Fara Dabhoiwala

Fara Dabhoiwala is writing a global history of free speech and researching a biography of Francis Williams. He teaches at Princeton.

Letter
Stephen Sedley relies on 19th-century sources to claim that Julian, the enslaved Indian teenager, would have been ‘forbidden by law to testify in his own defence’ during his Old Bailey trial in 1724 (Letters, 7 July). But at this earlier date different principles applied, and procedure was much more informal. Criminal trials were very brief, often lasting only a few minutes. The same jury would...

On Valentine’s Day​ 1661 Elizabeth Pepys and her husband, Sam, rose early and walked from their house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation. The previous year, Elizabeth had...

In​ a largely illiterate world, laughing was something one did with other people. Early theorists of humour considered it a form of speech rather than writing. And speech could be extremely dangerous, as the Bible warned: ‘Death and life are in the power of the tongue’ (Proverbs); ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity’ (James). Elsewhere in scripture the tongue...

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