and appearances above their station.98 Even seemingly positive accounts of Maclaine in fact contained a degree of negative commentary. A half-length portrait of Maclaine included within a printed biography depicted him as a true gentleman, be-wigged and dressed in fine attire. Yet four lines of verse beneath the image affirmed the great cost of his desires: ‘Now for these foolish days of wanton pride / My soul is justly humble in the dust / All judging hearin / Who knows my crimes has seen my sorrow for ’em.’99 An Exact Representation of Maclaine the Highwayman Robbing

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Figure 3.2 An Exact Representation of Maclaine the Highwayman Robbing Lord Eglington on Hounslow Heath (London: P. Angier, 1750), British Museum Prints and Drawings [accessed 27 June 2013], 1894,0611.79.

Lord Eglington on Hounslow Heath, published in August 1750 at the price of 6 pence plain or 1 shilling coloured, likewise demonstrated that Maclaine on occasion robbed without the polite decorum which he pretended to (Figure 3.2). The scene is a menacing one, with both Maclaine and his accomplice William Plunket threatening their victims with cocked pistols. Indeed, the image notes that Maclaine swore to Eglington that if the latter ‘did not throw the blunderbuss out of the chaise, he wou’d blow his brains thro’ his face’ (a report that also circulated widely in the London press). Public attitudes to Maclaine and his fellow highwaymen may well have been hardened by such images. The case of Maclaine certainly prompted concerns that the popularity of the gentleman highwayman was subverting attempts to crack down on robbery during the postwar crisis.100 After bemoaning the number of prints published about Maclaine, Horace Walpole bluntly concluded that highway robbery ‘grows no joke’.101 In other ways, too, the representation of robbery in print was becoming more uniformly negative during the mid-century crime wave. The number of relatively positive and entertaining accounts of gentlemen highwaymen was dwarfed by a much larger volume of negative commentary in the years 1748–52. Comments were regularly made in print at this time that robbery

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had reached new lows. In many of the mid-century Ordinary’s Account written by John Taylor, for instance, he bemoaned the state of crime in general and the practices of robbers in particular. In December 1747, he lamented the numbers already executed, and the prospect of more to come, given the seemingly inexhaustible supply of hardened offenders appearing before him: ‘for nowa-days since youth are trained up to thievery as if it were permitted by us, as it was by the Spartan Law; whenever an old offender, though perhaps a young man, goes off the stage, there’s no want of another to succeed him.’102 Likewise, in October 1751, he considered the execution of 11 malefactors ‘a dismal spectacle to the thinking part of the world!’ and pitied ‘that the examples of such numbers executed in a Christian country should have no better effect; but the evil seems to increase with punishment’. For, he continued, ‘no sooner is one set of the publick [sic] infectors of the peace and property of the community cut off from among the inhabitants of the earth, but another is ready to follow in the same way’.103 The mid-century panic about crime certainly appears to have spurred Taylor to view his subjects’ words with increasing scepticism, and to pass negative judgement upon offenders’ efforts to mitigate or deny their guilt. Taylor took this new approach despite his professed intention ‘to neither add nor diminish from the account, these poor unhappy wretches give of themselves, and as near as possible, always repeat it in their own words.’104 Of course, given that the Ordinary’s Account was built upon the words of the condemned, Taylor could not have completely curtailed the offender’s voice, and indeed in some instances, even in the case of heinous offenders and those convicted of especially serious crimes, he provided relatively sympathetic accounts. But in many instances after 1748, offenders (especially robbers) appeared in a more negative light in the Ordinary’s Account than previously. Although William McLaughlin denied the highway robbery for which he was convicted in 1749, it was, according to Taylor, ‘plainly proved against him,’ that even ‘the very character persons he called into his aid and defence [they] gave him, added circumstances from whence his guilt might be inferr’d,’ and subsequently there could ‘be no manner of doubt of his guilt’.105 In the case of the notorious smuggler Arthur Gray, executed in May 1748, Taylor hinted that he had indeed not reproduced the malefactor’s words to the full. He explained that while it was far from him ‘to endeavour to set off any person in [Gray’s] unhappy circumstances in a worse, or even so bad a light as his general character

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would bear,’ it was nevertheless ‘on all hands agreed, that this unhappy wretch has been most infamous,’ and neither would Taylor ‘by any means endeavour to put a gloss upon a bad matter, such as will not bear the light’.106 Especially negative reports of robberies were printed in London newspapers during the mid-century crime wave. Although violence was often only implied (reports simply noting that victims had been ‘attacked’ or ‘robbed’), in lengthier reports robberies were described as particularly brutal, unpremeditated and shocking acts of excessive violence. Commentators in the press regularly insisted in the years after 1747 that the crime problem had reached unprecedented levels, and that robbers had reached unmatched levels of barbarity and insolence. The Whitehall Evening Post in October 1750 concluded that ‘to such a pitch is villainy now arrived, that these hardened wretches not only rob a man of his property, but on any the least opposition, or even delay, wantonly take away a life they cannot restore’.107 Robbers working in gangs were depicted as especially violent. Again, in October 1750, the General Evening Post reported that as one man made some resistance upon being attacked by two footpads on Ludgate Hill, one of the assailants ‘gave a signal, which brought four more confederates to their assistance, who broke one of his ribs, and bruised him very much, after which they robbed him of his watch, and what money he had about him’.108 In sometimes gruesome detail, London newspapers recounted attacks which left victims severely injured.109 Occasional reports were printed of highwaymen acting with civility to those whom they robbed, apologizing that they did so out of ‘necessity’ (in order to fund their genteel lifestyles), or refusing to take money from ladies in their coaches.110 But the overwhelming majority of reports of robberies concentrated upon the violence either threatened or actually committed by desperate street robbers. Editorial commentary further reinforced this image. In June 1751, the Whitehall Evening Post hoped ‘that some speedy and effectual methods will be found out for suppressing those gangs of desperate villains, who molest all entrances to the town, plundering passengers often, and sometimes murdering them’.111 If the newspapers’ rather simple terminology of ‘attacked’ or ‘robbed’ only implied violence, then this was fleshed out in greater detail by the first-hand testimony of victims as reported in the Old Bailey Proceedings. As a printed publication, the Proceedings circulated the experience of victims as an image of crime and victimization which ran alongside those published in other forms of

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crime literature. A crucial element of the trial in cases of alleged robbery was to uncover the level of violence (if any at all) that was threatened or committed by the accused. Victims were as such told to describe in detail the behaviour of their attackers. And in the years 1748–50, when the Proceedings were radically curtailed in length – which thereby limited attention to an even greater extent than usual upon cases of robbery which resulted in sentences of death – the violence used by robbers held a more prominent place in the publication. It was reported in many trial accounts in this period that victims had been subjected to violence. Some even recounted their fears of being killed. For some readers of the Proceedings it must have seemed that robbers were eminently capable of murder, despite the fact that few trials for killing which were tried at the Old Bailey resulted from fatalities during the course of robberies. In April 1749, the Proceedings reported Benjamin Tribe’s experience as a victim of robbery: ‘said I, pray gentlemen don’t commit murder; I have money, take it, it is in my left pocket . . . by my intreaties they seemed a little softened.’112 Another trial report in the same edition of the Proceedings told of how two armed men had rushed at John Sergeant, ‘damned his eyes and limbs,’ and threatened to cut his throat after he attempted to prevent them from robbing a woman in the street.113 In some instances, the Proceedings added unsettling details to offences which had first been reported in the press. In August 1749, the Penny London Post provided a very brief report of the robbery of Seymour Stocker, a brewer, at Ratcliff Cross, noting only that it was carried out by ‘three villains, who tripped up [his] heels’ and took his watch, money and silver buckles.114 But in the account of the robbery given by Stocker at the trial of John Mooney for the crime at the Old Bailey the following month, other details of the violence used by the offenders emerged. According to Stocker – as reported in the Proceedings – not only did the robbers trip him up, one also put a pistol to his chest, ‘and told me if I spoke a word he would shoot me, demanding my money and watch immediately’. As the robbers moved away, they again threatened to shoot Stocker if he dared to stir.115

The prosecution wave and judicial decision-making London newspapers, the Proceedings, the Ordinary’s Account, criminal biographies and graphic prints together offered readers especially negative representations

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of robbery during the mid-century crime wave, representations which focused attention upon the victims and which highlighted the violent and shocking aspects of theft. Given the unprecedented scale of the crime problem, calls were regularly made for readers to act more assiduously in response to crime, not just to robbery and other serious forms of offending, but also to minor cases of petty theft. ‘It would be for the good of the publick [sic],’ the General Advertiser commented in 1748, ‘if everyone would take care to prosecute [pickpockets], trifling as they may appear; and not be content with delivering them up to a mob of perhaps half their own fraternity’ for informal methods of punishment.116 On several occasions the paper noted with disapproval when pickpockets had been subjected to a ducking in the local pond or horse trough, rather than being prosecuted, and thus, so it was complained, allowing such criminals to continue in their business.117 By the early months of 1751, the General Advertiser took an increasingly insistent line: ‘villanies [sic] of all sorts being so frequent as to render every man’s property precarious,’ it was asserted, ‘it must add to the character of every man, who, in even the minutest [sic] circumstances, is attentive to bring offenders to justice.’118 The London press too called for more assiduous and stringent responses to serious thefts. ‘The frequent and wanton barbarities committed of late by robbers, in and about the streets of London,’ the Whitehall Evening Post commented in December 1750, in one of countless similar instances, ‘call aloud for some exemplary manner of punishing those found guilty of them.’119 In a report carried by several other London newspapers, the General Evening Post in September 1750 noted with dismay that ‘great interest’ was being made for the pardon of the 16 malefactors sentenced to death at the recent sessions of the Old Bailey, while at the same time, the paper complained, ‘we are informed that the robberies committed within a week last past, in about this town, do at the highest computation amount to scarce two hundred’. Doubtless with a degree of exaggeration, the paper grumbled that such requests for pardon were being lodged on seemingly any and every grounds: for some because they are young, and for others because they are old; for some because they have good friends, and for others because they are friendless; for some because they are handsome, and the objects of liking, and for others because they are so ugly, that they are the objects of compassion; for some because they have kept good company and are well known, and for others because they were never heard of before.120

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It was thus with some pleasure that the General Advertiser could report that no application for pardon would henceforth be regarded, unless the suitors had first made amends for the offender’s previous crimes, and that they enter into a security with the government to ensure the convict’s good behaviour for the future. Did victims respond to such calls for more assiduous and stringent responses to crime? And did jurors, judges and the central government take a harder line to crime following the huge increases in crime reporting and the especially negative images of crime which were printed in the years after 1747? Answering such questions with precision is difficult in any instance, but it is made especially challenging by two related developments which took place at mid-century which severely hamper our ability to assess changes in judicial decision making in the courts during the post-war crime wave. It is worth considering these developments in some detail in order to understand how they may have distorted patterns of verdicts and sentencing at the Old Bailey at mid-century.121 These two developments at mid-century consisted of a change in how petty thefts were dealt with in Middlesex, as well as a mass transferral of grand larceny cases from the Old Bailey to the lower courts. Magistrates could process accusations of petty theft (a non-capital offence at common law) in the metropolis in a number of different ways, either by sending the accused on for trial at the courts, by committing the accused to a house of correction to face corporal punishment and/or a period of hard labour, or by dismissing the accused without punishment if they provided some kind of restitution to the victim, or if the crime simply went unproven. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century at the very latest, it is clear that many petty theft accusations in the metropolis were frequently being diverted away from prosecution at the lower courts and the Old Bailey and instead dealt with by summary justice, a practice which in many instances posed advantages to both victims and defendants as opposed to prosecution by indictment.122 A small number were prosecuted at the Old Bailey and at the sessions of the peace for Middlesex and Westminster, although not for the City of London (where cases of petty larceny in every instance were either sent to the Bridewell house of correction or the Old Bailey).123 Indeed, up until midcentury it seems that most petty larcenies were punished by summary justice outside of the courts.

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But quite suddenly in 1749, however, there was a seismic shift in policy in Middlesex. This shift in policy consisted of two strands. First, there was a huge reduction in the number of petty theft accusations disposed of at the Clerkenwell house of correction, a change which amounted to a nearabandonment of the use of summary justice in cases of petty theft in Middlesex after 1749. The Clerkenwell house of correction calendars have survived only sporadically for the mid-century period. But from the records that are available it seems that while around 6 to 12 petty thieves were committed each month to Clerkenwell for whipping or hard labour between 1746 and 1749, in 1750 virtually none were committed, and only two to three each month in the immediate years thereafter.124 Even accusations which were described in the Clerkenwell house of correction calendars as merely ‘suspicions’ of pilfering rather than the accused caught in the act were now being sent on to the courts for formal jury trial.125 And secondly, transportation was introduced for the first time as a punishment at the Middlesex sessions of the peace for petty theft. This is significant, for at precisely the same time it appears that large numbers of grand larcenies were essentially fictionalized as petty thefts (by reducing the value of the goods stolen in the indictment to less than 1 shilling) and transferred from prosecution at the Old Bailey to the Middlesex sessions of the peace. The number of grand larcenies tried at the Old Bailey increased substantially from 233 in 1747 to 368 in 1749. But after this point, at exactly the same time as the introduction of transportation at the lower courts, indictments at the Old Bailey for grand larceny fell significantly to 285 in 1750, with further decreases thereafter (Table 3.6).126 By February 1752, a number of Middlesex magistrates (it is unclear who) were complaining of the ‘inconveniencys’ [sic] which resulted from this practice of incorrectly valuing stolen goods in the courts. The Justices thus ordered that when committing a prisoner for stealing anything of small value, magistrates should examine the prosecutor as to the value of the goods and specify this in their warrant of commitment, ‘that it may appear whether the said goods are of one shilling value more or less’.127 It is unclear why this change in practice was introduced. Although the change in policy in Middlesex does not seem to have been part of any national plan, nor stemmed from a central government directive, nevertheless a similar change took place in Surrey at mid-century. As J. M. Beattie has shown, in the

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London Table 3.6 Indictments for petty theft at the Middlesex sessions of the peace, and indictments for grand larceny at the Old Bailey, by year, 1747–54 Year

Middlesex sessions of the peace

Old Bailey

1747

95

233

1748

92

296

1749

109

368

1750

172

285

1751

151

263

1752

129

219

1753

150

233

1754

189

219

Total

1,087

2,116

Sources: LMA, Middlesex Sessions of the Peace Process Register of Indictments, MJ/SB/P, Microfilms XO71/011, 012; Old Bailey Proceedings Online [version 6.0, accessed 19 June 2013],‘Statistics Search’, tabulating year where offence category is grand larceny and ‘other’ theft, between 1747 and 1754, and counting by offence.128

years 1750–52 a large number of grand larcenies were likewise ‘fictionalized’ as petty thefts (with the goods stolen deliberately valued at 10 pence) and transferred from the assizes to the quarter sessions in Surrey. Transportation had been in use for some time at the Surrey quarter sessions in cases of petty theft before mid-century, yet so many of the fictional petty larcenists of 1750– 52 were sentenced to be banished overseas (as they would have been if charged with grand larceny) that in the spring of 1750 the clerk of the peace had to be authorized to make contracts with the merchants in order to ensure that the sentences were carried out.129 This change in both Middlesex and Surrey likely resulted, as Beattie suggests, from a determination to relieve the pressures on the higher courts which had a much larger number of capital theft cases to deal with at this time.130 Yet the change in policy did not extend to the City of London, where the aldermen-magistrates continued to deal with petty theft accusations in the same way as they had for decades, by summary justice at Bridewell. From the sessions minute books it seems that in the City of London, unlike in Middlesex, not a single case of petty larceny in the years 1747–54 was tried at the sessions of the peace, and instead all cases of minor property appropriation committed in the City and prosecuted by indictment were tried

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at the higher court of the Old Bailey. This had long been the practice, and was probably a result of the pressures of time and resources that the aldermenmagistrates and the Lord Mayor worked under. It is impossible to ascertain precisely how many grand larcenies were fictionalized as petty theft at mid-century and removed from trial at the Old Bailey. The changing level of grand larcenies tried at the Old Bailey resulted from both the new policy of transferring a number to the lower courts but also to the actual number brought before the courts in the first place, and we have no means of assessing the relative impact of the two. It is significant, however, and perhaps indicative of the scale of the fictionalization of grand larcenies at mid-century, that some 100 fewer such offences were tried at the Old Bailey between 1749 and 1750, while in the same years there was an increase of 60 petty thefts tried at the Middlesex sessions of the peace. Moreover, in almost every other category of theft tried at the Old Bailey, the number of indictments tried between 1749 and 1750 was either the same, or higher. In short, this suggests that significant numbers of grand larcenies were being fictionalized and transferred from the Old Bailey after 1749. If we assume that the 60 extra petty larceny cases tried at the Middlesex sessions of the peace in 1750 compared to 1749 were actually cases of grand larceny removed from the Old Bailey, then this equates to some 17 per cent of all grand larceny cases brought before the Old Bailey, or roughly 11 per cent of all property theft indictments. This is a substantial figure, and the fact that the numbers of petty thefts tried at the Middlesex sessions of the peace remained at a high level in 1751 while the number of grand larcenies tried at the Old Bailey further decreased moreover suggests that the new policy continued to be implemented after 1750. Indeed, this is also suggested by the complaint of Middlesex Justices in February 1752 of the ‘inconveniencys’ arising from the deliberate undervaluing of stolen goods. My purpose is not to understand the precise dynamics of how grand and petty larcenies were processed within the judicial system during the midcentury crime wave. It is instead simply to highlight the fact that the removal of a significant number of grand larcenies from trial at the Old Bailey (perhaps in the region of 11 per cent of all theft indictments) subsequently poses considerable problems for any attempt to analyse patterns of judicial decision making in that court, and thus for understanding in quantitative terms how

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jurors and judges reacted to the mid-century panic about crime. Moreover, this is an issue which previous studies of the mid-century crime wave have not recognized. We might briefly examine a few examples as particularly indicative of the problem. As Nicholas Rogers has noted, there was a notable increase in the percentage of convicted thieves who were sentenced to death at the Old Bailey during the onset of the mid-century crime wave.131 Yet if this increase reflects a more stringent attitude on the part of jurors and judges, it must surely also reflect (at least in part) the transferral of large numbers of grand larcenies to the lower courts (which if tried at the Old Bailey were unlikely to have resulted in sentences of death). The removal of grand larcenies must likewise have helped to produce the increase in the percentage of guilty theft cases sentenced to transportation and the concomitant decrease in such cases sentenced to whipping or branding which Rogers has also identified.132 There was also, finally, a significant decrease in the proportion of part-guilty verdicts passed at the Old Bailey after 1747 in cases of theft, especially verdicts which reduced the value of the goods stolen to under one shilling, thus making the offence non-capital.133 If taken at face value, this would appear to suggest that jurors at the Old Bailey were acting more stringently in relatively minor cases of theft. But again, this pattern must surely have been due in part to the fact that lower-value grand larcenies were being siphoned off from the Old Bailey. By contrast – and in support of this argument – there was less change in the proportion of part-guilty verdicts which reduced the offence to theft under 40 shillings, no doubt because such higher-value thefts were unlikely to have been ‘fictionalized’ as petty larcenies. In some instances the changes in patterns of verdicts and sentencing at the Old Bailey in the years 1747–55 are so extensive that it seems unlikely that these could be solely due to the impact of the transferral of grand larcenies to the lower courts, and instead it suggests a genuine change in the behaviour of jurors and judges. But assessing the relative influence of the change in processing grand larcenies on the one hand or the judicial decision making of jurors and judges on the other is impossible. We must therefore confine our analysis to patterns of decision making in relation to types of offences which would not have been affected by this change in policy for less problematic evidence of attitudes, along with fragmentary qualitative material which can give us some sense of the behaviour of prosecutors, jurors and judges. Together

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this evidence suggests that in many instances judicial decision makers acted more punitively and stringently during the mid-century crime wave. There is, for instance, some tentative evidence to suggest that Londoners heeded the calls of newspapers such as the General Advertiser to bring petty thieves to justice, no matter how trifling the offence. At the end of 1747, with alarm about crime now ringing through the press, George Watts brought a prosecution to the Old Bailey against John Milford for allegedly stealing 2 pence from him. After acquitting the defendant, the court chastised Watts for his overly zealous behaviour, commenting that it was ‘the first instance, of a man committed for stealing two pence and now not proved; a most infamous thing, to commit a man to Newgate, for stealing two pence’.134 At the Old Bailey in 1753, James Jackson described to the court how his prosecutor for petty theft of a handkerchief had not been satisfied with throwing him into a pond, but had then also proceeded to charge a constable with him, and carried forward the prosecution to the courts.135 Many other victims prosecuted petty thieves in the courts when informal methods or even the house of correction might normally have been used. In May 1750, Dulick Wilis, a boy just 10 years old, was prosecuted and sentenced to transportation at the Old Bailey for petty larceny.136 Edward Badcock in October 1749 moreover prosecuted Edward Cluney at the Old Bailey for snatching a hat from his head priced at 6 pence, despite the fact that Cluney had not tried to escape after being seen in the act, but instead brought the hat back, in addition to which Badcock had been ‘inform’d by a gentleman, that the prisoner had bore [sic] a very good character before’.137 It seems that the concerns about violent theft and the more resentful attitudes which were expressed in print towards the crime in the years 1747–55 were also in some instances mirrored in the decision making of juries, judges and the authorities. A petition signed by a Justice of the Peace, the prosecutor and 109 of ‘the principal inhabitants of Shadwell,’ for the pardon of a convicted highwayman in September 1750 certainly indicates hardening attitudes to robbery among propertied men of the metropolis. ‘Robberies have of late been so frequent and examples of justice are become so necessary,’ the petitioners noted, ‘that was it not for some very singular circumstances attending the case of William Watson . . . we should not presume to have applied to your excellencies [sic] for mercy towards him’.138 A charge to the grand jury of Norfolk in September 1752 likewise expressed concern that instead of paying

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attention to the ‘particular circumstances’ of capital offences, and showing a due ‘tender regard’ for offenders, jurors were of late passing blanket guilty verdicts, likely due to the perceived seriousness of the crime problem.139 During the mid-century crime wave, judges were also coming under pressure from the central government to act less leniently. As Douglas Hay explains, ‘the great alarm about crime levels in the 1750s . . . generated an unusually high level of resistance, both in the judicial practice of “administrative” pardons, and in government responsiveness to subsequent petitions to save those who had been left to hang’.140 Many judges complained bitterly about this, as did Sir John Willes, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, when asked in July 1750 to provide a report on the highway robbers he had already granted an administrative reprieve: ‘I am sorry to find . . . that the same credit is not given to the present judges, as hath been given to their predecessors for many years last past’.141 Just 2 months previously, the Lord Chancellor and first Earl of Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, had chastised the assize circuit judges for recommending convicted offenders for mercy ‘without specifying any of the circumstances which induced them to make the said recommendations,’ and ordered that the aforementioned judges should produce adequate reports ‘to the end that their excellencies [sic] may be able to form a judgment, whether the said offenders are fit objects of his majesty’s mercy’.142 Apparently still dissatisfied with the behaviour of the judges, in February 1754 the central executive again reminded them that in cases of capital felonies they should ‘grant such reprieves, only in cases, where reasonable cause shall appear from the nature and circumstances of each particular case,’ and warned them not to forget ‘that mere importunity is none of those reasonable causes’.143 Judges nevertheless continued to grant administrative reprieves in many cases of robbery, even shocking ones, and upon the basis of what appears to have been ‘mere importunity’. Justice Denison, one of the circuit judges chastised by Hardwicke in May 1750 for failing to provide adequate explanation for granting a reprieve, in August of the same year recommended to the King’s mercy Joseph Rainbird, convicted of theft from a dwelling house at the Kent assizes, in his report explaining: The prisoner made no defence nor called any witnesses but was undoubtedly guilty of the fact for which he was indicted. And as the offence appeared to me to be attended with such circumstances as hardly distinguished it from a

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robbery and the offender seemed to be experienced in that sort of business I left him for execution. But very lately at the earnest importunity of some of his friends desiring an opportunity to lay a petition before your excellencies I respited [sic] the execution for that purpose for a short time.144

In other instances, judges continued to evaluate the necessity of putting an offender to death, even when under pressure from the executive to punish offenders to the full extent of the law. Justice Edward Clive justified his recommendation of the convicted robber William Dickens to mercy in July 1750 because one Thomas Wakelin, ‘convicted at the same assizes for a very bad robbery on the highway’ and subsequently executed, had, he believed, ‘answered in some measure the purpose of example’.145 Having said this, however, many judges do seem to have become more punitive in their decision making during the mid-century crime wave. In a printed biography of James Maclaine, the author Reverend Dr Fifield Allen described how he had warned the infamous ‘gentleman highwayman’ that he should have ‘very little foundation for any hope [of a reprieve] – that (if the public papers were to be depended upon) robberies were so frequent, committed too by people of a genteel appearance like his, that the administration found it necessary to execute the utmost severity of the law’.146 Such examples can certainly be found in the judicial records. Reporting upon the case of John Jepson, convicted and sentenced to death at the Chelmsford Assizes in August 1749 for highway robbery, Lord Chief Justice Baron Parker noted Jepson’s youth and his mother’s good reputation as ‘considerations that will have their due weight with [the King] in favour of this unhappy young man,’ but ultimately concluded that as ‘robberys [sic] are become so frequent, and the parliament having considered this offence of such a nature, as to give a reward of forty pounds for apprehending and prosecuting any person guilty of this offence to conviction,’ he did not think himself ‘warrant to recommend John Jepson as a proper object of your majesty’s compassion’.147 The central government maintained the hard line against robbers which it urged judges to follow. In the immediate years after 1748, some 75–93 per cent of convicted robbers in London failed to receive a pardon and were subsequently executed, resulting in large numbers making their exit at the gallows.148 A total of 32 convicted robbers were put to death at Tyburn in the year 1750 alone. Perhaps even more remarkably, of the 15 robbers sentenced

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to death at the Old Bailey in 1752, just one managed to secure a pardon from execution.149 Just as concerns were expressed in crime literature about the shocking increase in robberies in the streets and highways of the metropolis, and as press reports called for an end to the seemingly ‘continual pardons’ which apparently incited offenders to commit crimes, so the authorities responded by radically restricting mercy to the condemned.

Conclusion In this chapter we have sought to rethink the role of print in post-war panics about crime, using the London crime wave of 1747–55 as a test case. Previous analyses of this and other eighteenth-century post-war panics have pointed to the part played by the press, but aside from a couple of instances, this has not been studied in detail. Nicholas Rogers for instance has provided a useful but brief analysis of crime reporting in the press during the mid-century crime wave, concluding that the newspapers ‘helped to produce something of a moral panic in London’. The fear of violent crime that the press helped to create was, he also argues, ‘disproportionate to reality,’ as crime seemed ‘to strike at the very sinews of society’.150 But questions have emerged from this pervious work, and these have been the focus of our analysis. What was the precise nature of newspaper crime reporting in the months leading up to, and following, the return to peace in 1748? How was crime represented in the other major forms of printed crime reporting that were aimed at propertied Londoners, such as the Proceedings, the Ordinary’s Account, criminal biographies and graphic prints? The detailed analysis of this chapter has revealed some important aspects of the dynamics of printed crime reporting within the mid-century post-war panic about crime. In the first instance, concerns about crime and the anticipated effects of demobilization were voiced in newspapers, pamphlets and periodical literature before the end of war and the return of servicemen in 1748. These concerns were seemingly confirmed, and the panic about crime subsequently reinforced, through vast and sudden increases in the scale of crime reporting and notably more negative representations of crime in print which highlighted to an even greater extent than usual the more violent and threatening aspects of crime – not just in the press, but across other forms of printed crime reporting too.

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While changes in criminality likely had some influence upon these developments in crime reporting, it seems clear that other factors were more significant, namely what Esther Snell has referred to as ‘the imperatives of production’: including newsworthiness, the availability of alternative sources of news and the mechanics of compilation.151 Until more is known about the selection processes of newspaper editors it would be rash to completely discount the influence of changes in criminal behaviour in the transition from war to peace, but the patterns of crime reporting uncovered here and the recent work of Snell both suggest that this may have had relatively little impact. There was almost always a pool of offences which editors could draw upon, probably few of which made it into print, given the relatively low absolute numbers of crimes that were reported in the press, even during periods of relatively high levels of crime reporting such as 1748–50. In her detailed analysis of the Kentish Post, Snell has shown that post-war increases in crime reporting in the paper were due more to crime regaining its former editorial prominence than to a demobilization crime wave.152 While the case of crime reporting in midcentury London newspapers is less clear, the precise timing of the fluctuations in levels of crime reporting do tentatively suggest that a similar process may have been at work. As we have seen, as news of peace preliminaries emerged in the spring of 1748, levels of crime reporting stagnated or even declined, only to increase rapidly in the second half of 1748 as news of hostilities abroad came to a close. By the beginning of 1749, with peacetime restored, editors of the London press seemed to have shifted their attention overwhelmingly to the subject of crime. Interest had been growing since 1747 with the depredations committed by smugglers, followed by concerns about the effects of demobilization. But by the close of 1748, with foreign news on the wane, and with prosecutions for theft rapidly on the rise, the London press opened its pages to crime, to such an extent that in February 1749 the Whitehall Evening Post could devote over half of its newshole to crime and justice. And it was not just war, but other sources of news too that could have an impact on the scale of crime reporting in the press. As shown in Table 3.5, levels of crime reporting in London newspapers increased in the final months of 1746 as news of the Jacobite rebels began to wane. Editors of London newspapers at mid-century stuck to templates which dedicated half of all crime reports to accounts of violent theft, and this remained the same even as the absolute scale of crime

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reporting increased hugely after 1748. Moreover, the changes in the nature of trial reporting which took place in the Proceedings at mid-century which we have uncovered resulted from an editorial decision to limit the length and cost of the publication. Nor were developments in the scale and nature of printed crime reporting in the immediate years after 1747 even reflective of the nature of crime brought before the courts. Of course, having highlighted the dynamics of printed crime reporting during the mid-century London crime wave, this raises the question of how typical that particular period was. How does the case of mid-century compare to other major panics about crime in late seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury London? What part did print have to play in the London crime waves of the 1690s and the 1710s when some of the key genres of crime literature studied here – particularly the Proceedings, the Ordinary’s Account and the newspapers – were still in their infancy? By contrast, what was print’s role in the moral panic about law and order in London which followed the end of the War of American Independence in 1783 when the Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account had lost their popular audience and newspapers more than ever before came to be the predominant source of printed information on crime and justice? Addressing such questions can tell us much about the interaction between the forms of printed crime reporting available to readers, contemporary attitudes to crime, and the processes which underpinned postwar panics about crime, events which frequently produced substantial changes in the law and its administration in the eighteenth century.

4

Print Culture and Policing The Efficacy of Empirical and Providential Detection

In the years 1747–55, then, crime was represented in especially negative terms across a range of printed publications. A rapid and large increase in the scale of crime reporting highlighted the severity of the crime problem, and attention was largely focused upon the most violent and threatening aspects of crime. This coverage almost certainly exaggerated the prominence and the threat of the most serious kinds of offences to propertied Londoners. None of this is to argue that contemporaries were not exposed to the possibility of becoming a victim of a serious criminal offence, nor that the experience of crime did not shape at least some people’s perceptions of the crime problem. But it seems clear that printed crime reporting at mid-century was influenced by many other factors than changes in criminality, not least by the particular form of the publications themselves. As Nicholas Rogers has argued, contemporary perceptions were heavily conditioned by these images.1 Indeed, a number of diarists and social commentators came to anxious conclusions about the state of crime upon the basis of what they read in print. Propertied and well-read Londoners such as Gertrude Savile, Mary Delany and Spencer Cowper were evidently convinced by press reporting that robberies and even murders were on the increase at this time. Two sets of questions consequently emerge. First, what explanations were put forward in print for this alarming increase in crime? What were deemed to be its causes, what solutions to the crime problem were advocated, and what efforts were actually undertaken to tackle the issue? Secondly, what did printed crime reporting suggest about the effectiveness of the criminal justice system in its ability to bring offenders to justice? What would readers have learnt from print about the efficacy of existing methods of policing to deal with the crime wave?

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The messages about criminal justice and policing which were promoted in eighteenth-century print have begun to receive some initial attention in a number of recent studies of the Old Bailey Proceedings and eighteenth-century newspaper crime reporting.2 This is much needed, for previous research on eighteenth-century crime literature (including studies of the Ordinary’s Account and criminal biography in particular) has tended to focus overwhelmingly on printed representations of crime and criminals, and far less on the images of prosecution, policing and punishment that were distributed through print. These recent studies have put forward a number of suggestive arguments about the nature of printed discourses of policing in the eighteenth-century press, and we will have cause to consider this in more detail below. Suffice it to say here that upon the basis of mid-century London newspapers I come to somewhat different conclusions about the extent to which the press provided a relatively positive and reassuring image of policing, particularly when considered alongside the several other forms of printed crime reporting which we are concerned with in this study. The representation of policing in print has also been largely absent from the voluminous amount of research which has been conducted on policing practices in eighteenth-century London. This work has radically overturned traditional interpretations of eighteenth-century policing (which for the most part took the complaints of contemporary reformers at face value) as a hopelessly ‘imperfect, inadequate, and wretched system’ which desperately awaited the coming of the ‘new’ police in 1829.3 No longer can this be maintained.4 It is clear, rather, that policing practices in London developed gradually throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, accelerating from the 1780s onwards.5 Changes were taking place before the reforms of Henry and John Fielding in the middle decades of the eighteenth century (although that is not to say that the Fieldings did not have a substantial impact).6 Nor can the eighteenth-century resistance to the kinds of reform which took place with the 1829 Metropolitan Police Act any longer be considered as a stubborn attachment to an outmoded and ineffective system of governance. Opposition to change was not, as Francis Dodsworth has shown, simply about the protection of vested interest; rather it reflected a classical understanding of the nature of freedom and its relation to the existing structure of government. Eighteenth-century policing was built upon a model of civic duty which stood at the very heart of governance, and

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which was seen to be the guarantor of liberty and freedom from corruption.7 Moreover, the decentralized nature of policing in the eighteenth century was in many ways effective in meeting local needs.8 In short (and for the want of space much more could be said on this issue), policing methods were undergoing substantial change in eighteenth-century London, and this has revised the historical narrative of policing reform, even if there is no simple linear progress from the developments of the eighteenth century through to the widespread structural reforms of the nineteenth. Nevertheless, this important recent work on policing in eighteenth-century London has not fully explored how policing practices were represented in print. Most of the discussion has continued to focus upon the social policy pamphlets written by the leading voices of police reform in the eighteenth century. There has been much less attention to the more widely read forms of publication such as newspapers and the Old Bailey Proceedings which also disseminated images of policing in London and offered contemporaries a repository of ways of thinking about crime and justice. Understanding how policing was represented to contemporaries may help to explain why changes took place, or at least why some methods flourished and others faded. It certainly provides an important context for policing reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This chapter provides an initial investigation of how policing was represented across a variety of publications during a particular moment when crime was also depicted as an especially pressing problem. It begins with an analysis of the debates which took place in print at mid-century about the causes of, and solutions to, the crime wave. This will be linked to the efforts that were actually put into effect to tackle what were seen as the ‘root’ causes of crime. We will then consider how the policing of property crime was represented in print during the mid-century crime wave, with particular attention to the extent to which print may have served to reinforce or undermine public conceptions of the efficacy of the justice system in bringing offenders to condign punishment. Crime literature did not offer a single, coherent image of policing at midcentury. Indeed, in some instances distinctly contradictory messages were offered to readers about the effectiveness of the methods in place to deal with crime. For instance, while the authors of social policy pamphlets bemoaned the failures of civil officers and the public in enforcing the law, particularly

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in relation to offences against moral order, London newspapers by contrast frequently trumpeted the successes of parish authorities and peace officers in proactively policing the morals of the metropolis. Within individual publications too the perspectives could be mixed. But on the whole, it will be argued, print played a largely integrative role which reinforced an image of the justice system as capable of dealing with the criminal threat.

Print and the root causes of crime Rarely was the term ‘police’ used in print before the 1760s, nor did it have its present narrow meaning of a uniformed force employed by the state to govern law and order. ‘Police’ instead implied a much more general system of government, ‘the task of which was to regulate aspects of communal existence with the aim of establishing the common good of the community . . . closely associated with maintenance of the moral order, security, and the maximization of national resources’.9 Contemporaries more often spoke (as synonymous with ‘police’) of the ‘civil power’, which, Henry Fielding claimed at mid-century, had ‘by the remissness of the magistracy lost much of its ancient energy’, and which he intended to rouse ‘from its present lethargic state’.10 This encompassed a wide range of activities, from the regulation of tradesmen and apprentices to the maintenance of clean and well-lit streets, the suppression of moral and religious misbehaviour, and the prevention and detection of crime.11 Printed guides for constables and other parish officers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for instance detailed the broad range of duties which they were expected to undertake, particularly in relation to moral order.12 Indeed, to contemporaries such activities by necessity went hand-in-hand. Maintaining social and moral order was deemed crucial to preventing criminality at its source, and commentators and parish authorities placed increasing importance on the regulation of the streets as a means to prevent robberies. As Bob Harris argues, ‘crime sharpened fears about morals because of contemporary diagnoses of the causes of crime’.13 It was widely perceived that crime was a symptom of the ‘root’ causes of irreligion, idleness and immorality. In a pamphlet of 1753, for instance, John Maud maintained that the failure ‘to secure the laws of morality from insult and contempt’ was ‘daily more and more confirmed by

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the acknowledged increase of robberies and murders’.14 The pseudonymous pamphleteer Philonomos similarly contended that ‘if idleness, drunkenness, gaming, lewdness, and immorality, could be suppressed, those greater crimes, which make so terrifying an appearance, excite such a general clamour, and cause such frequent and numerous executions, would very quickly cease’.15 Concern about the state of contemporary morals formed a common thread throughout the ‘long’ eighteenth century, but anxieties were expressed most vociferously during periods of anxiety about crime, such as in the 1690s, 1730s, 1750s and 1780s. Similar themes emerged time and again, not least fears about the damaging effects of rising wealth, increasing consumption, luxury and the fluidity of social status. Yet each crime wave and the attendant anxieties about morals contained distinct contexts and subtle shades of difference. The concern about morals during the London crime wave of 1747–55, for instance, was given greater purchase by a number of events at mid-century which appeared to imply God’s displeasure: harvest failures and food shortages; the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745; the London earthquakes of February and March 1750; and a devastating distemper among the horned cattle in 1753 were together interpreted by polemicists and sermonizers as a reflection of the nation’s gross irreligion and a pressing call for a reformation of manners. Nicholas Rogers has suggested that the raft of sermons produced in the wake of the London earthquakes demonstrates little more than opportunism on the part of the clergy, who ultimately realized that they had to ‘negotiate the more secular discourses of print if they were to have the power to persuade’.16 Harris has placed more stock in the clergy’s outbursts, but Rogers’ argument that the general tenor of the printed discussions of crime and morality at mid-century was ‘journalistic rather than homiletic’ is largely convincing, even if this refers to points on a spectrum rather than hermetically sealed categories.17 What both Rogers and Harris show is that there was a notable division between the clergy and the judiciary, and this may help to explain why the exhortations to moral reform ultimately produced little prosecutorial effect. There was a great deal of discussion about the specific root causes of crime in the more secular forms of printed literature at mid-century, along with the proposal of schemes for remedying the problem. This discussion took place across a range of genres, including newspapers, social policy pamphlets and the Ordinary’s Account. The first part of this section therefore investigates

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these discussions. The second part attempts to investigate the practices that were initiated at mid-century and the impact that this had upon the detection, prosecution and punishment of morality offenders in London. Calls were regularly made in print for magistrates, peace officers and the public to make every effort to identify and apprehend those upsetting the social and moral order of the metropolis. Were any such stricter policing campaigns carried out, and if so, to what extent was the vehement focus on the root causes of crime in print reflected in the actual punishment of irreligion and immorality? Bob Harris has provided a useful discussion of some of the responses that were undertaken at mid-century. His evidence for such responses is however largely confined to London newspapers. What is needed, therefore – as Harris himself has acknowledged – is a detailed analysis of the judicial records which reveal the patterns of prosecution for social and moral offences.18 But first we need to consider the explanations which were put forward in print for the mid-century crime wave. Two issues which were largely marginalized in the mid-century debates about the causes of crime included poverty and demobilization. The problems of want and returning servicemen were often discussed in less detail or integrated within the wider discourses of the idleness and immorality of the poor. Many commentators took a hard line to poverty. People were committing crimes because they were poor, it was accepted, yet such poverty came as a result of inordinate pleasure seeking, a desire for wealth or the need to support lewd women.19 Others took a more sympathetic view. ‘It is humbly hoped’, ran one report in the London Evening Post, ‘that in whatever regulation shall be thought necessary with regard to the poor, due commiseration will be shewn [sic] to such as become indigent through misfortune, since if poverty, independent of the circumstances by which it is incurred, should be looked on as criminal, instead of repressing it, will encourage the most dangerous of all vices in reference to society, that of acquiring wealth at any rate.’20 The seaman’s plight too was conceded, Rogers notes, ‘its potential links with crime admitted. Yet in the larger discourse upon crime it was marginalized’.21 By contrast, issues of irreligion, idleness and immorality received much more attention. The crime problem was at least in part presented as the result of ‘spiritual mischiefs’ and an ‘almost universal contempt of religion’.22 Sabbathbreaking and profane cursing were the subjects of particularly extensive

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discussion. ‘I know I shall be laugh’d at by a great many, when I mention the profanation of the Sunday’, admitted one contributor to the London Evening Post. But it seemed clear to him that those who persisted in breaking the Sabbath would soon become hardened, and ‘thenceforward capable of the most flagitious wickedness’. ‘Hence’, he concluded, ‘many a father and mother, when their sons came to the gallows, have wonder’d how it came to pass, being ignorant of the speedy transition there is from one crime to another, when conscience and shame are removed out of the way.’23 Of greatest concern in printed commentary were the ‘temporal mischiefs’ of idleness, drunkenness, gaming, lewdness and public diversions, particularly – although not exclusively – among the poor. In a pamphlet published in 1750, one anonymous country Justice of the Peace attributed the crime wave to ‘that torrent of gaming, extravagance, lewdness and irreligion which has appeared amongst all ranks of people’.24 Several commentators condemned gaming for bringing people to ruin. By all accounts, the problem had reached unprecedented heights at mid-century. ‘ The misfortune is’, one pamphleteer argued, ‘that the itch of gaming does not confine itself to the gentry, it has caught the mob.’25 Gin too reduced the poor to want and pushed many into crime to feed their addiction.26 According to the London Evening Post, most of ‘the numberless offenders’ brought before the magistrates of Middlesex and Westminster in 1750 ‘seem’d prompted to the various crimes for which they were taken up, by that most pestiferous liquor, gin’.27 Henry Fielding in his Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers moreover maintained that drunkenness was a vice ‘by no means to be construed as a spiritual offence alone, since so many temporal mischiefs arise from it, amongst which are very frequently robbery and murder itself ’.28 And the increase in trade, wealth and consumption appeared to instil in the poor a desire for luxury and a love of pleasure.29 Indeed, it was the socially inappropriate tastes of the lower sorts that most vexed Fielding, one of the leading social commentators on crime at mid-century. ‘ This fury after licentious and luxurious pleasures’, Fielding declared in his Charge delivered to the Grand Jury at the Sessions of the Peace held for the City and Liberty of Westminster, published in July 1749, ‘is grown to so enormous a height, that it may be called the characteristic of the present age.’ And, Fielding continued, if such ‘immoralities of the people, which will sprout up in the best constitution, be not from time to time corrected by the

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hand of justice, they will at length grow up to the most enormous vices, will overspread the whole nation, and in the end must produce a downright state of wild and savage barbarism’.30 Fielding developed this conservative and traditional conception of English society and the causes of crime at further length in his Enquiry 18 months later, calling upon the legislature to restrict the diversions which led the ‘useful members of society’ into a life of idleness and crime.31 If there was a broad consensus that the idleness and immoralities of the poor were in dire need of redress, there was however some disagreement during the mid-century crime wave about the extent to which the vices of the great should also be the focus of reform. In this instance the discussion of crime and its causes was subsumed within a wider political debate between pro- and anti-ministerial sentiments which revolved around the issue of corruption in high office. Writing under the pseudonym of Ben Sedgly, the prominent Jacobite author Richard Rolt in 1751 produced a tract of Observations on Mr Fielding’s Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers. Like Fielding, Rolt was deeply disturbed by the ‘present reigning vices among the vulgar’ which were productive of the most serious consequences. Yet Rolt chastised Fielding for suggesting that the vices of the great were of no social significance. Only through the positive example of the better sorts could their social inferiors be expected to turn away from vice and idleness. ‘Whoever would punish the faults of others’, Rolt declared, ‘should first qualify himself to prosecute by amending his own: then may we expect to see the turbid stream gradually refining to its primitive purity.’32 In a series of letters printed in the oppositionist paper, the London Evening Post, and in a pamphlet of 1750, the anonymous writer ‘Brittannicus’ likewise condemned the vices and follies of the polite. By plundering the nation to enrich themselves, by reducing the people to poverty, and by setting a shameful example to the poor, the great served ‘not only to seduce, but also compel’ the lower orders into committing ‘most atrocious crimes’, those ‘murders, robberies, etc.’ which rendered ‘it hazardous to travel the highways, and almost unsafe to walk the streets’.33 ‘Bad example and impunity are the sources of idleness, and both come from above’, the London Evening Post later complained; ‘if pleasure becomes the general taste, the lowest people will be idle at least, if not luxurious’.34 Other writers were, however, like Fielding, keen to limit their attacks upon the pleasure-seeking

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of the poor alone. Charles Jones believed that the ‘main spring and origin of most of the robberies, etc. that have been committed for some years past’, were ‘the vices and extravagancies of the common people, particularly those in and about the cities of London and Westminster’.35 The solutions to the crime problem which were put forward in newspapers and social policy pamphlets at mid-century thus concentrated as much upon eradicating the root causes of crime as remedying defects in the justice system. Calls were frequently made in print for the stricter regulation of social and moral order of the poor, through tighter licensing of alehouses and the sale of gin; the suppression of public diversions, such as gaming; attacks upon bawdy houses and upon prostitution; clearing the streets of beggars and vagabonds; and committing the idle and suspicious to hard labour in the house of correction.36 Others offered more reformative measures such as the establishment of county workhouses or modification of the poor laws.37 In general, proposals sought to improve the administration of the laws against immorality rather than the creation of new legislation. An effective and just body of laws existed, many commentators argued, but these were not being put into effect. Indeed, the authors of social policy pamphlets frequently denounced the failures of peace officers and the public to carry out their duties in enforcing the laws to regulate the social and moral order of the metropolis. Again, such complaints tended to form part of broader political attacks against corruption by anti-ministerial writers. ‘Our laws are perhaps as wisely calculated as those of any other nation under heaven’, stated Brittannicus in one mid-century pamphlet, ‘but what avails this, when they are not put in execution? How many disorders appear at the present juncture? How many exorbitancies [sic], which might easily be prevented by the prudence and wisdom of those who are entrusted with power?’38 Another pamphleteer, in condemning the dishonesties of corrupt peace officers, avowed it was ‘a well-known case . . . that most disorderly houses are in fee with some of these rascals’. By contrast, London newspapers in many instances presented a very different view of the authorities’ efforts to tackle the root causes of crime. Countless reports were printed in the immediate post-war period of magistrates – in attendance with constables and other officers – proactively seeking out centres of vice and disorder. Typical of numerous similar reports, the London Evening Post in April 1750 noted that Henry Fielding, in attendance with a party of

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constables, ‘went to a notorious publick [sic] gaming house . . . and seiz’d a great number of persons who were gaming, 20 of whom were, after a long examination, committed to the Gatehouse . . . the neighbourhood testified their joy at the demolition of this great nusance [sic], by universal acclamations’.39 Other reports celebrated the success of the civil authorities in clearing the streets of ‘common nuisances’. Contrary to arguments made by pamphleteers, ordinary inhabitants were likewise shown in the newspapers to be actively engaged in the policing of moral order. Representative of countless similar reports, in January 1748 the Jacobite’s Journal described how ‘the inhabitants of the parish of St Martin in the Fields have been so vigilant in causing the loose and disorderly women within their parish to be taken up and punish’d, that people may now walk the streets there without much interruption by them’.40 We should certainly not take these representations uncritically. Social commentators had a vested interest in blackening the existing system in order to advance their own projects. Or, as we have seen, such criticisms were made upon the basis of wider political sentiments. On the other hand, as discussed in further detail in the following section, the more positive images put forward in the press likely resulted from editorial imperatives which encouraged a reliance upon the institutions of criminal justice as a source of information. Yet as Bob Harris rightly argues, press reports do at least suggest that several efforts were being made by the central government, magistrates, parishes, vestries and private individuals to tackle vice and immorality in the metropolis.41 It is worth examining these efforts in some detail in order to put the printed discussions which we have been talking about in the context of contemporary actions, and to think about the extent to which the vociferous attacks upon vice, idleness and immorality that were made in print at mid-century actually encouraged – or were at least mirrored in – greater attempts to combat such problems. ‘The picture which begins to emerge’, Harris has argued upon the basis of newspaper reports, ‘is of a series of responses which are, when seen in their totality, impressive in range and intensity, if uneven, and, in some cases, limited in effect.’42 As will now be shown, a wider analysis of manuscript and judicial records supports this argument, and particularly highlights the ultimately limited effect of such efforts upon levels of prosecution for morality offences, a pattern which is especially striking given the level of concern expressed in print, and the apparent agreement among contemporaries that

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irreligion, idleness and immorality were in such dire need of redress. We will look first at the efforts of the central government, then magistrates and the parish authorities. Two new pieces of legislation were passed by Parliament in the early 1750s which aimed to curtail several of the problems which attracted especially strong condemnation in print. In the first instance, the Gin Act of 1751 sought to tighten regulation of the gin trade and to restrict the popular consumption of spirituous liquors through higher taxation and licensing fees, as well as extending trading laws beyond publicans to petty hawkers. Earlier attempts to suppress or regulate the gin trade in the second quarter of the eighteenth century had been largely ineffectual. An Act of 1743 had even relaxed the system of regulation as a means of raising revenue during wartime.43 But as Lee Davison and others have argued, the renewed demands for tighter regulation in the early 1750s was crucially abetted by the context of the post-war panic about crime and the establishment of a parliamentary committee in 1751 (discussed at greater length in the following chapter) to look into the causes of the crime wave and to devise legislative solutions to the problem.44 ‘Against a background of widespread alarm amongst the propertied classes about social control’, Harris notes, ‘the “moral” case against gin seemed unanswerable.’45 ‘An Act for better Preventing Thefts and Robberies, and for regulating Places of Publick [sic] Entertainment, and punishing Persons keeping Disorderly Houses’, which passed the following year (now known as the Disorderly Houses Act of 1752) likewise emerged from the mid-century panic about crime. The Act provided for stricter regulation of places of entertainment ‘for the lower sort of people’, and sought to facilitate the prosecution of keepers of gaming and bawdy houses, by offering rewards of ten guineas to inhabitants for information leading to convictions, and by removing the writ of certiorari to King’s Bench. Efforts too were made by the metropolitan magistrates and the aldermen of the City of London to curb vice and immorality in the capital at midcentury. Repertories of the Court of Aldermen indicate that after 1748 the City authorities made frequent requests for precepts against vice and immorality to be printed and ‘posted up in the most publick [sic] places’, in addition to assuring that wardmote presentments against bawdy and disorderly houses would be prosecuted at the City’s expense, and ordering that stricter policing be made

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of all social nuisances.46 In April 1750, the aldermen expressed concern about ‘the great increase of all manners of vice’ and stated their ‘firm resolution to discountenance such practices for the future, and to punish the offenders with the utmost severity the laws allow to that end’, warning that peace officers who neglected their duty would be severely punished.47 A meeting of Westminster Justices in April 1748 resolved to put the laws against gaming houses and ‘loose, idle, and disorderly’ persons into greater execution and to carry out night-time searches for places of ill repute. They also intended to increase the number of able-bodied watchmen so as to apprehend all ‘dangerous and suspicious’ persons, further resolving to publicize their efforts in the Daily Advertiser.48 A committee of Middlesex Justices of the Peace established in June 1751 likewise agreed on the need to improve ‘the methods of executing the laws now in force for the apprehending and punishing disorderly persons, rogues and vagabonds and incorrigible rogues’, hoping that the City Justices would act likewise. The committee’s resolutions included establishing regular meetings between magistrates, printing advertisements about laws relating to vagrancy, and directing to the constables for dealing with vagrants.49 Reports frequently appeared in the press during the mid-century crime wave of initiatives introduced by parishes, vestries and private individuals to improve the detection and prosecution of vice and immorality in London, with calls to others to follow such shining examples. In January 1751, the London Evening Post declared that the subscription set up by the inhabitants of St Paul, Covent-Garden, for prosecuting bawdy-house keepers was ‘an example worthy the imitation of the inhabitants of all parishes, where such nuisances and annoyances are’.50 According to the Whitehall Evening Post, the vestry of St Mary’s, Whitechapel in May 1751 similarly announced that it would pay the costs of prosecuting disorderly houses in the local area.51 Vestry minutes for St Clement Danes moreover demonstrate that parish officials at mid-century ‘discussed methods of suppressing disorderly houses, curtailing the sale of spirituous liquors, enforcing the laws against the profanation of the Sabbath, and arresting prostitutes’.52 These efforts on the part of Parliament, magistrates and parish authorities produced some increases in prosecution for social and moral offences in the years 1747–55, but the overall results – so far as the surviving evidence suggests – appears to have been limited. In Middlesex in particular there was

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a flurry of activity against Sabbath-breakers and the keepers of disorderly houses – primarily for gaming and prostitution – in the early 1750s. At the Middlesex sessions of the peace, some 38 indictments for keeping disorderly houses were put before the grand jury in 1750, along with 64 indictments for Sabbath-breaking. In 1753, too, immediately following the introduction of the Disorderly Houses Act, some 68 prosecutions were filed against the keepers of disorderly houses at the lower courts in Middlesex, with an increasing tendency for such indictments to be found as true bills.53 This is matched by evidence from the Hackney petty sessions book at mid-century. The sessions book shows that summary convictions for Sabbath-breaking were more common in the early 1750s than in the immediate previous years, perhaps because, as Ruth Paley explains, it ‘was a period when heightened anxieties about crime rates fuelled a demand for moral reform’.54 Stricter licensing campaigns moreover resulted in the closure of several places of public entertainment, particularly those frequented by the poor. As Nicholas Rogers and Bob Harris have both demonstrated, a number of pleasure gardens were closed in the wake of the Disorderly Houses Act, along with greater attempts to shut down fairs and ‘vulgar’ blood sports.55 And there were sporadic sweeps against vagrants and prostitutes. The numbers of vagrants removed through the City of London increased substantially between 1748 and 1750, while in the parish of St Clement Danes, some 70 women were charged as common streetwalkers in the years 1752–6, 31 of whom endured a public whipping.56 But if there was some increased activity in particular respects, the overall results were limited. The increase in indictments put before the grand jury in Middlesex against the keepers of disorderly houses was not mirrored in other jurisdictions. Far fewer such offences were prosecuted at the sessions of the peace for the City of London. Just 21 indictments for keeping disorderly houses were prosecuted there in the years 1747–55, seven of which were found not guilty. In the same period, only 22 indictments were put to the grand jury of the City sessions against Sabbath-breakers.57 Likewise, very few such offences were prosecuted at the Westminster quarter sessions, where only 15 indictments for keeping ill-governed houses were considered between 1747 and 1754, nine of those failing to result in a conviction.58 Certainly, if there was an initial flurry of activity in the early 1750s, this did not last. There was in fact a steady decline in the number of presentments against disorderly

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houses made by the inquest juries of the 26 wards of the City after 1753.59 And from an analysis of the sessions rolls for Westminster and Middlesex, along with presentments brought before the King’s Bench, Faramerz Dabhoiwala estimates that in 1758 probably no more than 10 or 15 successful actions were taken in the courts against brothel keepers across the capital.60 This pattern of sporadic activity but ultimately limited overall effects is also possibly indicated by the numbers of offenders punished with summary justice for morality offences at mid-century, although the evidence on this point is not without problems. It is worth briefly considering the wider picture of summary justice in eighteenth-century London and some of the difficulties of the sources for this aspect of criminal justice before examining the data. In the Tudor period, many powers were introduced which allowed Justices of the Peace to deal with a variety of administrative, civil and criminal matters without recourse to a formal jury trial.61 This was facilitated, at the same time, by the establishment of houses of correction – such as Bridewell, in 1533 – which provided a vehicle for policing the urban environment and the disciplining through hard labour and corporal punishment those who were deemed to be a threat to social order, including vagrants, prostitutes, disorderly apprentices, misbehaving servants and the ‘loose, idle and disorderly’.62 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, magistrates could utilize the growing number of statutes mandating summary justice which covered a range of issues.63 Changes in the broader social role of the law which fostered a ‘more laissez faire approach to moral offences’ in addition to fewer meetings of the governors of Bridewell and the development of parochial workhouses all contributed to a general decline in the numbers committed to metropolitan houses of correction for offences against the social and moral order over the course of the eighteenth century.64 But metropolitan magistrates of the eighteenth century nevertheless continued to rely heavily upon summary justice for dealing with a range of common and civil law matters, regularly committing moral offenders to houses of correction for periods of imprisonment, hard labour and/or whipping. Two main types of evidence survive for the practice of summary justice in eighteenth-century London. The first includes records of the business conducted by magistrates within the City of London and the wider metropolis. Aside from a couple of miscellaneous notebooks and the minute books of the Guildhall justice room – where the aldermen-magistrates of the City of

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London served in rotation to dispense justice on a daily basis – for the year 1752 onwards, this form of evidence is extremely scanty.65 The second type of material includes records of London’s several houses of correction: Bridewell for the City; Clerkenwell for Middlesex; and Tothill Fields for the City of Westminster.66 After 1701, as Dabhoiwala notes, the workhouse of the London Corporation of the Poor also operated as a second house of correction for the City. Unfortunately, the minute books for this court have not survived. Other evidence suggests that in the mid-eighteenth century the workhouse may well have taken in a substantial number of committals, perhaps in the region of 300–400 for all social, moral and criminal offences covered by summary justice. For the City of London we therefore only have a partial picture. But the surviving records of London’s houses of correction do at least provide some systematic – although certainly not complete – information on the extent of summary justice in relation to moral offences. Practices of summary justice and methods of record keeping differed according to jurisdiction. Most commitments to the houses of correction were made by a Justice of the Peace. But in the City, unlike in other jurisdictions, commitments could also be made directly by constables, lower officers and even parents or masters. Indeed, Bridewell was a complex institution which had its own unique procedures. Inmates were released either by a warrant from an individual Justice of the Peace, or by the regular court sessions held by the institution’s board of governors, composed of the City aldermen as well as a number of lay governors. It is the minute books of the court of governors that provide us with the most detailed information on the use of summary justice in the City of London. But as Dabhoiwala explains, the difficulty is that the minute books only record those prisoners who appeared before the governors at one of their courts, omitting those who were committed and discharged between such sessions.67 From a detailed comparison of the Bridewell minute books of the court of governors with other sources, Dabhoiwala estimates that perhaps a third of all committals to Bridewell in the eighteenth century were not recorded in the minute books.68 This poses serious problems for the use of the minute books for quantitative data on patterns of summary justice in the City. Unlike the Bridewell court books, which only list prisoners who were at Bridewell on the particular days that the court of governors met, the Clerkenwell house of correction calendars record on a rolling, day-to-day basis all those

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who were committed to the institution and how they were dealt with. The calendars have, however, only sporadically survived for the mid-eighteenth century, and virtually no calendars have survived for the Tothill Fields house of correction. The descriptions of offences provided by the Bridewell court books and the Clerkenwell calendars too pose problems of analysis. The language is frequently opaque or impossible to classify. Offenders are often included under such catch-all legal phrases as ‘loose, idle and disorderly’. Many of those committed were accused of no more than being poor or without work, yet others were tainted by a generally criminal character. As Robert Shoemaker explains, ‘virtually any unhelpful practice indulged in by the poor could be used to label them as loose, idle and disorderly and therefore liable to incarceration in the house of correction’.69 The house of correction records are certainly not without problems, and care should be taken when using them. Yet they undoubtedly offer the most detailed – although certainly not complete – information on the use of summary justice against social and moral offences which were deemed to be the root causes of crime in eighteenth-century London. There are serious difficulties with compiling the annual total number of committals to either the Bridewell or Clerkenwell houses of correction – in the case of the former, because the number of times the governors met distorted the amount of cases recorded in the minute books; and in the case of the latter, because of the haphazard survival of the calendars. We must look instead, therefore, to the average number of committals recorded at each meeting of the governors of Bridewell or within each separate house of correction calendar. This provides a rough and tentative indication of the fluctuating use of summary justice for social and moral offences in the metropolis during the mid-century crime wave. What this suggests, it might be argued, is that there was little significant change in the policing and punishment of irreligion, idleness and immorality at mid-century with the vociferous condemnations against such root causes of crime that were made in print at this time. Analysis of all the recorded meetings of the court of governors of Bridewell in the years 1745–54 reveals that the average number of committals to the house of correction for social and moral offences (which here includes committals for ‘loose, idle and disorderly’ behaviour; vagrancy; disorderly apprentices and servants; prostitution; swearing oaths; and profane cursing,

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but does not include accusations of petty larceny which were not attended by one of these further charges) was marginally higher in the years 1747–54 than the 2 years preceding the London crime wave (Table 4.1). In 1751, typically some 25 per cent more people were recorded as having been committed for this broad range of social and moral offences at each meeting of the court in comparison to 1745, suggesting that the efforts to police immorality in the City were having some impact. It is difficult to make any meaningful conclusions out of the monthly pattern of committals, as the absolute numbers are so low and fluctuate so erratically. Nevertheless, Graph 4.1 does show that there were a number of large spikes in arraignments to Bridewell in the years after 1747. On the whole, however, these were rather modest increases in the levels of committals to Bridewell. The average number of offenders recorded at each meeting of the governors was only marginally higher during the height of the panic about crime in the years 1749–52 than in the years 1745 and 1746. Moreover, this increase might not necessarily reflect greater policing of immorality, but rather more stringent behaviour Table 4.1 Committals to Bridewell house of correction for social and moral offences, by year, 1745–54 No. of Governors’ meetings

Average no. of committals per meeting

Year

Committals

1745

35

9

3.9

1746

27

7

3.9

1747

49

8

6.1

1748

51

9

5.7

1749

58

9

6.4

1750

53

10

5.3

1751

61

9

6.8

1752

49

8

6.1

1753

33

6

5.5

1754

38

6

6.3

Total all years

454

81

5.6

Average per year

45.4

8.1

5.6

Source: Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum, Minute Books of the Court of Governors of Bridewell Hospital, Microfilms COZ-17, 18.

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Committals 3 per. moving ave.

Committals

20

15

10

5

Jan 1747 Apr 1747 Jul 1747 Oct 1747 Jan 1748 Mar 1748 May 1748 Sep 1748 Dec 1748 Mar 1749 Jun 1749 Sep 1749 Nov 1749 Feb 1750 Apr 1750 Jun 1750 Sep 1750 Nov 1750 Feb 1751 Apr 1751 Jun 1751 Sep 1751 Nov 1751 Feb 1752 Apr 1752 Jul 1752 Nov 1752 Mar 1753 Jun 1753 Oct 1753

0

Month of Governors’ meeting

Graph 4.1 Committals to Bridewell house of correction for social and moral offences, by month, January 1747–October 1753. Source: Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum, Minute Books of the Court of Governors of Bridewell Hospital, Microfilms COZ-17, 18.

towards petty crime, for many – indeed most – of the accusations of loose, idle and disorderly behaviour recorded in the Bridewell court minute books also involved an accusation of pilfering. Suspicions of theft may well have been as important as fears about immoral behaviour. This is supported by the Clerkenwell house of correction calendars. As discussed in the previous chapter, in Middlesex petty thefts were largely removed from the bounds of summary justice in the immediate years after 1749. It is therefore likely that all those committed to the Clerkenwell house of correction for social and moral offences were apprehended primarily upon suspicions of immoral behaviour, rather than accusations of theft. Indeed, this is also suggested by the language used in the Clerkenwell calendars: committals for social and moral offences (again, including accusations of ‘loose, idle and disorderly’ behaviour; vagrancy; disorderly apprentices and servants; prostitution; swearing oaths; and profane cursing) were almost never attended with an additional accusation of pilfering, as was often the case in the Bridewell court of governors minute books. Again, the Clerkenwell calendars suggest that

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the policing of irreligion, idleness and immorality did not significantly change in Middlesex at mid-century. The average number of committals recorded in each calendar was certainly higher in the years 1748–53 compared to that before the onset of the panic about crime, as shown by Table 4.2 and Graph 4.2. But the scale of the increase, as in the City of London, was likewise modest. If greater calls were being made in the years 1747–55 to police the moral health of the metropolis in order to attack the causes of crime at the root, and if – as we have seen – greater efforts were in many instances being initiated among Parliament, magistrates and parish authorities, then how might we explain the relatively limited overall effect this had on the numbers apprehended and punished for irreligion, idleness and immorality? As numerous scholars have noted, in many respects the efforts initiated in the early 1750s in response to the crime wave were by the end of the decade and well into the 1760s effectively a dead letter. Despite the best intentions of the 1752 Disorderly Houses Act, for instance, prosecutions of brothels and gaming houses remained both expensive and time-consuming. In the face of what many deemed to be the failure to curb immorality in the capital, in 1757 a new society for Table 4.2 Committals to Clerkenwell house of correction for social and moral offences, by year, 1746–55

Year

No. of available calendars

Total no. of committals in available calendars

Average no. of committals per calendar

1746

2

65

33

1747

4

138

35

1748

6

199

33

1749

3

130

43

1750

5

180

36

1751

6

207

35

1752

4

162

41

1753

4

168

42

1754

2

79

40

1755

4

110

28

40

1,438

36

Total all years

Source: LMA, Clerkenwell House of Correction Calendars of Committals, 1746–55, MJ/CC/R/3-58.

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Print Culture, Crime and Justice in Eighteenth-Century London 60 55 50 45 Committals

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5

Ju l1 Fe 746 b Se 174 p 7 Ja 174 n 7 Ap 174 r1 8 Ju 748 l1 Ja 748 n D 174 ec 9 Ap 174 r1 9 Ju 750 l1 Ja 750 n Ap 175 r 1 Se 175 p 1 Ja 175 n 1 O 175 ct 2 Fe 175 b 2 Se 175 p 3 Fe 175 b 3 Fe 175 b 4 O 175 ct 5 17 55

0

Month

Graph 4.2 Committals to Clerkenwell house of correction for social and moral offences, by month, July 1746–October 1755. Source: LMA, Clerkenwell House of Correction Calendars of Committals, 1746–55, MJ/CC/R/3-58.

the reformation of manners was established to launch a series of campaigns against vice.70 There is not scope here for examining the many reasons for the limited success of the measures enacted in the early 1750s (and indeed, as others have shown, the subsequent reformation of manners campaign in the years after 1757). It might simply be said that this resulted from the same difficulties as beset previous and later attempts to bring about moral reform. In the 1690s, 1730s and the 1780s, all periods of intense concern about crime and immorality, the reformation of manners campaigns that sprung into life all ultimately disbanded in the face of considerable opposition.71 As Harris notes, part of the opposition must surely have arisen from the much wider body of opinion which viewed the activities of these reformers as incompatible with the principles of justice – namely flexibility and discretion – which were inscribed in the legal system. Attempts throughout the eighteenth century to promote the systematic prosecution of morality offenders failed because of resistance from the accused, the public and all ranks of criminal justice officers.72 Again, as with the changes in prosecutorial behaviour surveyed in the previous chapter, this analysis suggests that although there was significant

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alarm about social and moral offending in the years 1747–55, the action which came as a result did not match up to the level of concern expressed by contemporaries.

Print and the policing of property crime To what extent did printed crime reporting suggest that London’s system of policing was able to deal with the mid-century crime wave, a problem which contemporaries diagnosed as the symptom of the seeming torrent of vice, idleness and immorality? If the scale and nature of crime reporting in the years 1747–55 served to highlight the violent and threatening sides of crime, would readers have been reassured by reports of the detection, arrest and committal of offenders? In her excellent recent study of the eighteenth-century Kentish Post, Esther Snell has argued that in the consistent reporting of unsolved crimes, failures to apprehend offenders, ‘corrupt and inept law officers’, and criminal escapes from jail, ‘no source before the newspaper had published the failings of the judicial system with such regularity’. The pressures of newspaper production, she suggests, forced editors to rely on stories as they emerged and not when they were resolved, thus promulgating the weaknesses of the justice system. This was a discourse completely at odds with the traditional reassuring rhetoric of divine retribution and inexorable justice which were a hallmark of criminal biography. In short, ‘the efficacy of both empirical and providential detection was subverted by the entirely new phenomenon of the newspaper’s scale of crime reporting and its willingness to print stories of unsolved offences’.73 Snell is certainly right to argue that press narratives emphasized the secular justice of Man while at the same time subverting notions of divine retribution in bringing offenders to justice. Yet in contrast to Snell, I now want to suggest (upon the basis of mid-century London newspapers) that the press in many ways provided a highly positive and reassuring image of policing. Indeed, I would stress that the imperatives of newspaper production also forced editors to rely upon magistrates’ offices, jails and other institutions of criminal justice which provided stories of resolved offences and which emphasized the authorities’ efforts at policing. In the frequent reports of captured offenders, of

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the increases made to policing resources, and the significant efforts undertaken to bring offenders to justice, no source before the newspaper had in fact published the successes of the justice system with such regularity. Moreover, in mid-century London, newspapers were accompanied by other forms of crime reporting such as the Old Bailey Proceedings which likewise emphasized that offenders were being brought to condign punishment. Of course, we are not comparing like-for-like: Snell’s study of the Kentish Post covers the much wider period 1717–68, and we should be sensitive to the different contexts of provincial Kent and metropolitan London. However, as over 90 per cent of the Kentish Post’s content was taken directly from the London press, and as Snell’s study covers the mid-century years studied here, we can with justification consider her arguments in some detail. These somewhat disparate conclusions are, I would argue, a matter of emphasis rather than kind, reflecting the complex and multi-vocal nature of eighteenth-century crime reporting itself. As Peter King rightly suggests, ‘the sometimes chaotic styles of crime reporting in newspapers created a kaleidoscope of different and often contradictory messages’ about crime and justice.74 I do not want to argue that Snell’s interpretation is wrong. As shown below, mid-century London newspapers carried many reports which pointed out the failures of the justice system. My intention rather is to emphasize the other side of the coin, to point out the many ways in which the press and other forms of crime literature at mid-century highlighted the efficacy of empirical (although not necessarily providential) detection and of policing in London more generally. We begin therefore with a detailed analysis of crime and justice reporting in London newspapers in the years 1748–55. This is then followed by an analysis of the representation of some of the central aspects of policing in London in both newspapers and other forms of crime reporting at midcentury. Finally, in reflecting upon this evidence, I want to suggest that the development of crime reporting in the press and in the Proceedings in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have influenced what Malcolm Gaskill has identified as the ‘displacement of providence’, a gradual shift from cultural notions of the divine intervention of God’s justice to the secular force of Man’s justice.75 Many commentaries were certainly printed at mid-century which reflected negatively on the capability of the justice system to prevent and detect

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offenders, both in newspapers and the other forms of crime literature which we are concerned with. Mid-century London newspapers distributed countless reports of unsolved crimes, failures to apprehend offenders, and negligent and corrupt watchmen. Indicative of numerous similar reports, the Whitehall Evening Post in January 1751 described how ‘three fellows forced a young woman into a coach at the corner of York-street within a few yards of the watchhouse, and notwithstanding her cries, which alarmed the neighbourhood, the watchmen suffered her to be carried off, without interposing, although called to by several neighbours for that purpose’.76 Other reports described watchmen asleep at their posts, leaving their posts early or even committing assaults upon fellow officers.77 Such reports of corrupt and ineffectual watchmen were frequent enough and held such cultural purchase that impostors were at times able to carry themselves off as venal officers in order to manipulate people for personal gain.78 At least one pamphleteer was disturbed by such negative reports (although it must be noted, with the vested interest of blackening the night watch in order to proclaim the necessity of his proposed reforms): the daily papers will envince [sic] what I say, if my reader will take a cursory view of them, and reflect on the many robberies committed on our persons and houses, within the hearing and sight of the watchmen on duty; who must be either bribed, or absolutely deaf or blind, when they pretend to know nothing of the villainies committed within a few yards of their several stands.79

Private individuals likewise occasionally came in for criticism: when reporting the robbery of a Mr Neville ‘by six fellows armed with drawn cutlasses and pistols’, the Whitehall Evening Post in November 1750 chastised the ‘two or three persons who passed by in the meantime . . . who durst not offer to assist him’.80 As Nicholas Rogers notes, a prevalent theme of crime reporting during the mid-century crime wave was the seeming impunity with which robberies were carried out. Readers encountered regular reports of criminal gangs rescuing their accomplices from arrest, even beating and wounding those who attempted to resist them or call out for help.81 In July 1749, the London Evening Post reported that one street robber had been rescued from a watch-house near Leadenhall Street by fellow members of his gang, ‘who carry’d him off from thence, through Cornhill, with acclamations’.82

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Negative comments were similarly aired in pamphlets of social commentary, although only infrequently. Watchmen came under fire as ‘either infirm, old, or indigent people, who serve their offices for hire, [and] are often in fee with the public-houses, who entertain them in such houses, whilst persons of ill fame who resort there, take advantage of their absence from their stations, and commit the most notorious disorders’.83 Another writer asserted that if there were to be fewer criminals it was first necessary to ‘have better justices of the peace, men more vigilant, less interested in supporting crimes, and more active in discovering them, and punishing under-officers who neglect their duty’.84 The pseudonymous pamphleteer Philonomos moreover argued for the ‘utmost necessity of the government keeping a strict eye on inferior magistrates, and such as act under them, for upon their doing their duty in a vigorous, disinterested, and upright manner, the security, tranquillity, and prosperity of this nation must ever depend’.85 Such comments were relatively rare, however, and for the most part social policy pamphlets paid far greater attention to the causes of crime rather than defects in the criminal justice system. Commentators such as Henry Fielding – and in the later 1750s, John Fielding and Saunders Welch, High Constable of Holborn – were furthermore keen to assert that failures on the part of peace officers arose not so much from wilful neglect as from an ignorance of the law. ‘So far is the power of apprehending felons . . . from being universally known’, noted Henry Fielding, ‘that many of the peace officers themselves do not know that they have any such power, and often from ignorance refuse to arrest a known felon ’till they are authorized by a warrant from a justice of the peace.’86 Pictorial prints condemned criminal justice officers at all levels for negligent or corrupt behaviour through stereotyped imagery. Many graphic satires depicted watchmen and constables as elderly, decrepit men, asleep at their posts, open to bribes and powerless to deal with rakes and rogues. Few prints on the subject of policing exist for the 1740s and 1750s, but those from a slightly later period perhaps give us a flavour of the kinds of images which were circulating at mid-century. The Midnight Magistrate, or the Humours of the Watch House (1754) satirized the venality of watchmen and constables and the apparent ‘majesty’ of the law.87 The Guards of the Night Defeated (1774) also depicted a party of watchmen overcome by three prostitutes in a failed raid upon a bawdy house.88 Senior criminal justice officials were likewise lambasted. Images of

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notable Justices of the Peace such as John Fielding, Saunders Welch and Samuel Gillam showed them as reliant upon fees (and therefore corruptible), personally motivated and practising ‘blind’ or ‘deaf ’ justice.89 These negative representations of peace officers in pamphlets and pictorial prints drew upon conventional and long-standing rhetorical imagery for the purpose of social and political satire. It may well have been therefore that readers took such prints with a pinch of salt. Certainly, as J. M. Beattie has shown, metropolitan watchmen of the first half of the eighteenth century could act with diligence and conscientiousness in apprehending offenders. And these disparaging images may also have been counterbalanced by the more positive messages given off by newspapers and the Old Bailey Proceedings. As Snell rightly argues, the eighteenth-century newspaper’s ‘insatiable appetite for crime stories’ led it to report offences that were unsolved and unpunished on a scale never seen before.90 Yet the press also published an equally large number of reports of offenders successfully apprehended. Indeed, taking all four of our sample mid-century London newspapers together, there was close to a fifty–fifty split between reports of felonious property crimes committed in the metropolis which mentioned that the offender had been taken and those in which the crime was left unresolved.91 Similarly, approximately 50–55 per cent of crime reports printed in the Kentish Post in the years 1752–3 featured the arrest or punishment of offenders.92 These patterns of reporting in London newspapers remained remarkably stable over the period 1746–50. The huge increases in levels of crime reporting in metropolitan newspapers that took place from 1748 did not radically alter the balance between solved and unsolved reports. Between 1746 and 1750, the proportion of all crimes in our sample which were reported as solved hovered between a low of 44 per cent and a high of 48 per cent, with no discernible fluctuations in relation to the transition from war to peace. In short, during the mid-century London crime wave, for every report in the press of an offender fled from justice another noted that the thief had been captured. This was particularly the case in daily and tri-weekly publications, but much less so in weekly newspapers, as Table 4.3 clearly shows. To be sure, the difference between each type of publication in our sample is striking. Some 61 per cent of all reports of property crimes printed in the daily General Advertiser for instance mentioned the discovery of the offenders, compared to just

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Table 4.3 Reports of ‘solved’ and ‘unsolved’ property crimes in London newspapers, by publication, 1746–50 Solved no.

%

Unsolved no.

%

Total reports no.

%

General Advertiser

780

61.3

492

38.7

1,272

100.0

London Evening Post

597

46.6

684

53.4

1,281

100.0

1,230

43.6

1,591

56.4

2,821

100.0

149

28.1

381

71.9

530

100.0

2,756

46.7

3,148

53.3

5,904

100.0

Title

Whitehall Evening Post Old England All publications Source: Newspaper Sample.

28 per cent in the weekly essay paper Old England. For their own part, the tri-weekly London Evening Post and Whitehall Evening Post contained a very narrow majority of unsolved crime reports. Readers of the General Advertiser and the tri-weekly papers would thus have encountered a possibly more reassuring image of policing, which suggested that in many – if not most – instances, the perpetrators of crime were detected and apprehended. How might we explain these differences in patterns of reporting between individual titles? It seems clear that the proportions of solved or unsolved crime reports across publications directly resulted from the kinds of offences which the editors of each title chose to print. As we saw in Chapter 3, reports of violent thefts (street and highway robbery) constituted a far larger proportion of all reports of property crimes printed in the tri-weekly London Evening Post and Whitehall Evening Post, and particularly in the weekly Old England, compared to the daily General Advertiser. Yet as Table 4.4 shows, violent thefts were three times as likely to be reported as unsolved than solved. On the other hand, over two-thirds of all reports of thefts without the aggravating circumstances of violence – which formed a proportionally larger part of crime reporting in the General Advertiser than in the other sample publications – mentioned that the offender had been apprehended. In sum, there is a close correlation between the types of offences which individual titles typically published and the proportion of solved and unsolved reports. Again, as argued in the previous chapter, this must be due in large part to the imperatives which the editors of different types of publications worked under, and the consequences that this had for the types of sources of information

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Table 4.4 Reports of ‘solved’ and ‘unsolved’ crimes in London newspapers, by category of offence, 1746–50 Offence category

Solved no.

%

Deception

117

95.1

Killing

264

%

Total reports no.

%

6

4.9

123

100.0

63.6

151

36.4

415

100.0

1,570

69.6

686

30.4

2,256

100.0

Violent theft

873

26.7

2,398

73.3

3,271

100.0

All offences

2,824

46.6

3,241

53.4

6,065

100.0

Theft

Unsolved no.

Source: Newspaper Sample.

relied upon. This had important implications for the messages about crime and policing which each publication provided. Taking London newspapers as a whole, the representation of violent theft as largely unpunished must have been alarming to contemporaries. Although relatively few reports provided detailed accounts of robbers arrogantly flying from the face of justice in ‘triumph’, nevertheless judging by the evidence given here, it was certainly the case that violent offences were much more likely to be reported as undetected than solved.93 We might counterbalance this with the fact that in every other major category of offence, reports were more than twice as likely to end in the detection of the offender. Even reports of offences other than robbery which were of particular concern to contemporaries were just as likely to mention that the perpetrator had been apprehended as not. Reports of burglary and housebreaking for instance account for 14 per cent of all solved, and 13 per cent of all unsolved, crime reports printed in our sample publications in the years 1746–50. Murders (including infanticide) too were more often reported as solved than unsolved. Thefts with violence were undoubtedly a cause for concern. Nonetheless, it must be recognized that in all other instances readers would have encountered offences in which the offenders were more often than not discovered and apprehended. Contemporaries would not have read newspapers in such strict quantitative terms. But the patterns of reporting were so distinct as to have likely been broadly recognized. In addition to which, the mid-century London press frequently celebrated the efforts of parish and criminal justice authorities in the fight against crime.

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Many reports pointed to the capture of offenders. The Whitehall Evening Post in January 1749 believed that the recent detection of a street robber would in all likelihood lead to the discovery of ‘a large gang of villains, who have lately infested [Ludgate Hill]’.94 Reports also noted proposed and recently-implemented increases to policing resources, and commented on their success. In October 1749, as reports of robberies reached unprecedented levels in the press and as increasing numbers were being tried at the Old Bailey, the London Evening Post had the pleasure to inform its readers that ‘the horse-guards, which are appointed to patrol about the City and Liberty of Westminster, are to keep in the high streets, and that the parties of foot, which are destin’d for the same use, are to keep in the narrow streets, lanes, and other thoroughfares’, by which means the streets would ‘be entirely safe from the many outrages of evil-minded persons who have lately committed such acts of barbarity in the streets in the night time’.95 In the same month, several papers also publicized that a guard of soldiers would now be quartered in the towns around London, to patrol the roads and footpaths from five until eleven in the evening, in response to ‘the great number of robberies committed in and about the town’.96 Numerous similar reports moreover appeared in the following months and years.97 Reforms of the night watch were in addition publicized. The directors of the watch of the parish of St Bridget’s, the General Advertiser commented, ‘have come to a resolution, to make their watchmen be at their stands every evening at nine o’clock, instead of ten, to prevent, as much as in them lies, any street or other robberies, that may be committed; and it is hoped the other parishes of this city will follow this good example’.98 Such efforts were evidently successful: ‘we are informed’, reported the Whitehall Evening Post in 1749, ‘that there are no less than sixteen watchmen on the lower road to Clapham, who patrole [sic] within the call of each other; so that no robberies have been committed there lately’.99 In the following month the paper similarly celebrated the establishment of a subscription by the inhabitants of Moorfields to support ‘a sufficient number of able bodied men to patrole [sic] at night in those parts, to prevent the frequent robberies that of late have been committed and to detect a numerous gang, that for some time has infested that neighbourhood’.100 A striking feature of the mid-century London press is the constant reassurance given to readers that all efforts were being made to detect and apprehend offenders. Reports

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mentioned ‘diligent’ and ‘strict’ searches in pursuit of offenders, in order to bring the malefactors to ‘justice’ and ‘condign punishment’.101 In August 1750, the Whitehall Evening Post concluded a report about the spate of thefts committed on the wharfs and keys of the Thames with a pledge to readers that ‘great diligence is being used to bring the perpetrators, as well as encouragers, of these hurtful practices to light’.102 If the newspapers’ willingness to print stories of unsolved offences did serve to subvert the efficacy of empirical detection, this was to some extent counterbalanced by the equally persistent reassurance in the London press that offenders would be brought to justice. Moreover, both newspapers and the Old Bailey Proceedings emphasized the successes of peace officers and rewards – two key features of policing in London – in bringing offenders to justice, representations which in many ways stood in stark contrast to the complaints of pamphleteers and graphic satirists. During the mid-century crime wave, the London press carried countless reports of peace officers stopping suspicious persons, assisting victims of crimes and bravely apprehending offenders. In one report which did the rounds of London newspapers, a watchman spied several thieves climbing a ladder to break into a warehouse near Carnaby Market. After watching all the offenders enter the warehouse, the vigilant officer then secretly took the ladder away, called to his fellow watchmen, and secured the whole gang.103 The pro-active efforts of the authorities to search out and apprehend criminal gangs received particularly lengthy and celebratory attention. The Public Advertiser in July 1753 for instance provided a detailed account of the detection and arrest of a gang of pickpockets by a party of guards and petty officers led by the high constable of Southwark under the direction of the magistrate Thomas Lediard following information from one of the gang’s accomplices. ‘Great discoveries have been made’, the paper asserted, ‘and uncommon pains taken in detecting of the set . . . several are yet to be taken, and ’tis hoped when they shall be farther examined, persons who have been lately robbed will attend, that so dangerous a set may be brought to condign punishment’.104 As shown below, such reports appeared alongside numerous others in the Public Advertiser which celebrated similar efforts made by the Fieldings. Positive reports of watchmen and other peace officers which were regularly published in the Proceedings may well have provided some counterweight to the negative stereotypes put forward in other forms of print, as Beattie has

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suggested.105 The Proceedings are an incredibly useful source of information for how contemporaries actually responded to crime. Yet it should also be recognized that the very nature of the cases which made it to the Old Bailey and the construction of the Proceedings as a publication shaped the kinds of information about policing which it contained, foregrounding some measures and downplaying others. Indeed, the interest here is in the Proceedings as a source of information and a repository of ways of thinking about crime and justice for contemporaries which inevitably provided a partial and selective image of criminality, policing and prosecution.106 In the first instance, the Proceedings by definition focused on crimes in which the offender(s) had been detected and apprehended, and were thus more likely to highlight the successes of policing in London than its failures. Editorial policies were moreover influential. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, at mid-century the Proceedings gave even more attention than usual to serious offences which resulted in sentences of death, while simultaneously providing only brief reports of lesser offences and trials resulting in acquittals. Robert Shoemaker too has shown that while there is little evidence that the Proceedings misreported what went on at the Old Bailey, nevertheless by regularly omitting or curtailing details such as defence statements or legal arguments, trial reports were constructed to present a positive image of justice in which criminals received unambiguous justice.107 With some awareness, then, of the constructed nature of the Proceedings, what did the publication suggest to mid-century readers in broad terms about the policing of property crime in the metropolis, particularly in relation to peace officers? As Table 4.5 shows, just 6 per cent of trial reports published in the Proceedings in the years 1748–55 mentioned that offenders had been apprehended upon the efforts of peace officers working by themselves as the first response to a crime. On the face of it this would appear to suggest that officials had little part to play in detecting and apprehending offenders. However, analysing the data in more detail reveals the significant role of law officers in their cooperation with members of the public. In 33 of the 186 instances in which offenders were caught in the act, officers were reported as involved in some way. In many trial reports, therefore, peace officers were represented as central in bringing offenders to justice.108 Indeed, in many instances trial reports in the Proceedings described officers going beyond

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Table 4.5 Detection methods as described in the Old Bailey Proceedings, 1748–55 Adequate information on detection method

No.

%

Seen in act

186

33

Victims’ suspicions of the accused

139

25

Seen in area at time of crime

49

9

Stopped by buyer, or upon buyer information

49

9

Information provided by others

47

8

Stopped by officer

32

6

Advertisement of goods or offender

28

5

Accomplice evidence

13

2

Detective work carried out by victim

10

2

Goods found upon accused

9

2

Apprehended under JP’s warrant

2