Voices From The Old Bailey, Amanda Vickery

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BBC Radio 4, Wednesdays at 9am, repeated at 9.30pm. 27 July – 17 August, 2011.

Historians struggle to decipher letters and diaries – but what about those who left no record, the poor, those who couldn`t write? There is one fantastic source, and it is now online: the Old Bailey Archives.

Through court cases, we can hear the voices of the 18th century – thanks to the speedy court shorthand writers, everyone's speech is recorded, from the posh to the poor. It`s the nearest thing we have to a tape recording of the past.

In the second series of “Voices from the Old Bailey” Professor Amanda Vickery presents dramatised extracts from gripping court cases and discusses with fellow historians what they reveal about 18th century society and culture.

Rioting on the streets of London, sexual subcultures and crimes committed by servants, all are revealed. And in the final programme, Amanda asks “Whose Law Was it Anyway?” Was justice only for the rich?

Amanda listens to the voices of real people, on trial for their lives, with historians who are experts on the period. Throughout the series there are popular ballads about crime, specially recorded for the programme.

Produced by Elizabeth Burke for Loftus Audio.

Amanda Vickery Professor Amanda Vickery is the prize-winning author of The Gentleman's Daughter (Yale University Press, 1998) and Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale University Press, 2009). She is Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London. She lectures on British social, political and cultural history. Amanda reviews for The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review, Front Row and Woman’s Hour. Her TV series At Home with the Georgians aired on BBC2 in December 2010. She was a judge of the 2011 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize.

For more information about Amanda’s work see www.amandavickery.com

Producer: Elizabeth Burke is an award-winning radio producer; she has made many features and documentaries for Radio 4 and Radio 3, winning repeated Sony Awards. She has also worked as a Commissioning Editor for Radio 4 and as Editor of the Bristol Features Unit. She is now freelance and makes programmes through Loftus Audio.

Music: The ballads featured in the series were arranged by David Owen Norris
and were performed by Thomas Guthrie and Gwyneth Herbert

Actors: The cast of readers includes actors Simon Tcherniak, Euan Bailey and Madeleine Brolly.

Old Bailey Online
All the cases discussed in the programme can be found in the the Old Bailey online archive www.oldbaileyonline.org – a fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

The website makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use.

Other useful links related to the series:

BBC Radio 4 programme page