This four volume collection looks at the essential issues concerning crime and punishment in the long nineteenth-century. Through the presentation of primary source documents, it explores the development of a modern pattern of crime and a modern system of penal policy and practice, illustrating the shift from eighteenth century patterns of crime (including the clash between rural custom and law) and punishment (unsystematic, selective, public, and body-centred) to nineteenth century patterns of crime (urban, increasing, and a metaphor for social instability and moral decay, before a remarkable late-century crime decline) and punishment (reform-minded, soul-centred, penetrative, uniform and private in application).
The first two volumes focus on crime itself and illustrate the role of the criminal courts, the rise and fall of crime, the causes of crime as understood by contemporary investigators, the police ways of ‘knowing the criminal,’ the role of ‘moral panics,’ and the definition of the ‘criminal classes’ and ‘habitual offenders’. The final two volumes explore means of punishment and look at the shift from public and bodily punishments to transportation, the rise of the penitentiary, the convict prison system, and the late-century decline in the prison population and loss of faith in the prison.
Volume III: Next Only to Death: Secondary Punishments
Part 1. The Crisis of Punishment and the Penitentiary Act 1779
1: Rev. Samuel Denne, A Letter to Sir Robert Ladbroke . . . An Attempt to shew the good effects which may reasonably be expected from the Confinement of Criminals in Separate Apartments. (London, 1771).
2: Jonas Hanway, The Defects of Police. The Cause of Immorality (1775).
3. William Eden on crisis of American transportation, 16 Jan. 1776, British Library, Add MSS, Auckland Papers.
4. William Eden & Edmund Burke, exchange of letters, 1776. Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. III, 1774-1778 (1961), pp. 251-53; Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. II (1844), pp. 94-95.
5. William Eden, Observations on the Bill to punish by Imprisonment and Hard Labour certain Offenders; and to provide Places for their Reception, 1778, House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sheila Lambert, vol. 28 (1975), pp. 331-41.
6. Jeremy Bentham, A View of the Hard-Labour Bill (London, 1778).
7. ‘Letters to the Rev. John Roget, June 9 & 13, 1780’, Memoirs of The Life of Sir Samuel Romilly, written by himself; with a selection from His Correspondence, Edited by his sons, Vol. 1, second edition; London, 1840, pp. 122-132.
8. The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, carefully abridged from Mr. Boswell’s Large Work (London, 1792), pp. 125-128.
9. ‘State of Buckingham Prison’, 14 March 1787, Judges’ Reports, Part 2: TNA, HO 47/6.
10. ‘Transportation or Death’, Old Bailey Sessions Papers, 1787-89.
Part 2. The Hulks
11. ‘Report from the Select Committee on Secondary Punishments’, Parliamentary Papers (276), 1831-32, vol. VII, pp. 12-16.
12. Poverty, Mendicity and Crime . . . by W.A. Miles, ed. H. Brandon (1839), pp. 33-37.
13. Petition letter from wife of convict in Hulks in Bermuda, Dec. 20, 1860: British Library, Add MSS, Carnarvon Papers.
Part 3. Transportation: Personal Experiences
14. Van Diemen’s Land’, in John Ashton, Modern Street Ballads (1888), pp. 361-363.
15. Old Bailey Proceedings Online: cases of returning from transportation, or escaping from the hulks, felony punishable by death, 1787-89, 1809-1810.
16. Petitioner wants to be transported; is at present on board Hulk Justitia, 1826: TNA, Privy Council, PC1/74.
17. Petitioner wants to join convict husband in New South Wales, 1829: TNA, Privy Council, PC1/77.
18. Anonymous threatening letter to chairman of Wakefield Quarter Sessions, from prisoner sentenced to transportation, presently on hulk, not expecting to be transported, 1829: TNA, Privy Council, PC1/77.
Part 4. Transportation: the Critique
19. ‘Sydney Smith and Sir Robert Peel on Secondary Punishment’, Sir Robert Peel from His Private Correspondence, C.S. Parker (ed.), vol. 1 (1891), pp. 400-402.
20. Charles Grey, ‘Secondary Punishments—Transportation’, Edinburgh Review, vol. LVIII, Jan. 1834, pp. 340-359.
21. ‘Report from the Select Committee on Transportation’, Parliamentary Papers, 1838, vol. XXII, pp. 18-21.
22. Lord John Russell, memo on transportation and secondary punishment, Jan. 1839: TNA, CO 201/290.
23. ‘Sir George Grey on a Reformed System of Transportation’, Sir George Grey note to 3rd Earl Grey, 20 Jan., 1847: TNA, CO 280/217.
Part 5. Panopticon
24. Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, 6th edition (1800), pp. 481-497.
25. John Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe (1789), pp. 169, 220-222, 226.
26. ‘Penitentiary, Millbank, Death of Another Convict’, The Times, 19 July1823, p. 3.
27. Arthur Griffiths, Memorials of Millbank, vol. 1 (1875), pp. 92-103, 135-146.
28. ‘Mayhew and Binney on Milbank’, Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London (1862), pp. 235-236.
Part 6. Debate on Prison Reform
29. George Holford, ‘Thoughts on the Criminal Prisons of this Country, occasioned by the Bill now in the House of Commons, for consolidating and amending the Laws relating to Prisons’, Pamphleteer, vol. XVIII, 1821 (2nd edition), pp. 169-185.
30. Sydney Smith, ‘Prisons’, Edinburgh Review, vol. XXXVI, Feb. 1822, pp. 354-355, 358-360, 374.
31. Sydney Smith to Peel, 27 Mar. 1826, in Sir Robert Peel from his Private Correspondence, ed. C. S. Parker, vol. 1 (1891), pp. 402-403.
32. Description of the Tread Mill, for the Employment of Prisoners (1823), pp. 3-8, 27-29, 31-32, Appendix.
33. Elizabeth Fry on Religious Instruction in Prisons, ‘First Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to inquire into the present state of the several Gaols and Houses of Correction in England and Wales’, (438), Parliamentary Papers, 1835, vol. XI, Evidence, pp. 328-329, 338-339.
34. Reginald W. Jeffery, Dyott’s Diary 1781-1845, vol. 2, (1907), pp. 14-15, 26-27, 39-40.
35. W. A. Miles, ‘Select Committee on Gaols’, Secret Report, 1835, NA, HO 73/16.
36. ‘Second Report from the S.C of the House of Lords . . . into the Execution of the Criminal Law, especially re. Juvenile Offenders & Transportation’, (534), Parliamentary Papers, 1847, vol. VII, Appendix to Mins of Evidence, pp. 788-94. M.D. Hill submitted Draft Report on the Principles of Punishment, presented to the Committee on Criminal Law appointed by the Law Amendment Society in Dec. 1846.
37. A. Maconochie to Sir Denis Le Marchant (Under Secretary of State, Home Department) on the Mark System, 5 August 1847: TNA, HO 45/1840.
38. ‘Report from the Select Committee on Prison Discipline’, A. Maconochie’s Evidence, (632), Parliamentary Papers 1850, vol. XVII, pp. 447-463.
Part 7. Silent and Separate Systems of Prison Discipline
39. ‘Report of William Crawford, on the Penitentiaries of the United States’, (593), Parliamentary Papers, 1834, vol. XLVI, pp. 10-16; 27-40.
40. Charles Dickens, on Eastern Penitentiary, Philadelphia, American Notes, 1st pub. 1842.
Part 8. Pentonville and the Age of the Separate System
41. Elizabeth Fry to Jebb on Pentonville prison, 22 July 1841, Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry, edited by two of her daughters (1847), vol. 2, pp. 395-396.
42. Dr. Forbes Winslow, ‘Prison Discipline’, Medical Society of London, Lancet, vol. 1, 29 Mar. 1851, pp. 358-359.
43. Robert Ferguson, ‘The Two Systems at Pentonville’, London Quarterly Review, vol. XCII, April 1853, pp. 258-269.
44. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Model Prisons’, 1st March 1850, in Latter-Day Pamphlets, vol XX of Centenary Edition, The Works of Thomas Carlyle in Thirty Volumes, (1898), pp. 52-56; 58-60; 62-63; 65; 69-70; 73; 76-77.
Biography
Victor Bailey is the Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas, USA
