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"Crime England London History 18th century."
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Print culture, crime and justice in eighteenth-century London
In the first half of the 18th century there was an explosion in the volume and variety of crime literature published in London. The older genres of criminal biographies, social policy pamphlets, and 'last-dying speeches' were joined by a raft of new publications, including newspapers, periodicals and prints. Richard M. Ward provides a detailed study of crime reporting across these publications and explores the influence of print upon contemporary perceptions of crime and upon the making of the law and its administration in the capital.
Book
The Zong
On November 29, 1781, Captain Collingwood of the British shipZongcommanded his crew to throw overboard one-third of his cargo: a shipment of Africans bound for slavery in America. The captain believed his ship was off course, and he feared there was not enough drinking water to last until landfall. This book is the first to examine in detail the deplorable killings on theZong, the lawsuit that ensued, how the murder of 132 slaves affected debates about slavery, and the way we remember the infamousZongtoday.Historian James Walvin explores all aspects of theZong's voyage and the subsequent trial-a case brought to court not for the murder of the slaves but as a suit against the insurers who denied the owners' claim that their \"cargo\" had been necessarily jettisoned. The scandalous case prompted wide debate and fueled Britain's awakening abolition movement. Without the episode of theZong, Walvin contends, the process of ending the slave trade would have taken an entirely different moral and political trajectory. He concludes with a fascinating discussion of how the case of theZong, though unique in the history of slave ships, has come to be understood as typical of life on all such ships.
eBook
civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey
The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment. By coarse-graining the spoken word testimony into synonym sets and dividing the trials based on indictment, we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a long-term, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts. We separate this process into the shifting patterns that drive it, determine the relative effects of bureaucratic change and broader cultural shifts, and identify the synonym sets most responsible for the eventual genre distinguishability. This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process.
Journal Article
Jewishness Contested: The 1771 Chelsea Murder, Jewish Masculinity, and Jewish Civil Integration
On June 11, 1771, a group of thieves broke into a private house in Chelsea, a village outside London. The event ended with the killing of one of the servants in addition to the theft itself. Soon enough it became known that the perpetrators were Jewish and the case became a cause célèbre. The perpetrators were apprehended five months later, put on trial, and sentenced to death. The case attracted wide public attention and resonated into the nineteenth century. What made it a catalyst of such broad public agitation? I argue that it became a compelling case because it effectively featured the contradictions that were embedded in the contemporary imagery of the Jew—specifically of the masculine Jew—oscillating between an assimilated gentleman and a perilous criminal who poses a constant threat to the English woman. At the same time, and relatedly, it touched on the borders of Englishness. The question of whether Jews could be part of English civil society became a contested issue in the second half of the eighteenth century, a debate that reflected the uncertainty of the definitions of both Jewishness and English identity. As we shall see, gender and masculinity were hotspots of vulnerability for both concerns, and they figured prominently in depictions of the Chelsea case.
Journal Article
The London mob : violence and disorder in eighteenth-century England
By 1700 London was the largest city in the world, with over 500,000 inhabitants. Very weakly policed, its streets saw regular outbreaks of rioting by a mob easily stirred by economic grievances, politics or religion. If the mob vented its anger more often on property than people, eighteenth-century Londoners frequently came to blows over personal disputes. In a society where men and women were quick to defend their honour, slanging matches easily turned to fisticuffs and slights on honour were avenged in duels. In this world, where the detection and prosecution of crime was the part of the business of the citizen, punishment, whether by the pillory, whipping at a cart's tail or hanging at Tyburn, was public and endorsed by crowds. The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England draws a fascinating portrait of the public life of the modern world's first great city.
eBook
Male honour and the decline of public violence in eighteenth-century London
In explaining the long-term decline of violence in English society, historians have failed to recognize the importance of changing gender-based conceptions of honour. During the eighteenth century the per capita rate of homicide in London decreased dramatically, and because 93% of homicides were committed by men, this decline essentially involved a change in male behaviour. At the start of the period violence served to enhance or defend men's reputations, and thereby to reinforce their social and gender identities. In order to maintain their honour, most men felt the need to physically challenge anyone who insulted them or questioned their honesty or courage. Such disputes often took the form of duels and other ritualized staged fights and were conducted by men of all social classes. While the violence was limited by accepted rules (violence committed by women, though much rarer, more easily got out of hand), fatalities nonetheless occurred. Over the course of the century, however, these types of disputes became far less common as reputations came to be defined much less publicly in London, and men found new ways of establishing and defending their honour, and thus of asserting gender and social differences. However, private violence, notably wife beating, continued behind closed doors.
Journal Article
Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London
This is the first full-length study of prostitution in London during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is a compelling account, exposing the real lives of the capital's prostitutes, and also shedding light on London society as a whole, its policing systems and its attitudes towards the female urban poor. Drawing on the archives of London's parishes, jury records, reports from Southwark gaol as well as other sources which have been overlooked by historians, it provides a fascinating study for all those interested in Georgian society.
1. Introduction. 2. The Experience of Prostitution. 3. The Geography of Prostitution in London. 4. Prostitution and the Law. 5. Policing the Streets. 6. Policing Disorderly Houses. 7. Attitudes towards Prostitution. 8. Conclusion. Bibliography
\"This is an excellent book which would repay the attention of all social and cultural historians, and will remain the standard work on eighteenth century prostitution for the foreseeable future.\"
Albion
eBook
Loose, idle and disorderly: vagrant removal in late eighteenth-century Middlesex
This article is based on the records of over 14,000 individual vagrancy removals administered by the contractor for Middlesex, Henry Adams, between 1776 and 1786. It evidences the workings of the vagrant removal system and locates vagrancy at the interstices between criminal justice and poor relief. It concludes that individual Middlesex justices used arrest and removal under the vagrancy laws as a tool in their active management of local communities – targeting women in particular – while the City of London relied on the same mechanism to facilitate primarily male migration. Finally, this article explores the relationship between vagrant and poor law removal to suggest that the system of legal settlement had become increasingly ineffective in regulating plebeian mobility by the 1780s. It substantially modifies our understanding of the history of crime, settlement and poor relief.
Journal Article