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The greatest thing, by far, about the online archive of The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834 (which Chris just reminded me existed) is being able to look your namesakes up in it. Well, okay, no: the greatest thing about it is that it’s vast corpus of historical information about everyday people that’s been released free to the public with an impressive degree of organisation and searchable metadata.

But the most fun thing about it is looking up your namesakes.

Take Thomas Phillips, for example. Quite a common name. You could focus on the Thomas Phillips mentioned in William Griffin’s sodomy trial in 1726 (who lived in Mother Clap’s molly house for two years, but absconded before he could be brought to trial). You could focus on the Thomas Phillips (presumably the same chap each time) who keeps being done for highway robbery in the late 1770s, and clearly wasn’t very good at it.

But my favourite, just for the sheer baffling tumble-of-details slice-of-lifeyness, is Thomas Phillips’s trial for Bigamy, on 7th December, 1826.

Fourth Middlesex Jury – before Mr. Common Sergeant.

Fined One Shilling and Discharged .

Just to complete this little London newspaper trifecta of posts, I thought I’d extract a bit from the beginning of Roger Wilkes’ hugely enjoyable Scandal: A Scurrilous History Of Gossip (which is very interesting for anybody interested in the origins of modern British journalism, as well as being great fun):

“The harlots of Piccadilly hitched up their petticoats and stepped aside. Jostling pickpockets, hearing the commotion, were momentarily distracted, and carriage horses shied on the clattering cobbles. From his drawing room in Arlington Street, Horace Walpole was astonished to hear the sound of drums and trumpets; hurrying to his window he saw a procession carving a path through the crowd. At first, he thought it was a press-gang raising soldiery for the war in the American colonies, for this was the autumn of 1776. It was a war of sorts, but Walpole noticed that the marchers were smartly groomed, ‘dressed expensively, like Hussars, in yellow habits with blue waistcoats and breeches’. These were no warriors, but a hired band of street performers wearing masks, advancing to the beat of martial music and brandishing not muskets but coloured streamers and handbills, which they pressed into the hands of gaping onlookers. On their high caps, picked out in braid, the words ‘Morning Post’ glinted in the watery sunshine. At the head of the procession, Walpole recognized the pugnacious and defiant figure of the young Revd Henry Bate, the editor of that notorious scandal sheet and renowned throughout London as ‘the fighting parson’.

Walpole gazed down on ‘this mummery’ and despaired. ‘What a country!’ he twittered in one of his gossiping news-of-the-day letters. ‘Is there any sense, integrity, decency, taste left? A solemn and expensive masquerade in defence of daily scandal against women of the first rank.’ Walpole had heard that the Morning Post had a rival, the new, but identically named, Morning Post, so packed with even more scandalous matter, he noted, that it ‘exceeds all the outrageous Billingsgate that was ever heard of.’ The opening shots had been fired in London’s first – and highly entertaining – circulation war. The battleground was the paragraphing trade, the inky ancestor of newspaper gossip.

Daring to be different, the original Morning Post was roughly the size of a modern tabloid, cheaper and smaller than the other journals hawked on the street corners of Georgian London by a raggle-taggle army of bugle-blowing postboys. Advertisements dominated the content; one in the first number in 1772 offered for sale a register of addresses of the strumpets of Piccadilly; another (accordingly) offered ‘the famous Patent Ointment for the Itch’. For his morning threepence, the eager reader would also be regaled with a few items of foreign intelligence, news of the court, church appointments, borough elections, accounts of highway robbery, arrivals at the Bath spa, sporting intelligence and even some uplifting poetry. But what really sold the paper were its scandalous paragraphs, teeming with the details of people’s personal lives…”