In the last fifty years there has been an explosion of studies considering various aspects of crime and its punishment in eighteenth-century England. In addition to reflecting on and synthesizing much of this work, Richard Ward, through an analysis of one particularly active period (1744–57), has sought to demonstrate the relationship of crime with England's vibrant print culture as well as with its judicial and policing activities. In addition to an investigation of the massive secondary sources already referred to, Ward's bold project, resulting in Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London, entailed readings of criminal biographies of the period, the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts, the Old Bailey Proceedings, various works by contemporaries dealing with the problems of crime and punishment as well as the analysis of four of the major London newspapers of the day.

Ward notes that although some unfortunate Londoners learned about crime through direct experience as victims, most, he argues convincingly, got their information from print sources of various sorts. Ward's contribution to the ongoing analysis of the print culture of crime is in his analysis of four newspapers for his chosen years. The press offered a wide assortment of crime material, sometimes as reporting of crimes committed, sometimes through reflection on past deeds, sometimes as crime prevention. It also offered the growing justice system a sort of public bulletin board in which wanted criminals and thefts could be advertised. Readers of crime-related material however, were warned to read critically and judge for themselves between conflicting reports. Even the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts met with complaints about inadequacies and inaccuracies in its reports. Yet despite criticisms, Ward concludes that when contemporaries attempted to understand the causes of crime, these sorts of printed sources figured largely.

From these general comments, Ward proceeds to consider the mid-century period, which is his especial concern, and he examines the vast increase of reports of crime in this postwar period. I found particularly interesting his conclusion that in their impact on their readers, the effects of such reports in London's triweekly and weekly papers would have been greater than those experienced in reading the dailies. He also cautiously suggests that most papers, by what they chose to print or omit, inflated the sense that theft with violence was a severe problem and on the rise. This, of course, led to increased attention to policing, some involving attempts to enroll the readers of the press in assisting in the arrest and subsequent trials of robbers and thieves. Ward concludes by raising the possibility that “the changing nature of printed crime literature in the later eighteenth century might have as much been a cause (and not purely a symptom) of shifting public attitudes to crime” (220).

My favorite discussion in this book concerned the effects of print on the passage of the Murder Act of 1752. Ward not only explores some of the horrifying cases of murder that appeared in the press in the early 1750s, which were covered both in the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary of Newgate's Account as well as in the press, but also considers in some detail the public panic resulting from reports of several murders committed in the course of robberies, as well the two notable cases of parricides that gripped public attention. The inclusion of two prints by Hogarth that vividly illustrated the gruesome penalties for murder, and Ward's analysis of their effects, was a fit ending to a disturbing chapter.

Having found so much of interest here, I did however find three propositions unconvincing. The first was that the explosion of print was mainly accessible to those of the middling and upper classes. While it was true that these sorts could buy and read newspapers, it is significant that most pubs, inns, and coffee houses, open to all classes, also stocked these items, and that people often read aloud to their fellows. Furthermore Ward asserts that in the period he is investigating, “newspapers for the most part appeared in four pages per issue, with three columns of text per page” (20–21). Two of the popular dailies of the 1740s however, the Daily Gazetteer and the Daily Post, had only two pages through most of this decade. Finally, and this may not have been Ward's choice, the temporal perimeters of the title suggest that it includes all of the century; a more accurate title would have been limited to London in the mid-eighteenth century.

Despite these small imperfections, I hope Ward's fine volume will lead to larger comparisons, which he himself has suggested, with the crime waves of 1763 and 1814. And, as this book clearly shows, we still have much to learn about the culture of crime and the impact of print.