1 Crime, Culture, and the Self

Notes 1 Crime, Culture, and the Self 1. Post and Gazetteer, May 16, 1800, p. 2. 2. The Treason Act of 1696 (7–8 Will. III c. 3) provided counsel to those accused of treason. 3. T.B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors, 34 vols. (London, 1820), 27: 1356. 4. Nigel Walker, Crime and Insanity in England, 2 vols. Vol. 1: The Historical Perspective (Edinburgh, 1967), pp. 68–72. 5. My definition of language is influenced by J.G.A. Pocock’s definition and interpretation set out in the Introduction to Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), especially pp. 1–28. 6. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 7. 7. Miranda Chaytor, ‘Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century,’ Gender and History 7 (1995): 378–9. Chaytor’s article provides a thorough analysis of the structure of depositions and their interpretation. 8. J.H. Baker, ‘Criminal Courts and Procedure at Common Law, 1550–1800,’ in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. J.S. Cockburn (Princeton, 1977), pp. 15–48; J.S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes from 1558 to 1714 (Cambridge, 1972); idem, ‘Early Modern Assize Records as Historical Evidence,’ The Journal of the Society of Archivists 5 (1975): 215–31. 9. The scholarship on representation is quite extensive. For discussions of early modern England, see Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Crime in England, 1500–1700 (Ithaca, 1994); Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (New York, 1999); Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000); and Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, VA, 1992). For a more general discussion, see Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA, 1987); Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth Centuries (Madison, WI, 1989); and Sara Maza, ‘Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History,’ American Historical Review 101 (1996): 1493–1515. 10. The work on sensibility is tremendously rich and provocative. Some of the most helpful insights for this study emerged from Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford, 1987); G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992); Barbara Benedict, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800 (New York, 1994); R.F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York, 1974); Alan T. McKenzie, Certain, Lively Episodes: The Articulation of Passion in 170 Notes 171 Eighteenth-Century Prose (Athens, GA, 1990); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988); Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Palo Alto, CA, 1996); Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London, 1986); Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: the Senses in Social Context (Cambridge, 1993); Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 1998). 11. According to Charles Taylor ‘selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.’ Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 3. Taylor traces the association of responsibility and the self in western culture to Plato. Studies of the early modern self since Taylor include Leo Damrosch, Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Naylor and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997); and Dror Wahrman, ‘The English Problem with Identity in the American Revolution,’ American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1236–62; idem, ‘On Queen Bees and Being Queens: A Late-Eighteenth-Century “Cultural Revolution”?’ in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820 (Berkeley, 2002), pp. 251–80; and idem, The Invention of the Modern Self (New Haven, 2004). 12. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981), chapter 4. Carol Neely, ‘Recent Work in Renaissance Studies: Did Madness Have a Renaissance?’ Renaissance Quarterly 44 (1991): 776–91. 13. Martin Weiner’s study of the nineteenth century, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1990), examines the Victorian preoccupation with the relationship between criminality and self-regulation or mastery of the self. 14. Michael Grossberg, A Judgment for Solomon: The d’Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America (Cambridge, 1996), p. xii. 15. The dichotomy between popular and elite culture is most starkly portrayed in surveys of the period, for example in Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford, 1997); Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1982); Lawrence Stone, ‘Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700,’ Past and Present 33 (1966): 16–55; E.P. Thompson, ‘Patrician Society, Plebian Culture,’ Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 382–405; idem, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class,’ Social History 10 (1978): 133–65; Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, 1982), chapter 1; idem, ‘The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches,’ in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard Smith, and Keith Wrightson (New York, 1986), pp. 177–202. In histories of crime, a similar breach informs John Brewer and John Styles, eds., An Ungovernable People? The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1980); ‘Introduction,’ Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 1–40; V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994); Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, 172 Identity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England E.P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975); Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992); and E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York, 1975). 16. Richard Wightman Fox, ‘Intimacy on Trial, Cultural Meanings of the Beecher- Tilton Affair,’ in The Power of Culture, Critical Essays in American History, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, (Chicago, 1993), p. 131. 17. Along with all the depositions from the Northern Circuit from 1660 to 1800, I read all the cases from the OBSP from 1680 to 1714 and sampled 13 years between 1715 and 1800. For more on the depositions, see J.S. Cockburn, ‘The Northern Assize Circuit,’ Northern History 3 (1968): 118–30; idem, Calendar of Assize Records, Home Circuit Indictments, Elizabeth I and James I. Vol. I: Introduction (London, 1985). John Langbein has written extensively about the OBSP as an historical source. See ‘The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers,’ The University of Chicago Law Review 45 (1978): 263–316; and idem, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: A View from the Ryder Sources,’ The University of Chicago Law Review 50 (1983): 1–136. The publication of the OBSP is described by Michael Harris in ‘Trials and Criminal Biographies: A Case Study in Distribution,’ in Sale and Distribution of Books from 1700, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Oxford, 1982), pp. 1–36. Simon Devereaux explores the relationship between the accuracy of the OBSP and ideas about ‘public justice’ in the late eighteenth century in ‘The City and the Sessions Paper: “Public Justice” in London, 1770–1800,’ Journal of British Studies 35 (1996): 466–503. 18. My analysis is influenced by scholarship on law, narrative, and culture, including Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, eds., Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven, 1996); Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, eds., The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (Chicago, 1998); Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, ‘Telling Stories out of School: An Essay on Legal Narratives,’ Stanford Law Review 65 (1993): 807–57; Robert Hariman, ed., Popular Trials: Rhetoric, Mass Media, and the Law (Tuscaloosa, 1990); ‘Legal Storytelling,’ special issue, Michigan Law Review 87 (1989); Martha Merrill Umphrey, ‘The Dialogics of Legal Meaning: Spectacular Trials, the Unwritten Law, and Narratives of Criminal Responsibility,’ Law and Society Review 33 (1999): 393–423; and J.B. White, Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison, WI, 1985). Literature and law is a growing field that has influenced my interpretation of legal sources. See Jonathan Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore, 2002); Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore, 2001); Laura Hanft Korobkin, Criminal

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