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

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London
Author: Richard M. Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2014-08-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472507118

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.

Devilry, Deviance, and Public Sphere

Devilry, Deviance, and Public Sphere
Author: Christopher Hamerton
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2022-11-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3031148835

Devilry, Deviance, and Public Sphere draws on criminology and social theory to explore and expand social historical themes in the analysis of perceptions of deviance and crime in the eighteenth century. Developing the theoretical device of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, instigated by Stanley Cohen and developed by Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, the book explores the social discovery of, and public response to, crime and deviance in that period. Detailed contemporary case studies of youth violence, sexual deviance, and substance abuse are used to argue that Hanoverian London and its novel media can be identified as the initiating historical site for what might now be termed public order moral panics. In doing so, Hamerton provides a vivid historical lineage of moral panic which traverses much of the long eighteenth century. The book considers social change, allowing for points of theoretical convergence and divergence to be observed, whilst exploring historical models of public opinion, media, deviance and crime alongside the unique character and power located within the burgeoning Metropolis. Devilry, Deviance, and Public Sphere seeks to make an important contribution to the understanding of both moral panic theory and the historiography of crime and deviance, and posits that the current discourse on folk devils and moral panics can be extended and enriched via the exploration of the moral crises of earlier centuries.

Criminal Justice During the Long Eighteenth Century

Criminal Justice During the Long Eighteenth Century
Author: David Lemmings
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429678460

This book applies three overlapping bodies of work to generate fresh approaches to the study of criminal justice in England and Ireland between 1660 and 1850. First, crime and justice are interpreted as elements of the "public sphere" of opinion about government. Second, "performativity" and speech act theory are considered in the context of the Anglo-Irish criminal trial, which was transformed over the course of this period from an unmediated exchange between victim and accused to a fully lawyerized performance. Thirdly, the authors apply recent scholarship on the history of emotions, particularly relating to the constitution of "emotional communities" and changes in "emotional regimes".

Capital Punishment and the Criminal Corpse in Scotland, 1740–1834

Capital Punishment and the Criminal Corpse in Scotland, 1740–1834
Author: Rachel E. Bennett
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2017-12-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319620185

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book provides the most in-depth study of capital punishment in Scotland between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century to date. Based upon an extensive gathering and analysis of previously untapped resources, it takes the reader on a journey from the courtrooms of Scotland to the theatre of the gallows. It introduces them to several of the malefactors who faced the hangman’s noose and explores the traditional hallmarks of the spectacle of the scaffold. It demonstrates that the period between 1740 and 1834 was one of discussion, debate and fundamental change in the use of the death sentence and how it was staged in practice. In addition, the study provides an innovative investigation of the post-mortem punishment of the criminal corpse. It offers the reader an insight into the scene at the foot of the gibbets from which criminal bodies were displayed and around the dissection tables of Scotland’s main universities where criminal bodies were used as cadavers for anatomical demonstration. In doing so it reveals an intermediate stage in the long-term disappearance of public bodily punishment.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice
Author: Paul Knepper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 721
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0190602848

The historical study of crime has expanded in criminology during the past few decades, forming an active niche area in social history. Indeed, the history of crime is more relevant than ever as scholars seek to address contemporary issues in criminology and criminal justice. Thus, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice provides a systematic and comprehensive examination of recent developments across both fields. Chapters examine existing research, explain on-going debates and controversies, and point to new areas of interest, covering topics such as criminal law and courts, police and policing, and the rise of criminology as a field. This Handbook also analyzes some of the most pressing criminological issues of our time, including drug trafficking, terrorism, and the intersections of gender, race, and class in the context of crime and punishment. The definitive volume on the history of crime, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, and legal history.

London's Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720 - c. 1930

London's Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720 - c. 1930
Author: Heather Shore
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2015-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137313919

This book offers an original and exciting analysis of the concept of the criminal underworld. Print culture, policing and law enforcement, criminal networks, space and territory are explored here through a series of case studies taken from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

London Lives

London Lives
Author: Tim Hitchcock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2015-12-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107025273

This book surveys the lives and experiences of hundreds of thousands of eighteenth-century non-elite Londoners in the evolution of the modern world.

Punishing the Criminal Corpse, 1700-1840

Punishing the Criminal Corpse, 1700-1840
Author: Peter King
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2017-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137513616

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence. This book analyses the different types of post-execution punishments and other aggravated execution practices, the reasons why they were advocated, and the decision, enshrined in the Murder Act of 1752, to make two post-execution punishments, dissection and gibbeting, an integral part of sentences for murder. It traces the origins of the Act, and then explores the ways in which Act was actually put into practice. After identifying the dominance of penal dissection throughout the period, it looks at the abandonment of burning at the stake in the 1790s, the rapid decline of hanging in chains just after 1800, and the final abandonment of both dissection and gibbeting in 1832 and 1834. It concludes that the Act, by creating differentiation in levels of penalty, played an important role within the broader capital punishment system well into the nineteenth century. While eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historians have extensively studied the ‘Bloody Code’ and the resulting interactions around the ‘Hanging Tree’, they have largely ignored an important dimension of the capital punishment system – the courts extensive use of aggravated and post-execution punishments. With this book, Peter King aims to rectify this neglected historical phenomenon.

The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, by Sarah Fielding

The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, by Sarah Fielding
Author: Gillian Skinner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2022-04-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351003402

Sarah Fielding was one of the most respected women authors of her generation and a key figure in the development of the novel. She was admired especially by Samuel Richardson, who famously commented that her ‘knowledge of the human heart’ was greater than that of her brother, the novelist Henry Fielding. This edition revives The Countess of Dellwyn, the only one of Sarah Fielding’s major works not previously available in a modern scholarly edition. The novel is satirical and didactic, taking as its targets fashionable life and modern marriage (and scandalous divorce) and narrated with acerbic wit by its anonymous third-person narrator. This edition benefits greatly from Gillian Skinner’s editorial work and it is a book that will be of great interest to researchers into the eighteenth-century novel and women’s writing of the period worldwide.

Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion

Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion
Author: Katie Barclay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2022-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000619532

Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion: Public Justice explores how the legal history of long-eighteenth-century Britain has been transformed by the cultural turn, and especially the associated history of emotion. Seeking to reflect on the state of the field, 13 essays by leading and emerging scholars bring cutting-edge research to bear on the intersections between law, print culture and emotion in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Divided into three sections, this collection explores the ‘public’ as a site of legal sensibility; it demonstrates how the rhetoric of emotion constructed the law in legal practice and in society and culture; and it highlights how approaches from cultural and emotions history have recentred the individual, the biography and the group to explain long-running legal-historical problems. Across this volume, authors evidence how engagements between cultural and legal history have revitalised our understanding of law’s role in eighteenth-century culture and society, not least deepening our understanding of justice as produced with and through the public. This volume is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in the history of emotions as well as the legal history of Britain from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century.