Introduction

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century press abounded with stories of crime and justice which, due to their strong social impact and commercial value, have received ample attention in different disciplines, from press, social and legal historiography to historical pragmatics and news discourse analysis. Both historians and linguists have agreed on the key role played by the print medium in informing and constructing people's knowledge about law and order in a historical period characterised by the unprecedented circulation of crime news. Indeed, the appearance of the early newsbooks of the 1640s, their coexistence with previous forms of cheap print, and the evolution of print news throughout the eighteenth century along with the development of specialised crime literature offered a fertile and variegated soil for the shaping of public perceptions of crime and – most importantly – for the construction of people's (dis)trust of the judicial system. In order to trace the evolution of crime and trial reporting over 160 years, I will refer to the concepts of religion and law. As Sharpe points out (1999: 215), in a society overwhelmed by fear of apocalyptic disorder and, from the early eighteenth century, increasingly concerned about crime and the defence of property, religion and law operated in tandem in the battle against delinquency. If seventeenth-century crime and trial reports maintained a profitable ideological interlacement between Christian morality and legal practice, in the eighteenth century religion progressively withdrew and more technical aspects of the forensic procedure came to the forefront as guarantors of the justice and equity of the law. This very gradual process of secularisation was consistent with a corresponding change in the perception of crime itself, from mortal sin instigated by the devil to a social problem related to increasing poverty and unemployment.

In this chapter, I shall examine both crime and trial reports, focusing on the way in which the encoding of information contributed to forging early forms of moral panic among people with little or no direct experience of crime. While crime reports privilege a chronological narrative of the deed where minimal concessions to the trial examination are functional to the author's discrediting of the criminal's defence, trial reports are characterised by a closer adherence to the interactive structure of the legal proceedings with a higher communicative distance between author and reader.