ABSTRACT
Building on Douglas Hay’s contention that eighteenth-century British criminal law was ‘a system of selective terror’, this chapter maps a poetics of the eighteenth-century criminal trial, focusing on some of the ways in which judges, lawyers, and reporters appealed to listeners’ and readers’ emotional receptivity through the arousal of terror, horror, and other overpowering emotions. Legal commentators from Mandeville to Paley drew on aesthetic theory and dramatic practice to analyse the spectacular representations of criminal justice: from Aristotle’s emphasis on the tragic arousal of pity and terror to Burke’s model of the sublime and Radcliffe’s writings on obscurity and visibility in Gothic fiction. The chapter concentrates on two trials notable for their emotional intensity and public resonance: the 1733 trial of Sarah Malcolm for murder and the 1806 trial of the colonial governor of Trinidad, Thomas Picton, on charges of torture. Taken together, the two cases demonstrate that the adversarial model did not introduce theatricality to the English trial, but built on established forms of dramatic conflict to incite emotional convictions in jurors and readers alike. This potential for theatricality underlies the essay’s attempt to formulate a poetics of the eighteenth-century trial.
