Blog Post #1

For the first blog post assignment, I have looked at a few sites regarding crime in London. The website range from the 1670s to the 1920s. Crime proceedings and court documents are some of the best resources to look into the lives of ordinary people in the early modern period. Documents, reports, newspapers, and family histories could feature members of the elite and upper-class. But for regular members of society and the lower classes, servants, merchants etc., court documents are the only way to see what life was like for them. The four sites that I am comparing were worked on by numerous researchers, directors, professors, students, museums and many more. The four sites are all intricately connected and share different types of data useful for a multitude of research topics. Locating London’s Past, London Lives, Digital Panopticon, and The Old Bailey are the four sites I will be looking at for this assignment.

I am starting with Locating London’s Past because the data from this site comes from both The Old Bailey and London Lives. The Directors of Locating London’s Past are Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker and Dr. Matthew Davies. The main focus of this website is John Rocque’s 1746 map of London which the Museum of London Archaeology geo-referenced. Then, The Old Bailey Online and London Lives added datasets of about 1.7 million tagged places and names to the map. This is important for researchers because they can narrow down where a crime occurred and also where the defendant lived and find out if there are any significant trends in the data. This website is an excellent example of what Lara Putnam terms “fishing,” meaning it is a good place to look for the information you don’t know is there yet. One can browse through the data points and data to see if there is anything worthwhile to further a research topic (Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” 381).

The website is also easy to use for any age group who wants to study trends in crime. To find information on crimes at the Old Bailey, choose the Old Bailey dataset (also worked on by Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker). It will then prompt you to select specific data depending on what you are specifically looking for. Once you have inputted your data, all the trial accounts from the Old Bailey show up on the map. You can then click on the red pins to see what happened there. The only downside to this website that I found is that it is really easy to lose your place whether you are looking at the list of trials or the map if you are not keeping track of the street names and people involved. The trial accounts from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey usually only give information on the crime itself, the verdict, the punishment, and who was involved. Some longer trials give more information and insight into why the crime occurred and more social, economic, political background. However, some of the trials are shorter and do not give as much information other than the crime, the verdict and the punishment. 

The London Lives digital archive is fascinating because it looks very similar to the Old Bailey Online. Still, this site gives additional information on the lives of the people who committed crimes, not just about the crimes themselves. Directors of this site are also Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker. This digital archive has made it possible to focus on individuals. Many of the sources from this site came from the Old Bailey Online, but it also looks at London parishes which kept very detailed records of charity work, workhouses, marriages, and deaths. The archive also looks at hospital admission and discharge registers. Because London Lives looks at individual people, it is easier to browse through the website to find something of interest. In contrast, with Locating London, I found it harder to browse because I couldn’t keep track of where I had already looked on the map and list. Once you have located a name and case that looks interesting, the archive gives information on the individual’s early life, what their trial was about, and his execution. The archive also includes more personal information such as relationships the defendant had, the case of John Gower; it came out in his wife’s murder trial that he wanted to divorce her. He told the landlady that she had moved to another address to cover her disappearance. The court also found that he had married a second woman while his first wife was still alive. The Old Bailey presents much of the same information, but it is in the form of a primary source, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand the whole story because of how it is written. London Lives breaks down the information in a way that can make sense to any reader, and then they have the primary source linked so that researchers can reference the actual document. 

Lastly, the Digital Panopticon, also directed by Robert Shoemaker and Tim Hitchcock, takes a different approach from Locating London, London Lives and the Old Bailey, and instead focuses on London Convicts in Britain and Australia. However, similar to London Lives, Panopticon also focuses on the more individualized aspect of the trials and breaks down the lives of the convicts. Transportation became very popular in the eighteenth century as a form of punishment for certain crimes. The hope was that transportation, rather than execution, branding, etc., would lead to the reformation of the offender. It would deter criminals from committing crimes and remove criminals from society. 

These websites have different uses depending on the type of research being conducted. Locating London is good at looking at trends in specific crime categories, what punishments were most used, crimes committed by males vs. crimes committed by females. London Lives and Digital Panopticon are good websites to investigate a specific person, what their early life was like, what socio-economic factors led to a life of crime, and what happened after their sentencing.