Courtroom Drama: School Mock Trials in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

This article examines school mock trials, where middle-class secondary schoolboys and, more rarely, schoolgirls designed their own courtroom drama for entertainment. School mock trials offer important new evidence of how popular knowledge of the law was developed in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England. Teenage participants used the legal process as a template to satirise current events, comment on the gender and class order, and police their own extracurricular societies. This made them active participants in a wider culture of mock trials that thrived in educational and associational spaces in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England.