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Convict Bodies: An exploratory data analysis of a nineteenth-century language of coercion
Across multiple historical contexts, we encounter a recurring fantasy: using language to conjure an image of a person out of place to enable the apprehension of said person in real life. An especially fantastical version is encountered in the otherwise middling James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only (1981), in which the protagonist, played by Roger Moore, encounters a villain unknown to him. Later, at MI6 headquarters, a clerk suggests to a somewhat baffled Bond that he go into “the identigraph room”. Q, played by Desmond Llewelyn then in his late 70s, leads Bond into a computer lab and places him in front of a monitor, by early eighties’ standards sizable. Q then hunches in front of a computer and asks Bond to describe the man he encountered. Bond provides a series of generic descriptors (“caucasian”, “brown hair”) while Q enters the data. A face, rendered as a simple line-drawing, appears on the monitor. At one point, the nose grows comically large, suggesting that Q does not yet fully master the software. Bond adds: “glasses”, and a set of spectacles appears on the screen; “octagonal”, Bond adds, and the glasses change shape. In the end, Q presses a button, and a dot matrix printer starts printing an image of Emile Leopold Locque, a Belgian henchman and murderer, who, according to Bond, has “escaped from Namur Prison by strangling his psychiatrist. He has worked for drug syndicates in Marseilles and Hong Kong. Now reported working for Greek smugglers.” Now, the hero knows whom he is chasing. Technologies for identifying wanted individuals through language and drawing go back centuries, but at the time, the scene and the otherworldly powers it ascribed to the computer appear to have been inspired by technologies for creating images using composites of different photos, so-called photofit. 1
This essay is about such fantasies in early nineteenth-century Copenhagen and attempts to craft a system for identification of convicts escaping from a Copenhagen prison, known to its contemporaries as the Stockhouse Slavery or simply the Slavery.2 The essay presents an exploratory analysis of a dataset of about 1500 unique convict descriptions of men, as only men were subjected to this form of convict labour. The dataset is available on this platform.3 The originals are found in the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen. The essay is the collective product of a digital history class held at Aalborg University in the autumn of 2021. The class was taught by Johan Heinsen for fifth-semester students in the BA-programme in history. The class consisted of 7 workshops in which we first used Transkribus to digitise a corpus and subsequently explored the data presented here with methods inspired by social data science.4 We worked in the programming language R.
Why did the state record the appearances of penal slaves?
Convict escapes from the early modern penal institutions known in Scandinavia as slaveries were a frequent occurrence. As presented elsewhere, upwards of 20 percent of all convicts ran at least once during their sentence to penal labour.5 The many escapes were possible because convicts worked on fortifications and building sites across the city, i.e., outside the slaveries. In this manner, the productive aims of the institution created a regime of labour that allowed illicit exit.
From the early eighteenth century onwards, a customary bounty was paid to anyone who apprehended prison breakers and army deserters. By the mid-eighteenth century, it became increasingly common to advertise both groups, along with runaway servants and other workers or subjects, in newspapers. As shown by Anders Dyrborg Birkemose, this nascent surveillance technology evolved.6 Over the next 100 years, the administrators of the Copenhagen Slavery and of slaveries elsewhere in Denmark were among the most steady advertisers. An advertisement typically described what the wanted person looked like. Until 1807, these descriptions seemingly had to be recorded once an escape happened, but not all escapes were advertised. An order to fortress commanders from 11 April 1807 required that all convicts in the slaveries should have their appearances recorded for the express purpose of advertisement.7 The order also stated that when a convict ran, his likeness should be advertised in the newspapers and in letters directed at the authorities wherever the convict originated.8
Each description consisted of two or three elements. First a note about when the convict had arrived, his place of birth, and his age. Sometimes his height was noted, typically in inches. Then followed a set of standard phrases concerning the man’s appearances: the shape of his face and its most prominent features, proportions of his body and limbs, hair and eye colour. The third element, which was sometimes omitted, listed singular identity markers. An example of a description containing all three elements is that of Johan Didrik Eskildsen:
ORIGINAL: indkom i Slaveriet den 5de November 1831 föd i Kjöbenhavn, 31 Aar gammel. Middel Væxt, spinkel Legems bygning, blaae Øine, mörkt Haar, Paa hans höire Arm er udstukket et Meneske-Hoved, en Havfrue og Bogstaverne IDDS og D. E. S. Paa den venstre Arm et Meneske-Hoved et Flag og Bogstaverne K E S og S E. S. Paa den höire Kind tet ved Munden har han et Ar.
TRANSLATION: Arrived in the Slavery on 5 November 1831, born in Copenhagen, 31 years old. Average height, slender build, blue eyes, dark hair, on his right arm a human head, a mermaid and the letters IDDS and D. E. S. On the left arm a human head, a flag and the letters K E S and S E. S. On the right cheek close to the mouth he has a scar.