¹ Nightingale, Joseph, London and Middlesex; or, An Historical, Commercial, & Descriptive Survey of the Metropolis of Great-Britain (London: J. Harris et al., 1810–1815), 3Google Scholar, pt. 1:615, 615n. For Nightingale, , see The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Stephenson, Leslie and Lee, Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921–1922), 14:510–11Google Scholar. The complete set of volumes were a recent addition; the recorder had supplied them in 1812. See the Corporation of London Records Office (CLRO), Repertories of the Court of Aldermen, vol. 216, p. 567, September 29, 1812.

² The full title of the Sessions Paper was The Whole Proceedings on the King's Commission of the Peace, Oyer and Terminer, and Gaol-Delivery for the City of London; and also the Gaol-Delivery for the County of Middlesex; Held at Justice-Hall in the Old-Bailey, [date]. In subsequent notes, I will use the conventional abbreviation, OBSP (for Old Bailey Sessions Paper). In the text, I use the phrase most often employed by contemporaries, “the Sessions Paper.”

³ This increase can easily be overstated. There was a dramatic increase in the number of cases of greater than two pages in length. But the overall shift was from the vast majority of cases being less than one-half page in length to a majority being between one-half to two pages long. After 1795, the size of the typeface was reduced, and the amount of space used on each page increased, so straightforward comparisons of the length of trial accounts before and after that year are more problematic.

⁴ The Sessions Paper has been used extensively in such famous studies as George, M. Dorothy, London Life in the XVIIIth Century (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925)Google Scholar; Rudé, George, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century: Studies in Popular Protest (London: Collins; Fontana Press, 1970)Google Scholar, pt. 3, and Hanoverian London, 1714–1808 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1971)Google Scholar. For eighteenth-century trial procedure, see Langbein, John H., “The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers,” University of Chicago Law Review 45 (Winter 1978): 263–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources,” University of Chicago Law Review 50 (Winter 1985): 1–136Google Scholar; Beattie, J. M., Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, chap. 7; Landsman, Stephan, “The Rise of the Contentious Spirit: Advocacy Procedure in Eighteenth-Century England,” Cornell Law Review 75 (March 1990): 497–609Google Scholar; and Beattie, J. M., “Scales of Justice: Defense Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Law and History Review 9 (Fall 1991): 221–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a controversial attempt to relate material in the Sessions Paper to larger issues of society and of economic practices, see Linebaugh, Peter, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane; Penguin Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

⁵ CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 70, fols. 142–43, November 13, 1778.

⁶ Christie, Ian R., “British Newspapers in the Later Georgian Era,” in his Myth and Reality in Late-Eighteenth-Century Politics, and Other Papers (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 313–15, 323–26Google Scholar; and Black, Jeremy, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 80–81, 99–108Google Scholar.

⁷ The publication history of the Sessions Paper before 1775 is discussed in Harris, Michael, “Trials and Criminal Biographies: A Case Study in Distribution,” in Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700, ed. Myers, Robin and Harris, Michael (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1982), pp. 6–15Google Scholar. I analyze the publication history of the Sessions Paper between 1770 and 1800 in “The Fall of the Sessions Paper: Criminal Trial and the Popular Press in Late Eighteenth-Century London,” Criminal Justice History (in press).

⁸ This perception is fundamental to the exercise of judicial authority in the modern Anglo-American tradition, as one English judge famously asserted in 1924: “It is not merely of some importance but it is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done” (quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 3d ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979], p. 250Google Scholar, no. 20).

⁹ It was noted of both the April and July sessions at the Old Bailey: see the Gentleman's Magazine 40 (1770): 234, 342Google Scholar; and the Annual Register 13 (Chronicle 1770): 128Google Scholar.

¹⁰ General discussions of penal policy and experimentation during this era can be found in O'Brien, Eris, The Foundation of Australia (1786–1800): A Study in English Criminal Practice and Penal Colonization in the Eighteenth Century, 2d ed. (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1950), pp. 77–133Google Scholar; Shaw, A. G. L., Convicts and the Colonies: A Study of Penal Transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and other Parts of the British Empire (London: Faber & Faber, 1966)Google Scholar, chaps. 1–2; Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, pp. 560–618Google Scholar; and Oldham, Wilfrid, Britain's Convicts to the Colonies, ed. Oldham, W. Hugh (Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1990)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Beattie, Crime and the Courts, chap. 9; and Ekirch, A. Roger, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

¹² The City proper continued to do without a formal penitentiary. By 1817, the conditions in its prisons seemed to many to be scandalously far behind the practices established in many other parts of the nation; see Condon, Richard Herrick, “The Reform of English Prisons, 1773–1816” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1962), chap. 5, pp. 160–74, 189–98Google Scholar.

¹³ For a comprehensive discussion of this change, see Wilf, Steven, “Imagining Justice: Aesthetics and Public Executions in Late Eighteenth-Century England,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5 (Winter 1993): 51–78Google Scholar. For two somewhat different views, see Linebaugh, pp. 363–65.; and Gatrell, V. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 52–54, 602–4Google Scholar.

¹⁴ In March 1786, the City government petitioned the king to direct his ministers to relieve the “dreadful accumulation” of convicts in the jails, desiring “a speedy and due execution of the Law, both as to capital punishment and transportation, without which all other regulations must prove nugatory and abortive” (Gentleman's Magazine 56 [1786]: 264Google Scholar).

¹⁵ The origins of the recorder's Report are described in Beattie, J. M., “The Cabinet and the Management of Death at Tyburn after the Revolution of 1689,” in The Revolution of 1688–89: Changing Perspectives, ed. Schwoerer, Lois G. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 218–33Google Scholar. Its operation between 1800 and its abolition in 1837 is discussed in Aspinall, Arthur, “The Grand Cabinet, 1800–1837,” Politico 3 (December 1938): 333–44Google Scholar; and Gatrell, chap. 20.

¹⁶ Adair was also, until 1780 and then again after 1793, a prominent Whig M.P. The bulk of his papers, preserved in the British Library (BL), Additional (Add.) MSS 50829–30, 53800–808, 53815, is given over to his concerns and activity regarding the East India Company; there are strikingly few papers relating to his tenure of the recordership.

¹⁷ Lord Sydney to the lord mayor of London, February 2, 1787, Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office Papers (HO) 43/2, pp. 202–3. By this time, there were at least fifty-two capital cases outstanding; see J. Adair to [E. Nepean?], December 26, 1786, HO 47/5. One hopes that the greatest accumulation of unreported sessions was that of 1788–89, when the king's illness resulted in four sessions' Reports having to be heard at once (Gentleman's Magazine 59 [1789]: 271Google Scholar). It says a great deal about the extent of the crisis two years earlier that these four sessions involved only forty-six capital cases, as opposed to the fifty-two from only two sessions in late 1786.

¹⁸ PRO, HO 42/2, fols. 96–97, February 28, 1783; fols. 230–31, May 2, 1783; and fols. 306–8, June 27, 1783. The fourth concerns Gordon Rioters; see PRO, State Papers (SP) 37/21, fols. 146–47, July 5, 1780. There is an almost unbroken run of the summarized Reports from 1816 until 1837, located in HO 6/1–22. Each consists of several pages of columns: “Name,” “Crime,” “Substance of Petition,” and “By Whom Recommended.” Some of them have the results written in underneath.

¹⁹ A survey of the published editions of the correspondence of George III and George IV. as well as of the unpublished papers of the home secretaries between 1782 and 1830, turns up no less than thirty instances of the scheduling of the Report being timed to accommodate the lord chancellor's attendance. The only instances in which it was done solely to facilitate the attendance of someone else—Lord Chief Justice Mansfield in 1783—occurred at a time when the chancellorship was in commission; see Fortescue, John, ed., The Correspondence of King George III from 1760 to 1783 (London: Macmillan, 1927–1928)Google Scholar, nos. 4325, 4399, 4446. A sense of how influential the lord chancellor's view could be is communicated by Lord Eldon's recollection of one instance, in 1801, when his views swayed the king toward mercy against the opinion of all but one of the ministers present; see Twiss, Horace, The Public and Private Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon (London: John Murray, 1844), 1:398–99Google Scholar. In 1832, Eldon maintained that “for twenty-five years he had been the individual who advised his Majesty as to the infliction of the punishment of death …. He never went to the King with the recorder's report in his hand, without having carefully read every case it contained, made an abstract of the whole evidence, and considered of the effect of that evidence, and its bearings in each particular case” (Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 13, col. 987, June 25, 1832Google Scholar).

²⁰ A full list of the City officers who received free copies of the Sessions Paper appears at CLRO, Journals of the Court of Common Council, vol. 70, fols. 141–42, November 13, 1778.

²¹ Recorder to Viscount Sidmouth, November 12, 1821, PRO, HO 6/6, is the first instance I have found of page references being provided in the list accompanying the recorder's notice of his readiness for the Report.

²² The first instance I have found of actually specifying only certain cases for close consideration is contained in a note from Robert Peel to his undersecretary in August 1824: “[The recorder] says there are 13 Cases, of which not more than 3 would be read—one of Burglary—one of Horsestealing, & the other of forging a Banker's Cheque under Circums[tances] of great distress” (BL, Add. MS 40367, fol. 184). The role of the Sessions Paper in these choices is clear from a notice of 1832: “The printed Sessions paper is occupied from page 459 to page 474 and the written Report has 58 pages entirely filled with the Evidence … the Report must I fear from necessity take up a great deal of time more than the whole of the Report of the July and September Sessions” (recorder to Viscount Melbourne, October 11, 1832, PRO, HO 6/17).

²³ Aspinall, pp. 336–38, 340, 343–44. For his occasional attempts to override the council's advice, see Bresler, Fenton, Reprieve: A Study of a System (London: George C. Harrap, 1965), pp. 42–43Google Scholar; and Gatrell (n. 13 above), pp. 550–65.

²⁴ Some details of parliamentary inquiry into this issue are given in Twiss, 3:359–408. In speaking to the question of the delays in chancery, Peel noted of Eldon that “having spent several hours on the Court of Chancery, he often employed twelve or fourteen more in the consideration of cases which involved the life or death of unhappy culprits” (Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 2d ser., vol. 10, col. 417, February 24, 1824Google Scholar).

²⁵ In 1829, the recorder regretfully informed the home secretary that the next report “will be very voluminous and present more cases for serious consideration than have occurred for some time …. I can hardly expect from the extreme length of the evidence to be able to send it to the Lord Chancellor before Friday next at the earliest perhaps not till Saturday” (he was writing on Sunday; recorder to R. Peel, July 5, 1829, PRO, HO 6/14).

²⁶ Aspinall, pp. 338–39; and Bresler, pp. 52–53. In fact, the act that ended the recorder's Report (1 Vict. c. 77) passed on the same day as those that removed capital punishment from all but a handful of offenses (1 Vict. cc. 84–91). Before July 1837, about five to eight cases were coming before the monarch at each session; afterward, only one or two were being considered, now by the judges.

²⁷ In 1789, a minor crisis was provoked in the renewed transportation system when several convicts at the Old Bailey briefly refused to accept pardon on that condition. In relaying news of these difficulties to his superior, the undersecretary enclosed a copy of the Sessions Paper that contained an account of the prisoners' trials (E. Nepean to W. W. Grenville, September 19, 1789, BL, Add. MS 59356, fols. 61–62, 63–64). The run of the Sessions Paper held by the Public Record Office only begins in 1801 (PRO, Prison Commission Papers 1), so it seems reasonable to assume that it was not being used for any systematic administrative purposes before that date. The City only began to allocate a copy for the home secretary's use in 1821—the same year in which the recorder began to list page references to it in his notices of readiness to Report (CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 112, fols. 228–29, January 10, 1821). In August 1786, the Home Office had requested that the sheriffs transmit a copy to the secretary “from time to time” (E. Nepean to sheriffs of London, August 21, 1786, PRO, HO 13/4, pp. 163–64), but the lack of regular reference to the paper, coupled with the evidence noted above, suggests to me that this was not consistently done before 1821.

²⁸ Aspinall, Arthur, ed., The Later Correspondence of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962–1970)Google Scholar, no. 508, Sydney to George III, April 20, 1789.

²⁹ CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 74, fols. 281–82, November 20, 1782. When Joseph Gurney took over as publisher-proprietor in 1778, he submitted a proposed contract, among the terms of which would have been that “the Short-hand Writer shall furnish the recorder, for the Time being, with a Copy of the Capital Trials, within four Days from the End of Each Session” in order “that the Report to his Majesty of the Capital Convicts may not be delayed”; see Gurney's “Proposals Humbly Offered to the Consideration of The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, the Court of Aldermen, and the Common-Council of the City of London; for Changing the Mode of Publishing the Sessions Paper (1778),” Guildhall Library, London, Broadside (B'side) 30.71. But the final terms settled between Gurney and the City make no mention of such a provision (CLRO, Journals of the Court of Common Council, vol. 70, fols. 141–44, November 13, 1778), and, in 1787, Hodgson told an aldermanic committee that, although he provided accounts of capital cases to the recorder, he “was under no Contract so to do” (“Committee of Aldermen to expedite the Report of the several Capital Convicts by Mr. Recorder & c.,” CLRO, Small MSS box 4, no. 47/398, February 17, 1787).

³⁰ E. Hodgson to the Committee of City Lands, November 1, 1785, CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, Minutes & Papers, December 1785.

³¹ CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 78, fols. 181–82, 283, October 11 and December 6, 1786.

³² This Committee was struck less than two weeks after the letter that the home secretary addressed to the lord mayor (Lord Sydney to the lord mayor, February 2, 1787, PRO, HO 43/2, pp. 202–3; and CLRO, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen 191, p. 152, February 13, 1787). It seems never to have reported back to the aldermen, but the effect of its recommendations is apparent in the subsequent regulations of the Common Council, of which all aldermen were members.

³³ CLRO, Journals of the Court of Common Council, vol. 72, fols. 275–77, October 21, 1790.

³⁴ CLRO, Small MSS box 40, no. 47/398, February 17, 1787.

³⁵ Recorder to [Lord Sydney?], February 8, 1785, PRO, HO 47/3. Three years later, another crisis of overcrowding in Newgate prompted a plea in person from the recorder (Annual Register [Chronicle 1788]: 223Google Scholar; and Gentleman's Magazine 58 [1788]: 1116Google Scholar). Similar conferences occurred in 1789 and 1791 (Gentleman's Magazine 59 [1789]: 951, 1045Google Scholar; and CLRO, Court of Aldermen: Committees Minute Books, 1791–94, pp. 34–43 [my thanks to Greg Smith for this source]). And in April 1792, the sheriffs pleaded for an imminent scheduling of the recorder's Report on the grounds of Newgate's crowded condition (sheriffs to [H. Dundas?], April 2, 1792, HO 42/20, fol. 155).

³⁶ This is based on the figures for transfers to the hulks that are given in PRO, HO 13.

³⁷ The procedure for pardon that prevailed outside London is discussed in Beattie, , Crime and the Courts (n. 4 above), pp. 431–34Google Scholar; and Beattie, J. M., “The Royal Pardon and Criminal Procedure in Early Modern England,” Historical Papers/Communications historiques, 1987, pp. 9–22Google Scholar.

³⁸ This is based on a count of references recorded in PRO, SP 44/90–96 and HO 13/1.

³⁹ Recorder to [E. Nepean?], [ca. Mar 1785], and recorder to [Lord Sydney?], May 3, 1785, both PRO, HO 47/3; H. Dundas to recorder, February 11, 1792, HO 13/8, p. 396; recorder to [H. Dundas?], February 15, 1792, HO 47/15; and recorder to the duke of Portland, April 8, 23, 1795, and August 8, 1795, HO 47/19; and recorder to the duke of Portland, August 5, 1795, HO 42/35. In 1795, the condition applied was military service—an alternative kind of transportation.

⁴⁰ Lord Sydney to recorder, October 26, 1785, PRO, HO 13/3, pp. 236–37; recorder to [Sydney?], December 28, 1785, HO 47/3; Sydney to recorder, December 2, 1786, HO 13/4, p. 336; recorder to Sydney, December 31, 1786, HO 47/5.

⁴¹ Lord Sydney to recorder, June 19, 1788, PRO, HO 13/6, pp. 214–16; W. W. Grenville to recorder, June 15, 1789, HO 13/7, pp. 73–75; recorder to [W. W. Grenville?], June 24, 1789, HO 47/9. The difficulties that secondary references posed for the recorder were apparent as early as 1783, when Adair was obliged to leave town on business and could only promise to return “answers to them by 3 or 4 at the time till the whole are gone through” (recorder to Lord North, July 28, 1783, HO 42/3, fol. 38v).

⁴² This is based on a count of references recorded in PRO, HO 13/7–8.

⁴³ BL, Add. MS 53815, fol. 61, entry for January 2, 1790.

⁴⁴ E. Nepean to sheriffs of London, August 21, 1786, PRO, HO 13/4, pp. 163–64.

⁴⁵ Buller, J., to [?], August 5, 1782, PRO, HO 42/1; Ashhurst, J., to [Lord Sydney?], March 11, 1787, HO 47/6; recorder to Lord Sydney, August 21, 1789, HO 47/9; recorder to H. Hobhouse, August 19, 22, 1822, HO 6/7. The respective lengths of the five trial accounts referred to were 32 pages (an entire number; see OBSP [n. 2 above], June 1782, pp. 416–47); 1.3 pages (OBSP, July 1786, pp. 852–83); 0.7 pages (OBSP, June 1789, pp. 498–99); 0.3 pages (OBSP, May 1822, p. 363); and 0.4 pages (OBSP, July 1822, p. 390). The lengths of the eight trial accounts that were presumably read for the recorder's Report of February 24, 1783 (HO 42/2, fols. 96–97), ranged from 0.7 to 4.0 pages in length, with five of them falling between 1.0 and 1.8 pages.

⁴⁶ CLRO, Small MSS box 4, no. 47/398, February 17, 1787.

⁴⁷ Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, pp. 362–76Google Scholar; Landsman, pp. 533–72, 591–603; and Beattie, , “Scales of Justice,” pp. 232–36Google Scholar (all n. 4 above).

⁴⁸ The importance of character evidence is discussed in King, Peter, “Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law, 1750–1800,” Historical Journal 27 (March 1984): 37–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Beattie, , Crime and the Courts, pp. 439–49Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Gatrell (n. 13 above), p. 201.

⁵⁰ CLRO, Journals of the Court of Common Council, vol. 72, fols. 275–77, October 21, 1790; and Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 84, fols. 267–68, December 7, 1792.

⁵¹ CLRO, Journals of the Court of Common Council, vol. 73, fols. 381–82, October 24, 1793; and Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 87, fol. 74, April 29, 1795.

⁵² In 1782, the City still expected an annual £50 licensing fee from the publisher; it first began subsidizing him in 1787, to the tune of four guineas per session (i.e., £33.12s.) per annum; in 1795, this was raised to one hundred guineas (i.e., £105) per annum (CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 74, fols. 77–78, March 20, 1782; Journals of the Court of Common Council, vol. 70, fols. 254–55, June 6, 1787; and Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 87, fols. 344–45, November 25, 1795).

⁵³ In a recent study of pardon practice in the late nineteenth century, Roger Chadwick notes that use of the Sessions Paper “was normal practise in non-capital cases where Judge's notes were rarely submitted”; see his Bureaucratic Mercy: The Home Office and the Treatment of Capital Cases in Victorian Britain (London and New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 202, 225Google Scholar, quote on p. 225, n. 80.

⁵⁴ CLRO, Common Council: Minutes & Reports, 1822–23, p. 100, September 26, 1822. The recorder was so dependent on the Sessions Paper for administrative purposes that, on one subsequent occasion, he had to apologize to the home secretary for entering the wrong name on a pardon warrant: “The mistake originated in making out the List from the printed Sessions Paper” (recorder to R. Peel, August 1, 1828, PRO, HO 6/13).

⁵⁵ Guildhall Library, London, B'side 30.71; and CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 70, fols. 141–44, November 13, 1778.

⁵⁶ CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 85, fol. 317, February 7, 1794. The City again took this expense upon itself after the recorder stated that he needed it “not only to enable him to make his Report but to give him an opportunity of enquiring into the Law and nature of the several cases, and also into the Characters of those under condemnation” (CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 97, fol. 70, June 18, 1805).

⁵⁷ The specific motion of Common Council required that the Sessions Paper “be requested as soon as possible after every Sessions published by the Recorder and authenticated with His Name” (CLRO, Journals of the Court of Common Council, vol. 66, fol. 271v, November 17, 1775). The title page of every number of the Sessions Paper for the subsequent year included the promise that it had been “Reviewed and Published by John Glynn, Serjeant at Law, and Recorder of London.”

⁵⁸ It certainly was not yet a certain indication of full accuracy, as the Gentleman's Magazine observed soon after of the account in the Sessions Paper of the famous trials of the Perreau brothers for forgery and of their accomplice, Caroline Rudd: “the sessionspaper is now placed upon a more respectable footing than formerly …. It is certainly much improved, but not yet purged of all its usual inaccuracies. In p. 11 the period between Mrs Perreau seeing the bond the first and second time is said to be three months; and again, in the same paper, it is lengthened out to five months; but whether [this is] the blunder of the counsel or short-hand writer is not clear” (Gentleman's Magazine 45 [1775]: 605Google Scholar). Joseph Gurney, who was shorthand writer for—but not yet also the publisher of—the Sessions Paper, thought that its account of proceedings relating to Caroline Rudd was so “exceedingly defective, and in many places grossly erroneous” that he subsequently published his own; see Gurney's, An Account of the Arguments of Counsel with the Opinions at Large of the Honourable Mr. Justice Gould, Mr. Justice Ashhurst, and Mr. Baron Hotham. Upon the Question at the Session at the Old-Bailey, On Saturday, the 16th of September 1775, Whether Margaret Caroline Rudd ought to be tried (London: Martha Gurney, 1775), p. 8Google Scholar. The offending account appears at OBSP, September 1775, pp. 493–98.

⁵⁹ The number of noncapital references to the recorder increased from seven in 1769 to fourteen in 1770, forty-four in 1771, twenty in 1772, thirty-two in 1773, forty-five in 1774, and thirty-three in 1775 (Redington, Joseph and Roberts, Richard Arthur, eds., Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1760–1775 [London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1878–99], 2:564–65; 3:147–49, 373–76, 601–4; and 4:133–49, 278–94, 531–45Google Scholar).

⁶⁰ Beattie, , Crime and the Courts (n. 4 above), pp. 538–48Google Scholar; and Ekirch (n. 11 above), pp. 223–29.

⁶¹ In 1778, parliamentary officials estimated that approximately 960 people had been transported each year from 1769 to 1776 (O'Brien [n. 10 above], p. 87). A comparison between the tabulations provided in the Calendar of Home Office Papers, vols. 2–4 and the Sessions Paper confirms that most of these references involved cases where transportation had been the original sentence.

⁶² W. Eden to recorder of London, November 29, 1775, PRO, SP 44/91, p. 437. Unfortunately, the letters received by the central government during this period (SP 37) are not extensively preserved, but the entry books do not suggest that the City ever requested help in relieving Newgate before 1775.

⁶³ For pardon on condition of military service, see Conway, Stephen R., “The Recruitment of Criminals into the British Army, 1775–81,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 58 (May 1985): 48–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁴ Dictionary of National Biography, 8:13Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Annual Register 18 (Chronicle 1775): 174Google Scholar; Gentleman's Magazine 45 (1775): 549Google Scholar; and London Magazine 43 (1775): 602Google Scholar. The most detailed account of the debate can be found in the Middlesex Journal and Evening Advertiser (November 16–18, 1775).

⁶⁶ Wilkes finished his terra as lord mayor heavily in debt; his ultimate solvency was only assured by his succeeding to the chamberlainship in 1778; see Treloar, William Purdie, Wilkes and the City (London: John Murray, 1917), pp. 174–87, 193–205Google Scholar; and Sainsbury, John, “John Wilkes, Debt, and Patriotism,” Journal of British Studies 34 (April 1995): 189–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁷ Even the scholar most sympathetic to Wilkes, George Rudé, implicitly closes the radical phase of Wilkes's career by 1774; see his Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763–1774 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Treloar, p. 173.

⁶⁹ Brewer, John, “The Wilkites and the Law, 1763–74: A Study of Radical Notions of Governance,” in An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Brewer, John and Styles, John (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 128–71Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Annual Register 14 (Chronicle 1771): 142–43, 193–95Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Cannon, John, ed., The Letters of Junius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 428 (October 17, 1771)Google Scholar.

⁷² Sheriffs (J. Wilkes and F. Bull) to keeper of Newgate (R. Akerman), October 16, 1771, quoted in Hughson, David, London; Being an Accurate History and Description of the British Metropolis and Its Neighbourhood, to Thirty Miles Extent, from an Actual Perambulation (London: J. Robins; Albion Press, 1805–1809), 1:602–3Google Scholar. A slightly different, shorter version appears in Treloar, pp. 124–25.

⁷³ Gentleman's Magazine 41 (1771): 423, 471Google Scholar. Two months later, the lord mayor demanded that Wilkes and Bull surrender their keys to the galleries in the Sessions House, turning them over to his own servants for their own personal profit (London Magazine 39 [1771]: 617–18Google Scholar). One of their successors and former radical colleagues, Richard Oliver, sought to counter this the following year by posting a sign reading, “No money to be paid for admission into this court of justice,” although I do not know what the outcome of this action was (London Magazine 40 [1772]: 498Google Scholar).

⁷⁴ The failure of general public admission in October 1771 may have accounted for the next mayor's intercession in the pricing practices of the Sessions Paper's publisher two months later:

To the Public

With a view to accommodate the Public, and to render the purchase of the sessions paper easy to every person, the Lord Mayor has given express orders that during his Mayoralty, the whole trials of each sessions shall not exceed two parts, at sixpence each part.

(OBSP, December 1771, p. 32; my emphases).

⁷⁵ The agitation of the Wilkites in this cause is analyzed in Thomas, Peter D. G., “The Beginnings of Parliamentary Reporting in Newspapers, 1768–1774,” English Historical Review 74 (October 1959): 623–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “John Wilkes and the Freedom of the Press (1771),” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 33 (May 1960): 87–98Google Scholar; Rudé, , Wilkes and Liberty, pp. 155–65Google Scholar; and Rea, Robert R., The English Press in Politics, 1760–1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963)Google Scholar, chaps. 12–13. Wilkes may also have contemplated similar action regarding the House of Lords; see Lowe, William C., “Peers and Printers: The Beginnings of Sustained Press Coverage of the House of Lords in the 1770s,” Parliamentary History 7 (1988): 248Google Scholar. By 1775 then, Wilkes and his associates had a history of promoting public access to deliberative institutions by means of the press.

⁷⁶ Annual Register 17 (Chronicle 1774): 157–58Google Scholar; and London Magazine 42 (1774): 509Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ The details of physical alterations to the Sessions House are recorded in CLRO, Journal of the Committee for Rebuilding Newgate, 1767–1785. It indicates that orders were given on May 18, 1774, to erect “a Screen of Stone … upon the Circular Wall of the Sessions House in order to prevent Communication between the Public and the Prisoners” (p. 151).

⁷⁸ However, one description of the Sessions House, published seventeen years later, noted that “The entrance into the area is narrow, to prevent a sudden ingress of mob.” See [Pennant, Thomas,] Some Account of London, 2d ed. (London: Robert Faulder, 1791), p. 232Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ The erection of the wooden passageway is mentioned in Sheehan, Wayne Joseph, “The London Prison System, 1666–1795” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1975), p. 79Google Scholar. The brick version, covered at the top by an iron grating, became the infamous “birdcage walk,” under whose stones the corpses of executed felons were interred. The previous existence of a semicircular screen of some sort is suggested by a drawing dated 1772 (see Oldham, James C., ed., The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992], 1:115Google Scholar), although I have not yet been able to determine how long before then it may have been in place.

⁸⁰ Just how imposing the new appearance of the Sessions House was is perhaps suggested by a photograph from about 1900 reproduced in Rumbelow, Donald, The Triple Tree: Newgate, Tyburn and Old Bailey (London: Harrap, 1982), p. 49Google Scholar. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the courtroom had been open to the air on the side facing the yard (see ibid., pp. 69–70, for pictures of the Sessions House in 1675 and early in the following century). But again, caution should be exercised. The temptation to construe this arrangement as a kind of open-air “theatre” of justice is surely more a by-product of artistic license than of physical reality: passersby would not have been able to see over the wall into the courtroom.

⁸¹ Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1767–1769), 4:127–41Google Scholar; quote is at 140 (emphases are in original).

⁸² It was conventional in important cases for counsel on each side to employ their own shorthand writers for their own uses. But this could also make it feasible for one side to claim that the other had distorted the record to their own advantage. Scottish legal authorities ruled against reconsidering a major case in 1796 because they maintained that it was “not likely” that “what the Junior Council for the Crown … is stated by a short hand writer employed by the persons convicted to have said” was accurate (R. Dundas to the duke of Portland, September 5, 1796, PRO, HO 102/13, p. 218).

⁸³ For Glynn, , see Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, vol. 1, 1770–1830, ed. Baylen, Joseph O. and Gossman, Norbert J. (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 189–93Google Scholar.

⁸⁴ When Gurney brought to Glynn's attention the presence of two other writers taking down the trials for publication, Glynn maintained “that the Court had no authority to restrain them, for that any person had a right to take down and publish the proceedings of the Court, and he seemed surprised when he was informed that the City had sold a right of publication” (CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 77, fol. 70, September 14, 1785).

⁸⁵ [Blackburn, Archdeacon Franciset al.,] A Collection of Letters and Essays in Favour of Public Liberty First Published in the Newspapers in the Years 1764, 1765, 1766, 1767, 1768, 1769 and 1770 by an Amicable Band of Wellwishers to the Religious and Civil Rights of Mankind (London, 1774), 3:230Google Scholar; my thanks to Valerie Frith for this reference.

⁸⁶ Hay, Douglas, “The Laws of God and the Laws of Man: Lord George Gordon and the Death Penalty,” in Protest and Survival: The Historical Experience: Essays for E.P. Thompson, ed. Rule, John and Malcolmson, Robert (London: Merlin Press, 1993), esp. pp. 69–72Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in this and the subsequent paragraph are from CLRO, Small MS box 4, no. 47/398, February 17, 1787.

⁸⁸ In 1725, the shorthand writer and publisher of the Sessions Paper were rebuked by the aldermen for “the Lewd and Indecent Manner of printing the last Sessions paper” (CLRO, Repertories of the Court of Aldermen 129, pp. 368, 376–77, September 29 and October 7, 1725). As late as 1821, when the contract for publication was being reconsidered, the recorder informed the City Lands Committee “that no Alteration should be made in the Stipulation for furnishing to him a written Copy of the Trials, it being impossible for him to dispense with such written Account as the whole of such Trials as were of an indecent Nature are not printed verbatim” (CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 112, fol. 243, January 24, 1821).

⁸⁹ Guildhall Library, London, B'side 30.71; and CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 70, fols. 142–44, November 13, 1778. The notion that the improved publication of acquittals as well as convictions was the City's doing rather than the publisher's is reinforced by Gurney's apology to his purchasers, shortly thereafter, for the increased number of issues per session that resulted from the City's requirement “that the Trials at the Old Bailey shall, in future, be printed at large, as well in cases where the prisoners are acquitted, as when they are convicted” (OBSP, December 1778, p. 40).

⁹⁰ CLRO, Journals of the Court of Common Council, vol. 72 fols. 275–77, October 21, 1790. Two years later, the publisher, once again seeking subsidization, noted that this decision had stemmed from a conviction that this “would save paper and printing, and be equal to an additional salary” (CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 84, fols. 194–95, September 19, 1792).

⁹¹ CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 82, fols. 237–39, 265, 282, November 3, 17, and December 1, 1790.

⁹² CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 84, fols. 194–95, September 19, 1792.

⁹³ The oath appears twice in the Sessions Paper itself, each time at the beginning of the legal year; see OBSP, December 1792, p. 56, and December 1793, p. 112. For the new contract, see CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 84, fols. 267–68, December 7, 1792.

⁹⁴ Gentleman's Magazine 62 (1792): 508–10, 1052, 1146–47Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Justice William Ashhurst expressed the idea clearly in his charge to the grand jury at King's Bench in November 1792: “Gentlemen, there is no Nation in the world that can boast of a better System of Government than that under which we have the happiness to live … though crimes must not go unpunished, I may venture to affirm, there is no Nation whatever that is so careful of the natural Liberty of the Subject, or has made such humane provisions for offenders, as the Nation in which we live” (Gentleman's Magazine 62 [1792]: 1050Google Scholar). For the enhanced role of oaths of loyalty during the 1790s, see Langford, Paul, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 98–118Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ The earliest membership list that I have been able to consult, that for 1799, includes such magistrates as Sir George Paul, William Morton Pitt, and Sir Christopher Willoughby—leaders of prison reform in Gloucestershire, Dorset, and Oxfordshire, respectively—among many others; see the Report of the Committee of the Society for Carrying into Effect His Majesty's Proclamation against Vice and Immorality, for the Year 1799, Together with a List of the Members (London, [1799])Google Scholar.

⁹⁷ For the origins and activity of the Proclamation Society, see Innes, Joanna, “Politics and Morals: The Reformation of Manners Movement in Later Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Hellmuth, Eckhart (London and Oxford: German Historical Institute; Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 57–118Google Scholar; for Mainwaring and his views, see pp. 70, 97.

⁹⁸ Of course, the establishment of the hulks in 1776 and their expansion during the 1780s belies the literal truth of this assertion. However, the central government resisted any formal recognition of its custodial role in regard to convicts until the early nineteenth century. I analyze this issue, as well as several others that I have raised in this article, in “The Home Office and the Administration of Criminal Justice in England, 1770–1830” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, in progress)Google Scholar.

⁹⁹ John Brewer has demonstrated that the central government did have one extraordinarily large and effective bureaucratic body—that which was responsible for collecting taxes, particularly the excise; see his The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989)Google Scholar. By and large however, the eighteenth century was largely characterized by a devolution of administrative responsibilities from the center to the localities; see Innes, Joanna, “The Domestic Face of the Military-Fiscal State: Government and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Stone, Lawrence (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 96–108Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ There have been many studies of the anxieties about the role of the press in spreading sedition and corrupting morals from the 1790s to the era of “Peterloo.” Of particular note are Webb, R. K., The British Working Class Reader, 1790–1848: Literacy and Social Tension (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), chap. 3, and pp. 322–32Google Scholar; Cranfield, G. A., The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London: Longman, 1979)Google Scholar, chaps. 4–5. Thomas, Donald, A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969)Google Scholar, has chapters on the activities of the Proclamation Society and the Tractarians (chaps. 7, 9).

¹⁰¹ Quoted in Lamoine, Georges, ed., Charges to the Grand Jury, 1689–1803, Camden Society, 4th ser., vol. 43 (1992), p. 452Google Scholar. Mainwaring delivered this charge to the grand jury on December 10, 1792—within days of when Manoah Sibly was made to take his oath as shorthand writer.

¹⁰² For an argument similar to the one that I am making here, see Chibnall, Steve, “Chronicles of the Gallows: The Social History of Crime Reporting,” in The Sociology of Journalism and the Press, ed. Christian, Harry, Sociological Review Monographs, no. 29 (Keele, Staffordshire, 1980), esp. pp. 192–202Google Scholar. I differ from Chibnall in that, although we both see a process of cultivating conformity via the press, I believe that the notion was considerably older than he suggests, and not entirely a product of changing conceptions of authority in the late eighteenth century. Moreover, it seems that some officials were not confident that the strategy was either worthwhile or effective.

¹⁰³ [Richardson, Samuel,] The Apprentice's Vade Mecum; or, Young Man's Pocket-Companion (London, 1734), pp. 9, 33Google Scholar. Although there is no evidence of this role being explicitly fulfilled by the Sessions Paper before the late eighteenth century, Ian Bell is probably correct to suggest that it was “broadly” and “covertly” supportive of the authority of the courtroom; see his Literature and Crime in Augustan England (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 72–74Google Scholar. In this connection, it is interesting to note that virtually no acquittals were reported in detail before 1779.

¹⁰⁴ Radzinowicz, Leon, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 (London: Stevens & Sons, 1948–1968), 3:27–28Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁵ PRO, SP 44/378, pp. 219–21, May 30, 1768; the text of the license also appears in the book itself: The Tyburn Chronicle; or, Villainy Display'd in All Its Branches, 4 vols. (London, 1768), pp. i–iiGoogle Scholar. Interestingly, this book was advertised in the Sessions Paper (OBSP, February 1771, p. 158); the advertisement reproduces the rhyme from its title page, which makes its intentions only too clear:

The Contents of these Volumes will amply display

The Steps which Offenders have trod:

Learn hence, then, each Reader, the Laws to obey

Of your Country, your King, and your God.

For the license for The Cheats of London Expos'd; or the Tricks of the Town laid open to both sexes (London, 1769)Google Scholar, see SP 44/378, pp. 367–69, April 4, 1769.

¹⁰⁶ Colquhoun, Patrick, A Treatise of the Police of the Metropolis, 7th ed., revised (London: J. Mawman et al., 1806; reprint, Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1969), p. 27Google Scholar; see also Radzinowicz, 3:296–98.

¹⁰⁷ [Patrick Colquhoun], “Observations on the Plan of a Police Gazette—submitted to Magistrates in general by Earl Spencer,” BL, Althorp Papers, G260. Colquhoun's authorship of these “Observations” is confirmed by a letter from him to Spencer, August 28, 1806, located elsewhere in the Althorp Papers, at G246.

¹⁰⁸ The pertinent letters to the Treasury proposing such publications are J. Beckett to G. Harrison, March 18, 1814, PRO, HO 36/17, p. 316; H. Hobhouse to S. R. Lushington, March 23, 1818, HO 41/4, fols. 46v–47v; and H. Hobhouse to S. R. Lushington, December 27, 1820, HO 36/19, pp. 285–86. I have not been able to locate any responses to these letters among the Treasury entry books, and this, coupled with the fact that the letter of 1820 was canceled at the source, suggests that the Treasury did not share Sidmouth's enthusiasm for the strategy of government-sponsored trial accounts.

¹⁰⁹ In 1787 he apologized to his readers for “the disagreeable necessity” of increasing the price per issue, promising at the same time to limit the total number of issues per session “in order to make it equal, if not better, to those Ladies and Gentlemen, as well as Coffee-house-keepers and others, who regularly take Sets” (OBSP, January 1787, p. 230).

¹¹⁰ Bentham, Jeremy, Draught of a Code for the Organization of the Judicial Establishment in France (1790), in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. Bowring, John (1838–1843; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 4:316–17Google Scholar.

¹¹¹ CLRO, Journals of the City Lands Committee, vol. 97, fol. 145, November 19, 1805.

¹¹² McGowen, Randall, “The Image of Justice and Reform of the Criminal Law in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” Buffalo Law Review 32 (Winter 1983): 117–22Google Scholar; and Beattie, , “Scales of Justice” (n. 4 above), pp. 250–58Google Scholar.

¹¹³ CLRO, Small MS box 4, no.47/398, February 17, 1787.

¹¹⁴ Cooper, David D., The Lesson of the Scaffold: The Public Execution Controversy in England (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974)Google Scholar, chaps. 3–7, passim; see also McGowen, Randall, “Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England,” Journal of British Studies 33 (July 1994): 257–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gatrell (n. 13 above), pp. 597–601. McGowen views the abolition less as a transformation of public participation in judicial execution than as the end of it altogether; Gatrell notes the role of popular literature in maintaining some sort of public audience but views it as a semipornographic phenomenon.

¹¹⁵ The most effective argument for this ideological function of the criminal law is Hay, Douglas, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” in Hay, et al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 17–63Google Scholar.

¹¹⁶ Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Pantheon, 1978)Google Scholar; and Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.