Evangelicalism, legal theory, and the politics of criminal law reform in England, 1808-1830

The criminal statutes of eighteenth-century England have become famous as a "bloody-code" which could impose a death sentence for crimes as minor as pick-pocketing and shoplifting. In practice many factors contributed to mitigating strict enforcement, but the threat of death remained a primary deterrent in the written law. This study looks at the politics of criminal law reform in a period when parliamentary leaders resisted all efforts to change laws. It explores the interplay within the discourse of the debate on reform of penal theories, programs of moral reform, and utilitarianism. A central theme is the contribution of Evangelical politicians and philanthropists, examining their distinctly religious arguments as well as relating their ideas to utilitarianism and the practical politics of their day.;While eschewing the assumption made by earlier historians of the criminal law that penal reforms were part of an inevitable movement of improvement in public institutions, this investigation also avoids the premise of recent writers who have treated penal reforms as simply a change in the mechanisms of social control, which the appeals to humanitarianism obscured. This study assumes that all involved in criminal law reform were as concerned for social order as the most ardent defenders of the old laws, but argues that the discussion of the death penalty involved real issues about the extent and morality of government power. Restricting capital punishments offered a substantive challenge to how far the Crown, and the ruling elites who filled the Crown offices, might exercise coercive authority. That restrictions on the ultimate punishment helped legitimate new regimes of prison discipline, aimed at reforming the convict, does not negate the fact that those who hanged for forgery and certain property crimes in 1808 would not have been executed in 1830. This analysis shows that while the political effort to reform the criminal laws was a less grand campaign than that for repeal of the Test and Corporation acts or the abolition of slavery, it significantly affected the structures of law and the expectations which defined civilized government and a humane society in the nineteenth century.