Searching for the Self in Eighteenth-Century English Criminal Trials, 1730-1800

At Samuel Prigg's trial for murder at London's Old Bailey in May 1746, a witness for the defense testified that Prigg "sometimes . . . has talked wildly, and I have taken him to task as he has been rambling backwards and forwards." The witness continued with a succinct history of Prigg's mental condition: "He always seemed a good sort of a man and a sensible man before his illness seized his head: I saw him about three weeks ago, he said he believed he should drown himself." ¹ Another witness told the jury that she had known Prigg for many years; but in the month before the murder she said, "I looked upon him to be very wild with his eyes, and very melancholy, and like a person out of his senses" (p. 72). In May 1751 when Philip Gibson was tried at the Old Bailey for assault and robbery, a witness for the defense called Gibson "a right lunatic" because he "used to get up out of bed, and sing, tol de rol, I shall be hanged, I shall be hanged. All the people used to say he was not in his right senses, and that certainly he would not be hanged. He'd talk to himself, plead guilty, and sing." ² At the same session of the Old Bailey, Edward Meredith confessed to the theft of a large sum of money. Meredith told the court: "I am a young man that has had a great deal of trouble with a young woman which I lately married . . . I had no money to support her and my brains were turned, and between whiles I am not in my senses. ³ William Smithson, accused of stealing clothes and other valuables, appeared at the Old Bailey in December 1778. He presented a "drunkenness defense," saying, "I know nothing of the matter; I was very much in liquor; when I am in liquor I am out of my mind; I don't know what I say or do." ⁴ Prigg was sentenced to death; Gibson, to death but recommended for mercy; Meredith, to transportation; and Smithson, to three years of navigation.

These cases reflect the prevalence of a language of mental states in the English courtroom. By the middle of the eighteenth century pre-trial examinations and trial testimony alike reveal the efforts of defendants to fashion pleas of diminished responsibility based on popular perceptions of mental distress. This version of madness differed significantly from exculpatory insanity as defined by the law and in legal commentary. With words like "confusion," "distraction," "melancholy," "distemper," and "passion" defendants explained a wide spectrum of psychological states that ranged from irritability to delusion and insanity. Defendants borrowed the language of legal insanity to argue for some kind of diminished intent and attributed their state to physical injury, the onset of childbirth, drunkenness, and poverty. ⁵ Prosecutors, defense counsel, judges, and jurors also considered states of mind.

The spread of this language of mental states coincided with the emergence of the culture of sensibility in contemporary literature and intellectual discussion. ⁶ By the mid-eighteenth century, "sensibility," which had previously referred only to physical sensitivities, came to describe an emotional and moral faculty: a special and admirable susceptibility to one's own feelings and the feelings of others with the power to preserve humanity in the face of secularization, industrialization, and consumerism. ⁷ The relationship between emotion and morality preoccupied the era of sensibility and is markedly present in the era's literature. In The Man of Feeling (1771) Henry Mackenzie's exemplary protagonist, Harley, embodied the search for virtue through emotional expression. Through direct contact with the suffering of others, Harley performed compassion, which implicitly affirmed his own superior sensibility and virtue.

The relationship between sensibility and justice disturbed members of the legal establishment and observers of England's courts. Some warned of...