For most historians, William Wilberforce is not immediately associated with the history of capital punishment, at least not beyond his occasional efforts to solicit mercy for individuals sentenced to death, and his distinctly subaltern role in the decisive early nineteenth century parliamentary debates over the abolition of the death penalty in England. Most scholars concern themselves with the first of the two “great objects” of which, in a diary entry for October 28, 1787, Wilberforce declared that “God Almighty has set before me … the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.” That concern is easily justified: the abolition of the slave trade quickly became the central preoccupation of Wilberforce's public life, and its implications were of global significance. His second professed mission of 1787 onwards—to help launch and sustain the Society for Giving Effect to His Majesty's Proclamation against Vice and Immorality—has inspired a smaller, although no less rich, body of scholarship. Our broad perspective on Wilberforce's public life remains that which was first laid down half a century ago, and which has subsequently been reinforced by historians of gender such as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall. Wilberforce and his associates are principally seen as the progenitors of nineteenth century moral earnestness and spiritual idealism, as well as the feminine ideal of “the Angel in the House.” They were, as Ford K. Brown suggested in 1961, the “Fathers of the Victorians.”

Shortly after two o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 19 September 1789, the last act of the sessions at Justice Hall in the Old Bailey began. London's accused capital offenders were tried here eight times yearly. Those who were convicted and received sentence of death or transportation remained in nearby Newgate Prison until their sentences could be carried into execution. So, too, did the capital respites: those convicts who were to be spared execution but who would not actually be pardoned until the Recorder of London, the chief sentencing officer at the Old Bailey, had decided what condition should be imposed. The vast majority of pardoned capital respites were transported to New South Wales. Before that condition of pardon could be put into effect, however, the respites had first to be brought back into the court at the end of another sessions in order to be formally notified, and to signal their acceptance, of the condition of their pardon—that is, to “plead their pardon” at the bar of the court. Although it is unclear from the sources whether or not the respites were still obliged, as they had been down to the 1690s at least, to present the most overt symbol of deference—kneeling while pleading their pardon—the symbolic significance of this procedure seems still to have been thought important, even if it had become largely a formality.

This article examines the series of legislative measures, beginning in 1776, which culminated in the passage of the Penitentiary Act of 1779. It argues that, although the Penitentiary Act is of considerable long-term significance in the history of English criminal justice and penal practices, the act passed in 1779 was in fact a somewhat modest affair by comparison with the scheme originally envisioned by its principal architects. The act embodied a decisive retreat from an original ambition to replace transportation with imprisonment at hard labour as the principal punishment next to death in late eighteenth-century England. This modification arose from a pragmatic appreciation of the limitations imposed, first, by a persistent preference amongst most legislators for transportation of the worst classes of offenders not actually put to death and, secondly, by the reluctance of local authorities to have such a preference imposed upon them to the detriment of local control of punishment and of the finances which paid for it. Attention is also drawn to how the course of events was shaped by the interaction of the act's main architects, William Eden and Sir William Blackstone, with both government and non-ministerial MPs such as Sir Charles Bunbury.

Early in the second decade of the nineteenth century, a Unitarian preacher named Joseph Nightingale gained admittance to the judges' room at the Old Bailey. He appears to have thought the room small and unremarkable, save for “a bookcase filled with the volumes of the State Trials, a few other law books of reference, and the yearly volumes of the Sessions Papers, or abstracts of the causes tried at this Court, from the earliest period to the present times.” It was this set of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, among all the books there, which most fired his imagination: “In casting one's eye over these records of our Fall, it is painful to notice the gradually increasing thickness of the volumes. Those which I have seen thus uniformly bound, lettered, with the date of the year, and the name of the Lord Mayor for the time being, commence with the year 1730, and reach down to 1812: the first volume may contain perhaps 150 pages; the last, five or six hundred: let it not, however, be hence concluded that this circumstance proves only the increase of vice; it indicates also an increased population, and extended commerce, and improved police.”

Nightingale's analysis of the causes for the increased length of the Sessions Paper shows an admirable grasp of both the changes in the character of society and in the means of ordering it to which historians address themselves. But a simpler factor in this change that seems to have eluded his notice was that, beginning in 1778, and especially after 1782, the length of individual trial accounts given in the Sessions Paper increased significantly.