The introduction defines “courtroom culture” as the constant interplay of law, informal practice, courtroom dialogue, cultural norms and social identity from which the dynamics and meanings of courtroom events were fashioned. Such dynamics and meanings, I argue, did not emerge fully formed from pre-existing patterns in English law and society, but were shaped on a daily basis by those in court and beyond it. This active process of generating, negotiating, and contesting the meaning of courtroom events are examined in the chapters that follow. Having outlined the fundamental arguments of the book, the Introduction engages the relevant historiography and theory on these issues and provides a brief chapter outline.

The first chapter traces the origins of the London police courts and the introduction of courtroom scenes as a literary and journalistic subject in the later eighteenth century. In the absence of an official police force, an orderly, hierarchical courtroom was necessary to sustain magistrates’ public legitimacy and to justify the considerable expansion of the summary court system. In the reformation of summary justice amidst its widening public portrayals, the courtroom’s legal capacity to punish disorder became indelibly linked to its cultural capacity to define public order and the putative threats to it. The first generation of courtroom reporters and the magistrates working in the early decades of the nineteenth century employed the locale to propose distinct visions of moral and social order in the metropolis. They set many of the precedents that would continue to define the courts and their public portrayals in subsequent decades.