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The True Bill Press is a new independent press specializing in reprints of 18th and 19th century classic works that are currently out-of-print and generally inaccessible. The Press was begun in 2006 and plans to publish about three titles a year. Recommendations for titles suitable for publication will be gratefully received.

 

 

By W.T. Stead

Edited and with annotations and an introductory essay by Antony E. Simpson

Originally published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885.

Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill Press. 207p.

ISBN-10: 0-9791116-0-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-9791116-0-0

Published October 2007 in hard cover at a price of $65.00

A reprint of a classic report on child prostitution in London researched and written in 1885 by a leading journalist of the time. Generally credited with ensuring the passage of a major item of legislation, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, was designed to protect young girls from sexual abuse. Published here in its entirety as a monograph for the first time.

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Edited, with annotations, commentaries, and an introductory essay by Antony E. Simpson.

ISBN-10: 0-9791116-1-7

ISBN-13: 978-0-9791116-1-7

Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill Press. Available Spring, 2008.

The public execution, a routine ceremony which lasted in Britain until 1868 and elsewhere in the Empire until the 20th century, is here documented through the personal accounts of six literary figures. These accounts are discussed in the context of the gradual emergence of a modern system of criminal justice. It is suggested that it was concern for the behavior of the crowd, rather than for the fate of the condemned, which strongly affected most of these writers.

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Edited, with annotations and an introductory essay by

Mark Freeman and Gillian Nelson.

ISBN-10: 0-9791116-2-5

ISBN-13: 978-0-9791116-2-4

Lambertville, NJ: The True Bill Press. Available Summer 2008.

Late-Victorian and Edwardian England saw a great increase in social distress, including a ten-fold rise in the homeless population. Reaction to this was mixed and included more punitive legislation intended to discourage recourse to public charity. At the same time, there was considerable interest in polite society in the living conditions of the vagrant and undercover explorations of workhouses, casual wards, and other resorts of the dispossessed were reported regularly. Some ten such accounts are reprinted here, most for the first time since they were originally published.

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