In Armed with Sword and Scales: Law, Culture, and Local Courtrooms in London, 1860–1913, Sascha Auerbach presents what his previous scholarship has promised: the first full-scale study of the workings of London's police courts in the later Victorian and Edwardian years. He examines the police courts, of which there were thirteen by 1885, presided over by twenty-three salaried magistrates, from a number of vantage points: the law they dispensed, the social and moral functions they served, the agency they allowed participants in legal proceedings, and the way their work was communicated to the public in “Police Intelligence” columns in the local press. It is a subject overdue for systematic attention. Through charges brought by the police or through summonses brought by private individuals or agents of the London School Board, police courts adjudicated a large and increasing number of larcenies, interpersonal violence, violations of the Metropolitan Police Acts, and infractions of municipal and state regulations. In 1899, the London police courts processed 94,000 private summonses, indicating a vast increase of voluntary courtroom usage. Auerbach draws upon an array of sources, including press reports and magistrates’ memoirs, to which he adds a database of 10,000 entries from police-court minutes and registers between 1882 and 1915. Anyone who has tried to decipher the cryptic jottings of magistrates and clerks of the court in these minutes and registers will acknowledge the hard labor that has gone into the creation of this database. It is a crucial addition, which Auerbach employs to good effect, allowing a clearer comparison to be drawn between courtroom portrayal and courtroom practice. It becomes evident that press stories were profoundly unrepresentative of the types of cases that fetched up in the courts and of the character of courtroom interactions. Press reports inclined to the zany or controversial case, accepted police evidence as the uncontested facts of the case, and ignored the flexibility of police-court practice and the agency of individuals within it, which Auerbach is at pains to retrieve.

The objective of the London police courts was established at their inception in the late eighteenth century. Magistrates like Sir John Fielding sought to adjudicate cases in tune with the moral expectations and social circumstances of their audience. They believed the working poor possessed a sense of justice that, if harnessed, could secure the courts’ legitimacy in the eyes of their clientele. Magistrates were singing from the same hymn sheet in the 1890s in memoirs that claimed firsthand knowledge of the social dynamics of their districts (a claim Auerbach gently disputes, in light of the movement of magistrates from court to court, and the gulf in social standing between justices and the judged). This claim meant that magistrates were unwilling to undermine their self-constructed image as guardians of the poor by rigidly enforcing regulations of uncertain legitimacy. Stipendiaries were sympathetic to parents who used their children for domestic or waged labor, and were prepared to hold at bay school board agents who invariably sought summonses against parents for their children's truancy. Plaintiffs and defendants also challenged the right of magistrates, police, or other state agents to govern their lives. Women in particular co-opted these legal structures. They used the courts to combat marital violence, compel husbands to fulfill their financial obligations, and obtain the cash support that would allow them to leave a troubled marriage. As Auerbach concludes, Cecil Chapman's 1925 memoir, A Poor Man's Court of Justice, would have been as appropriately entitled, “A Poor Woman's Court of Justice.”

The text is largely free of mistakes, though in a footnote I am credited with having edited Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, while in the bibliography, Peter Bailey is correctly identified as editor; and V. A. C. Gatrell is given the credit for not only The Hanging Tree (1994) but also for Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged (1991). The introductory section of the book is a daunting read. Before we learn much about the police courts, we are thrown into a discussion of how their history casts light on larger debates in British history, such as the relationship between the state and the individual, or the integration of the courts with working-class life, or the role of the courts in class and gender dynamics. It is a heady start and feels premature. In addition, large swathes of text are statement sans illustration. At the same time, Auerbach shows how revealing a specific case can be. In October 1848, Bridget Donovan applied at Clerkenwell police court for a warrant to arrest her adversary. When this was refused, she hurled a brick at the magistrate. Appearing at Worship Street police court on a charge of assault, Donovan declared that she threw the brick at the stipendiary “because he would not give me law and justice” (107). This illuminating example of the way that individuals went to the police court to demand accommodation is a rare human touch in an otherwise bloodless account.

Armed with Sword and Scales will become renowned, above all, for its compelling replacement of the notion of a “policeman-state” by that of a “court-going community” (22). The police court, Auerbach argues, was much more than a tool to coerce the lower ranks into obedience. The working poor in large numbers were willing to summon constables for aid, especially in assault cases, and to use private summonses to defend their own vision of justice. Likewise, magistrates were willing to mitigate, not to say challenge, the intrusive presence of the constabulary in poor communities. Auerbach finds in the historical record little to validate an unrelievedly coercive interpretation of the police courts, and much to demonstrate the role of individual agency and the creative use of the law and its machinery.