The Old Bailey Proceedings and the Representation of Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century London

Abstract

Proceedings of the Old Bailey, published accounts of felony trials held at London's central criminal court, were a remarkable publishing phenomenon. First published in 1674, they quickly became a regular periodical, with editions published eight times a year following each session of the court. Despite the huge number of trial reports (some fifty thousand in the eighteenth century), the Proceedings, also known as the "Sessions Papers," have formed the basis of several important studies in social history, dating back to Dorothy George's seminal London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925). 1 Using this source, along with manuscript judicial records, criminal biographies (including Ordinary's Accounts), polemical pamphlets such as Henry Fielding's Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), and of course the satirical prints of William Hogarth, historians have constructed a picture of eighteenth-century London as a city overwhelmed by periodic crime waves that stimulated wide-ranging reforms of the policing and judicial system. 2 But how reliable are the Proceedings? Historians