Sex, the law and the press in Georgian London

A taste for salacious gossip is nothing new. It's a stereotype, but true, that Georgian London was a bawdy place and had no shortage of scandal to go round. The spreading of scandalous stories was helped by the 18th century explosion in the newspaper trade. In 1770, London had 5 daily papers; by the 1780s …

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Criminal (in)justice in 18th-century England

Because the popular representation of the 18th century is intimately bound up with the Enlightenment, many tend to think of it as a time when society was inexorably moving towards a golden rational future and climbing out of the dark, superstitious seventeenth century/medieval era/Dark Ages/whichever awful period you care to name. However, looking at the …

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William Garrow, a legal pioneer

In the 18th and 19th centuries, criminal barristers were viewed by many people with suspicion and even hostility. A cartoon from around 1800 portrays a barrister saving a clearly guilty thief whilst trampling on the figure of Justice. In a way, it's not so different from the dislike which criminal barristers arouse in some people …

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