From Sessions to Newspaper? Criminal Trial Reporting, the Nature of Crime, and the London Press, 1770–1800

Abstract

During the last three decades of the eighteenth century, the Old Bailey Proceedings (or Sessions Paper) declined and collapsed as a viable publishing enterprise. The writer-publishers of the Proceedings attributed that collapse to a dramatic expansion in newspaper reporting of trials at the Old Bailey. This article surveys the scale and substance of London newspaper reporting of Old Bailey trials from 1770 to 1800. It concludes that, although there was indeed an enormous increase in the number of Old Bailey cases reported in the newspapers, nonetheless, the extent of newspaper reporting was neither sufficiently complete nor ideologically consistent enough to provide the sole and entire explanation for the collapse in public favour suffered by the Proceedings after 1770. Rather, it is suggested, both the disappearing audience for the Sessions Paper and the new patterns of newspaper reporting suggest a distinctive shift in the readership of mainstream, respectable literature of crime — a trend towards viewing crime, more and more, as the product of a frightening and distinctively 'criminal' class of persons, rather than a pattern of behaviour to which anyone might be susceptible.