Sir John Fielding and the Problem of Criminal Investigation in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

Eighteenth-Century England witnessed an extraordinary transformation in the capacity to disseminate information. Improvements in communications, particularly the turnpike roads and the postal service, together with the multiplication of printing presses and newspapers, underpinned what has been described as an ‘information explosion’. The changes which these developments wrought in the political and commercial life of the nation are increasingly familiar to historians. Their impact on eighteenth-century crime and policing is less so.