The London Journal

Volume 30 No.1 2005

EDITORIAL

It is a great moment to be a historian of London. Not very long ago, even professional historians were discouraged from researching many aspects of non-elite London life by the sheer scale and diversity of the documents kept in London's archives. As a result of funding provided by the New Opportunities Fund (NOF), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Paul Mellon Foundation and a host of other organizations, documents which once sat disregarded and inaccessible to most people in the secure vaults of our archives are increasingly available at a few clicks of a mouse. The internet is turning a considerable proportion of this archive into an everyday resource consulted not just by scholars, but by family and local historians, journalists and the simply curious. The eight hundred printed and manuscript maps of London that form the Crace Collection have been posted by the British Library (www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/crace); while Patrick Mannix and Motco have made a further set of high quality scans of important maps available in an easily searchable format (www.motco.com). Some twenty thousand images are now available on the Guildhall Library's Collage site (http://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk), while the Centre for Metropolitan History's London's Past Online (www.history.ac.uk/cmh/lpol) provides an important bibliographical resource. British History Online now makes available an important collection of published primary sources, many of which are London related (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/), while Rictor Norton's Gay History and Literature site grows each year, giving a new audience access to an impressively wide range of materials (www.infopt.demon.co.uk/gayhist.htm). For the nineteenth century, the London School of Economics' Charles Booth Archive Online (http://both.lse.ac.uk) brings the back streets and rookeries of London to life. In combination with a plethora of other sites too numerous to name, these new resources are transforming old words and images into the bits and bytes of the everyday present. The largest and perhaps most accessible of these sites is the Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org). This issue of the London Journal is dedicated to articles which use and analyse the newly searchable Proceedings and, in the process, explore the possibilities which this new world of online resources has helped to create.

The Old Bailey Proceedings record the felony trials held at the Old Bailey, or London Sessions House, between 1674 and 1834. The Proceedings were published eight times a year, and contain, in varying levels of detail, transcripts of over one hundred thousand trials for crimes committed in the City of London and County of Middlesex. Totalling some twenty-five million words, these trial reports have long been one of the most voluminous, intractable and yet enticing collections of documents of London's varied history, extensively consulted by historians and writers including M. Dorothy George, Peter Linebaugh, Roy Porter and Peter Ackroyd. Thanks to funding from NOF and the AHRC, and the technical expertise and sheer hard work of the Higher Education Digitisation Service at the University of Hertfordshire and the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, a full edition of these transcripts is now freely available online, together with supporting documents and commentary.

The articles collected together in this edition of the London Journal derive from a conference at the University of Hertfordshire in the summer of 2004 (Tales from the Old Bailey: Writing a New History from Below, reported in the London Journal, 29 no. 2, 2004, 54-56) held to mark the completion of the digitisation project. The four articles included here reflect some of the best work presented at the conference, and demonstrate some of the ways in which newly accessible internet sources will allow the history of London to be rewritten. They show how the ability to sift millions of words for specific details makes it possible to rapidly assemble a wealth of relevant information about a wide range of previously difficult to research topics. In the process, these articles question several conventional truisms about Georgian London. The articles by David Turner and Jennine Hurl-Eamon use the Proceedings to challenge two components of the received wisdom that have long haunted the work of urban historians. By unpicking the history of bigamy as detailed in the Proceedings, Turner questions the way historians have used the supposed existence of an urban anomie in this largest of European cities as a measure of London's 'modernity'. Hurl-Eamon turns our vision of the family lives of soldiers and sailors on its head - replacing an all too easy condemnation of the behaviour of a class of men and women (but particularly men) with a humane understanding of their motivations and a more positive assessment of their emotional lives.

Using a similar methodology, Rictor Norton assesses what we can learn from the Proceedings about the vibrant world of homosexuality in Georgian London. But perhaps because this is an aspect of the Proceedings which has already been extensively researched (not least by Norton himself), he adopts a more polemical approach, arguing that the Proceedings need to be read against the grain. Essentially, he pleads for a different kind of history - a history of gay London that places the behaviour of individuals (rather than homophobic persecution) at the heart of our understanding of molly culture. Similarly, Andrea McKenzie's article is a reminder of the need for detailed source criticism. By comparing the Proceedings with the related and contemporary Ordinary's Accounts, she provides insight into how these apparently consistent documents changed over time, and why. She reminds us that the Proceedings are just one of the many distinct genres of printed literature about London life which proliferated with the rapid expansion of print culture from the late seventeenth century. She shows us what this literature, when used with an ear cocked for narrative forms and the sources of language, can tell us, not just about the day-to-day activities of London life, but also the mental worlds of both rich and poor.

Collectively, these articles warn of the dangers and promise the joys of a new internet history. They suggest a few of the varied impacts that the new world of democratic and accessible information will have on our understanding of the everyday life of Europe's first million-person city. They indicate that many of the all too easy assumptions that underpin our image of the past will be stripped away by a wind of newly accessible information. The platitudes that describe the working lives and slums of Georgian London, that give voice to the dystopian visions of plebeian and irregular London, will not survive the detailed knowledge that online resources allow.

ABSTRACTS

This article uses evidence from the Old Bailey Proceedings to re-assess eighteenth-century London's reputation as a 'magnet for bigamists'. Examining the changing pattern of indictments and the motives of prosecutors, it questions current historical views on bigamy that argue that it was both a widespread social phenomenon and a popularly tolerated form of remarriage in a society where divorce was restricted to the social elite. It demonstrates that bigamy was increasingly perceived as a crime of male sexual exploitation as the eighteenth century progressed. Analysing in detail the stories told by prosecutors, witnesses and defendants, it explores how motives were ascribed to bigamists and how plural marriages were justified. It uncovers a complex array of explanations for bigamy from economic survival to conscientious choice, and in the process provides a revealing insight into the marital lives of London's non-elite.

The Old Bailey Proceedings can reveal far more than the bigamy and violence typically understood to be a prominent feature of soldiers' and sailors' marriages. This article looks at a wide variety of eighteenth-century criminal cases to offer a much broader picture of military marriage. It is clear that many men in the army defied rules which forbade marriage to all but a minority of soldiers and that numerous soldiers used their identities as husbands and fathers to establish character and gain credibility in the courts. Peripheral testimony presents images of soldiers and sailors treating their female companions with chivalry and respect. While frequent separation and low or unreliable pay clearly placed additional strain on military couples and contributed to drunkenness, infidelity and domestic abuse, the distinctive circumstances of military employment simultaneously engendered survival strategies based upon mutual affection and cooperation.

Trials for sodomitical offences at the Old Bailey provide evidence not only for a gay subculture and a collective gay identity in the 'molly houses' of eighteenth-century London, but also for a personal homosexual identity among 'sodomites' and 'indorsers' whose activity seems limited mainly to cruising grounds and bog-houses. This article argues that although homosexual prosecutions appear to focus primarily upon a sexual act, they can be used to understand an underlying sexual orientation. By exploring the impediments to recovering gay history from criminal records - the distortions caused by a narrow focus on strictly jurisprudential issues, such as the misrepresentation of consenting relations as 'criminal assault' or the legalistic discourse of 'sodomy', a narrow sexological focus on strictly sexual behaviour, such as 'active'/'passive' 'roles', and doctrinaire claims about 'the homosexual' not being 'constructed' until modern times - this article lays the foundation for a history of being gay in eighteenth-century London. It argues that a precise focus on the broader sociocultural content of trials, newspaper reports and satires can uncover a history of recognisably gay men.

ANDREA MCKENZIE, From True Confessions to True Reporting? The Decline and Fall of the Ordinary's Account (pp. 55–70)

The fact that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Newgate chaplains have laboured under an almost universally bad press has tended to obscure the larger cultural purchase of the Ordinary's Account of the confessions and speeches of the malefactors executed at Tyburn. Given the contemporary investment in the political and metaphysical significance of last dying words, the early Account presented more compelling truth claims than its erstwhile sister publication, the Old Bailey Proceedings. However, the later eighteenth century would witness the elevation of the Proceedings to the status of an official trial record and the decline and disappearance of the Account as a regular serial publication. This article charts the eclipse of the confessional genre by a more 'factual' discourse of reportage. In the process it explores the transformation of the older conception of the condemned as a 'monument of grace' and an 'Everyman' qualified to preach to the general public into a 'poor unhappy wretch' lacing both the rational and moral faculties of his readers.

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