Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London

Richard Coulton, Matthew Mauger, Christopher Reid

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349681822
  9781137411952
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137411969
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This study offers an authoritative and readable account of the hidden history of book theft in eighteenth-century London. It exploits a rich primary source, the compelling narratives of crime contained in the digitised Proceedings of the Old Bailey. The authors explain how cases of book theft came to court, and how in the ensuing trials the nature of the book itself became a question for legal debate. They assess the motives which led Londoners to steal books and the methods they employed in thefts from households and booksellers. Finally, the authors ask what the Proceedings tells us about the social ownership of books, and how the phenomenon of book theft differently affected book producers and consumers. Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London will appeal to readers interested in the connected histories of metropolitan life, crime, and the book in this period, and in the uses of digital resources in humanities research.

© The Author(s) 2016

Richard Coulton, Matthew Mauger and Christopher ReidStealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London10.1057/978-1-137-41196-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Richard Coulton¹ , Matthew Mauger² and Christopher Reid³

(1)

Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

(2)

Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

(3)

Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

Abstract

The Introduction sets out the scope, methods and objectives of Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London. It provides a succinct account of the historical development of the primary source material, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, and assesses the opportunities and challenges it presents in its digitised form as Old Bailey Proceedings Online. The chapter defines and problematises book theft in relation to property crime more generally during the period. It offers an overview of the 721 records identified as the project data set, explaining both what genres of books were stolen and what motivated their theft. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the study’s structure in three main chapters, ‘Courts’, ‘Prisoners’ and ‘Prosecutors’, thereby defining key terms for the analysis that follows.

Keywords

Book theftUrban microhistoryOld Bailey Proceedings History of property theftMotives for book theft

End Abstract

On 5 May 1736, Henry Justice, Barrister at Law of the Middle Temple, was tried at the Old Bailey ‘for stealing divers Books, the Goods of the Masters, Fellows, and Scholars of Trinity-College, in Cambridge’. ‘The famous Trial of Henry Justice’, as a contemporary newspaper described it, stood out from the humdrum cases which typified the business of the court. At a time when many trials held there were dispatched in half an hour or less, the newspaper reported that Justice’s trial ‘lasted above six Hours, and was one of the most remarkable ones that has been for some years past at the Old Baily, the Arguments, Examinations of Witnesses, &c. being very long on both Sides’.¹ The importance of the occasion was marked by the presence in court, unusual though not unprecedented at the time, of the two government law officers, Attorney General Sir John Willes and Solicitor General Sir Dudley Ryder, who led the case for the prosecution. Announcing the imminent publication of the trial, and no doubt hoping to exploit public interest in the case, the editor of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey (henceforth Proceedings) remarked that ‘being so curious as to deserve to be particularly related, it is now drawn up in a very exact manner’. The report, when it appeared, showed that he had been as good as his word. The indictment alone ran to 2000 words, listing at length the titles of each of the 60 volumes – many of them rare and valuable – which Justice was accused of stealing from the library of his alma mater. Once the evidence had been heard, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and Justice was sentenced to transportation to Virginia for a period of seven years.²

Henry Justice’s case is perhaps the best-known example of book theft in eighteenth-century England, and certainly the best-known of those that came to trial.³ It sparked our own interest in the phenomenon and as the most detailed account of proceedings for book theft at the eighteenth-century Old Bailey it is important to our study. But by any reckoning Justice was an unusual book thief and his case, though intriguing, cannot be regarded as representative. Born into a professional family in York, he was a Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge, a member of the Middle Temple and a practising lawyer. According to a roman à clef written by his wife, Elizabeth, he was driven to disgrace by an uncontrollable passion for books rather than by pecuniary necessity.⁴ In the years after his trial he tried to restore his reputation as a bibliophile, and he ended his days in Holland, where he published an elegant edition of Virgil and amassed a valuable library of more than 8000 books and manuscripts.⁵ When we read Justice’s remarkable story in the broader context of trials for book theft, the contrast is striking. Few of the hundreds of eighteenth-century Londoners who appeared in these trials seem to have shared his passion for books. In their mostly precarious conditions of life, books were commodities to be traded for cash as soon as that could be managed, not trophies to be hoarded and perused in libraries or closets.

The stories of these men and women are told in the 721 trials involving book theft which we have identified over the course of the long eighteenth century. The potential of the Proceedings as a tool for research into the lives of Londoners has long been recognised. In a now classic work, Dorothy George spoke of the ‘flood of light’ the Old Bailey records throw on the conditions of the urban poor.⁶ As we will see, they can be used to trace the history of things – aprons, candles, tankards, books – as objects of property theft as well as to trace the histories of persons.⁷ Focusing on a single commodity across an extended period has certain advantages in terms of inclusiveness. Although we are not the first to draw attention to the importance of book-related material in the eighteenth-century Proceedings, our study offers a more comprehensive approach to the records than has previously been published.⁸ We ask, who stole books in eighteenth-century London, and why did they steal them? Who were the victims of book theft, and in what capacity did they own the stolen goods? What questions of law and legal procedure were raised when book-theft cases came to trial? How significant was book theft in the context of the general economy of crime?

In addressing these questions, we aim to make a contribution to the histories of crime and the book in the eighteenth century, and to show how they intersect.⁹ We will see, for instance, how an apparently straightforward but actually complex question that has exercised book historians – what exactly makes a book a book? – was repeatedly raised as a matter for legal decision, with consequences for the innocence or guilt of the accused, at the eighteenth-century Old Bailey. In several accounts, descriptions of the scene of the crime in the Proceedings throw light on the techniques employed by thieves and the spaces in which thefts were committed. We are shown how books were displayed for sale inside and outside bookshops and how thieves learned to exploit the vulnerability of the stock. The testimony of booksellers, some of them unrecorded elsewhere, draws our attention to the overlapping circles of the London trade: we see how commercial rivalry was set aside as booksellers made common cause in restoring stolen property and tracking down culprits. Prosecutions brought by men and, more rarely, women across the social spectrum – from the middling and labouring ranks as well as the metropolitan elite – provide important new evidence about the social distribution and ownership of books. We hear something about the volumes which lawyers shelved in their chambers and also about the books domestic servants kept among their household goods. In all these ways, the Proceedings records a history of books as they existed in the practices and spaces of everyday urban life: stored in unbound sheets in a printer’s warehouse; exposed for sale, but also to theft, on a bookseller’s counter; jumbled together in a trunk with an artisan’s worldly goods; placed on a shelf in a cheesemonger’s shop awaiting conversion to waste paper. As we read these trials for book theft, a sense of the ordinariness of books as articles of production, use and sale, and of their relative importance, or unimportance, in different walks of life, is strongly felt.

Reading the Reports

Our engagement with the published Proceedings in this book is underpinned by searches made via the online database known as the Old Bailey Proceedings Online. We must acknowledge, from the start, that the trial reports which Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available as a single data set in fact represent serial publications reaching across four centuries that were printed according to inconsistent and changing criteria.¹⁰ Each issue covered the business of one of the periodic meetings (or ‘sessions’) of London’s senior criminal court, and was generally on sale soon after the closure of the sessions in question. The earliest examples appeared in the mid-1670s, typically styled News from Newgate. Before the first matter concerning book theft was reported in January 1678 (an enigmatic report of ‘a Maid-servant arraigned for stealing a Hood and a Bible from one of her Master’s neighbours’), regular coverage of all eight annual sessions – if not necessarily every trial in each session – had been established. By the 1720s, the reports, now appearing under the settled title The Proceedings of the King’s Commission of the Peace, and Oyer and Terminer, and Goal-Delivery of Newgate, had emerged as the officially endorsed record of the Old Bailey sessions, issued under the authority of the City’s Lord Mayor.¹¹ Until the mid-eighteenth century, the Proceedings fulfilled this requirement in addition to – or perhaps in spite of – its ambition as a commercial enterprise designed to entertain its readers, and to sell in sufficient numbers to realise a profit. Indeed, the Proceedings carried advertisements until the 1750s. But increasing civic pressure to ensure comprehensive coverage meant that the publication became less viable as a money-making venture. In the later 1770s, following complaints concerning the lack of any meaningful oversight (not to mention allegations about its inaccuracy) it was re-designated under the authority of the Old Bailey’s chief judge, the Recorder of London, with a requirement to present ‘a true, fair, and perfect narrative of the whole evidence upon the trial of every prisoner, whether he or she shall be convicted or acquitted’.¹² The oversight of the City of London resulted in longer and more detailed reports that were relied upon for the onward administration (and performance) of sentences and pardons.¹³ By the time that we encounter our final book-theft case in December 1820, the Proceedings had been established for nearly 40 years as an official publication of the City.

Little is known about the circumstances by which trial reports were transcribed and edited in the early decades. The increasing tendency from the 1720s to represent the spoken words of the trial suggests the employment of note-takers and short-hand writers in the courtroom. Thomas Gurney, who acted as a court reporter in the 1740s and 1750s, placed regular advertisements in the Proceedings for his short-hand system.¹⁴ These notes were transcribed in full (with a copy sent, after 1778, for the review of the City Recorder),¹⁵ before a series of decisions were made to determine which details were suitable for publication. As readers of the Proceedings, we need to be aware of these layers of editorial intervention that separate us from the words that were act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Courts
• 3. Prisoners
• 4. Prosecutors
• Backmatter