Interview with the Authors

Tim Hitchcock and Bob Shoemaker

What sparked your interest in the Old Bailey Proceedings?

Tim: My interest in the Proceedings comes from the tiny details that spring from every page. I can think of no other source that gives us quite the same access to the past, or provides the same drama. It is also a source that privileges the poor and the ordinary.

Bob: I first encountered the Proceedings while conducting my research on the London ‘mob’. The witness statements provided wonderful details concerning the events surrounding riots, and contained many surprises. This kind of narrative detail about the lives of ordinary people is otherwise very hard to find for the eighteenth-century.

What prompted you to write Tales from the Hanging Court?

Tim: After we put the Proceedings online it became increasingly clear that our interest corresponded with a real popular thirst for material of this kind. Tales from the Hanging Court was our attempt to marry an essentially academic understanding of the history of London to the narrative power of the trial reports in order to create something that everyone could enjoy.

Bob: The online edition of the Proceedings is a huge resource (and we are very proud of it) but its size can be daunting. People kept asking us about our favorite trials and we realized there was an appetite for a book that contained some of the ‘greatest hits’ in the Proceedings. We also realised that the trial stories become even more compelling when they were combined with other related source materials to tell a more complete story.

What were the challenges in bringing the content to life?

Tim: We both write academic history, which tends to privilege analysis over drama and abstract ideas over personal experience. Using the trial reports gives each chapter a natural narrative, but the life of the book comes from the inclusion of strong personalities and the details of everyday life. Knowing which details to include, and how strongly to represent the feelings and emotions of men and women long dead, was a constant challenge.

What’s your favourite court case from the proceedings and why?

Bob: There are so many to choose from! I really enjoyed writing ‘Exposed on the Pillory’ because it involved this barbaric punishment, but also highwaymen, a corrupt informer, and the crowd, whose lives all crossed in this tragic story.

Tim: I love ‘The Great Escape’, which is drawn from seventeen different trials. It is the story of 48 men, sentenced to transportation to North America, who mutinied on the ship and escape onto the coast of Kent. It brings out beautifully the fear of an 18th century person setting out on a sea voyage, and brings to life a set of events that has been almost totally forgotten.

What were the main challenges in writing the book?

Tim: Choosing the trials was perhaps the most difficult challenge. There are 57,000 recorded in the Proceedings, and we could only discuss a few dozen. Beyond this, getting the balance right between eighteenth-century prose and a modern accessible style was a constant conundrum. We were anxious to let the victims and perpetrators of crime speak for themselves, but eighteenth-century writing and speaking is not always easy. Sometimes it was necessary to paraphrase and reword, where we would have preferred to present the evidence in a more unvarnished style.

Bob: The original trial reports were often incomplete or repetitive, requiring careful editing. We sought to try and retain the drama and historical authenticity of the original trial texts while making the stories as compelling to the twenty-first century reader as they were to their more knowing eighteenth-century counterparts.

What next?

Tim: We are already well begun on two projects to extend the Old Bailey Proceedings Online. The first of these will post on the Internet 70 million words of nineteenth-century trial Proceedings taking the electronic edition up to 1913. We are also digitising a large proportion of the manuscript archive of eighteenth-century London, as a way of giving depth and background to the trials. We hope in time to be able to trace individuals and through hospital parish records, through the prisons and tax records, as a way of creating a fuller knowledge of the lives of working Londoners. We are embarked on creating a new history from below. We very much hope that part of this will include writing a successor to Tales from the Hanging Court.