AS RECENTLY AS 160 YEARS AGO, most common-law trials were conducted without the benefit of testimony from those who were most likely to know the facts of the matter: the parties, their spouses, and all witnesses who had any pecuniary interest in the question, no matter how slight. Fear of perjury had provided one of the principal rationales for this system of disqualification; it was not only thought to protect excluded witnesses by denying them the opportunity to commit perjury—considered both a temporal crime and a spiritual sin—but also to guard the legal system against testimony considered most...

CROSS-EXAMINATION IN THE VICTORIAN era was both deeply resented and indispensable to the functioning of the legal system. Anthony Trollope compared tolerance of the abuses of cross-examination to the widespread practice of skinning eels while they were still alive to guarantee their freshness: both were tortures “allowed even among humane people.”¹ James Fitzjames Stephen, for his part, asserted that crossexamination had been “more severely censured by the unprofessional community” than any other aspect of legal practice.² At the same time, cross-examination increasingly came to be the primary defense against perjury in the courtroom. This tension between public disapproval and utility...

IN 1858, THE GOVERNOR GENERAL OF INDIA, Charles Canning, passed on a remarkable petition to the Court of Directors of the East India Company in London. The petition was from Ishri Pershad, described by Canning as a “native of respectability” in the city of Allahabad.¹ Writing in the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58 that had sorely challenged British rule, Pershad had a simple message for the British government of the North Western Provinces in India: I told you so. Pershad reminded the government that in 1856, before the outbreak of the rebellion, he had proposed a scheme...

IN 1878 THINGS BEGAN TO GO badly for the Castles. James Castle, a gas-fitter, and his wife, Elizabeth, had been happily married for three years, but early in 1878 Elizabeth started drinking heavily, or in the parlance of the time, she became “addicted to habits of intemperance.” The following year James learned that Elizabeth had committed adultery with another gas-fitter, Walter Wombwell. James responded by throwing Elizabeth out of their house; he also filed a petition for divorce against her, naming Walter as a co-respondent. At the Divorce Court, James was represented by counsel, but Elizabeth and Walter neither appeared...

ONE OF THE MORE CURIOUS ASPECTS of nineteenth-century British legal history is the long delay between the reforms permitting testimony from civil parties and those permitting it from criminal defendants. For much of the nineteenth century, Britain maintained a divided system, allowing the former testimony but not the latter. This time lag becomes less perplexing if considered in relation to the ongoing process of experimentation with the production of truth in the courtroom described in the previous chapters. The efforts to control perjury can be seen, in part at least, as largely fruitless attempts to resolve the problem of deceitful...