Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700-1850

David Lemmings was born in London and educated at the Universities of Sussex, London and Oxford before coming to Australia as a Research Fellow of the University of Adelaide in 1987. He then moved to the University of Newcastle in 1990 where he became Head of the Department of History in 1998 and Associate Professor in History in 2000. In 2008, Professor Lemmings moved to the University of Adelaide where he is Professor of History and leader of the Change Program in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

• Chapter 1 Introduction: Criminal Courts, Lawyers and the Public Sphere, David Lemmings; Chapter 2 Trials in Print: Narratives of Rape Trials in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, Esther Snell; Chapter 3 ‘Useful and entertaining to the generality of Readers’: Selecting the Select Trials, 1718–1764, Andrea McKenzie; Chapter 4 Representing the Adversary Criminal Trial: Lawyers in the Old Bailey Proceedings, 1770–1800, Robert Shoemaker; Chapter 5 Arts of Public Performance: Barristers and Actors in Georgian England, Simon Devereaux; Chapter 6 Negotiating Justice in the New Public Sphere: Crime, the Courts and the Press in Early Eighteenth-century Britain, David Lemmings; Chapter 7 Contemplating the Evil Within: Examining Attitudes to Criminality in Scotland, 1700–1840, Anne-Marie Kilday; Chapter 8 Fiction or ‘Faction’? Literary Representations of the Early Nineteenth-century Criminal Courtroom, Allyson N. May; Chapter 9 Publishing Courtroom Drama for the Masses, 1820–1855, Rosalind Crone;

'In the final analysis, the significance of Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700-1850 is greater than the sum of its parts. Each chapter provides an interesting, well-researched analysis that will undoubtedly be useful to a specialized audience of legal and cultural historians who study the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But taken as a whole, the book accomplishes much more than that. It provides a vivid picture of a rising print culture that largely supplanted the physical presence of ordinary folk at criminal trials.' Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books 'These essays together provide a nuanced assessment of how developments in courtroom culture and court reporting could in some ways offer opportunities for the kind of rational, critical debate typical of the Habermasian public sphere, yet in other ways closed off the space for such discussion. This has important insights for how we understand the law as ideology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.' History 'Overall this is a cohesive collection that substantially accounts for the developing professionalism of trials, changes in attitudes to the courts, the way the workings of the courts were reported to a wider public, and especially the way that the emergence of a professional body of criminal advocates changed not only the conduct of trials but also public perceptions of the legal system.' Parergon 'One of the few areas of historical enquiry that has hitherto remained largely untouched by [Jürgen] Habermas' work is the history of crime and the courts. This collection helps to rectify this apparent anomaly, and forms a welcome contribution to reconfiguring our understanding of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - of modernity.' English Historical Review