Category Archives: Themes

Criminal Records: Prison Licences

Introduction

Home Office and Prison Commission Licences are one of the core sources being used by the Digital Panopticon to trace the lives of nineteenth century convicts sentenced to imprisonment in England.  Licences began to be issued in 1853 when the 1853 Penal Servitude Act officially substituted terms of transportation for terms of imprisonment. Licences granted convicts undertaking penal servitude freedom before the expiration of their sentence in a system closely modelled on the Australian ‘Ticket-of-Leave’. The licence system remained in place well into the twentieth century.

The licences are split into two collections, the PCOM 3 licences for male convicts and PCOM 4 for female convicts. However, only a proportion of the total licences issued between the 1850s and 1940s have survived and are accessible to the public. For women only licences issued between 1853-1871 and 1882-1887 are available, and for men licences issued between 1853-1887.

What are the licences?

A licence document was issued for each convict on release, detailing the conditions of their freedom. However, the prison ‘licences’ can actually refer to a much larger collection of documents covering an individual’s entire time in penal servitude. The PCOM licences can contain items such as a penal record detailing criminal history, medical evaluation form, prison punishment records, and notes of applications by the prisoner to the Secretary of State. From the 1870s onwards, licence bundles also contain photographs of offenders and records relating to their correspondence in prison and, on occasion, police intelligence about their associates and former lives.

This example shows the licence issued for Caroline Jones when she was released in 1866, and her reception form at Newgate Gaol from when her sentence began.

Caroline Jones Licence       Caroline Jones Newgate form

These collections of documents were created by a number of officials over the course of an individual’s incarceration. Various legislation over the second half of the nineteenth century, such as the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act, made provision for the collection of an increasing volume of data about offenders. Some forms, like the penal record, were completed as a convict was processed into prison, others were produced over time as a convict served their sentence. Medical records, record of punishment, and applications and letters travelled with a convict to each institution they spent time in where it became the duty of different administrators to keep them up to date.

This left hand example shows the medical record of Elizabeth Davis, partially completed on her admission to prison, but updated with details of her weight every time she moved to a new institution. The right hand example shows the punishment record of Elizabeth Davis as she served a sentence of penal servitude in Woking prison between 1873 and 1875. Further entries were added each time she committed a prison offence.

Frances Reece medical record      Frances Reece prison offences record

Why are they important to historians?

How, when and, most importantly, why such extensive information relating to convicts was collected over the course of the nineteenth century is currently being explored as part of the Digital Panopticon’s Epistemologies theme.

The PCOM prison licences give historians an unparalleled insight into the imprisonment of thousands of ordinary nineteenth century convicts. The multifaceted remit of these records means that they are useful for studying the personal details of individual convicts and following their journey to and through the convict prison system. Documents within the licence bundles offer us the chance to amass details such as aliases and criminal histories, names and addresses of family members, police intelligence about a convicts ‘character’ and previous life all of which can be used to find the same individual in other sources. These records are also useful for developing a more comprehensive understanding of the prison regime during the mid and late nineteenth century imprisonment came to define penal experience after the end of transportation. Institutional paper-work shows how the system of labour, diet, and marks for gratuity operated on a daily basis. Lastly, any of these records allow us to examine in more detail individual facets of the convict prison system. Whether that be the development of medical provision for prisoners over time, or the punitive measures taken to control the prison population.

This example shows the penal record of Elizabeth Davis, stating her full conviction record and several aliases which can be used to trace her in other records.

Frances Reece penal record

Problems with the licences

Despite the potential of these records there are issues and limitations that researchers should be aware of. There is a lack of consistency in the content of licences. Some of the earliest examples have little more than the paper licence issued for prisoner release, and later licences (from the 1870 and 1880s in particular) can have vast amounts of material. The style and content of recorded information also changes over time. Whilst this can be useful for epistemological questions and examining the development of the administrative prison system, it does present a challenge when creating research questions relating to inmate experience across time. Whilst offering a great amount of detail about individuals and their lives inside (and often outside) prison, the documents were written from the perspective of the prison system. The emotional lives of inmates, their motivations, and experiences are not often explored. For example, the licences can help historians investigate the difficult and dangerous environment in which prisoners lived. Instances of prisoner violence and distress are very commonly recorded on prison offence forms. However, the forms do not record contextual exploration of why and how such behaviours occurred. Likewise, information relating to key issues such as mental illness are largely absent from these documents.

Nonetheless, the diverse range of documents available through the PCOM prison licence collection remain one of the best and most important sources for researching the men and women confined in Victorian convict institutions. The PCOM licences give us a rare insight into the minutia of daily prison life. Most importantly, these sources provide otherwise unavailable information about thousands of individuals serving time in prison between the 1850s and 1880s. Licence documents can prove essential for understanding the lives of prisoners and for collecting information which lets us trace how they arrived in prison, and what happened after their release.

Elizabeth Morley, a humble petitioner

Elizabeth Morley's petition for mercy, 1795

Elizabeth Morley’s petition for mercy, 1795

In the spring of 1795, Elizabeth Morley (or Morlay) was convicted at the Middlesex Sessions of the Peace and sentenced to 7 years transportation. Because this was not at the Old Bailey, we have very little information about her trial. Her entry in the Home Office Criminal Registers doesn’t include a physical description or even a description of her offence. But Elizabeth petitioned the magistrates for clemency, and from that we’re able to learn quite a bit more about her offence and Elizabeth herself – or at least the version she presented to the magistrates.

Throughout the 18th century and well into the 19th, many convicted criminals petitioned authorities begging for mercy; a few were granted a full pardon and released but a reduction in the severity of the sentence passed in court was more common, whether that had been for death, transportation or imprisonment. Petitioners were successful in changing the punishment initially prescribed in court so often that tracing actual outcomes is a major challenge for historians of criminal justice in the period and, of course, for our project.

The main series of criminal petitions relating to the more serious crimes that incurred the death penalty or transportation is at The National Archives (TNA HO17-18). There is currently an important volunteer project underway at TNA to catalogue HO17, and a large group of the petitions and related records has been digitised by FindMyPast. It’s more unusual to find a petition concerning a sentence of transportation in local archives, though this one is earlier than TNA’s petitions. However, Elizabeth’s petition is very similar in form and style to many of TNA’s criminal petitions.

They’re documents intended to persuade authorities that the petitioner is a worthy object of mercy. This includes extreme deference to authority – they’re always ‘humble’ petitions. It’s hard for historians to know to what extent petitions really represented the ‘authentic’ voices of ordinary people. The flowery language similarly may not be Elizabeth’s own – the handwriting is that of a highly educated person, and the mention of ‘social passions’ wouldn’t have been out of place in literary genres from philosophical tracts to Jane Austen novels.  It’s common for petitioners to stress their age, as Elizabeth does, and perhaps with good reason, since it seems that older prisoners were slightly less likely to be transported. It’s also not uncommon for them to blame someone else for leading them astray!

Elizabeth’s petition seems to have been successful, in that she doesn’t appear in the Transportation Registers or convict indents data, but we don’t (yet) know what did happen to her. However, I think we have a little bit of her previous history. In October 1793, an Elizabeth Morley was tried at the Old Bailey for stealing a variety of items including shirts, napkins, women’s clothes and pockets. She was acquitted; much of the evidence against her was quite circumstantial. In the course of the trial we learn that she was a married woman, with two sons. This is corroborated by her entry in the Criminal Registers, which describes her as

48. 5/2 Hazel Eyes Brown hair fresh Complexion Brentford Married woman

Now, this would of course make this Elizabeth only 50 in 1795, five years younger than the age stated in the petition. But ages in our data, before the age of universal civil registration, are often approximations and it isn’t at all unlikely that the 1795 Elizabeth would be exaggerating her age slightly for sympathy. (It’s striking that she claims to be 55 – Richard Ward has shown how ages in the Old Bailey data tended to be rounded up or down to numbers ending in 0 or 5.)

The context of the 1793 offence is also a good fit. Women were often charged with receiving in circumstances very similar to those of the 1793 trial; thieving and receiving domestic items like these were closely related criminal activities in women’s ‘economies of makeshifts‘.

It isn’t an absolutely certainty that the two sets of records belong to the same woman, but the balance of probabilities is looking good. What do you think?

[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.]

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

Life stories and their Historians: Bridging a divide?

Most of us have at one time or another wondered about our ancestors. Even the historians whose bread and butter is the study of social, political, economic or cultural histories speculate about their own family’s part in the unfolding of the wider movements and economic changes down the ages. Many others have studied the genealogical websites, and laboured in the archives, simply to chart the family line further and further back until either reliable data or stamina are exhausted. New pieces of information that are discovered may offer a glimpse of a family ‘on the make’ or a family ‘on the slide’. Whatever the case, family history has become a persistent and compelling pastime enjoyed by millions of people.

Screen Shot 2015-06-12 at 08.16.37

(Image via RootsChat)

For those without an aristocratic pedigree to fall back on, family piety used to amount to little more than repeated anecdotes about half-remembered relatives.  Now that the internet has democratized information, anyone with a computer and a measure of determination can go much further.  Archives and public records and censuses are accessible to all, and there’s plenty of advice on how to make sense of them.  The viewing figures for the BBC’s series ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ have held up for a decade, while  ‘Secrets From the Clink’, its lurid ITV cousin, adds a distinctively Dickensian preoccupation with forebears who served time. The investigation of family history has become the third most popular online activity, after shopping and pornography. Primary research is no longer exclusively a matter for academic historians, traditionally concerned with movements that shape national destinies – wars, politics, conquest, or trade.  Amateurs can share the buzz of a first-hand encounter with discovery, retrieving neglected documents and filling in the gaps in a family tree.  If you have ancestors and a search engine, you too can be a historian.

Screen Shot 2015-06-12 at 08.20.16

(Image via http://www.victorianchildren.org)

Unsurprisingly, professionals in the business of history have mixed feelings about the swarm of explorers among the databases. Every historian sympathizes with the impulse to learn about the past.  But bare facts about long-buried members of a family can’t reveal much about the broader cultural and economic circumstances that defined their lives, and those who pursue them often do so in the context of their own interests and priorities. Objective analysis takes second place to the resurrected details (revealing self-made success, lost grandeur, anti-authoritarian spirit or helpless victimhood) that best confirm the values of the investigator. Trained historians observe, sometimes disdainfully, that such researchers are looking for archival comfort food. But in general family detectives are too busy digging for the next piece of evidence to take offence, while their denigrators are not seriously threatened by part-time rivals.  The two breeds of historians are more or less prepared to tolerate each other, though there isn’t much traffic between them.

Screen Shot 2015-06-12 at 08.10.44

(MEPO 6, 8 March 1907. Available at findmypast.co.uk)

Perhaps the Digital Panopticon can help to bridge the divide? The data provided is clearly of use and of interest to those researching their family history. Indeed the information that can be found in the prison records can reveal more about the character, physique, and exploits of forefathers than almost any other record. In this respect they are a boon to the genealogist, and a first-rate source of information. Each of the life stories revealed by the Panopticon is varied and interesting enough to be studied in its own right. However, when taken together they are invaluable to the social historians as a guide to (for example) the height and weight of the ordinary Londoner, the character of crime and punishment in the nineteenth century, and the long-term effects of transportation and imprisonment on generations of families living in Australia and in the United Kingdom. The next trick might be to persuade the two communities (genealogists and social historians) that they have something in common. They might even learn something by talking to each other, not least because descendants can provide valuable information to historians about the identities and experiences of their forebears. They can fill in the gaps and silences that punctuate the records. In return, historians can add context to family histories by revealing the social conditions in which our ancestors lived, loved, and laboured.

 

Professor Dinah Birch

Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange

University of Liverpool

PhD Work in Progress- Emma Watkins &The Case of George Fenby

The Case of George Fenby

You can see a video of Emma’s slides here: The Case of George Fenby

Euryalus Wash room

(Image courtesy of National Archives)

My PhD research explores the lives and criminal careers of convicts in the nineteenth century, specifically juveniles aged 7-14 – who were sentenced at the Old Bailey to either transportation to Australia or Penal servitude at home – in the period of 1816-1850.

After transcribing all juvenile criminals fitting my criteria a sample will be traced using data-linkage between different digital resources.[1] Then through utilising both a quantitative and qualitative approach, the common factors and experiences present in the lives of juvenile offenders will be identified, and biographies of individuals created.

This will allow for a rounded understanding of the context of these offenders, and enable me to approach the broader questions such as: (i) what part did social, economic, environmental and familiar factors play in criminal juvenile lives? And (ii) by comparing both those who were transported and those who served a penal sentence, which route led to greater criminal desistance and why?

Centred on transportation, this blog will use a case study interspersed with some initial trends of the whole transportation dataset. Notwithstanding the estimated 72, 500 convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land alone, in my period there were 1411 juveniles sentenced to transportation to Australia as a whole.[2]

VD lAND

(Image courtesy of photolibrary.com)

Firstly, it is important to point out the disparity in numbers between male and females. There were only 77 females sentenced to transportation, compared with 1333 male. This disparity is clearly seen in this graph comparing age and gender of transportees (shown in Figure 1.0). This graph also shows the proportional increase of transportee sentences and age. But, the key word here is sentence as not all were sent.

Number and Age of Juveniles Sentenced to Transportation

     EW Fig 1.0 EW Fig 1.0 p2

Figure 1.0

The youngest transportee in the sample is George Fenby. According to some historians, juveniles were not usually transported until “they were a suitable age” – 14 or 15 years old.[3] If they were younger upon conviction they would spend this period of limbo in local gaols or on the Hulks (moored prison ships). Clearly, however, there were exceptions and juveniles were transported under the age of 14. George Fenby is an example.

 Description List CON18/1/15

EW Fig 1.2

Figure 1.1

Parish Birth Records

EW Fig 1.3

Figure 1.2

Fenby’s trip on-board the Manlius took four months. While his transportation records suggest that he was 10 years old, it would seem that he was in fact 12 years old when he first stepped foot in Van Diemen’s Land (see figure 1.1 and figure 1.2). Interestingly, whereas transportation officials believed the youngest male transported was 10, the youngest female in my sample – Mary Ann Oseman – was described as 14 when she arrived in Australia. Four years older than the youngest male.

Born in 1818, one of Hannah Fenby’s five children, George Fenby was convicted and sentenced for stealing two pairs of shoes from a shop, with his mother. The court believing him to be 9 years old.[4] Fenby’s mother, age 43, was also transported on board the Eliza for her part in the offence.

Subcategory of Offences

EW Fig 1.4EW Fig 1.4 p 2

Figure 1.3

Except the odd coining or fraud offence, all offences were theft. As we can see in the graph above (see Figure 1.3), the most common offences were Grand and Simple Larceny. Grand Larceny involved the theft to the value of at least 1 shilling in the absence of aggravating circumstances. But, in 1827, this offence was replaced by the new offence of Simple Larceny, which also did away with Petty Larceny and the complication of minimum values. Pickpocketing was also prevalent but this is skewed by male offenders, which is highlighted when we break down offences by gender (see Figure 1.4).

Male Offence Subcategory

EW Fig 1.5 m

Female Offence Subcategory

EW Fig 1.5 f

Figure 1.4

Still, even after breaking down offences by gender the most common offences in both sex remain Grand and Simple Larceny – if taken together. However, as well as some differences between genders it is noteworthy that the offence, shoplifting, is not prevalent in either sex. Yet, if we take into account the ‘spatial environment of the crime’, the most common place to steal from, in both genders, was the shop (see Figure 1.5). The Fenby’s are an example this.

 EW Fig 1.6

Figure 1.5

The question is: why was Fenby selected from the Euryalus Hulk for actual transportation at such a young age – when others were not? Perhaps his Conduct and Appropriation Records may shed some light (see Figure 1.6). After being with his first mistress, Mrs. Humphrey’s for less than two years, Fenby was re-assigned to a John Kerr. There Fenby began his misconduct relatively unremarkably, for example, he received twelve lashes for being absent in December 1833. However, just a year later his misconduct took on a new form. It was reported that Fenby took “liberties” with his master’s 6 year old daughter, himself only being approximately 14. As a result he was removed to Port Arthur, and placed in the worst class of boys at Point Puer (a juvenile penal settlement 1834-1849). This event even made the Colonial Times (see figure 1.7). At Point Puer Fenby received a further twelve lashes for “most riotous and improper conduct in the cells”. This was followed by more absenteeism. It is possible that Fenby’s behaviour in the colony is indicative of his behaviour while imprisoned before transportation, resulting in his early selection.

  EW Fig 1.7

Figure 1.6

 EW Fig 1.8

Figure 1.7

After receiving a certificate of freedom in 1836, he at some point made his way to Victoria, living for period in Geelong where he worked as a sawyer. There he again appeared in the papers in August 1842 having been charged with attempted highway robbery (see Figure 1.8). Unfortunately as yet I have no details of this charge other than a newspaper clipping and so do not know the outcome. However, we can be relatively confident that it was him, because it states his alias was Timms. There is a connection with Fenby and the name Timms. Not only was the name on his mother’s death certificate, but the connection is also shown in a newspaper notice addressed to George Fenby by his mother Hannah Timms (see Figure 1.9).

 EW Fig 1.9

Figure 1.8

 EW Fig 2.0

Figure 1.9

While there are unknowns in periods of this convict’s life, what is clear is that George Fenby lived an eventful 75 years, living 15 years longer than the average life span. Marrying three times and having children with his first and second wife. Fenby died in 1893 in Corryong, Victoria.

While George Fenby was badly behaved, he was not a repeat offender before he was transported. Notably, only 26% of male juveniles had former indictments or convictions acknowledged at court, compared with 49% of females. This suggests a greater reluctance to sentence girls to transportation unless they were known to be repeat offenders. For males there is a sudden recording of previous convictions just before 1830. While this is probably more of a change in recording, rather than boys suddenly deciding to commit more than one offence – it is of interest both because of its sudden importance – and because when we look at females we can see there is more of a correlation (see Figure 2.0).

 ew Fig 2.2

Figure 2.0

This all raises more questions than it answers. On what basis were juveniles sentenced to imprisonment or transportation? And of those sentenced to transportation, how many were actually sent? And how were they selected?

This idea that bad behaviour and previous offences led to a greater chance of those sentenced to seven years transportation actually being transported, is supported by the 1812 Parliamentary Paper. However, in the same paper, while the superintendent of hulks claimed that “probable utility” to the colony was not considered, he then goes on to say he would not send men over 50, and would probably not send women over 42, and definitely not over 45 – because they would be a “great burthen to the colony.”[5] Notwithstanding the fact that Hannah Fenby was 44 on her arrival.

At the other end of the scale, Captain Williams, government inspector of prisoners, believed many juveniles were too “diminutive” to be sent. So, did they base selection on the size and strength of the juveniles, implying utility was considered? Or was it those they perceived as “hardened” that were selected? Or were other factors, such as practicality, influential? Meaning whether ships were available.

Through tracing how many juveniles sentenced to transportation in my sample were actually transported, and using prosopography, I hope to approach these questions of selection.

 Footnotes

[1] Examples of online sources that will be utilised; The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, 1764-1913, Found at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org//; State Library of Queensland, Convict transportation registers database, Found at http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/resources/family-history/convicts /; Tasmanian Government, Tasmanian Names Index, Found at http://linctas.ent.sirsidynix.net.au/client/en_AU/names/

[2] James Bradley et al, “Research note: The founders and survivors project”, The History of the Family, 15:4 (2010), p. 467

[3] Jeannie Duckworth, Fagin’s Children – Criminal Children in Victorian England, (2002), pp.86-87

[4] Follow link to original Court Proceeding of George and Hannah Fenby; http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18290716-103-defend808&div=t18290716-103#highlight

[5] Report from the Select committee on Transportation 1812 (314), pp. 77-78. (p.16 index)

Bibliography

Duckworth, Jeannie, Fagin’s Children – Criminal Children in Victorian England, (London, 2002)

Godfrey, Barry. S., Cox, David J., and Farral, Stephen, D, Criminal Lives: Family life, Employment, and Offending, (2007, Oxford)

James Bradley et al, “Research note: The founders and survivors project”, The History of the Family, 15:4 (2010)

Jeannie Duckworth, Fagin’s Children – Criminal Children in Victorian England, (2002)

K.S.B Keats-Rohan (ed.) Prosopography Approaches and Applications. A Handbook (Oxford, 2007)

Report from the Select committee on Transportation 1812 (314)

Shore, Heather, Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in early 19th-century London, (Suffolk, 1999)

Digital Resources

 State Library of Queensland, Convict transportation registers database, Found at http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/resources/family-history/convicts /

 Tasmanian Government, Tasmanian Names Index, Found at http://linctas.ent.sirsidynix.net.au/client/en_AU/names/

 The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, 1764-1913, Found at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org//

Digital Panopticon PhD Work in Progress- Aoife O’Connor

A previous blog post outlined how crime records are among the ‘most extensively digitised’ source sets.  My PhD will explore the impact of this digitisation on the study of crime history.

What do I expect to measure?  What is impact?  Simon Tanner tells us it is not recognition, neither is it outcomes.  It is change.  In his Balanced Value Impact Model he describes a model for assessing a digital resource through a number of criteria.  It sets a high bar for impact.  As does The Research Excellence Framework, which defines impact as ‘any effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’.   How do you prove an increase in cultural capital, in appreciation, in a fundamental shift in thought process owing to your research in the humanities?  How many historical studies are likely to influence government policy?  If impact is not successful dissemination of research to a wider public, what is it?

The focus of my study will be on the digitisation, dissemination and impact of UK, Irish, and Australian and Tasmania records.  I will use a number of core sites in my research: Old Bailey Online, London Lives, Founders & Survivors, Findmypast and Ancestry.  Other sources that I will examine include online newspapers such as Trove and British Library Newspapers Online, specialist popular sites such as blacksheepancestors.com, those that host databases of convict records such as records.nsw.gov.au and sites that include broader popular material of interest to crime historians such as Harvard Law Library’s broadside collection. My thesis is also interested in the ways in which crime historians communicate their research in popular ways and looks to online communities such as Flickr, Twitter and Pinterest.

In each case I will assess the accessibility of the resource and the effect that may have on impact.  Are paywalls a bar to impact, or is the requirement for an institutional log in to an otherwise free resource preventing that material from being used?  Are websites being designed for impact?  Are they being designed for particular users?

Impact takes time to manifest.  Change is not seen overnight in the humanities, the reality is even dissemination beyond scholarly publications and the assimilation of research by the wider public can take years.  As a part-time student, who will not be writing up until 2021, I am able to devote more time than usual to gathering my evidence, I expect to begin that process later this year and continue it throughout the coming four years, 2016-2020 via my website www.acriminalrecord.org (at the time of writing this site is still very much bare bones).

It is easier, then, to talk of potential impacts: the ability to do truly longitudinal studies, the requirement on students to use ever larger sample sizes, the potential for data linkage on a large scale.  But the actual impacts have yet to be revealed.  I will argue that digitisation is change to dissemination, among other things, and that the REF model of ‘proving worth’ should not overly burden researchers or overwhelm our concept of ‘impact’.  I will look at a broad range of impacts to gain a sense of what impact means to different stakeholders.  The impacts of digitisation on access, use, dissemination, research methodologies, teaching, publishing, public history; and the impacts of research utilising digital resources on cultural capital, and users sense of history and self.

One of my key questions will be if digitisation has fundamentally altered the ways in which crime records are utilised.  Has digitisation changed the user demographic?  My data will come from the users.  Their uses of the records produced by the justice and penal institutions will inform the direction of my research and I aim to visualise these in quantitative and qualitative ways.

One area of examination will be how users are using online crime records- either in research, teaching or in popular culture. The use of The Old Bailey Online to engage literature students in a critical discourse about crime and entertainment in the nineteenth century is a particularly imaginative use of these resources.  Social historians are also utilising these sources as evidence of daily life such as Tim Hitchcock’s recent work with Anne Helmreich and William J. Turkel on the portable possessions Londoners as recorded in the Old Bailey trials.  Yet one area which has so far been overlooked has been the ways that popular writers use these resources, and I aim to consider this as part of my work.

In particular, I am hoping to reach out to family historians.  I expect to see both continuity and change.  Family historians have likely always appreciated the value of ‘crime records’, and I want to explore the impact of digitisation on their research process. Previously many would have soughtå out a criminal ancestor based on family lore, but with the advent of digitisation, more are discovering ‘criminal’ ancestors serendipitously.

As an employee of Findmypast I have first-hand, albeit anecdotal at this stage, evidence of the range of reactions these types of users have when confronted with a criminal ancestor- from amusement to horror.  I also see a potential pattern emerging related to level of kinship, and family’s attempts to distance themselves from their criminal associations. In all I have witnessed descendants shrug off, laugh, be embarrassed by, and take pride in their criminal forbearers.

It is this strand of research that, in these very early stages, is dominating my plans. I am beginning to steer away from the ways that traditional crime historians use digitised source sets and am looking to the ways that other users are using digital resources. What has been the impact on their histories and, crucially, how are they being used?

Voices of Authority: Towards a history from below in patchwork

This post is intended to very briefly describe a project I am about halfway through – that seeks to experiment with the new permeability that digital technologies seem to make possible – to create a more usable ‘history from below’, made up of lives knowable only through small fragments of information.

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This particular project is called ‘Voices of Authority’, and is a small part of a larger AHRC funded project – The Digital Panopticon – that is seeking to digitise and link up the records reflecting everyone tried in London between around 1780 and 1875, and either sent to prison, or else transported to Australia.  This small element of the wider project is bringing together a series of different ways of knowing about a particular place, time and experience – the Old Bailey courtroom from around 1750-1850, and the experience of being tried for your life and for your liberty.  The conceit behind this project, is really a suggestion that building something in three dimensions, with space, physical form and performance, along with new forms of analysis of text; can change how we understand the experience of the trial process; and to allow a more fully empathetic engagement with defendants; along with a better understanding of how their experience impacted on the exercise of power and authority.

This is only half completed project – so this is very muchy a report of ‘work in progress’.  But, in essence, what seeks to do is bring together three distinct different forms of ‘data’ and to re-organise those data around indivudual defendants.

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First, it takes the text of the Old Bailey Proceedings – the trial accounts of some 197,745 trials held between 1674 and 1913, and recognises them as comprising two different and distinct things – a bureaucratic record of the trials themselves (names, verdicts, punishments); and at the same time, one of the largest corpora of recorded spoken language created prior to the twentieth century – some 40 million words of direct, recorded testimony for the period under analysis.

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These understandings of the Proceedings are, of course, built on projects of much longer duration; including the OldBailey Online, and more particularly, on Magnus Huber’s additional linguistic mark-up of the Proceedings, which allows ‘speech’ to be pulled from the trial text, and to identify the speaker along the way.  This is available via the Old Bailey Corpus.

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The project also builds on text and data mining methodologies – including direct counting of word and phrase distributions, and the application of a form of explicit semantic analysis, that allows us to look at the changing character of language used in witness statements over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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In other words, the first element of the project is the text and speech, crimes, punishments and dates provided by the Old Bailey Proceedings.

The second element is the body of the criminal – the physical body of the individual  men and women involved.  The broader project is creating a dataset of some 66,000 men and women – with substantial and detailed information about their lives, both before and after transportation or imprisonment – reflecting the inter-relationship between the people who became defendants and criminals with the systems of a global empire. And this material provides a huge amount of data about bodies – to add to the words individuals spoke to power.  Height, weight, eye colour, tattoos among a range of other aspects of a physical self.  Suddenly, we know if a collection of words was spoken by a ten stone, 5 foot two inch woman with brown hair and black eyes, and a withered left arm; or by a six foot man with an anchor tattoo on his left arm, and a scar above squinting blue eyes.

To think about it another way, this bit of the ‘project’, allows us to worry about the ragged boundary between the ‘physical’ as recorded in a set of numerical and standardised descriptions, and the ‘textual’ – the slippery and ambiguous content of each witness statement.

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In relation to ‘history from below’, this allows us to put together the lives of people like William Curtis, who as a 16 year old, in the summer of 1843, had a perfectly healthy tooth pulled, before stealing the dentists’ coat.

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And Sarah Durrant, who was convicted for receiving two banks notes worth 2000 pounds. It all allows us to know their words (their textualities), and at the same time to see them as part of a different kind of truth – of place and body.

The aspiration is to essentially code for the variabililties of body type at scale, to add a further dimension to both the records of the bureaucracy of trials (charge, verdict punishment), and the measurable content of the textualities of those same trials.

And finally, we are adding one additional dimension – space –  a ‘scene of trial’.

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For this we are first of all building on a project called Locating London’s Past, which among other things, maps crime locations on to the historic landscape of London.  And to this we are adding a reconstruction of the courtroom, where all these trials took place.

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Simply using Sketch-up, we have made most progress on the George Dance’s building, finished in the late 1770s and providing the main venue for the relevant trials for the next hundred years – basing the models on the architectural plans from which it was built.

In the process of creating this model, huge amounts of imformation about trial procedure has been revealed, including the changing layout of the court, and the relative position of the different speakers.  The design itself reflects a hitherto unacknowledged transition in the character of how witnesses and defendants were divided in this evolving space, evidencing a new story of the evolution of the criminal trial.

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The architecture itself, suggests that there was a clear transition from a situation in which witnesses and victims stood in a similar relation to the judge and jury (both facing the judge, relatively close to one another); to one – like a modern anglo-american courtroom  – where the judge and witnesses are on one side, and the defendant on the opposite side of the courtroom.  In other words, the character of the adversarial relationship at the core of the adversarial trial was re-defined, with the witnesses and victim re-located on the either side of the argument, and the judges role, redefined as arbiter between them.  At some level, in the process community resolution was replaced by court judgement.

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If you want to explain why conviction rates at the Old Bailey rose from under 50% in the mid eighteenth century, to over eighty percent at the end of the nineteenth century, starting from precisely the moment when the courtroom was rebuilt, this ‘fact on the ground’ needs to be part of the story.

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What has also been revealed is the importance of levels – with lawyers speaking upwards to the judge, jury, witnesses and defendant, from a cock-pit several feet below their eye level.  Like a theatre audience, the judge, jury and defendant looked down on the stage below.  In other words, what was created, at least for a short time (70 years), was the real feel of a ‘theatre’ in which, as a barrister, you were forced to perform to the gods.

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Looking forwarding to the next stage, this particular sub-project is seeking to move from the ‘art’ of making and performance, through a humanist and historical appreciation of ‘experience’, towards the tools of social science and informatics – seeking to combine the close reading of a single desperate plea, with the empathy that can only come with physical knowledge, with that macroscopic image of all the similar words spoken over a hundred years – how that one plea fits in a universe of words and bodies.  And all of this, is in turn, being undertaken in pursuit of a more nuanced and empathetic engagement with the lives of working people – both for its own sake, and as part of a new analysis of the workings of power ‘from below’.

With luck, this will allow us to move beyond a simple analysis of the courtroom, and the ‘adversarial trial’ – to an analysis through which we can see the whole system from the defendants’ perspectiv.

In other words, the next step is about creating a history of the British criminal justice system, and of transportation from an experiential perspective on a large scale – contributing to a history of common human experience, evidenced from the distributed leavings of the dead, analysed with all the approaches available to hand, from all the perspectives available.

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Open Data and the Digital Panopticon

Of all historical periods and subjects, crime and justice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London is the most extensively digitised. Through the digitisation of countless numbers of court records, transportation registers, prison archives, trial reports, criminal biographies, last dying speeches and newspapers (amongst many other things), we can access a wealth of information about crime, policing and punishment in the metropolis, and about the fates of the offenders tried there, all at the click of a mouse.

To our great benefit, much of this data is openly available, a product of the dogged efforts of public bodies, academics, data developers, volunteers and enthusiasts; often (but certainly not always) supported by public funding. In the process it has opened up seemingly boundless possibilities for research.

Indeed, without several of these open datasets the Digital Panopticon could not be realised. In our efforts to trace the life courses and subsequent offending histories of London convicts transported to Australia or imprisoned in Britain in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we will be reliant on a number of open datasets such as the British Convict Transportation Registers and Female Prison Licences.

It seems timely, therefore, on Open Data Day, to celebrate these fantastic, freely-accessible resources, and to highlight just a couple of ways in which they will be useful to us on the Digital Panopticon. Taking place on 21 February 2015, Open Data Day will involve a series of events and gatherings which seek to develop support for, and to encourage, the adoption of open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments.

I have talked in a previous post about the ways in which visualisations of the openly-available British Convict Transportation Registers database can be used to put transportation under the ‘macroscope’ – to chart the complex patterns and interactions of penal transportation in their entirety, spanning the breadth of Australia and the length of a century, taking in the lives of tens of thousands of individuals along the way.

In this post I briefly want to highlight another open dataset which will be at the heart of the project – the prison licence records of females incarcerated in British jails in the nineteenth century, held by the National Archives (under the catalogue reference PCOM 4), the metadata for which is openly available on the Archive’s online catalogue.

The licences almost without exception record the age of the offender on conviction, a potentially useful piece of information for us on the Digital Panopticon in terms of record linkage. But, as with our other datasets, we want to know how accurately ages were recorded, and again in the case of the female licences by visualising the data it suggests some interesting things for us to think about.

Not least, it again reveals the tendency towards age heaping in the recording of ages at round numbers such as 20, 30 and 40, suggesting that recorded ages were regularly rounded up or down rather than representing the true age of the offender. If ages were recorded accurately, we would expect to see a smooth distribution of recorded ages. As seen in the graph below, however, this was far from the case in the recording of female prisoner ages in the nineteenth century, with spikes at the ages of 20, 30, 40 and 50, and dips at the ages 29, 31, 39, 41.

Age on Conviction as Recorded in the PCOM4 Female Prison Licences

Age on Conviction as Recorded in the PCOM4 Female Prison Licences

Does this mean, therefore, that we should disregard recorded ages as entirely inaccurate? Not necessarily – as the graph below demonstrates, when we compare the distribution of ages across different sets of records, it suggests that recorded ages were perhaps broadly reflective of age patterns. The distribution of offender ages is typically younger in the Old Bailey Proceedings (OBP) and in the Convict Indents (CIN – the records of those transported to Australia) compared to that of females imprisoned in Britain (PCOM4) – certainly what we would expect, given the nature of criminal justice policy at the time.

Ages of Female Offenders as Recorded across each Dataset

These are just a couple of ways in which the Digital Panopticon will be drawing upon the wealth of open data available to criminal justice historians. We are indebted to the hard work of all those who have contributed to the creation and dissemination of this embarrassment of riches which, in combination with the powerful digital technologies now at our fingertips, is opening up a whole new realm of research opportunities.