A Tasmanian Judge Jeffreys? John Lewes Pedder in popular history

Like Judge Jeffreys of the Bloody Assizes (1685), the ‘hanging judge’ has become a stock character in popular historical imagination. In the late nineteenth century, Tasmania conjured its own Judge Jeffreys in the form of Chief Justice Pedder. As the senior law officer in Van Diemen’s Land during the convict era, Sir John Pedder sentenced over 200 offenders to the gallows. From the 1870s, a series of newspaper ‘histories’ cast Pedder as the island’s hanging judge, and this folk reputation continued to resonate with popular audiences into the twentieth century. By contrast, the chief justice enjoyed a reputation for humanity and compassion during his lifetime. This article traces Pedder’s posthumous construction as a Tasmanian Judge Jeffreys, and argues that its enduring appeal owes more to a compelling literary trope than to the evidence of the colonial archive.