This week the newly updated Old Bailey Online was unveiled, with newly powerful features and a very welcoming look. It’s deliciously easy to use; a keyword search will turn up every incidence of that word across the full text of more than 192,000 trials held in London’s central criminal court from the late 17th to the early 20th century. It also shows the distribution of that word. A colleague searched “knife” yesterday and it returned more than 9,000 occurrences pretty evenly distributed across time. Because I’m a historian of genealogy of course I had to see what I could find. Sure enough there are a few references. (One was for a prisoner being questioned about his past. What, do I have to give you my genealogy? he asked.).
But I hadn’t anticipated this story. In early 1743 Hannah White was brought before the court for theft; she was accused of breaking into the home of Thomas Thompson in Weybridge, about 20 miles southwest of London. He reported that in late 1742 his “study was broke open” and that indeed “there was a second robbery.” Among the items taken were “Dr. Anderson’s Royal Genealogies; with sundry other books.” Not only did Ms. White take this particular volume, but when she sold the books to Thomas Taylor, she offered the Royal Genealogies “in exchange for a Family-Bible; I shewed her one very handsomely bound, and she sold me Anderson’s Genealogy, for this Bible and 3 s. in Money.”
There are at least three compelling featured to this story, as brief as it is, and with as little context as I’m able to give it right now. The first of course is the value assigned to Anderson’s work, 850+ pages in a genre of European interest in royal lineages that were published at pace in the eighteenth century. They were advertised in the colonies at booksellers in all the cities (though not this one, or at least I haven’t been able to find it yet). It was first published in 1732, and in a 1736 London bookseller’s catalog was offered in two sizes.
The second is the role of genealogy here. Hannah White understood the value of this volume, but also connected it with her own capacity to produce family history. A “Family-Bible” was a large-sized volume suitable for family eg not just individual devotional use. Not until the late 18th century would such volumes include printed family record pages, and Bibles were still not the primary locus for family records but these large size volumes usually with a blank page between the old and new testaments offered a good location for recording births, marriages, and deaths–as did the end papers. Her canny swap of the Anderson book for her own Family-Bible suggests what I’ve long argued– that Bibles invoked genealogical thinking, deeply connected to the British American genealogical culture.
The third of course is the figure of the woman reader, genealogist— and book thief. I briefly wondered if the Olive Payne who advertised Anderson’s Royal Genealogies in 1736 was a woman, and certainly it was unusual not to use the masculine Oliver, but all accounts of the Payne’s suggest he was an elder son/ brother of the Paynes who had a multigenerational business. I’d love to track that down but have promised to stop here for now. Women in the book trades, in all dimensions of that trade, are fascinating.
Hannah White was found guilty, and sentenced to seven years transportation. Was she sent to the colonies? Women, then. as now, represented a small proportion of those accused and convicted of crimes, and thus of transported convicts. I’d sure love to find her in New England, though studies show those most convicted criminals were sent to the Chesapeake in the eighteenth century (I’m relying for this characterization on work by Roger Ekirch and others). For now, huge thanks to the Old Bailey Online for such a terrific (and diverting) resource.