Science News - July 30, 2011

After 1825, numbers of guilty pleas soared, accounting for one-third of all cases by 1850 and 40 percent by 1913. Many of these trials contained no more than 100 words. Trial records showed that defense lawyers increasingly encouraged clients to plead guilty during the second quarter of the 19th century.

“Finding a revolution in legal practice at that time came as a complete surprise,” Hitchcock says.

Scholars have noted various reasons for plea bargaining’s popularity, including the gradual rise of a powerful legal profession and growing concerns about prison overcrowding. But the timing of a transition from jury trials run by judges to out-of-court deals arranged by lawyers has attracted virtually no attention.

“It’s not clear why female bigamy cases increased at that time, but Victorian England witnessed cultural changes in the latitude granted women to control their lives,” Cohen says.

To test the possibility that in the late 1800s a rising number of frustrated wives started seeking new husbands based on mutual affection, Cohen and colleagues combed through trial records to determine frequencies of different adjectives applied to the word marriage over time. The big winner among marriage modifiers as the Victorian era played out: loveless. Other words that increasingly described marriages in Old Bailey trials included clandestine, forbidden, foreign, fruitless and hasty.

That’s only suggestive evidence for
a new strain of female independence,
Cohen cautions. But it’s striking, he
adds, that the few early female bigamy
trials found in the data included long,
nasty attacks on defendants’ characters
by prosecutors and judges. Toward the
end of the 19th century, women accused
of having two husbands received quick
trials and little legal grief.

Love and marriages

Another tale from the Old Bailey concerns the growing independence of Victorian-era women, as witnessed by records from bigamy trials.

Roughly equal numbers of male and female defendants appeared in court during the 1700s, Cohen said at the meeting. But adjudicated crime became a man’s world during the next century, when eight times as many males as females appeared as defendants. As part of that trend, the number of bigamy cases brought against men progressively increased after 1820, regularly reaching 20 to 30 cases annually by the end of the century.

At the time, marriages were often arranged or instigated by male suitors or their families, and men were expected to rule over their wives. Legal divorces were difficult and expensive to obtain, but many people accepted informally agreed upon divorces as valid.

Given that spouses could lose contact for months or years and legal records of past marital unions often could not be located, perhaps it’s not surprising that Victorian-era men increasingly got hauled into court facing accusations of having two or more wives. Unexpectedly, though, the number of cases of female bigamy rose from virtually nil to an average of six or seven annually after 1880.

Portion of guilty pleas

0.3

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Let’s cut a deal Researchers have found that around 1825 some trial transcripts continued their trend toward lengthening while others became much shorter (top, trials involving killing are in red). The change has been linked to a concurrent increase in the number of guilty pleas as a portion of all verdicts (bottom).

Trial length over time

Trial length in words

10,000

1,000

100

10

1700 1800 1750

Year

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Guilty pleas over time

1900 1850

History’s future

Cohen and his colleagues know that many humanities scholars hold digital humanists in as low esteem as Old Bailey prosecutors once held women accused of bigamy. That’s certainly true of historians, in Hitchcock’s view. “About 90 percent of them sit quietly in an archive for a decade and then write a book with their names printed as large as possible on the cover,” Hitchcock says. In their world, data-crunching makes rude noises with no apparent historical meaning.

Change is brewing, though. An analy-
sis of the frequency with which different
words appeared in more than 5 million
books in Google’s digital archive has
yielded insights into language changes
and other cultural trends and attracted
much interest ( SN Online: 12/16/10). Har-
vard biologist Jean-Baptiste Michel and
bioengineer Erez Lieberman-Aiden, who
conducted the analysis, call such attempts
to use scientific methods to explore ques-
tions in the humanities “culturomics.”
But trends identified in huge databases,
such as a link between increases in female
bigamy cases and marriages described
as loveless in Victorian England, require
confirmation with independent lines of
evidence, Michel and Lieberman-Aiden
cautioned in a joint e-mail.

Cohen plans to compare cultural trends gleaned from Google’s digital book bin with Old Bailey findings. Hitchcock wants to construct a thief’s-eye view of Victorian London from court records, charting how often various goods were stolen during the 1700s and 1800s.