"Give Me Not Poverty, Lest I Steal"

"The Judges sat Grave and Mute, gave me an easy [meaning 'indifferent'] Hearing, and Pronounc'd the Sentence of Death," Moll Flanders recounts. Convicted of one of the 200 offenses punishable by death, in her case stealing £46 of silk cloth—919 shillings more than the one shilling threshold for felony theft—Daniel Defoe's heroine had tried to mitigate her sentence with a speech that "mov'd others to Tears that heard [her]."² This confrontation between a legal subject and the human messiness of motives, emotions, and especially mental impairment is the subject of Dana Rabin's Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Rabin explains that the legal system was equipped to deal with "a coherent and cohesive self," a punishable body, and with total, unmistakable, "perfect" insanity, not with pitiable human beings who insisted that temporary states of mind resulting from starvation, pain, passion, and suffering explained (and excused) their crimes, especially in the age of sensibility.

This important book tells the story of the law's confrontation with a major change in the larger culture: the privileging of "sensibility." The language of the mind that accompanied this movement, Rabin argues, destabilized "the definition and determination of mens rea, criminal intent, the basis of all criminal law" (8). "Sensibility" is no easy term to define, and major studies of it, including John Mullan's Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (1988), Jerome McGann's The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (1996, which she does not cite), and especially G. J. Barker-Benfield's The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1992), have expanded our understanding of the term, but also our awareness of its complicated and complicating impact on every facet of British life. Rabin, following Barker-Benfield, defines it as a "component of identity" and the "moral faculty" of "susceptibility to one's own feelings and the feelings of others" (11). She usefully summarizes opinions about human nature and the proliferation of theories of self and moral sense by, among others, Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith, and then weaves together legal, social, and cultural history to tell the story of juries, judges, and legal theorists grappling with the new demand that they possess sensibility.

The story begins and ends with James Hadfield, a former soldier and silversmith who shot at George III in a crowded theatre. After a brilliant defense by Thomas Erskine, he was found "Not guilty; he being under the influence of insanity at the time the act was committed" (1). Before reading this book, the phrase "at the time" slides by unnoticed; after reading it, the words glow with significance. Rabin slowly develops the context in which this verdict was rendered in four chapters. After the introductory one, chapter 2 clearly explains the mechanics of eighteenth-century trials and the major changes in the century, such as the evolution of the lawyerized courtroom from the "accused speaks" trial that Moll Flanders portrays. It introduces the types of insanity pleas and summarizes the pertinent legal opinions of such major figures as Matthew Hale, author of The History of the Pleas of the Crown, and William Blackstone, who wrote Commentaries on the Laws of England. Chapter 3 turns to moral philosophy, the history of conceptions of the self, and the ideas of the self and responsibility that were circulating in popular literature. Rabin works with pleas involving clouded judgment, such as drunkenness and necessity, and briefly with several novels, including Moll Flanders and Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling. Chapter 4 uses cases of infanticide committed by unmarried women to widen discussion of the influence of sensibility and sources of opinion to those of trial judges and juries. Rabin's attention to the economic circumstances and sex of those on trial is developed in this chapter. The next chapter extends the story of the courts' attempts to deal with the language of mental excuse and the concept of partial or temporary insanity linked specifically to something like...