Professor Rosalind Crone

I joined the History Department at the Open University in 2009. Previously, between 2006 and 2009, I was based in the OU English Department as a research fellow on an AHRC-funded project, The Reading Experience Database (1450-1945). Before that, I completed my BA (Hons) at the University of Queensland in Australia, and was awarded an MPhil and PhD in history from St John’s College, University of Cambridge. I have also taught modern British social and cultural history at the University of Cambridge.

At the Open University, I am a member of the Centre for the History of Crime, Policing and Justice, and the History of Books and Reading Research Collaboration. I am also an affiliated member of the Harm and Evidence Research Collaborative in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I also remain a member of the project team for the Reading Experience Database.

Outside of the OU, I am a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I am also, together with Prof Heather Shore at Manchester Metropolitan University, editor of a monograph series published by McGill-Queen's University Press: States, People and the History of Social Change.

Broadly speaking, my research interests lie in a 'long' nineteenth century, c1780-c1914. More specifically, I am interested in the society and culture of nineteenth-century Britain, and particularly themes such as criminal justice, popular culture, education and reading practices.

I welcome PhD proposals on these themes but also on other social and cultural topics in the period of the nineteenth century. Recent and current PhD students have worked on a range of projects including policing in nineteenth-century Leeds, representations of crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century press, unreasonable marital behaviours in Victorian Glasgow, sexual violence by men towards men, and pupil rebellions in public schools between the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries.

At present, I am completing research in three areas:

 Prison History

For the last 10+ years, I have been working on the history of prisons in Britain. Work began with an interest in reading in prisons which quickly expanded into research on prisoner literacy, prison schools, the (complicated) 19th century prison system, prison reform, and most recently, labour or work in prisons.

I have completed a number of articles on the literacy rates of prisoners. In April 2012, I was awarded a small grant from the Marc Fitch Fund to use surviving prison records from Suffolk to map the educational experiences of the poor in that county for the seventy years or so prior to the 1870 Education Act. This research was published as an article in Social History in 2018 (and you can read a blog post about the article here).

In March 2014, I was awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship to complete the research for my book on nineteenth-century prison education. Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in Nineteenth-Century England was published by Oxford University Press in May 2022 (for more details, follow this link).

In 2018 I launched a new resource, Prison History, which makes datasets originally arising from my research on the nineteenth-century prison freely available to other scholars and members of the public in order to expand our understanding of the use and experience of imprisonment in the past. Prison History currently hosts 19th Century Prisons, a database of 846 convict and local prisons operational in England between 1800-99, and Local Lock-Ups, a database of more than 900 structures used for the temporary confinement of accused criminals (and riff raff) by local communities between c.1500 and the 20th century. Prison History has featured in the genealogical magazine, Who Do You Think You Are, including as one of the 'Websites to Watch in 2020'.

In August 2019, I was awarded an AHRC Follow on Funding grant to work in partnership with Prisoners' Education Trust and former prisoners to transform the research completed for my monograph, Illiterate Inmates, into a free, Badged Open Course on the history of prison education in the UK. The course will be available to students in secure environments, to prison staff and those working in the criminal justice sector, and to anyone with an interest in the history of prisons in early 2022 on The OU's free learning platform, Open Learn.

Violent Entertainments

In 2012 I  completed a monograph derived from my doctoral research on violent entertainments in nineteenth-century London: Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London (Manchester University Press). This book is the first full-length study to address the wide range of gruesome, bloody and confronting amusements and pastimes, patronised by large numbers of ordinary Londoners, that did not conform to the values of respectability and restraint which we so often claim characterised Victorian culture. While pastimes involving displays of actual violence were brought under control during the early-nineteenth century, graphic, yet orderly, ‘re-enactments’ of high-level violence flourished in street or travelling entertainments, penny broadsides, popular theatres, cheap instalment fiction and Sunday newspapers. By examining these predominantly new amusements in detail, this book explores the ways in which gruesome, bloodthirsty and violent representations provided an outlet, indeed siphoned off, much of the actual violence that had hitherto been expressed in all manner of social and political dealings, thus providing a crucial accompaniment to schemes for the reformation of manners and the taming of the streets, while providing a mechanism through which the common people could ‘protest’ against the values of the establishment.

More recently, I combined my interests in popular entertainment and policing to produce a collection of documents for the Pickering & Chatto series, The Making of the Modern Police, edited by my colleague in the history department, Paul Lawrence. My volume, Policing Entertainment (volume 4) was published in autumn 2014. The 6 volume collection has since been reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement (13 March 2015).

Click here to find out more about Violent Victorians.
The book has been reviewed in the following journals:
Journal of Victorian Culture, June 5, 2012
IHR Reviews in History, June 2012
BBC History Magazine, August 2012
The London Journal, vol 37, November 2012
Times Literary Supplement, 25 January 2013
Urban History, vol 40, February 2013
New Theatre Quarterly, vol 29, February 2013
The Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol 59 (3), 2013
Victorian Studies, vol 57, Summer 2015

International Histories of Reading

Between March 2010 and February 2011, I was a Co-I on the AHRC project, ‘Developing an International Digital Network in the History of Reading’ with colleagues in the English department – W.R. Owens and Shafquat Towheed. During this period, the Reading Experience Database (RED) was subjected to major redevelopment: the UK RED website was enhanced, by adding new teaching tools and improving its functionality, in preparation for distribution to colleagues in Australia (Griffith University, Brisbane), Canada (Dalhousie University, Halifax), the Netherlands (Universiteit Utrecht) and New Zealand (Victoria University of Wellington) to allow the creation of other national REDs; and work began on a new international portal housed on the Open University web space to allow simultaneous searching of national REDs in particular fields. For more information, see the RED website.