Author Archives: Sharon Howard

Crime and the Courts in Three Dimensions: Workshop Presentations

The workshop was immensely enjoyable and stimulating and we’d like to thank all the speakers and attendants for making it so. We hope to bring a fuller workshop report in the near future, but in the meantime the workshop presenters have made the slides of their presentations available for those interested to download. (The Mulcahy/Rowden slides are not yet available but will be added if we get them.)

Valeria Vitale, An Ontology for 3D Visualization in Cultural Heritage

The use of 3D computer graphics and modelling techniques in the study of the ancient world has been mainly limited to the display of traditional research. Often, their value has been assessed merely on aesthetic quality. Behind every scholarly 3D visualisation is a thorough study of excavation records, iconographic documentation, literary sources, artistic canons. However, this research is not always detectable in the final outcome, and 3D visualisations do not seem able to meet the standards of scientific method (reproducibility) and academic publishing (references and peer-review)…

Tim Hitchcock, Re-imagining the Voice of the Defendant at the Old Bailey

When the sessions house at the Old Bailey was rebuilt in the 1770s, a traditional open courtroom was transformed in to a fully enclosed space, with a new and complex internal layout. The relative positions of the judge, jury, defendants and witnesses where substantially reconfigured. This presentation represents a preliminary attempt to capture the significance of that transition in sound: to explore how the different actors in the legal drama of a trial heard, both their own voice, and that of other participants…

Nick Webb, Analysing historic works of architecture using digital techniques

This presentation will discuss the use of digital techniques to analyse significant works of architecture, whether they exist, are destroyed or are not built at all. A methodology is introduced for future research employing digital tools in this context. Examples will show how the process augments research already undertaken by architectural historians, who provide traditional critique and analysis, by testing such studies further using a range of contemporary digital techniques…

Programme for Workshop on 3D and the History of Crime

The History of Crime and the Courts in Three Dimensions

Tuesday 20th October, Sussex Humanities Lab, Silverstone Building, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9SH. Campus Map

Registration: Please register via the Eventbrite page

Timetable

9:00: Coffee
9:30: Linda Mulcahy (LSE), and Emma Rowden (Sydney), Unicorns and Urinals: Why do modern courts look the way they do?
10:15: Valeria Vitale (King’s London), An Ontology for 3D Visualization in Cultural Heritage
11:00: – Coffee
11:20: Tim Hitchcock, Re-imagining the Voice of the Defendant at the Old Bailey.
11:50: Nick Webb (Liverpool), Analysing historic works of architecture using digital techniques.
12:30-1:20: Lunch.

Synopses

Professor Linda Mulcahy (LSE), and Dr Emma Rowden (UTS Sydney): Unicorns and Urinals: Why do modern courts look the way they do?

In this paper we will explore the history of ideas about court design and why it is that contemporary English courts look the way they do. Drawing on the findings of a Leverhulme grant we will explore the principles and claims underpinning debate about how the different actors in the trial are positioned in the courtroom. In particular we are keen to identify the conditions of possibility that have made the form and content of the various centralised design guides produced since 1970 legitimate. We argue that in addition to concerns about how design facilitates due process the history of court design has been progressively fuelled by fears about lay users of the justice system.

Valeria Vitale (King’s College, London): An Ontology for 3D Visualization in Cultural Heritage

The use of 3D computer graphics and modelling techniques in the study of the ancient world has been mainly limited to the display of traditional research. Often, their value has been assessed merely on aesthetic quality. Behind every scholarly 3D visualisation is a thorough study of excavation records, iconographic documentation, literary sources, artistic canons. However, this research is not always detectable in the final outcome, and 3D visualisations do not seem able to meet the standards of scientific method (reproducibility) and academic publishing (references and peer-review)… More specifically, an ontology for 3D visualisation in cultural heritage could, in the first place, define and describe the components of the 3D model and their relationships. This would help rebuilding data and metadata if the visual component was not readable anymore, enhancing accessibility, sustainability and longevity of the information. Through a dedicated ontology, a researcher could also assess the degree of speculation involved in the creation of each 3D element and its relationship with sources and referents, thus presenting 3D visualisation as a scientific hypothesis and not an «exact reconstruction».

Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex): Re-imagining the Voice of the Defendant at the Old Bailey

When the sessions house at the Old Bailey was rebuilt in the 1770s, a traditional open courtroom was transformed in to a fully enclosed space, with a new and complex internal layout. The relative positions of the judge, jury, defendants and witnesses where substantially reconfigured. This presentation represents a preliminary attempt to capture the significance of that transition in sound: to explore how the different actors in the legal drama of a trial heard, both their own voice, and that of other participants. By modelling the location of different speakers in the courtroom both before and after the rebuilding, and acknowledging the very different sense of space encountered in a room open to the elements, to one enclosed by four walls, this paper seeks to help recapture the eighteenth century experience of being tried and sentenced at the Old Bailey.

Nick Webb (University of Liverpool, School of Architecture): Analysing historic works of architecture using digital techniques

This presentation will discuss the use of digital techniques to analyse significant works of architecture, whether they exist, are destroyed or are not built at all. A methodology is introduced for future research employing digital tools in this context. Examples will show how the process augments research already undertaken by architectural historians, who provide traditional critique and analysis, by testing such studies further using a range of contemporary digital techniques. The findings demonstrate the significance of the process of constructing digital representations of architectural artefacts. This is important, as inferences have to be made due to representational source data such as architectural drawings almost always being incomplete. Therefore parallel study into the architect, their architecture and the contemporary context they worked within has to be investigated in order to fill in gaps in an informed way. The study of such primary and secondary source data may also reveal lines of enquiry that can be investigated using digital techniques. The key here is the advanced knowledge that digital tools bring compared to the critique of a work of architecture that was carried out in a pre-digital context.

Download programme (pdf)

Workshop: The History of Crime and the Courts in Three Dimensions

We are very pleased to be able to announce details of the project’s third workshop, which will focus on historical 3D reconstruction and visualization and on the importance of the physical space of the courtroom in influencing and mediating experiences of justice. This is closely related to key strands in the project’s Voices of Authority research theme.

Event Details

This half-day workshop addresses the ways in which historians can use 3D modelling to better understand and communicate the experience of standing trial in the past. Part of the Digital Panopticon research programme, speakers from history, digital humanities, architecture and the law will consider how the exploration of physical space is changing historical understandings of crime and the courts.

Tuesday 20 October, 9:00-13:00, Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton.

It is free of charge and anyone with an interest in the topic is welcome, but space may be limited, so please register in advance.

Provisional Timetable

9:00 – Coffee
9:30 – Linda Mulcahy (LSE), and Emma Rowden (Sydney), Title to be confirmed.
10:15 – Valeria Vitale (King’s London), An Ontology for 3D Visualization in Cultural Heritage
11:00 – Coffee
11:20 – Tim Hitchcock, Re-imagining the Defendant’s Experience at the Old Bailey in 3D.
11:50 –  Nick Webb (Liverpool),  Title to be confirmed (sound and cathedrals).

Event booking page

A tale of two Thomas Smiths

This is a bit different from previous convict tales: it’s about two people – who shared the same name. Lucy Williams has previously blogged here about the difficulties that people with identical names (and few other pieces of information to differentiate them) present for historians attempting to do record linkage. But the story of the two Thomas Smiths suggests that contemporary administrators sometimes found this challenging too.

Let’s start at the beginning, in the Old Bailey, with two trials just over a month apart in late 1833. Firstly, Thomas Smith (we’ll call him “Thomas A”), aged 35, was convicted in October of stealing gowns and other clothing, and sentenced to 7 years transportation. According to the transportation registers he was transported on the John Barry, 2 April 1834, to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).[1]

In November, Thomas Smith (“Thomas B”), aged 18, was convicted along with Benjamin Underwood of stealing lead piping. Benjamin was a year younger, which may be why he was sentenced to 6 months imprisonment rather than the 7 years transportation which Thomas received. In the transportation register, he went on the Henry Tanner, 27 June 1834, to New South Wales.

So far it seems straightforward – there’s enough detail in the register to make linkage quite easy, even though there were four convicts called Thomas Smith on the John Barry and two more on the Henry Tanner. (Moreover, there are upwards of 300 Thomas Smiths in the register database as a whole – and 8 Old Bailey defendants named Thomas Smith in 1833 alone.)

But then, on looking in the Tasmanian Founders and Survivors data at what’s supposed to be the entry for Thomas A, it suddenly gets a lot less simple:

This Man who states himself to have been tried in November came by mistake, in the place of Thomas Smith a Glass Cutter.

The statement is from a conduct record, and it’s corroborated by the corresponding entry in the description lists, where his age is given as 18.[2]

Thomas Smith in the  Description Lists (Tas CON 14/1/11)

Which Thomas Smith? (Tas CON 18/1/11)

In other words, the transportation register is wrong: it was actually Thomas B, the younger man, who went to Tasmania. This is also confirmed by the convict indents for the Thomas Smith who went to New South Wales on the Henry Tanner.[3] That Thomas is evidently Thomas A: aged 35, married with several children, and a glass cutter. (In receiving a mature, skilled worker rather than a teenage labourer, NSW seems to have done quite well out of the mix-up.)

So the confusion seems to be cleared up quite readily. But the mystery remains: how could the mistake come about in the first place?

It’s time to turn to some large datasets that have recently become available to the project: the several important series of hulk records digitised by FindMyPast and Ancestry. (Prison hulks were old ships, no longer sea-worthy, where convicts awaiting transportation were held, to ease overcrowding in gaols.) The two Thomases were transferred together from Newgate to the Fortitude at Chatham in December 1833. They are both in the quarterly returns for December 1833 and March 1834. In the latter, Thomas A’s entry has a note of his departure, “VDL 26 March 1834”. Thomas B makes one final appearance in the June 1834 register with the note “NSW 21 June 1834”. The British authorities had no doubts about where the two men were supposed to have gone.[4]

In Convict Maids, Deb Oxley describes how clerks built up detailed records of every convict transported, drawn both from judicial records and from individually examining and questioning the convicts several times during the stages of their journey from British gaols to Australia.[5] A key part of this process was the creation of the convict indents shortly before departure, which would travel with the ship to provide the receiving colony with essential information about each convict:

In order to construct his indent, [John] Clark [the clerk contracted to carry out this particular task during the 1830s] collated the relevant documentation, attended the docks several days before the voyage was expected to take place, inspected the convicts and called the roll, and finally questioned them, checking their answers against his paperwork.

I still don’t know exactly how the mix-up occurred, but it’s clear that in the case of the two Thomases, practice must have diverged quite significantly from the ideal. If a clerk had questioned the Thomas who boarded the John Barry and compared the man to the paperwork it would have been pretty obvious that something was not right. He was 17 years younger than he was supposed to be, had been convicted at a different time and for a different offence, and lacked any of the older man’s family and work history. There were some superficial physical similarities between the two Thomases – brown hair, 5 ft 4-5 ins in height, dark complexion – but in addition to the age gap, Thomas A had lost two upper front teeth, which sounds quite hard to overlook.

Surely the mistake had been discovered by the time Thomas A embarked for New South Wales, and yet none of the British-based records were ever corrected. And some of the confusion lingered in their Australian records long afterwards. The NSW records for Thomas A, from his convict indent right through to his certificate of freedom in December 1840 (also on Ancestry), continued to repeat the wrong Old Bailey trial date. Thomas B’s conduct record also retains the wrong trial date, and it also makes him both married and single, and a thief of both lead pipe and gowns (an interesting combination). The conduct registers were created partly from the indents and partly by examining the convict; the clerks seemingly decided to simply leave in all of the conflicting data they had been given.

The British penal system sent thousands of convicts to Australia every year for decades; it would be surprising if even the most well-oiled machine didn’t occasionally slip under those circumstances. It still happens, after all: as recently as July 2015, a prisoner was released ‘by mistake’ from Wandsworth Prison. If it had been anything other than a rarity, there would be far more frequent records of similar errors in the Australian records.

As such, it’s less of an issue for big data approaches than for efforts to trace individuals in depth (and we got there in the end!). Even so, it’s one of those instances where the stories of individual convicts open up wider questions: they force us to think about the problems and limitations of the available evidence. For a start, the case warns against presuming that information is more reliable simply because it’s repeated in several (even official) sources. Secondly, it provides a reminder that keeping track of people who shared the same name was not just a problem for historians today. Maybe it even offers one answer to the question posed by Bob Shoemaker: why was so much information about criminals being collected for no obvious purpose?

[1] TNA HO 11, searchable at the  transportation registers database
[2] Tas CON 31/1/40 and CON 18/1/11, both accessible via Thomas Smith’s record at the Tasmania Archives website.
[3] We are using the convict indents data created by Deb Oxley, which we’ll be including in DP; also searchable with images on Ancestry.
[4] HO9/2, available (as low quality pdf) via TNA’s digital microfilm service (at fol. 77) and searchable with better images at AncestryHO 8/38-40, at FMP; and see also ADM 6/421 (f.215) also on FMP.
[5] Oxley, Convict Maids, pp 18-27.

***

[This post is one of a series of Convict Tales, in which we post about individual convicts whose lives the project has begun to link together. It may be updated as we learn more.]

Event: Prison London: Crime and Punishment – The Capital in the Clink

Some of our readers may be interested in this talk by DP’s Tim Hitchcock and Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust, in London on 27 August.
Since the 18th century thousands of London’s population have lived behind bars.  A myriad of terrifying gaols, lock ups, hulks, sponging houses and places of correction have been replaced by our contemporary institutions of […]


CFP: Digital Panopticon: Penal History in a Digital Age

We are delighted to announce our call for papers for the project’s Australian conference! The deadline for submissions is 30 November. We particularly encourage proposals from postgraduates, early career researchers, independent researchers, family historians and public historians. (Also, although the CFP doesn’t mention such new-fangled things, if you’d like to present at a poster session or in an alternative format to the standard academic presentation, I’d urge you to get in touch, as early as possible, outlining your proposal.)

Call for Papers

Submissions are invited for a conference to be held at the University of Tasmania, 22-24 June 2016 on the digital humanities and the history of prisons, the law, courts and convict transportation systems. The conference will address ways in which the increasing amounts of data generated by criminal justice systems available in digital form can be used to shed light on the past. An exciting aspect of the meeting is that it represents an opportunity to bring together researchers from four existing high profile collaborations:

  • Digital Panopticon (Universities of Liverpool, Sheffield, Sussex, Oxford, Tasmania) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK
  • Founders and Survivors (Universities of Melbourne, Tasmania, Guelph, Liverpool, Illinois) funded by the Australian Research Council
  • Carceral Archipelago (Leicester) funded by the European Community
  • The Prosecution Project (Griffith University) funded by the Australian Research Council.

Papers which address the theme of the conference from researchers not affiliated with these research teams are also encouraged, including research higher degree students and family historians. Submissions will be particularly welcome which explore the ways in which digital technologies can enhance research understandings in the following areas:

  • Life course offending including the onset of offending and factors contributing to desistence.
  • The intergenerational impacts of offending and punishment.
  • Digital dark tourism or ways in which the availability of electronic data has shaped the packaging criminal justice history and the ethical implications associated with increasing availability of data.
  • Opportunities for using prison, transportation and criminal justice data to explore the history of the family.
  • The relationship between colonisation, unfree labour and penal transportation.
  • The analysis of court reporting (including digitised newspapers) and prisoner and witness testimony.
  • Ways in which data visualisation techniques including GIS, 3D and digital mapping can be used to explore criminal justice data.
  • The analysis of biometric data including information about age, height, literacy, scars, injuries and tattoos.
  • The law, penal policy and changing social conditions.
  • The epistemology of court, criminal and other penal record keeping.

Email abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a 50 word biographical note to Jennifer.MacFarlane@utas.edu.au by 30 November 2015.

Download: Call for papers (pdf)

Amelia Acton, a petty thief with a string of convictions

Some of Amelia's previous convictions, 1866 (TNA PCOM 4/45/7)

Some of Amelia’s previous convictions, 1866 (TNA PCOM 4/45/7)

Amelia Acton can be identified (with certainty) in the Old Bailey Online just once, in a trial for uttering (passing) counterfeit coin in 1854 – even though she was tried using a different name, Amelia Smith, and there is no mention of an Amelia Acton in that trial. We can connect Amelia Smith with the Amelia Acton who was convicted of a string of thefts using several different aliases between 1851 and 1866 because 19th-century bureaucrats were increasingly concerned to identify and record recidivists so that they could be punished more severely. Several of the records the project is using included information about previous convictions.

This list for Amelia is compiled from two sources: TNA PCOM4, Female Prison Licences (1853-83, records relating to women prisoners sentenced to penal servitude and released early on licence), and LMA MJ/CP/B, Calendars of Prisoners in the Middlesex House of Detention (1855-1889). MJ/CP/B is not currently online, and these records are in the process of being digitised for Digital Panopticon. Brief item-level descriptions for PCOM4 can be found on TNA’s website and the images are at Ancestry.co.uk. We will be rekeying more extensive data from these (and PCOM3, the counterparts for male prisoners), including information about previous convictions, health and physical descriptions, and offences in prison.

Another list of previous convictions, 1866 (LMA MJ/CP/B/13, 5 Nov 1866)

Another list of previous convictions, 1866 (LMA MJ/CP/B/13, 5 Nov 1866)

  • Middlesex Sessions, February 1851, as Sarah Smith: larceny (table cloths); sentenced to 4 months
  • Middlesex Sessions (Westmr), September 1851: larceny (shawl?); 12 months
  • Middlesex Sessions (Westmr), November 1852, as Amelia Welsh: larceny; 9 months
  • Central Criminal Court, February 1854, Amelia Smith: uttering counterfeit coin, 6 months
  • Middlesex Sessions, December 1854: larceny; 4 years.
  • Middlesex Sessions, April 1855: felony; 4 years penal servitude
  • Middlesex Sessions, August 1859: larceny; 4 years penal servitude
  • Middlesex Sessions, February 1861: larceny; 4 months
  • Westminster police court, March 1864: 3 months
  • Marylebone police court, July 1864 as Amelia Sayers: 4 months
  • Middlesex Sessions, November 1866: stealing a gown; 7 years penal servitude

I’m not certain that all of these records are completely accurate. I’ve definitely identified the following Middlesex Sessions convictions:

  • Middlesex Sessions (Westminster) 15 August 1859 (MJ/CP/B/6): tried as Amelia Acton, aged 40, trade “ironer”, for the theft of 23 yards of carpet value 15s. of Ann Boyce widow (felony); pleaded guilty to larceny after previous convictions and sentenced to 4 years penal servitude.
  • Middlesex Sessions (Clerkenwell) 5 November 1866 (MJ/CP/B/13): tried as Amelia Acton, aged 54, trade “washer”, for the theft of a gown value 12s of Thomas Gardner; pleaded guilty to larceny and receiving after previous convictions and sentenced to 7 years penal servitude.

Penal servitude was a harsher form of imprisonment in special ‘convict prisons’, including hard labour, which replaced transportation in the 1850s for repeat offenders. Amelia was sentenced to penal servitude on three occasions, in 1855, 1859 and 1866. Prisoners serving penal servitude sentences might be released early on licence (probation), but if they re-offended they were likely to have their licences revoked and be returned to prison. This happened to Amelia in early 1863 – just months after she’d been released on licence in October 1862. She was released when that sentence expired in August 1865, but she was back in the convict prison system again within 15 months. She was released on licence once again to the “Battery House Refuge” in February 1871 and I haven’t found any further offending records.

Are there other trials before 1851 or after 1866 that aren’t recorded in this list? But I’ll keep looking as we get more data… There are other Amelia Smiths who might be the right age in the Old Bailey Online, but no Amelia Acton or Amelia Welsh. If there are more, why aren’t they recorded with the rest? But if not, why did Amelia turn to crime in 1851 and why did she stop in 1871 after barely being able to stay out of prison for more than a few months at a time for 15 years?

What else do we know about Amelia? Quite a lot, though there’s one slight puzzle. In the records before 1866 Amelia’s age is quite consistent, with a year of birth around 1820. But in 1866, her age is given as 54 (y.o.b. about 1812) – she’s gained about 8 years! We know that ages were rarely precise for people born before civil registration started in 1837, but this seems an unusually large variation (there doesn’t appear to be any question that it’s the same woman). It certainly makes tracking her in other records more difficult. But so does the variety of names we have to search for: four different surnames and two given names!

We know a lot about Amelia from the PCOM4 records (which are amazingly rich). She was already  married with a child by 1855; Acton was her married name, and her maiden name may have been Welsh (or Welch). Her mother was living in Nightingale Street, Lisson Grove in 1855. Her complexion was dark, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes, and she was just over 5 feet tall. She put on weight as she reached middle age – she went from being described as ‘thin’ in 1860  to ‘stout’ in 1866. She was a laundress (or in closely related trades) according to several of the records. In 1870 she suffered from rheumatism – maybe age and poor health are the main reasons why she didn’t reoffend after 1871.

Beyond the criminal records, there are some possible matches in Census and civil registration records. There is an Amelia Welsh, aged 20, living in the St Pancras area in the 1841 Census. And there is an Amelia Acton, a widow aged 70 (consistent with the older age given in 1866), and whose occupation is given as laundress, in the 1881 Census. Sadly, this Amelia was a pauper in St Marylebone Workhouse. It looks like, for her, crime really didn’t pay. Finally, possibly, there is a death record in 1888 for an Amelia Acton, aged 79, at Guildford, Surrey.

Do you know anything about Amelia? Please let us know!

[This post is one of a series of Convict Tales, in which we post about individual convicts whose lives the project has begun to link together. It may be updated as we learn more.]

John Camplin, a young thief transported to Tasmania

John Camplin was aged 15 when he was tried at the Old Bailey in June 1818 for stealing a watch. John’s defence in court was not terribly convincing:

I found a brooch, took it into the shop to ask if it was gold, and found the watch on the floor. I was going to knock, and the prosecutrix took me.

John was convicted and sentenced to death. Perhaps because of his youth, the sentence was subsequently commuted to transportation to Australia for life.

The transportation registers tell us that John was one of 160 convicts who left England on board the Surrey in autumn 1818, bound for New South Wales or Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen’s Land).

John arrived in Tasmania in March 1819 and a number of records document his life there.

A description list [C128-157] records that he was 5′ 3″ tall, with grey eyes and brown hair, and that he came from Tottenham. It gives his age on arrival as just 14 (it’s very common for ages to vary from one record to another!). It also notes that he received a conditional pardon in 1828.

But his conduct record shows many episodes of bad behaviour including theft, insubordination and other abuses, which resulted in whippings, hard labour and an extension of his sentence, so he was still in Tasmania at least until 1839. He was described as a “confirmed thief” and his master complained about his “wanton” destruction of property. [NB: large image, may be slow to load]

camplin

We don’t know any more about John in Tasmania or what ultimately became of him, though we may find out more as the Founders and Survivors project progresses.

But we do have one other record, one that provides a more personal perspective than the administrative trail of criminality and punishment. John had left behind him in England a memento for his family, an engraved convict love token:

Dear Father Mother
A gift to you ~
From me a friend
Whose love for you
Shall never end
1818

Do you know anything about John Camplin? If so, we’d love to hear from you!

[This post is the first in a planned series of Convict Tales, in which we post about individual convicts whose lives the project has begun to link together. It may be updated as we learn more!]

See also:

The Real Artful Dodger?  and John Camplin, a misguided youth? (Prison Voices) [archived pages]

Convict Tales: small stories and big data

View near Woolwich in Kent shewing [sic] the employment of the convicts from the hulks, c. 1800. From the collections of the State Library of NSW.

View near Woolwich in Kent, c. 1800. From the collections of the State Library of NSW.

We’ll soon be starting a regular series we’re calling Convict Tales. Every week (or thereabouts), we’ll tweet and blog about individual convicts whose lives we’ve started to link together in our database. Some of their stories might be exciting, others will be quite unexceptional (and short).

We have several reasons for doing this. Firstly, we want to share with you some of the material that we’re starting to gather; the range and variety of sources will expand along with the development of the project. At the same time, it may be a reminder of the many gaps and silences in the records. We expect many lives to be fragmentary, or for links to be not quite certain. This can all be smoothed over, perhaps misleadingly, in the aggregate and the data visualisation. The final reason is that amidst all our visualisations and statistics, we don’t want to lose sight of the multitudes and the diversity of real people and individual stories – lives like those of George Fenby – that make up the monstrous regiments of ‘Big Data’.

PhD Studentship: Crime and Policing in 18th and 19th-Century London

We are delighted to announce that we have funding for a three-year PhD studentship, based at the University of Sheffield.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of both new forms of policing and ideas about habitual criminality. Taking advantage of the extensive records of both petty and serious crime digitised and linked together by the Digital Panopticon project, this studentship will investigate these phenomena from the perspective of the judicial records, by tracing the incidence and character of criminal prosecutions. The project will seek to understand the extent to which prosecutions at the Old Bailey resulted from patterns of underlying criminal activity, repeat offending, and/or the actions of prosecutors and the police in identifying previously identified ‘suspicious characters’. The student may wish to focus on identifying the social and cultural factors which made some Londoners prone to reoffending and rearrest, or examining the impact of changing methods of policing on patterns of prosecutions, or analysing the relationship between the chronology of repeat prosecutions and the evolution of contemporary thought about reoffending. This research will allow the student to draw conclusions about the causes of crime, the impact of the new police, and the background to nineteenth-century thought about crime. The topic will appeal to researchers interested in the history of crime and policing and the social history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England more generally.

The award will cover the cost of UK/EU tuition fees and provide an annual maintenance grant at the standard RCUK rate (full-time rate £13,863 for 2014-15) for three years.

Start date: 1 October 2015.

Deadline for applications: 27 February 2015

How to apply: see further information here.