Even by the imposing standards of the Research Excellence Framework, the criminal justice historians at Oxford Brookes are an impressive bunch. The co-editors of this volume have already published several monographs and essay collections, and they each have twenty or more articles and chapters to their credit. They also have three more essay collections in the pipeline. When do they sleep?
The range of this collection is wider even than the title implies. It consists largely of discrete and detailed case studies. Most of them also consider the strengths and weaknesses of the relevant source material, much of which has only become more readily accessible in our era of digitization. Five authors provide case histories of individual British criminals, three examine contested police practices in nineteenth-century England and France, and six more afford us interesting new glimpses into the character of prison discipline in England and the United States.
David Nash reviews various accounts of the execution of Scotsman Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy in 1697, showing how different generations of writers, scholars, and artists deployed that event to purposes which speak to their own times. Adrian Ager details the confinement of a seventeen-year-old girl in one of the infamous Lock Hospitals established under the Contagious Diseases Acts, considering in turn the policing practices that put her there, the uses to which opponents of the Contagious Diseases Acts turned her case, and the surprising degree of compassion shown to her and others—despite their readily understandable acts of defiance—by one of the hospital matrons. Far less deserving of sympathy, by any standard, was Kate Webster, who in 1879 strangled her wealthy mistress, cut up her corpse, and disposed of the parts at various locations in and around Richmond. As Anne-Marie Kilday demonstrates, Webster commanded horrified attention: first in the contemporary newspaper press, then for six decades thereafter as a central exhibit in Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. Indeed, she commanded attention again as recently as 2010, when the skull of her victim was at last uncovered … in the backyard of Sir David Attenborough's home (140)!
Moving into the twentieth century, Katherine Watson shows how the crime passionel crossed the Channel in 1907, when a pregnant Frenchwoman named Emilie Foucault, abandoned by her younger lover for a more socially appropriate match, pursued him to a London hotel and threw vitriol (concentrated sulfuric acid) in his face, disfiguring him for life. As Watson demonstrates, Old Bailey juries had long treated similar cases with a degree of indulgence, frequently imposing only light sentences upon them. On this occasion, the victim's long pattern of neglect seemed so despicable—so closely did it conform to contemporary tropes of melodramatic villainy—that Foucault was entirely acquitted after only fifteen minutes of deliberation. Four decades later, contemporary perceptions of gender, as well as the character of Americans (“overpaid, oversexed and over here”), were sufficiently powerful that, when an American GI named Gustav Hulten went AWOL and embarked on a robbery spree with an eighteenth-year-old burlesque hostess named Elizabeth Jones, culminating in the murder of a cab driver, Hulten was hanged whereas Jones had her death sentence commuted to nine years in prison. Clifford Williamson shows us that the mercy shown to Jones (for which she was distinctly ungrateful) was in fact characteristic of the era: only one in every ten women condemned for murder between 1900 and 1949 was hanged, compared with three in every five men (95). Yet Jones also benefited from the public's desire—particularly intense during a war for national survival—to believe that no teenaged girl, of however checkered a background, was capable being a fully cognizant and responsible actor in so awful a crime.
Three other contributors shed interesting new light on nineteenth-century policing. David J. Cox, our greatest living authority on the Bow Street Runners, traces the changing images of that famous proto-detective force from the newspapers of their own day to their many modern fictional incarnations. Rachael Griffin vividly evokes the care with which London's new Metropolitan Police, in enforcing unpopular laws against illicit liquor consumption and gambling during the 1840s, attempted to allay the ongoing fear that plainclothed officers might invade the rights of private property. And Anya Johansen deploys an impressively deep archive of public complaints against a single Parisian police commissaire of the belle époque to reveal how a transparently corrupt individual was sustained in high office by family connection.
Turning finally to imprisonment, Neil Davie uses both the published memoirs of Pentonville's senior prison chaplain of the 1840s and 1850s and his reports to parliament to reveal his surprising skepticism regarding the reformative value of strict separation during the first phases of that system. Two more chapters deploy the now-extensively digitized convict and prison registers to show how we can now trace the lives of individual offenders in considerable detail. Helen Rogers examines the lives of a series of juvenile offenders in Great Yarmouth during the 1840s. And Helen Johnston, Barry Godfrey, and Jo Turner trace the life history of Julia Hyland, an adolescent girl first caught up in the net of the “ticket of leave” system in 1868 and only released from it for the last time one year before her death twenty years later at the age of thirty-four. Vivien Miller concludes the volume with a detailed account of the memoirs of six people who did time in the chain gang system of the American South during the early to mid-twentieth century.
Not all of the contributors adhere to the volume's professed organizational framework—the discipline of “micro-study”—as rigorously as do both the editors in their introduction and Sarah Wilson in her chapter on financial crime in the Victorian era. Given the many discrete pleasures of the individual case studies presented here, however, few readers will regret the absence of excessive theorization. Bring on the pleasures of thick description. Few people who derive pleasure, or even instruction, from a cockfight want to think too hard about it.
