Criminality And The Common Law Imagination In The 18th And 19th Centuries

Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers how the cultural narrative affected the development of the law itself in the 18th and 19th centuries in three case studies: adultery, child criminality and rape testimony.

Erin Sheley shows how the symbolic relationship between adultery and threatened English sovereignty created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the private wrong of adultery; how the literary 'construction' of childhood by 19th-century fairy tale writers affected the development of the juvenile justice system; and how evolving rules about rape victim 'character evidence' functioned as epistemological components of volatile national identity.

This dissertation explores the relationship between the legal account of criminality and the cultural narratives sustaining it during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It considers how the singular importance of precedent to Anglo-American law resulted in an imagery of historical legitimacy that came to shape the cultural construction of criminality. At a theoretical level, the dissertation moves towards a model for how the cultural memory of crime and punishment contribute to the development and legitimizing of formal legal institutions. The dissertation takes up three case studies in which the common law understanding of some aspect of criminality was in flux during this period and examines how the cultural imagination may have interacted with individual representations to shape the official penological discourse. The first chapter takes up the construction of the criminal person, by examining how the nineteenth century cultural "construction" of childhood as a period of existence theoretically and morally distinct from adulthood impacted the development of a juvenile justice system. The second chapter turns to the question of how the relationship between adultery and English sovereignty in the historical imagination created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the act of adultery. Finally, the third chapter considers the development of the rules of evidence sufficient to establish criminality by examining literary "proofs" of rape and their relationship to actual trials.

While it is easy to assume that the system of criminal justice in nineteenth-century England was not unlike the modern one, in many ways it was very different, particularly before the series of Victorian reforms that gradually codified a system dependent on judge-made precedent. In the first half of the century capital cases often tried almost summarily, with the accused not being adequately represented and without a system of appeal. There were also fundamental differences in procedure and in the rules of evidence, as indeed there were in attitudes towards crime and criminals. David Bentley has provided an account of the nineteenth-century criminal justice system as a whole, from the crimes committed and the classification of offences to the different courts and their procedure. He describes the stages of criminal prosecution -- committal, indictment, trial, verdict and punishment -- and the judges, lawyers and juries, highlighting significant changes in the rules of evidence during the century. He looks at the reform of the old system and assesses how far it was brought about by lawyers themselves and how far by external forces. Finally, he considers the fairness of the system, both as seen by contemporaries and in modern terms.

These narratives of violence, theft, disruptive sexuality, and rebellion compelled their readers to sort through fragmentary or contested evidence, anticipating the openness to discordant meanings and discrepant points of view which characterize the later fictions of Defoe and Fielding."--BOOK JACKET.

This book applies three overlapping bodies of work to generate fresh approaches to the study of criminal justice in England and Ireland between 1660 and 1850. First, crime and justice are interpreted as elements of the "public sphere" of opinion about government. Second, "performativity" and speech act theory are considered in the context of the Anglo-Irish criminal trial, which was transformed over the course of this period from an unmediated exchange between victim and accused to a fully lawyerized performance. Thirdly, the authors apply recent scholarship on the history of emotions, particularly relating to the constitution of "emotional communities" and changes in "emotional regimes".

This book examines how the law was made, defined, administered, and used in eighteenth-century England. A team of leading international historians explore the ways in which legal concerns and procedures came to permeate society and reflect on eighteenth-century concepts of corruption, oppression, and institutional efficiency. These themes are pursued throughout in a broad range of contributions which include studies of magistrates and courts; the forcible enlistment of soldiers and sailors; the eighteenth-century 'bloody code'; the making of law basic to nineteenth-century social reform; the populace's extension of law's arena to newspapers; theologians' use of assumptions basic to English law; Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's concept of the liberty intrinsic to England; and Blackstone's concept of the framework of English law. The result is an invaluable account of the legal bases of eighteenth-century society which is essential reading for historians at all levels.

Crimes in England in the 18th and 19th centuries were committed and judged differently, depending on whether the culprit was male or female. This study of the English judicial system in London provides a detailed view of its complex workings, with particular attention to the role and treatment of women.