Convicted out of her own mouth

Convicted Out of Her Own Mouth is a polemical historical work by Herbert Wrigley Wilson, the English naval historian and journalist who lived from 1866 to 1940 and who produced a substantial body of writing on naval history, contemporary political subjects, and various other matters during a long career as a journalist with The Daily Mail and as a writer on naval and military affairs.

The title suggests the polemical character of the work. The phrase convicted out of her own mouth was a standard rhetorical device used in late nineteenth and early twentieth century polemical writing to indicate that the subject of the work was being criticized on the basis of evidence drawn from its own statements and admissions rather than from the testimony of opposing parties. The device gave the writer the rhetorical advantage of appearing to let the subject speak for itself while actually arranging the evidence to support a particular critical interpretation.

Wilson was best known as a naval historian, with substantial works on the history of British and other naval forces during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His major naval works included substantial studies of the development of ironclad warships, of various naval battles and campaigns, and of the broader history of British naval policy across the modern period. He had a serious reputation in the naval history field and his works were widely used as reference sources for several generations after their initial publication.

Alongside the naval history Wilson produced a substantial body of polemical writing on contemporary political and international subjects. This was largely tied to his work as a Daily Mail journalist during the period when The Daily Mail under Lord Northcliffe was one of the most influential English newspapers and was actively involved in various of the major political controversies of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Wilson’s polemical works typically took up particular contemporary international or political situations and presented strongly argued positions on them, often in support of the broader political line of The Daily Mail.

The specific subject of Convicted Out of Her Own Mouth depends on the particular target Wilson chose for the polemical treatment. The book is mostly of interest now to historians of late nineteenth and early twentieth century English political and international polemical writing, and to readers studying the development of mass circulation English journalism in the period before the First World War.