The problems posed and issues raised by perjury in the administration of justice have a long history. In the eighteenth century, of primary concern was the deliberate lying under oath by “thief-takers” motivated by the prospect of financial gain in the form of government rewards for criminal convictions. Lies of a very different kind—“pious perjury”—were also common during the age of the Bloody Code: although the death penalty applied to the majority of criminal offenses, jurors balanced truth against justice in their decision making, downcharging or delivering partial verdicts in order to spare convicts from the noose. In Engines of Truth, Wendie Schneider turns her attention to a less-studied period, the second half of the nineteenth century, and shifts the focus to different categories of potential liars: interested parties in civil trials, allowed to testify under oath from 1851 (1846 in the County Courts), and defendants in criminal trials, who were granted the same privilege under the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898. Within this period she explores strategies for producing truth and controlling the veracity of testimony in the courtroom, which included perjury prosecutions but also, and ultimately more importantly, cross-examination. Of the various “engines of truth” experimented with, Schneider argues, cross-examination was eventually accepted as the most effective means of combating testimonial duplicity.

This study is broad in scope and falls into two parts. In the first, Schneider examines the common-law trial in Britain, sampling perjury prosecutions in England and Wales between 1835 and 1900 and examining press coverage of controversies sparked by the practice of cross-examination. But this is a cultural as well as a legal study, and in the second half of the book she explores administrative attempts to control the testimony of persons thought predisposed to lie: Indians and women. Drawing on colonial records in the India Office Library, Chapter 3 thus describes the efforts of the British in India to deal with a native population it believed to be naturally duplicitous, “inherently mendacious” (105), and “habituated to perjury by centuries of despotic government” (107). Schneider also argues that in India the stakes were higher: “forensic deceit was a question of order as much as it was of law” (104). Shame sanctions were experimented with as a means to combat what was perceived as habitual lying. This chapter also considers the legal complexities encountered by the British in their attempts to redefine the law of perjury to correspond to common law practice while ostensibly, in Bengal, administering Islamic law. They had as well to accommodate regional disparities in administration throughout the Indian subcontinent. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the 1872 Indian Evidence Act, a statute inspired in part by a desire to provide guidelines for “legally unsophisticated” colonial judges (141) but which was also seen by James Fitzjames Stephen and others as something of a blueprint for redefining perjury at home.

Chapter 4 returns to Britain to examine the Divorce Court instituted in 1857, and specifically, to examine the role of the Queen's Proctor, a Victorian law officer charged with the responsibility of discovering deceit in divorce cases, whose inquisitorial office constituted yet another experiment in producing witness veracity. The chapter looks at the first 24 years of the office, combining archival records and newspaper coverage of unreported cases. Like the British government's attempts to prevent lying in Indian courts, the office of the Queen's Proctor also failed as an “engine of truth”; neither succeeded in preventing wilful perjury. But the discussion such attempts provoked did contribute to the 1898 Criminal Evidence Act. By the end of the nineteenth century, Schneider argues, legislators had abandoned attempts to eradicate perjury from the courtroom, instead pinning their hopes on the ability of cross-examination to reveal its presence. Safeguarding “respectable” persons had also assumed primacy, and allowing criminal defendants to testify under oath, so that they could refute scandalous accusations such as those levelled at clergyman Henry Hatch in 1860, was now deemed essential to the discovery of the truth.

Although the decision to allow defendants to be sworn was new, the recognition that cross-examination was essential to the revelation of truth in the courtroom turns the historical wheel back a century, and Schneider might have referenced the work of J.M. Beattie, whose “Scales of Justice” (published in this journal) is, surprisingly, not cited in her coverage of eighteenth-century precedents. It was, after all, the “infamous practitioners” at the Old Bailey who pioneered the technique of cross-examination. They may not have been gentleman, or perceived as such, but their unique ability to uncover perjury is generally believed to be one of the reasons why the presence of defense counsel was permitted in practice at least 100 years before it was legally sanctioned by the Prisoners’ Counsel Act of 1836. That is, after experimenting with other potential means of eradicating mendacity, the authorities reverted to a long-established remedy.