From 1674 to 1834, The Proceedings on the … Gaol Delivery of Newgate reported all the trials at the Old Bailey, the major criminal court for London and Middlesex. During the past three decades, scholars have rediscovered the Proceedings and used them to analyze crime, criminal law, and the criminal courts. Like much such recent work, Tales from the Hanging Court is founded on the Proceedings. Unlike that work, Tales does not claim to be an analysis of crime or the criminal courts. Its aim, instead, is to present “the most colourful and revealing” eighteenth-century trials, “trials that allow the modern reader to feel the grit and humanity of life in eighteenth-century London” (xiv).

Nonetheless, Tales’ organization mirrors that of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century crime and criminal law, especially J. M. Beattie's Crime and the Courts (Princeton, NJ, 1986), the work that has defined this field. Tales is a selection of thirty-six trials from among the fifty thousand eighteenth-century trials in the Proceedings. Most of the book consists of narratives of these thirty-six trials, each narrative incorporating very lengthy excerpts from the Proceedings. The narratives are organized in chapters, and the foci of Tales’ chapters are the foci of the chapters in Beattie's book: criminal offenses, delivering the accused to trial, trial, and punishment. Each Tales’ chapter begins with a brief account of the chapter's topic, and each narrative of a trial is prefaced by the authors’ explanation of its relevance to the chapter's topic. It therefore seems that Tales is what it does not claim to be: a presentation of colorful trials structured so as to focus on crime, trial, and punishment in eighteenth-century London.

Perhaps it is because Tales emphasizes the colorful without defining its subject that it sometimes errs in presenting that subject. Take, for example, Tales’ choice of a trial to illustrate the changing role of barristers in felony trials. In law, defendants to a charge of felony were allowed counsel only to assist them with points of law. In fact, from the 1730s, judges at the Old Bailey were allowing barristers to conduct some cross-examinations, while continuing to limit their role in the trial. It is therefore odd that Tales presents, as its illustration of this expansion of the barristers’ role, the trial not of a felony but of a misdemeanor. Unlike defendants in felony, defendants in misdemeanor had always been free to make whatever use they wished of legal counsel at their trials. It is therefore quite possible that the trial selected to illustrate barristers’ changing role in felony trials may be irrelevant to, or even misrepresent, that phenomenon.

Tales’ emphasis on color to the detriment of emphasis on its subject also occasions more systemic problems. Tales does not inform its readers that historians have found its subject worth debating and that such debate has informed historians’ investigations over the past several decades. As a result, the introductions to its chapters can be a relatively banal summary of historians’ conclusions that lacks the acuity of their argument. For example, Tales’ chapter on thefts informs the reader that most thefts were caused by poverty but that others were caused by the temptations inherent to a consumer society, while others arose from disputes about rights to property, rights in dispute because of change in the forms of production. Unfortunately, readers are not informed that these quite different hypotheses arise from highly stimulating discussions about the relation between crime and society.

Such discussions, focused on their subject, have demanded that discussants confront tough questions: What is a crime? What treatment should be accorded accusations of crime and people so accused? What, if any, punishment is appropriate for those convicted of crime? Because Tales does not define its subject as the crimes, trials, and punishments it presents, its evaluation of the ethical and social dilemmas relevant to its subject can be confusing. Take, for example, Tales’ presentation of the relation of morality to theft. According to Tales, “it was generally the loose morals of the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of crime that did most to encourage theft” (157). By this, Tales means that many victims were drunk, while others had been robbed by the prostitutes whose services they sought. Do the authors therefore consider drunkenness to be immoral? Or was this the eighteenth century's view? Tales acknowledges that, to the eighteenth century, drunkenness was a “weakness,” and its discussion of a trial involving prostitution acknowledges that men's resort to prostitutes was considered much less immoral than women's resort to prostitution. It therefore seems that it is the authors who consider drunkenness and men's resort to prostitutes immoral. Yet it is also the authors who conclude the chapter on punishment by noting that the eighteenth century invented the punishment of imprisonment, a punishment that, according to the authors, neither reforms nor deters. Drunkenness as immoral and imprisonment as ineffective: this is an odd combination of attitudes, unless the authors think yet harsher punishments are requisite. Nonetheless, as their epilogue attests, they do not favor capital punishment. What then is their view of crime, trial, and punishment? And how does it affect their presentation of these subjects? Tales from the Hanging Court would have been a more engaging book if its authors had grappled with such questions.