Chapter 5 examines how, via the daily parade of summonses, a variety of actors employed local courtrooms to shape the social and cultural contours of marriage and affiliation. As in other aspects of metropolitan life, the courtroom was not merely a venue for the expression of law or norms that were constituted elsewhere or a space for the enforcement of middle-class standards of morality. Legal structures originally developed to protect patriarchal privilege could, to some degree, be co-opted by women instead. Several decades before working-class women could directly shape the terrain of formal politics, they were effectively navigating the terrain of local courtrooms and influencing both their daily practices and the meanings that emerged from them. Their engagement demonstrates how crucial working-class women were to recasting the nature of the state in this period. The adaption of the state to address familial matters occurred in tandem with the adaption of women to the mechanisms of the state.

The introduction defines “courtroom culture” as the constant interplay of law, informal practice, courtroom dialogue, cultural norms and social identity from which the dynamics and meanings of courtroom events were fashioned. Such dynamics and meanings, I argue, did not emerge fully formed from pre-existing patterns in English law and society, but were shaped on a daily basis by those in court and beyond it. This active process of generating, negotiating, and contesting the meaning of courtroom events are examined in the chapters that follow. Having outlined the fundamental arguments of the book, the Introduction engages the relevant historiography and theory on these issues and provides a brief chapter outline.

Three wider frames of analysis, all engaged in the introduction and throughout the volume, merit some closing considerations that will pave the way for further exploration of courtroom culture in other contexts. The first of these frames is the legal and administrative development of London and how its intertwining with the magistrates’ courts might help us reconsider metropolitan history. Secondly, the prominence of police courts in popular journalism and the contrast between these portrayals and daily practice have important implications for how we understand culture, both in the metropolitan context and in relation to governance. A final topic worthy of further engagement is how the relationship between the modern state, Liberalism, and the individual was changing over time, and the role that police courts and their depictions played in these changes.

Chapter 4 examines the wide array of daily activities that became the subject of courtroom contests in the decades prior to the First World War. The ease of access and broad participation of the local community as principals and witnesses helped make the police-court summons process the most egalitarian aspect of metropolitan law. As courtrooms incorporated an ever-wider segment of the urban population in a diverse array of operations, courtroom language and its implications also became integrated into personal contests outside the court. And just as particular phrases or concepts changed their meanings when used in a courtroom, their employment outside the courtroom carried other meanings still. Accordingly, the final section of the chapter examines not just what it meant for men and women to summons one another, but what it meant to use the language of summonses in different contexts. With such practices, men and women brought the courtroom, as an imagine space, into an interpersonal contest well before they brought their contests into the courtroom itself.