Law Times No. 1505, 3 February 1872

The Law Times doesn’t sound very exciting does it? It doesn’t have illustrations or lots of entertaining ads. And yet if we actually engaged with the periodical, it is full of very human, often moving and funny stories both on and behind the page.

In the single issue of the Law Times from 1872 that is reproduced below, the report at the bottom right of the 3rd page (p. 243 of the volume) is especially striking. It concerns the supposed effects of reading stories about criminals upon the behaviour of young people. The paragraph mentions “Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin and the like,” characters in popular stories by William Harrison Ainsworth from over 30 years previously (it goes to show how old the writer was). The report concerns the effects of reading what was called at the time an 1868 “sensation drama” called Foul Play by the renowned Dion Boucicault and Charles Reade, adapted from a long novel by the same authors.[1] It’s not 100% clear from the report what actually happened but it seems that some sailors decided to carry out in real life what had happened in the play. There’s no indication of what motivated them to do what they did though – poverty? The report is much more concerned about the bad effects of reading – it might make workers wonder if there was some other system of making a living than doing their jobs! It certainly recalls reports concerning the bad effects of computer games, and before that of violence on television and film. What’s striking here is these suppositions about the effects of reading appear in a legal journal as evidence.


In the single issue of the Law Times from 1872 that is reproduced below, the report at the bottom right of the 3rd page (p. 243 of the volume) is especially striking. It concerns the supposed effects of reading stories about criminals upon the behaviour of young people. The paragraph mentions “Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin and the like,” characters in popular stories by William Harrison Ainsworth from over 30 years previously (it goes to show how old the writer was). The report concerns the effects of reading what was called at the time an 1868 “sensation drama” called Foul Play by the renowned Dion Boucicault and Charles Reade, adapted from a long novel by the same authors.[1] It’s not 100% clear from the report what actually happened but it seems that some sailors decided to carry out in real life what had happened in the play. There’s no indication of what motivated them to do what they did though – poverty? The report is much more concerned about the bad effects of reading – it might make workers wonder if there was some other system of making a living than doing their jobs! It certainly recalls reports concerning the bad effects of computer games, and before that of violence on television and film. What’s striking here is these suppositions about the effects of reading appear in a legal journal as evidence.


[1] Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation: Or the Spectacular, the Shocking and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Anthem Press, 2003: 211- 2 writes about the play in the middle of an entertaining chapter on the high-tech, high-emotion stage spectacle which was “sensation drama.”


A more obviously tragic case is on p. 251 (the 9th page of the issue) – the case of the 13-year-old Mary Ann Turner. She was in a “Protestant refuge for homeless children.” Her father, a Protestant, had died when she was two and she’d been brought up by her mother, a Catholic. Her mother, it seems, was a drunkard and neglected and starved poor Mary Ann: a “district visitor” had had the girl taken away and sent to the refuge. Her mother didn’t want her back but wanted her in a Catholic one. The Court refused to intervene. It wasn’t anyone’s job to ask Mary Ann what she wanted or to help her mother. I was very struck by how, apart from Mary Ann, only the lawyers are named – no-one else seems of the slightest importance. Mary Ann seems only an object whose position in the world is examined by the legal men who were, after all “only doing their job.” It’s as if they are the opposite of the sailors in the previous paragraph. Work for the lawyers means working together and following the rules established by custom (helped perhaps by a dose of anti-Catholic bias).

Even if the ads on the first two and last two pages are’t flashy, they tell stories. For a start, they give us a clue as to what kind of person read the Law Times – the kind of person who seems indifferent to the fate of Mary Ann. They are evidently interested in dressing smartly, gardening, fishing, horses, dogs, guns (we assume for hunting), buying property. Why the advert for The Field magazine appears is clear (hunting, shooting and fishing offered networking possibilities for the wealthy professional classes); but why The Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper appears in the second page is not so readily apparent when all lawyers were men: perhaps lawyers were meant to buy it for their wives or women relatives? That tells us perhaps a lot about who controlled (or at least who the Law Times supposed was controlling) the media consumption in the house – the equivalent of who took possession of the remote (there is certainly another reason too, as I explain towards the end of this background piece on the Law Times).

Above all, though, readers were interested in looking for jobs and finding employees, as we can see on the first couple of pages. There is a lot to wonder about in these adverts for jobs, but one will do: why was “A London Solicitor” on the first page (in the column on the right) willing to recommend his clerk (who had started work with him aged 17) for a job in the country? Romance? Illness from the terrible London pollution? How would the city clerk adapt to life in the country?

There are a great many stories to be told in what might seem at first a dull publication!

For background on the Law Times, click here.


Here is the entire single issue in PDF format.

The-Law-Times-No.-1505


Downloadable image files of individual pages.

AK