The Old Bailey Proceedings and the Representation of Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

Abstract

T he Proceedings of the Old Bailey, published accounts of felony trials held at London's central criminal court, were a remarkable publishing phenomenon.First published in 1674, they quickly became a regular periodical, with editions published eight times a year following each session of the court.Despite the huge number of trial reports (some fifty thousand in the eighteenth century), the Proceedings, also known as the "Sessions Papers," have formed the basis of several important studies in social history, dating back to Dorothy George's seminal London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925). 1 Using this source, along with manuscript judicial records, criminal biographies (including Ordinary's Accounts), polemical pamphlets such as Henry Fielding's Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), and of course the satirical prints of William Hogarth, historians have constructed a picture of eighteenth-century London as a city overwhelmed by periodic crime waves that stimulated wide-ranging reforms of the policing and judicial system. 2 But how reliable are the Proceedings?Historians Robert B. Shoemaker is professor of eighteenth-century British history at the University of Sheffield and is codirector of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online project.He would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom) for funding the research that contributed to this article, Tim Hitchcock for encouraging him to write it, and seminar audiences in Leeds and Sheffield and the anonymous reviewers for this journal for their comments on earlier versions.1 Both because "Proceedings" is a short title of the actual publication and to avoid confusion with the manuscript sessions papers (depositions, examinations, etc.), this article uses the term "Proceedings" instead of "Sessions Papers," except when quoting from other sources.M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (

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