Criminal Lives: Punishing Old Bailey Convicts, 1780 – 1925:

Between 1700 and 1900, Britain stopped punishing the bodies of convicts and increasingly sought to exile them and/or reform their minds. Exile and forced labour in Australia and incarceration in penitentiaries became the dominant modes of punishment. This exhibition uses the collections of the London Metropolitan Archives and findings of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Digital Panopticon project to trace the impact of these changes on convict lives.

This education pack includes a guide to the exhibition narrative, a series of worksheets, a time-line and further reading suggestions. It has been put together to provide teachers and educators with a series of resources that can be used in a group visit by GCSE and AS/A-Level students to the exhibition.

The worksheets have been designed to meet the needs of EdExcel/Pearson, OCR, and WJEC Eduqas GCSE syllabuses and EdExcel A-Level History curricula. These courses all address the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century development of crime and punishment in the UK and transportation to Australia.