Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London by Richard M. Ward (review)

Mr. Ward examines the intersections of print, crime, and justice during the narrow time from 1747 to 1755. This is interesting for us because it was a time when Henry Fielding (and his half-brother John) said and did much about the problem of crime in London—not so much the Fielding of the novels (Amelia gets one brief mention in this book) but rather of the pamphlets, the Covent-Garden Journal, and the Bow-Street Runners. Mr. Ward looks at these but also at the Old Bailey Proceedings, the Ordinary’s Account of individuals committed to Newgate (and sent to execution at Tyburn), and the newspapers of the day. He shows us how print culture not only reported crime but also shaped perceptions and responses to criminal activity in the period. Somewhat surprisingly, representations of crime and criminals in print have rarely been considered in conjunction with rates of prosecution and punishment.

The so-called crime wave of the late 1740s to mid-1750s was to some degree a fabricated “moral panic” manufactured by the press to fill a “newshole”—a desire for news not necessarily matched by the facts—and by civic authorities in the metropolis keen to advance a law-and-order agenda. Mr. Ward is careful to note that records of law enforcement in the period are patchy, but he makes a convincing case that public alarm exceeded the real level of danger and the degree of action taken by the law enforcers.

In Mr. Ward’s reading of a representative sample of London newspapers, the press, while occasionally critical of the criminal justice system, presented a generally positive view of official action in response to crimes involving property or violence to the person, or both. He detects in this a larger shift from a providential conception of justice to one that emphasized human intervention in the form of detection, deterrence, and punishment.

The strongest chapter of the book deals with the Murder Act 1752, which “institutionalized” exemplary and ignominious forms of punishment meted out to convicted murderers. These included either public hanging of the felon’s body in chains or giving it over for dissection by the surgeons. The legislation has traditionally been seen as the result of Fielding’s recommendations, the demands of medical science for anatomy specimens, and the need to mediate between those demands and the calls of Tyburn crowds for bodies, but Mr. Ward argues that these do not provide a full explanation. More important was the growing role of the press in the formulation of public opinion and in the deliberations of the parliamentary committee charged with review of criminal justice. The press helped, in ways not hitherto fully understood, to make murder “an apparently pressing problem in 1751 and 1752.”

Well argued and based on solid research, this book’s narrow temporal and geographical focus invites further work.