Criminality And The Common Law Imagination In The 18th And 19th Centuries

Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers how the cultural narrative affected the development of the law itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in three case studies: adultery, child criminality and rape testimony.

Erin Sheley shows how the symbolic relationship between adultery and threatened English sovereignty created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the private wrong of adultery; how the literary 'construction' of childhood by 19th-century fairy tale writers affected the development of the juvenile justice system; and how evolving rules about rape victim 'character evidence' functioned as epistemological components of volatile national identity.

An account of the 19th-century criminal justice system as a whole, from the crimes committed and the classification of offences to the different courts and their procedure. The author describes the stages of criminal prosecution -- committal, indictment, trial, verdict and punishment -- and the judges, lawyers and juries, highlighting the significant changes in the rules of evidence during the century. He looks at reform of the old system and assesses how far it was brought about by lawyers themselves and how far by external forces. Finally, he considers the fairness of the system, both as seen by contemporaries and in modern times.

This book draws on law, literature, philosophy and social history to explore fundamental changes in ideas of selfhood, gender and social order in 18th and 19th Century England. Lacey argues that these changes underpinned a radical shift in mechanisms of responsibility-attribution, with decisive implications for the criminalisation of women.

The Birth of Criminology's focused presentation of primary readings and insightful commentary on the history of criminological thought make this college-level reader a "must-have for faculty, researchers, and students of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and behavioral science.

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?

This book examines how the law was made, defined, administered, and used in eighteenth-century England. A team of leading international historians explore the ways in which legal concerns and procedures came to permeate society and reflect on eighteenth-century concepts of corruption, oppression, and institutional efficiency. These themes are pursued throughout in a broad range of contributions which include studies of magistrates and courts; the forcible enlistment of soldiers and sailors; the eighteenth-century 'bloody code'; the making of law basic to nineteenth-century social reform; the populace's extension of law's arena to newspapers; theologians' use of assumptions basic to English law; Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's concept of the liberty intrinsic to England; and Blackstone's concept of the framework of English law. The result is an invaluable account of the legal bases of eighteenth-century society which is essential reading for historians at all levels.

How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.