Focuses on the key feature of women's experience in an area often overlooked by crime historians, but that is becoming more popular with the modern attention paid to women's history.The book is written in an accessible way which will be appealing to undergraduates and postgraduatesThe focus on Wales, the Welsh and Welsh language and immigration will contribute to contemporary investigations.

This book explores the relationship between the justice system and local society at a time when the Industrial Revolution was changing the characteristics of mid Wales. Crime, Courts and Community in Mid-Victorian Wales investigates the Welsh nineteenth-century experiences of both the high-born and the low within the context of law enforcement, and considers major issues affecting Welsh and wider criminal historiography: the nature of class in the Welsh countryside and small towns, the role of women, the ways in which the justice system functioned for communities at that time, the questions of how people related to the criminal courts system, and how integrated and accepting of it they were. We read the accounts of defendants, witnesses and law- enforcers through transcription of courtroom testimonies and other records, and the experiences of all sections of the public are studied. Life stories - of both offenders and prosecutors of crime - are followed, providing a unique picture of this Welsh county community, its offences and legal practices.