I am Afraid she is Perfectly Responsible for her Actions and is Simply Wicked

A micro-historical approach to the reconstruction of criminal careers and lives provides the historian with a unique insight into everyday lives of people; in our case, as crime historians, the everyday lives we are concerned with in particular relate to convicts who experienced the nineteenth-century criminal justice system. Micro-history offers us the opportunity not only to reconstruct the everyday life of these long-term prisoners, but also enables us to ground their experiences within the reality of nineteenth-century penal policy and as much as possible, their lives outside of this system. From such analysis, we can draw out the ‘general’ experience and also contribute to a historical approach which is often regarded as of great interest to the public. In this chapter, we will examine the life of one female convict, Julia Hyland, reconstructing her life inside and outside of the criminal justice system. Initially, however, we shall examine the methods by which we created these micro-histories and the sources on which they are based.