Newspaper reporting and attitudes to crime and justice in late eighteenth and early nineteeth century London

As other sources of printed information about crime, such as the Ordinary’s Accounts of the lives of executed criminals, lost their audience in the final third of the eighteenth century, newspapers came increasingly to dominate printed discussions of crime. However, no substantial study of the overall nature of newspaper reporting on crime and criminal justice issues has yet been undertaken. By focusing on the London press from the 1780s to the early years of the nineteenth century, this study aims to address a range of questions about the structure of crime and justice reporting, about the selectivity of law and order news and about the types of narratives and discursive structures that can be found at different periods. In particular it highlights the ways in which the multi-vocal, sporadic, brief and sometimes chaotic styles of crime reporting in newspapers created a kaleidoscope of different and often contradictory messages about such issues as the prevalence of violent crime, the effectiveness of policing and penal institutions and the quality of justice meted out by the courts. The printed word had a much less integrative role in relation to law and order issues than historians have sometimes suggested. Since very few of the inhabitants of late-eighteenth-century London would have had extensive first-hand experience of crime or of criminal justice institutions, most would have based their sense of the prevalence of crime, of the effectiveness of policing and of the nature of justice on other sources. Oral news networks in the neighbourhoods where they lived or worked would have provided some perspectives, as would letters and travellers from further afield. However, a large proportion of the population of late-eighteenth-century England would have gained most of * History Department, The Open University. Continuity and Change 22 (1), 2007, 73–112. f 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0268416007006194 Printed in the United Kingdom