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Naming and Shaming: Trial by Media in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2015

David G. Barrie
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Abstract

This article examines the relationship between shame and police court media trial reports. It explores the social and cultural mores that underpinned the construction of shaming practices in trial coverage and assesses the ways in which the media functioned as a judicial and extrajudicial shaming resource. Far from disappearing with changing sensibilities, as has been argued elsewhere, premodern religious and judicial shaming methods shifted into areas of modernity, being relayed, supported, and influenced by new forms of modern print culture. The media, this article contends, served as an extension of the disciplinary apparatus, with editors applying their own assumptions about the guilt of the accused regardless of judicial verdicts and in line with their own notion of “common-sense” lay justice. The use of shame, though, was discriminatory—mirroring, and even helping to define, middle-class notions of shameful behavior and masculine and feminine conduct—which would, crucially, expose the social and cultural confines of media censure.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 349 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015 

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References

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34 Caledonian Mercury, 28 July 1855.

35 Ibid.

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53 Police Reports, 15 August 1829, 50.

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59 Aberdeen Journal, 22 May 1833.

60 See, for example, “A Young Tailor,” Police Intelligencer, 27 October 1831; “A Gigantic Hibernian Cobbler,” Police Intelligencer, 27 October 1831; and “A Little Pickpocket,” Police Intelligencer, 1 November 1831.

61 Police Intelligencer, 18 August 1831–11 October 1832.

62 Police Reports, 6 July 1829–12 September 1829, 5–105.

63 See, for instance, the case involving George Robertson, Scotsman, 4 February 1826. See also the case, under the heading “Fraud in Coals,” involving Alex Brown, Mr. Samuel Young's weigher, convicted in Leith Police Court with sending out fraudulent weights of coal. Scotsman, 24 December 1836.

64 Police Intelligencer, 18 August 1831–22 October 1831.

65 Police Reports, 6 July 1829–15 August 1829, 5–56.

66 Police Intelligencer, sample period: 18 August 1831–28 September 1831.

67 Scotsman, 12 October 1832.

68 Ibid., 28 December 1836.

69 Kilday and Nash, Cultures of Shame, chapter 2.

70 Police Intelligencer, 18 August 1831–11 October 1832.

71 Police Reports, 6 July 1829–12 September 1829, 5–105.

72 See the report of an Irish woman charged with assault for attempting to stab policeman. Police Intelligencer, 22 August 1831.

73 See the case of four “respectable looking men” charged with being drunk and disorderly. Police Reports, 15 August 1829, 54.

74 Ibid., 14 August 1829, 32. Similarly, it reported the case of an “old grey headed sinner, once a respectable tailor” charged with keeping a bawdy house. Ibid., 25 July 1829, 18.

75 In 1831, the Police Intelligencer published the case of “A grocer of considerable note, residing in the [affluent] new town, [who] was charged with committing a breach of the peace by spitting in the face of a wine and spirit merchant, residing in Broughton Street.” Police Intelligencer, 22 August 1831.

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118 Ibid.

119 Ibid.

120 See, for instance, the Glasgow Herald's criticism of what it claimed was a lenient sentence handed down to a husband who had beaten his wife in a “very brutal manner.” Glasgow Herald, 4 September 1874.

121 Interesting Proceedings in the Police Court, 11 September 1830.

122 The Secret Memoirs of Samuel Rodger, 20.

123 Brown, “Religion,” 96.

124 See, for example, the essays in D'Cruze, ed., Everyday Violence in Britain.

125 See, for example, the paper's criticism of the conduct of senior Presbyterian figures in Edinburgh on marriage affinity reform and Sunday employment. Scotsman, 10 and 17 April 1850.

126 Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception.

127 Nash and Kilday, Cultures of Shame; and Shoemaker, “The Old Bailey Proceedings,” 559–80.

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131 Conley, The Unwritten Law, 23.