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.

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.

Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1660-1914 offers an overview of the changing nature of crime and its punishment from the Restoration to World War 1. It charts how prosecution and punishment have changed from the early modern to the modern period and reflects on how the changing nature of English society has affected these processes. By combining extensive primary material alongside a thorough analysis of historiography this text offers an invaluable resource to students and academics alike. The book is arranged in two sections: the first looks at the evolution and development of the criminal justice system and the emergence of the legal profession, and examines the media's relationship with crime. Section two examines key themes in the history of crime, covering the emergence of professional policing, the move from physical punishment to incarceration and the importance of gender and youth. Finally, the book draws together these themes and considers how the Criminal Justice System has developed to suit the changing nature of the British state.

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.

With the growth of printing in early modern Germany, crime quickly became a subject of wide public discourse. Sensational crime reports, often featuring multiple murders within families, proliferated as authors probed horrific events for religious meaning. Coinciding with heightened witch panics and economic crisis, the spike in crime fears revealed a continuum between fears of the occult and more mundane dangers. In Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, Joy Wiltenburg explores the beginnings of crime sensationalism from the early sixteenth century into the seventeenth century and beyond. Comparing the depictions of crime in popular publications with those in archival records, legal discourse, and imaginative literature, Wiltenburg highlights key social anxieties and analyzes how crime texts worked to shape public perceptions and mentalities. Reports regularly featured familial destruction, flawed economic relations, and the apocalyptic thinking of Protestant clergy. Wiltenburg examines how such literature expressed and shaped cultural attitudes while at the same time reinforcing governmental authority. She also shows how the emotional inflections of crime stories influenced the growth of early modern public discourse, so often conceived in terms of rational exchange of ideas.

Modern criminal courts are characteristically the domain of lawyers, with trials conducted in an environment of formality and solemnity, where facts are found and legal rules are impartially applied to administer justice. Recent historical scholarship has shown that in England lawyers only began to appear in ordinary criminal trials during the eighteenth century, however, and earlier trials often took place in an atmosphere of noise and disorder, where the behaviour of the crowd - significant body language, meaningful looks, and audible comment - could influence decisively the decisions of jurors and judges. This collection of essays considers this transition from early scenes of popular participation to the much more orderly and professional legal proceedings typical of the nineteenth century, and links this with another important shift, the mushroom growth of popular news and comment about trials and punishments which occurred from the later seventeenth century. It hypothesizes that the popular participation which had been a feature of courtroom proceedings before the mid-eighteenth century was not stifled by ’lawyerization’, but rather partly relocated to the ’public sphere’ of the press, partly because of some changes connected with the work of the lawyers. Ranging from the early 1700s to the mid-nineteenth century, and taking account of criminal justice proceedings in Scotland, as well as England, the essays consider whether pamphlets, newspapers, ballads and crime fiction provided material for critical perceptions of criminal justice proceedings, or alternatively helped to convey the official ’majesty’ intended to legitimize the law. In so doing the volume opens up fascinating vistas upon the cultural history of Britain’s legal system over the ’long eighteenth century'.

This study examines the considerable changes that took place in the criminal justice system in the City of London in the century after the Restoration, well before the inauguration of the so-called 'age of reform'. The policing institutions of the City were transformed in response to the problems created by the rapid expansion of the metropolis during the early modern period, and as a consequence of the emergence of a polite urban culture. At the same time, the City authorities were instrumental in the establishment of new forms of punishment - particularly transportation to the American colonies and confinement at hard labour - that for the first time made secondary sanctions available to the English courts for convicted felons and diminished the reliance on the terror created by capital punishment. The book investigates why in the century after 1660 the elements of an alternative means of dealing with crime in urban society were emerging in policing, in the practices and procedures of prosecution, and in the establishment of new forms of punishment.