Summary Justice and Working-Class Marriage in England, 1870–1940

Abstract

England's criminal justice system has been depicted as evolving from a preindustrial form in which wide judicial discretion served to legitimate the social order, to a new form where the need to impose industrial discipline on an increasingly urbanized work force produced less harsh but more systematic punishments. According to this vision, the wheels of Victorian justice ground both more gently and more intrusively than they had a century before, since along with the abolition of many capital crimes and the diminishing resort to incarceration went an intensified examination of private lives. As Jennifer Davis has made clear, however, historians of crime often underestimate the degree of continuity between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century law enforcement, particularly at the local level. Significantly, both eighteenth-century justices of the peace and nineteenth-century police court magistrates enjoyed great latitude in their dealings with the poor people who appeared before them. Nowhere is the highly personal and unsystematic nature of modern summary justice more strikingly revealed than in the police court's adjudication of disputes between husbands and wives.