Making Sense of the Emergence of Manslaughter in British Criminal Justice

Manslaughter emerged as a new and distinct category of crime amongst those tried at the Old Bailey in London in the first half of the nineteenth century. From being a rare charge in 1800, manslaughter came to represent over 60% of all trials for ‘killing’ by the 1850s. This article describes the methodologies used by the authors to explore this phenomenon via trials included in the Old Bailey Online. It details the use of unsupervised clustering, embeddings and relevance measures to map the changing language associated with the charge of manslaughter; and more importantly, describes the application of top-down ‘sense making’ methodologies to the resulting analysis. Along the way it argues for the importance of including qualitative judgements by subject specialists in the process of developing quantitative analyses. Inter Alia it suggests that the rise of manslaughter was the result of a complex set of forces including changing statute law, the rise of a professional police, changes in the administration of coroners’ courts, and a growing public intolerance of violence.