Biographical Legal History and eBay Serendipity. ‘I have arrived in good condition’: An Articled Clerk to his Mother, 1830

John Theodore Hoyle, the nineteenth-century borough coroner for Newcastle upon Tyne, was the subject of my doctoral research. From scattered fragments, I recovered his life story and analysed his work as coroner through legal biography and the concept of the ‘people’s judge’. During my research I uncovered some personal material, but my work was mainly informed by official publications, court correspondence, images, and newspaper reports.
Although my PhD is complete, it seems that I have not finished with JT Hoyle. In August 2024 a seller on eBay offered for sale an intriguing letter from a collection of railway-interest correspondence. I purchased the letter, which was sent in October 1830 by Hoyle, then an articled clerk, to his mother in Newcastle, from his lodgings in London. The letter is a cream two-sided folio sheet: it includes rich detail of people, places and events at a specific time from the pen of a young lawyer.
My paper outlines the contents of the letter and examines it through a legal historical lens, situating one lawyer at the centre of a narrative that opens a window into a time of social, political, economic and technological change. I consider questions of survival and chance and the jigsaw puzzle of sources available to legal historians. I suggest that both individual lives and material sources, such as the letter, present unusual and possibly unexpected avenues for legal history- they offer interdisciplinary possibilities, interweaving the visual, the textual and the material, with family history, local history, narrative and social history.