English 525: Crime and Punishment
WQ 2008
Tom Lockwood

Representations of crime and criminals in eighteenth-century Britain. We will be reading both literary and nonliterary sources, including Moll Flanders, The Beggar’s Opera, Jonathan Wild, Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, Crabbe’s “Peter Grimes”; criminal biographies like those of the robber and escape artist Jack Sheppard, “dying speeches” hawked below the gallows but printed before the hanging, “criminal conversation” trial pamphlets dishing every lurid detail of posh adultery lawsuits; and the vivid records of proceedings against the non-posh characters of the London criminal underclass, petty thieves, wife-beaters, prostitutes, con gamers, in the sessions papers of the Old Bailey, now fully accessible in a weirdly involving edition online. Class and gender are obvious points of interest, and for the critical discourse on this subject we will survey some crucial work from the group of traditional Marxist social historians associated with the University of Warwick in the 60s and 70s, including E.P. Thompson’s classic Whigs and Hunters, on state power and plebeian resistance, as well as more recent scholarship. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish will also feature, and we will have a chance to see how his high-flying representation of criminal justice stands up against the raw evidence of the system at work on the ground in the Old Bailey sessions papers and other primary sources. Should be fun.