Abstract
Forging banknotes was a capital crime in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Only during the Romantic period, however, was the death penalty routinely enforced. In 1796, no one in Britain was hanged for forgery. By 1818, 313 people had been sent to the gallows. A further 512 were transported to Botany Bay for passing forged notes. Considering that more than a thousand people were arrested for forgery, the conviction rate was very high. But it pales in comparison to the 300,000 forged notes the Bank of England received between 1797 and 1834. The circumstances surrounding the high incidence of banknote forgery in the period were equally unsettling. Following the suspension of cash payments, the bank issued — for the first time — one- and two-pound notes. They were poorly designed and easy to forge. To deter forgers, the Bank pursued a vigilant campaign of prosecution. This put it in a strange situation legally. The Bank was protecting the currency, but its own policies were behind the high incidence of forgery in the first place. The crisis finally came in December 1818 when two juries, acting against the advice of the judges, acquitted because they could not tell the difference between forged notes and the Bank’s. The acquittals led to reforms that curtailed juries’ ability to act with such discretion.1 Nevertheless, the statutes relating to forgery were not significantly altered until 1829 and even then forgery remained a capital offense.
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© 2013 Alexander Dick
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Dick, A. (2013). Monetary Forgery and Romantic Poetics. In: Romanticism and the Gold Standard. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292926_4
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