The City and the Sessions Paper

“Public Justice” in London, 1770–1800

Dados Bibliográficos

ID10064409
AutoresSimon Devereaux (0000-0002-5059-8085, autor correspondente)
Ano1996
Volume35
Fascículo4
Páginas466-503
Data de publicação1996-10-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of British Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/386119
OpenAlexW2154307165
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas20
Referências citadas30

Early in the second decade of the nineteenth century, a Unitarian preacher named Joseph Nightingale gained admittance to the judges' room at the Old Bailey. He appears to have thought the room small and unremarkable, save for “a bookcase filled with the volumes of the State Trials, a few other law books of reference, and the yearly volumes of the Sessions Papers, or abstracts of the causes tried at this Court, from the earliest period to the present times.” It was this set of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, among all the books there, which most fired his imagination: “In casting one's eye over these records of our Fall, it is painful to notice the gradually increasing thickness of the volumes. Those which I have seen thus uniformly bound, lettered, with the date of the year, and the name of the Lord Mayor for the time being, commence with the year 1730, and reach down to 1812: the first volume may contain perhaps 150 pages; the last, five or six hundred: let it not, however, be hence concluded that this circumstance proves only the increase of vice; it indicates also an increased population, and extended commerce, and improved police.” Nightingale's analysis of the causes for the increased length of the Sessions Paper shows an admirable grasp of both the changes in the character of society and in the means of ordering it to which historians address themselves. But a simpler factor in this change that seems to have eluded his notice was that, beginning in 1778, and especially after 1782, the length of individual trial accounts given in the Sessions Paper increased significantly

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