Crime in 19th Century Britain



Crime in 19th Century Britain

Introduction

According to Clive Emsley, crime is a subject that involves people's own perceptions, fears and prejudices. Thus generally involves willingness and eagerness “to pontificate”. This provides background to understand the nature of different crimes and its trials and punishment based on different social, cultural, religious and moral patterns. The study of crime in 19th century Britain consists of a number of different crimes like, killings, sexual offence, theft, treason and a number of different crimes, increased during this period. There were various unrecorded offences, as Emsley highlighted “the 'dark figure' of unreported offences”. There are also problem with the recorded offences, which have different statistics available from a number of resources. One of the main source, which provides detailed information about the crime in 19th century Britain are provided by the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. It is a published account of the historical record of the crimes in Britain and different information about the trials and proceedings.” First published in 1674, they quickly became a regular periodical, with editions published eight times a year following each session of the court”. It provides detailed account of the offences and related other criminal records in the history of Britain. Killing is the capital punishment and it is further divided in different categories in order to identify the nature of crime and its punishment. The case of Florance McCarthy and Dennis McCarthy, April 1826, presents example of the procedure that followed in the trial at Old Baileys for the case of killings and how the judgment is based on the basis of crime from different classification of killings.

Discussion

Old Bailey provides detailed accounts of the offences committed in Britain during 19th century. Old Bailey was the central criminal court for the City of London and the County of Middlesex, where all the trial for the criminal offences took place. One most important aspect about the offences is that, most of the crimes were considered as punishable by death, such as felony. This was the reason that there were more innocent people, killed in death penalty and after their deaths they proved wrongly convicted. For example trial of Robert Green, Henry Berry and Lawrence Hill were wrongly convicted for the murder of Sir Edmond-bury Godfrey.

During 19th century there were more statutes and amendments for the improvement of legislative system. It also involves various new punishments for different offences. There were different punishments, even with the slightest change in the nature of crime. There were also changes in the proceedings and definitions of offences and other related matters. These changes are very clear from the comparative study of 18th and 19th century definitions.

Old Bailey provides detailed information about the trail and proceedings of different offences like Breaking the Peace, Damage to Property, Deception, Killing, Offences Against the King (Queen), Sexual Offences, Theft, Theft with Violence and a number of different other offences.One of the capital crime was killing which was always considered as serious ...