374 Crime and the State
been responding to concerns expressed by the mayor and aldermen a few years
earlier about the tone and character of the trial reports.^16 But his principal rea-
son was almost certainly to increase the readership in the face of competition
from the collected trials series. The editor/publisher made this clear in a note
introducing and justifying the new format. The new Sessions Papers would not
only be fuller and more attractive, he said; it would also have an annual index so
that readers would be encouraged to bind the eight yearly issues to produce
‘a Complete Annual Register of these Proceedings, and thereby make it not
worth any ones while to Reprint them in Volumes, which has been done at
extraordinary Rates’.^17
That the new format of the Sessions Papers was a response to the competition
of the collected (and selected) trials, as well as a recognition of the opportunities
provided by the concern about violent crime in the late 1720 s, is also suggested
by the way the new space was used. The intention, the printer announced, was
‘to enlarge upon Trials... with respect to the Crime, the Evidence, and the Pris-
oner’s Defence’. In practice, this meant that murder, sexual assaults, robbery,
and other serious violence that interested, appalled, and titillated the reading
public were given more space than ever before. They were also reported in a
way that heightened their human and dramatic qualities by the much greater
use of verbatim testimony taken by a shorthand writer.^18 The Sessions Papers
continued to include all the trials in each session and to that extent it remained
a complete record of the Old Bailey proceedings. But a very large number of
trials were reduced to their barest bones in a few lines that merely noted the
names of the accused and victim, the offence, and the jury’s verdict. Indeed, to
judge by the first four Sessions Papers of 1732 virtually all simple larcenies and
many other kinds of cases were reduced in the new format to such squib reports,
as Langbein has called them. More than 60 per cent of the cases reported were
in that form. The much larger space available for fuller accounts of trials in the
first half of 1732 was principally devoted to much lengthier accounts than ever
before of cases involving violence, other capital offences, and one or two un-
usual cases or those that had some entertainment value. Murder and robbery
together accounted for 70 per cent of the space devoted to non-squib reports,
and other capital felonies, a further 16 per cent.^19
The public concern about robbery and gangs in London, about receivers and
thief-takers, thieving and untrustworthy servants, that helps to explain these de-
velopments of the Sessions Papers also helps to explain Daniel Defoe’s interest
(^16) McKenzie, ‘Lives of the Most Notorious Criminals’, 236 – 7.
(^17) OBSP, December 1729. The usefulness of the annual index was increased further when, in January
1732 , the cases began to be numbered and the Sessions Papers were given continuous pagination through
each mayoral year, from the first session in December to the eighth in the following October.
(^18) On the shorthand reporters, see Langbein, ‘Structuring the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial’,
12 – 14 ; McKenzie, ‘Lives of the Most Notorious Criminals’, 239 – 40.
(^19) Based on the OBSP for January, February, April, and May 1732.