Book Review

Scattered in research libraries and law libraries across the United States, printed on cheap paper, moldy and dog-eared, often untouched for over a century, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century murder trial pamphlets have suddenly become fashionable foundations for historical work. For good reason. They are wonderful sources, filled with rich and gruesome social detail, much political and moral commentary, the jumble and noise of the American courtroom, and marvelous iconography.	1
Some of us who have worked with such texts have used them as reportage on trials, windows on to the distinct and contending languages of lawyers and judges, defendants, expert witnesses, occasionally jurors. Like all sources, they need to be used with caution and care. The acts of murder, who did it and why, and the experience of crime and punishment are known only through the strategic calculations and the voices of lawyers, judges, defendants, and witnesses. Much always remains mysterious. Moreover, such pamphlets were produced for many reasons, sometimes to promote the careers and the skills of particular lawyers, sometimes because of local religious or political conflicts that the trial incidentally implicated, often because of scandal. The usually anonymous editors turned the trials into reflections on the life-styles of the rich and famous, or of the odd, or sometimes of the apparently ordinary (hiding deeper evil). Often the pamphlets read as grab bags of voices and positions, one perspective canceling out another.	2
Karen Halttunen, by contrast, treats these pamphlets as complex though coherent narratives. She portrays them as responses to the market demand of an anxious middle-class readership, obsessed with the mysteries of violence and evil in a post-Calvinist moral culture. She is keenly aware of all the difficulties these sources raise. And her discussions of the shaping powers of lawyers and of evidence rules, while cursory, show her sophistication. Still, for her these pamphlets appear less as reportage and more as elaborations on features of the "Gothic imagination."	. . .