This article examines the changing geographical distribution of crimes prosecuted at the Old Bailey (1720-1820) using the mapping facilities on the website Locating London's Past. By assessing the impact of the reform of the night watch, the creation of new 'rotation offices' and the development of forms of proactive policing, it argues that changing patterns of prosecutions reflect changes in policing and access to justice rather than the incidence of crime. The evidence presented here suggests, first, that improvements to the night watch made little difference to patterns of prosecution; second, that the rotation offices had a limited but measurable impact; and, third, that the development of investigative policing transformed the level and geographical distribution of prosecutions in the latter half of our period of study. A pattern whereby prosecutions were heavily concentrated in the West End in the early eighteenth century was replaced by a more even distribution (with the exception of the City), mapping closely onto the distribution of changes in policing. The article expands our understanding of the significance of new forms of professional justice and policing, and highlights their role in disrupting social relations in London by removing criminal accusations from the community.

AbstractThis article is based on a unique dataset of 75,448 written descriptions of tattoos on British criminal convicts who were either transported or imprisoned during the period from 1791 to 1925. Combining both quantitative evidence (provided as visualizations) and qualitative evidence, it shows that, rather than expressing criminal identities as criminologists and sociologists argued, convicts’ tattoos expressed a broad range of subjects, affinities, and interests from wider popular and even mainstream culture. The diverse occupations held by convicts, the contexts in which tattoos were created, and incidental references to tattooing in other parts of society all point to a growing phenomenon that was embedded in Victorian culture rather than constituting an expression of deviance or resistance. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, tattooing became fashionable within elite society. These findings not only shed light on the significance of tattooing as a form of cultural expression but also undermine the myth that nineteenth-century criminality was the product of, as contemporary commentators termed it, a distinct “criminal class.”

AbstractThe introduction of rewards for the conviction of serious criminals fundamentally transformed English criminal justice. The prospect of rewards totalling up to £140 encouraged additional prosecutions, more full (as opposed to partial) guilty verdicts, and more death sentences. In the process, in a series of largely unintended consequences, two fundamental pillars of early-modern justice were undermined: reliance on the public to prosecute, and the death penalty to deter crime. Policing agents began to play a much more important role in apprehending criminals, while the high level of executions contributed to growing doubts about the efficacy of capital punishment.

We hypothesise and evaluate a language model-based approach for scoring the quality of OCR transcriptions in the British Library Newspapers (BLN) corpus parts 1 and 2, to identify the best quality OCR for use in further natural language processing tasks, with a wider view to link individual newspaper reports of crime in nineteenth-century London to the Digital Panopticon-a structured repository of criminal lives. We mitigate the absence of gold standard transcriptions of the BLN corpus by utilising a corpus of genre-adjacent texts that capture the common and legal parlance of nineteenth-century London-the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online-with a view to rank the BLN transcriptions by their OCR quality.

The long eighteenth century marks a key period in the history of shoplifting, owing to the increase in fixed shop retailing, the growth of consumerism, and the creation, and later abolition, of a s...

This article seeks to understand why detailed personal information about accused criminals and convicts was recorded from the late 18th century in England, and why some of this information was converted into statistics from the 1820s, such that by 1860, extensive information about criminals' physical characteristics and backgrounds was regularly collected and tabulated. These developments in record-keeping and statistics were mostly the result of local initiatives and imperatives, revealing a grass-roots information-gathering culture, with limited central government direction. Rather than primarily driven by efforts at control or the practical demands of judicial administration, the substantial amount of information recorded reveals a strong and widely held desire to understand the criminal, long before the self-conscious enterprise of 'criminology' was invented.

The Digital Panopticon is a comprehensive online database and resource reflecting some fifty separate record series (500,000,000 words), evidencing the lives of 90,000 individuals either imprisoned in London, or else transported to Australia in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

This exhibition was contracted by and displayed at the London Metropolitan Archives. It received additional funding from the AHRC Digital Panopticon network as well as specific impact and engagement funding from The University of Sheffield and The University of Sussex.

London Lives is a fascinating new study that exposes the lesser-known experiences of eighteenth-century thieves, paupers, prostitutes and highwaymen. It charts the experiences of hundreds of thousands of Londoners who found themselves submerged in poverty or prosecuted for crime, and surveys their responses, to illustrate the extent to which plebeian Londoners influenced the pace and direction of change in social policy. Calling upon a new body of digital evidence, the book illuminates the lives of prison escapees, expert manipulators of the poor relief system, celebrity highwaymen, lone mothers and vagrants; revealing how they each played the system to the best of their ability in order to survive in their various circumstances of misfortune. In these acts of desperation, the poor and the criminal exercised a profound and effective form of agency that changed the system itself, and shaped the evolution of the modern state

In the late autumn of 1762, Robert Munro was admitted to St George’s Hospital, ‘very Melancholy & dejected’. He was disappointed in his search for work, owed money to a great many and had recently undergone an unsuccessful salivation to cure his venereal disease at the Lock Hospital. His head throbbed with pain. But in his despair, the event that finally drove him over the edge was the casual cruelty of his fellow patients, who ‘told him Fielding was after him’. Munro asked a hospital porter, Roderick McKinnon, if he had spotted Justice John Fielding on the wards, and in response McKinnon advised him that he ‘had better think of his maker’. In the early hours of the next morning, Robert Munro took a razor and cut his own throat. He died six hours later. The subsequent coroners’ inquest found that he had, ‘Cut his throat being a Lunatick’. However, in the hard decades of the 1760s and 1770s, many Londoners must have felt the rising despair that moved Munro’s hand.

In the spring of 1704 the governors of the London Workhouse were confronted by one of the uncomfortable realities generated by a rapidly growing city. Two brothers, Thomas and John Brinnish, had been taken up from the streets and brought before them, where they informed the governors that the churchwarden of their home parish in Bristol had given the brothers three shillings and directed them to the charity of Londoners. Thirty years earlier they would almost certainly have simply been whipped and sent on their way. However, in an increasingly bureaucratic system, the governors first wrote to the keeper of the workhouse at Bristol for more information. In the process, the Brinnish brothers were inducted into a system of vagrant and pauper removal, itself part of an evolving bureaucracy of poor relief and criminal justice that was changing in response to legislation, civic innovation and the actions of the reformation of manners societies. These in turn had been prompted in part by the 1688 Revolution, which led to more frequent meetings of parliament and the growth of voluntary societies seeking reform.

Thomas Limpus, with whom this book began, spent the 1790s in Australia. While attempts in the previous decade to transport him and others ‘beyond the seas’ – to Africa, revolutionary America, Canada and Honduras – had been stopgap and incompetent measures that collapsed in the face of plebeian resistance and settler opposition, his transportation to Australia was permanent. Sheer distance, combined with military power, limited indigenous opposition and a colonialist agenda that placed a new positive value on his life and labour, ensured that he would stay put. He died on Norfolk Island sometime before 1801.