15. Haunting Evidence: Quoting the Prisoner in 19th Century Old Bailey Trial Discourse. The Defences of Cooper (1842) and McNaughten (1843)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the representation of quoted speech in a corpus of Old Bailey trials from Victorian London, with detailed examination of two of them: Cooper (1842) and McNaughten (1843). These trials involve an insanity defence. As the trials were recorded by hand, they entail scribal choices about whether to record and how to represent quotation, making choices about direct and indirect quotation pragmatically interesting, since the illocutionary force of the recorded utterances is selected as important by the scribe. My corpus, the Monomania Corpus, is collected from the larger Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 [available online: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/], which contains 197,745 criminal trials over more than two centuries. Criminal trial hearings are communicative events which are densely intertextually structured. Prior questioning of witnesses and records of what they say are extensively quoted, requoted, and recontextualized in the course of the trial and quotation is used to demonstrate the defendant's criminal liability or his incapacity to commit a criminal offence. The establishment of a binding legal reality crucially hinges on the differential weights of prosecution and defence evidence, so the selective power of quotation is an important resource for defending the prisoner. In the case of Cooper, the prosecution’s use of direct and indirect quotation is incriminating for the defendant and the witnesses seem well ‘rehearsed’ in supporting the prosecution case, whereas the defence picture, drawn out through family members, presents the defendant’s insane utterances from childhood to early manhood, with the miserable, poor, young man being seen as easy prey by a constabulary looking for results. In McNaughten’s case, we see the two institutions of the law and medicine fighting over culpability and insanity, as the defence quotes from medical interviews with the accused. The analysis shows the powerful use of hypothetical quotation and establishes a new category of quotation: metatalk for suppressing quotation. The “haunting evidence” (Eigen 1995: 160) of prisoner testimony is given voice through the powerful alliance of advocate and witness (lay, and medical), as they tell the court, through the prisoner’s words, what he is incapable of putting together himself. The prisoner is prosecuted in his own words. What he says on arrest, in gaol, and before the magistrate, is recorded and replayed to self-incriminate, as he is ventriloquized by the prosecution, and it is therefore a masterful adversarial reversal to defend with the same voice, but from a different perspective.