2 - “A Ruffian Rightly Punished”

Summary

The second chapter examines how public portrayals of local courtrooms continued to change in tandem with the widening reach of summary justice in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this period, magistrates’ courtrooms became among the most common and public sites of personal, concrete contact between ordinary citizens and the state in its various guises. As the advertisements that crowded the pages of the new popular press broadcast the expanding availability of products and services, columns of “Police Intelligence” broadcast the expanding roles of courtrooms and the authority of magistrates, police, and municipal agents. In doing so, they served to delineate that authority in the public eye and to either condone or condemn – largely the former – its expression and to assess the morality of individual responses to it. By portraying these daily encounters between the state and the people, police-court columns offered readers a common standard for defining morality, for determining victims and villains, and for measuring justice and injustice in the courtroom.