Book Review: Print culture, crime and justice in 18th-century London

• Author: Joshua B. Hill
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567717743302
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

justice perspective, these two reminders are key. Criminologists, practitioners, and policy makers

should keep in mind these two reminders in their daily actions and decisions. As a field, criminology

needs to avoid the greater good rhetoric as it tends to focus on providing pleasures to the majorities

and pains to disadvantaged people.

ORCID iD

Daniela Barberi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8427-4134

Ward, R. M. (2016).

Print culture, crime and justice in 18th-century London.

New York, NY: Bloomsbury. 315 pp. $30.99, ISBN 978-1-14742-7643-6.

Reviewed by: Joshua B. Hill, The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567717743302

The history of criminal justice has provided rich material, leading not only to our understanding of

the development of the current model of criminal justice but also shedding light on the system’s

operation today. Historical scholarship provides a tremendous amount of fodder from topics as far-

flung as development of prison regulations regarding emergencies to the development of the lie

detector. Despite this, however, textbooks examining elements important to criminal justice rarely

address both the limitations of their own approach while making sure to add something substantial to

our understanding of a system’s operation in both its contemporary context and the modern era.

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London by Richard M. Ward (part of Blooms-

bury’s History of Crime, Deviance and Punishment series) is a unique text in that it both addresses

the context of the development of print technology and the changing demographics of readerships in

England in the 18th century and also faces head-on the difficulties in such a project, while still

maintaining an essential connection to modern understandings of crime and justice. Specifically,

while the book’s focus is a narrow period of time, between 1747 and 1755, the broader context in

which print media developed over that period – and the years just preceding it – raises incredibly

interesting questions for scholars today. For instance, the relationship between the return of sol-

diers—or the anticipation of their return—and media coverage of crime is a topic that remains

important today for scholars of crime and media.

Structurally, the book is broken into six chapters. The first chapter sets the scene regarding why

understanding this period is important and discussing important changes that occurred leading up to

the crime wave of 1747–1755. The second chapter situates the readings of crime within their

historical context—helping readers to understand how contemporaries of the texts examined would

have read them and demonstrating why understanding the publications dealing with crime in print is

important, as they shaped contemporary perspectives of crime. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters

examine how the topics of prosecution, policing, and corrections, respectively, were treated in the

print literature of the period, and the sixth and final chapter provides an excellent summary of the

proceeding chapters, tying them to the modern context through important impacts of the process of

how print media developed in relation to crime coverage during that period of history.

The book has several significant strengths worth mentioning. First, the breadth of the book’s

coverage is impressive. While (primarily) examining a relatively short historical period—8 years—

the scope of the literature examined is significant. The book uses everything from individual diaries

to official records of execution to weave together a compelling picture of why print media and the

352 International Criminal Justice Review 31(3)