These pages provide introductions to the different records included in the Digital Panopticon. You should review this background material in order to make sense of the records and find out how to locate the information you are looking for.
For useful contextual information on London, Australia, crime, justice and punishment between the later eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, see the Historical Background pages.
To aid source-based searching, there are informative individual records pages and also study guides to a range of different subjects - including women, juvenile offenders and family history - located in the Research and Teaching pages.