Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London

Richard M. Ward

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472507112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

In the first half of the 18th century there was an explosion in the volume and variety of crime literature published in London. This was a 'golden age of writing about crime', when the older genres of criminal biographies, social policy pamphlets and 'last-dying speeches' were joined by a raft of new publications, including newspapers, periodicals, graphic prints, the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary's Account of malefactors executed at Tyburn. By the early 18th century propertied Londoners read a wider array of printed texts and images about criminal offenders – highwaymen, housebreakers, murderers, pickpockets and the like – than ever before or since. Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London provides the first detailed study of crime reporting across this range of publications to explore the influence of print upon contemporary perceptions of crime and upon the making of the law and its administration in the metropolis. This historical perspective helps us to rethink the relationship between media, the public sphere and criminal justice policy in the present.

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, 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 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 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-seventeenth- and 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 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 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 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• 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’
• 4 Print Culture and Policing: The Efficacy of Empirical and Providential Detection
• 5 Print Culture and Punishment: ‘More Terror in it than Mere Hanging’
• 6 Conclusion: Content, Causes and Consequences
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright