Crime And Punishment In Eighteenth Century England

McLynn provides the first comprehensive view of crime and its consequences in the eighteenth century: why was England notorious for violence? Why did the death penalty prove no deterrent? Was it a crude means of redistributing wealth?

McLynn provides the first comprehensive view of crime and its consequences in the eighteenth century: why was England notorious for violence? Why did the death penalty prove no deterrent? Was it a crude means of redistributing wealth?

Why was the era of Augustan elegance also that of Hogarthian squalor? How far was the Industrial Revolution responsible for the rise of street gangs and highwaymen? Was it a coincidence that the autocratic monarchies of Europe suffered less from violent crime? Were such heroes as Dick Turpin motivated by Robin Hood impulses? Why were public executions regarded as entertainment and not deterrents? The author attempts to answer all these questions in this study of a society he characterizes as riddled with insecurities and governed by envies and fears. The book is aimed at students - graduate and undergraduate - of 18th European and British history, and those interested in crime, the law, criminality, and punishment.

Stories of transgression–Gilgamesh, Prometheus, Oedipus, Eve—may be integral to every culture's narrative imaginings of its own origins, but such stories assumed different meanings with the burgeoning interest in modern histories of crime and punishment in the later decades of the seventeenth century. In Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England, Hal Gladfelder shows how the trial report, providence book, criminal biography, and gallows speech came into new commercial prominence and brought into focus what was most disturbing, and most exciting, about contemporary experience. These narratives of violence, theft, disruptive sexuality, and rebellion compelled their readers to sort through fragmentary or contested evidence, anticipating the openness to discordant meanings and discrepant points of view which characterizes the later fictions of Defoe and Fielding. Beginning with the various genres of crime narrative, Gladfelder maps a complex network of discourses that collectively embodied the range of responses to the transgressive at the turn of the eighteenth century. In the book's second and third parts, he demonstrates how the discourses of criminality became enmeshed with emerging novelistic conceptions of character and narrative form. With special attention to Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, Gladfelder argues that Defoe's narratives concentrate on the forces that shape identity, especially under conditions of outlawry, social dislocation, and urban poverty. He next considers Fielding's double career as author and magistrate, analyzing the interaction between his fiction and such texts as the aggressively polemical Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers and his eyewitness accounts of the sensational Canning and Penlez cases. Finally, Gladfelder turns to Godwin's Caleb Williams, Wollstonecraft's Maria, and Inchbald's Nature and Art to reveal the degree to which criminal narrative, by the end of the eighteenth century, had become a necessary vehicle for articulating fundamental cultural anxieties and longings. Crime narratives, he argues, vividly embody the struggles of individuals to define their place in the suddenly unfamiliar world of modernity.

One of the fastest-growing and most exciting areas of historical research in recent years has been the study of crime and the criminal. The intrinsic fascination of the subject is enhanced by the fact that between the mid eighteenth century and early twentieth century, the English criminal justice system was fundamentally transformed as a new disciplinary state emerged. Drawing on recent research, this book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date synthesis of these important changes.

Designed to complement "Crime and Punishment: An Introductory History" UCL Press, 1996, this sourcebook contains documents specifically selected to illuminate major issues raised in the textbook. In the first part of the book, extracts of laws and royal, local and church records from Anglo- Saxon England to the 18th century reveal changing patterns of crime and punishment. The first sociology of English crime Harman's Caveat, 1566 as well as Henry Fielding's reform proposals of the mid-eighteenth century are included and the growing use of imprisonment is reflected in the later sections.; The second part covers the 19th century. Documents range from commentaries on the day-to-day crimes of theft, drunkenness And Assault To The Sensationalism Of Garroting And Murder. Documents charting the impressive growth of the police force are included. Criminal justice is approached through the minutiae of police charge books and newspaper column's, the personal reminiscences of magistrates, the sweeping arguments of law reformers and the pleading voices of Petitioners For Mercy. In A Chapter On Punishment, The Emotions Unleashed by public hanging and transportation can be compared with the relentless monotony of prison life.

During the eighteenth century English defendants, victims, witnesses, judges, and jurors spoke a language of the mind. With their reputations or lives at stake, men and women presented their complex emotions and passions as grounds for acquittal or mitigation of punishment. Inside the courtroom the language of excuse reshaped crimes and punishments, signalling a shift in the age-old negotiation of mitigation. Outside the courtroom the language of the mind reflected society's preoccupation with questions of sensibility, responsibility, and the self.

Shoplifting in Eighteenth-Century England examines the nature and impact on society of this commercial crime at a time of rapid retail expansion during the long eighteenth century. As a new consumer culture took root in England and shops proliferated, the crime of shoplifting leaped to public prominence. In 1699 shoplifting became a hanging offence. Yet whether compelled by need or greed, shoplifters continued to operate in substantial numbers on the shopping streets of London and provincial towns. Regarded initially as exclusively a crime of the poor, the eighteenth century witnessed a transformation in the public perception and understanding of such customer theft, signalled by the shocking arrest of Jane Austen's wealthy aunt for shoplifting in 1799. This book shows, through systematic profiling of those who committed this crime, that shoplifting was primarily a crime of the poor and predominantly an opportunist one. Providing both quantitative analysis and engaging insights into real-life stories, the book describes the variable strategies adopted by shoplifters to raid elite and poorer stores, the practical responses of shopkeepers to this predation and the financial impact on their businesses. It investigates the trade lobbying that led to the passing of the Shoplifting Act, the degree to which retailers co-operated with the judiciary and their engagement with the capital law reform movement of the later eighteenth century. Examining the range of goods stolen, the book also addresses questions of whether or not this form of theft was driven by consumer desire andsuggests that more subtle social and economic motives were at work. SHELLEY TICKELL is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire