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Research in urban history: recent theses on crime in the city, 1750–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2013

MATT NEALE
MATT NEALE*
Affiliation:
Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, Marc Fitch House, 3–5 Salisbury Road, Leicester, LE1 7QY, UK
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Extract

Doctoral theses have always had an important place in the historiography of crime, and indeed much of the discipline's most influential research has emerged from postgraduate study. For many years, the investigation of crime and justice in Britain was a staple topic of doctoral research, and theses by members of E.P. Thompson's ‘Warwick School’ had a shaping influence on the early debates of the discipline. In the British context, these early debates were concerned with questions about who could access the law and the extent to which the courts were used to enforce the values of particular social groups. More recently, scholars have given an increased amount of attention to the influence of newspaper reporting on perceptions of crime, and on the importance of printed accounts of crimes, trials and executions as texts which represented the function and effectiveness of the law in particular ways. Furthermore, over the last few decades our knowledge of policing and punishment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe has greatly expanded, providing important insights into two very important aspects of the judicial process.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , August 2013 , pp. 567 - 577
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Aside from monograph publications of theses, some of the research produced by Thompson's students was published as: Hay, D., Linebaugh, P., et al. (eds.), Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975)Google Scholar. King, Peter's book, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar, is another example of an influential text that has its origin in doctoral study.

2 D. Hay, ‘Property, authority and the criminal law’, in Hay, Linebaugh et al. (eds.), Albion's Fatal Tree, 17–64; Langbein, John, ‘Albion's fatal flaws’, Past and Present, 98 (1983), 96–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; King, Peter, ‘Decision-makers and decision-making in the English criminal law, 1750–1800’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 25–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 King, P., ‘Newspaper reporting and attitudes to crime and justice in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London’, Continuity and Change, 22 (2007), 73–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shoemaker, R., ‘The Old Bailey Proceedings and the representation of crime and criminal justice in eighteenth-century London’, Journal of British Studies, 47 (2008), 559–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For a scholarly survey of trends in crime and its prevention, see Emsley, C., Crime, Police and Penal Policy: European Experiences 1750–1940 (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Innes, J. and Styles, J., ‘The crime wave: recent writing on crime and criminal justice in eighteenth-century England’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 384–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For one other example, see King, P., ‘Newspaper reporting, prosecution practice and perceptions of urban crime: the Colchester crime wave of 1765’, Continuity and Change, 2 (1987), 423–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For Ward's analysis of the correlation between crime reporting and prosecutions, see Ward, ‘Print culture and responses to crime’, 56.

8 Harris, A., ‘Policing and public order in the City of London, 1784–1815’, London Journal, 28 (2003), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dodsworth, F., ‘The idea of police in eighteenth-century England: discipline, reformation, superintendence, c. 1780–1800’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69 (2008), 589CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

9 In addition to works already cited, see Hay, D., ‘War, dearth and theft in the eighteenth century: the record of the English courts’, Past and Present, 95 (1982), 117–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snell, E., ‘Representations of criminality and victimisation in provincial newspapers: the Kentish Post 1717 to 1768’, Southern History, 27 (2005), 48–75Google Scholar.

10 Sharpe, J.A., ‘Reporting crime in the north of England eighteenth-century newspaper: a preliminary investigation’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies, 16 (2012), 25–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For one of the studies on southern England to which Sharpe is responding, see E. Snell, ‘Perceptions of violent crime in eighteenth-century England: a study of discourses of homicide, aggravated larceny and sexual assault in the eighteenth-century newspaper’, University of Kent Ph.D. thesis, 2005.

11 Estabrook, C., Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces 1660–1780 (Manchester, 1998), 207Google Scholar.

12 In Bristol, for instance, prostitution was associated with streets in the medieval core of the city, but in Nantes, areas of newer development quickly established an association with prostitution: Pluskota, ‘Prostitution in Bristol and Nantes’, 208, 211.

13 Palk, D., doctoral thesis published as: Gender, Crime and Judicial Discretion, 1780–1830 (Woodbridge, 2006)Google Scholar.

14 For an example of the profitable use of urban/rural comparisons to make some important observations about the general characteristics of urban theft, see Beattie, J., Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1986), 147, 187Google Scholar.

15 The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913, www.oldbaileyonline.org/.

16 Thesis published as Regnard, C., Marseille la violente: criminalité, industrialisation et société, 1851–1914 (Rennes, 2009)Google Scholar.

17 For Pastorello's comment on the limited impact of homophobic discourses, see: Pastorello, ‘Sodome à Paris’, 415.

18 Thesis cited above and published as Crime, Prosecution and Social Relations: The Summary Courts of the City of London in the Late Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2009).

19 N. Arber, ‘The Norfolk County Gaol 1764–1887: “a good and sufficient prison”?’, University of East Anglia Ph.D. thesis, 2009.