Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650–1950

Pamela Cox, Heather Shore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351728300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

This title was first published in 2002: Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650-1950 provides a critical synthesis of the growing body of work on the history of British and European juvenile delinquency. It is unique in that it analyzes definitions of and responses to, disorderly youth across time (from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries) and across space (covering developments across Western Europe). This comparative approach allows it to show how certain themes dominated European discourses of delinquency across this period, not least panics about urban culture, poor parenting, dangerous pleasures, family breakdown, national fitness and future social stability. It also shows how these various threats were countered by recurring strategies, most notably by repeated attempts to deter delinquency, to divide responsibility between the state, civil society and the family, and to find a "proper" balance between moral reform and physical punishment, between care and control.

Chapter 1
Juvenile Delinquency in Time

Paul Griffiths*

Delinquent Juveniles

Can something exist without the power of prior definition? Historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe an aspect of youth that they call juvenile delinquency (apparently unaware of its precise chronology and political electricity of two centuries later), yet vocabularies of crime did not feature this phrase at that time. In so doing, they can draw support from two sources. First, the broad palette of behaviour recognised by modern-day senses of juvenile delinquency upset authority structures in early modern society too. Apart from the new possibilities raised by proliferating new technologies, the anti-social behaviour stigmatised as juvenile delinquency - violence, for instance, vandalism, scoffing, or theft - have troubled governors in nearly all historical situations.¹ And, second, juvenile delinquency was not a free-standing late point in discourses about youth and crime, it was instead a sequential stage in social commentaries on youth that evolved over time, though not in any inevitable way, and that simultaneously revealed and reshaped perceptions of day-to-day experiences.

The coming of the term juvenile delinquency after 1800, then, was not a sudden or neat break with the past. Delinquent behaviour by juveniles had a long and chequered history. Yet whether they are fishing for its origins, tracking its rise, shadowing its evolution, or trumpeting its invention, historians of juvenile delinquency usually stick closely to this side of the last five centuries. In their time travels they rarely scale the high fences that they construct between 1750 and 1800. On one side is the dim and distant early modern past with its peculiar social organisations and experiences. On the other side, however, is a modern pulse: steeply rising wage-labour, sweeping urban growth, and creeping industrialisation with its new class formations. One offspring of these new and unsteady circumstances, it is said, was juvenile delinquency.

This narrative of juvenile delinquency is tinged with shades of modernity. It sparkles with fresh claims and one of its crunch-words is 'new'. Jurgen Habermas tells us that one badge of work inspired by modernity is 'the new'.² Particular problems raised by the young accelerated quickly after 1800, it seems, and apparently sped out of control thereafter. So it is that Peter King can write that 'contemporary commentators rarely regarded young offenders as a separate distinct problem' before 1750.³ Debates heated up thereafter. So much so, that not long after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, juvenile delinquency first emerged as a discrete idea and threat, challenging contemporaries to propose new conceptualisations of age-related tensions and new solutions to still these troubled waters.

The understanding of juvenile delinquency in time cannot be imagined apart from historiographical impressions of the nature of childhood or youth at any particular point in time. Early path-breaking work on juvenile delinquency was conceived two or three decades ago when evaluations of the nature of experiences of early modern youth that today seem thin and threadbare were near orthodoxies. Influential, in this respect, was the claim that a 'new world of children' had emerged suddenly in the eighteenth century once the restrictive rules and other debris of the Tudor and Stuart centuries finally disappeared.⁴ Thus it has been incorrectly said that 'a more child-centred approach' recast childhood as a 'special' 'separate' stage of life towards the close of the eighteenth century, and that these developing senses of childhood are among the conceptual roots of juvenile delinquency.⁵

Wordsworth once rhymed that it was absolute bliss to be young in the hurricane rush of the French Revolution when nothing ever seemed still. But it was surely dreary and dull to be young before the so-called 'long' eighteenth century if a highly influential historiographical line understands the earlier actions and sentiments of young people correctly. The sources of satisfaction, exhilaration, and comfort said to be missing or at best infrequent and highly circumscribed in youthful experiences before 1700 have included formative experiences, free-time, masturbation, penetrative sex, or sensitive parenting.⁶ It was once thought that before the liberating rays of the eighteenth century youth was little more than a drab house-bound, service-framed, and master-led existence, and that this enclosure of youth stifled most independent thought or action. Little by little, however, as time passed, these shackles loosened. Creative energy, for so long dammed-up, at long last burst free. So it is that Mitterauer treats the last five centuries of youth as a protracted struggle for emancipation, a passage in the inevitable rush to modernity, and a voyage of self-discovery from darkness into the light. He concludes that 'formative experiences [of youth] were minimal' in what he calls 'old European society'.⁷

Time after time, early modern youth has been a casualty of twentieth-century historiographies. Its historical agency has been sapped in much historical work, its creative vigour is a pinprick, and its cultural freedoms have been made to seem few and far between. This impression was produced by contemporaries (and later historians) who presented an optimistic picture of the potential of service to shackle youth; by early modern historians who too frequently worked without the archival sources where experiences of youth were more profusely and colourfully recorded, or who confined bursts of youth disorder to apprentice culture or the legitimising cloak of misrule; and by those historians who, gripped by modernisation theories, believe that the roots of present-day experiences are only to be uncovered in the last two or three centuries. More recent work, however, has turned these once powerful interpretations almost upside down. We now know that sections of early modern youth were culturally dynamic, to the extent that they were able to challenge or even modify authority structures.⁸ Arguably, our history of juvenile delinquency in the long run over the last five centuries has yet to fully assimilate these latest turns in historical research.

Emphasis must be placed, however, on alterations and modifications over time. Experiences of youth were always changing. To reiterate, however, youth culture or formative experiences of youth did not emerge from a cultural vacuum in the eighteenth century or after, encouraged by changes in the workplace or schooling, for example, or the seemingly limitless possibilities offered by the fast-growing, sprawling cities. More apparent are modifications in the ideas through which 'problems' of youth (and youth itself) were imagined and stigmatised. Youthful delinquency, then, was always being reconfigured over time, in part as the result of changes in perceptions, cultures, and ideologies (the status and politics of the family in the wake of the Reformation is one such case), and in part as the result of changes in material conditions.

The biggest changes over time in responses to delinquent youth, it seems to me, were legal, legislative, and linguistic in nature. At its conception juvenile delinquency was first and foremost a regulatory discourse, and a pliable label through which to pin down undesirable youth and to cut them off from their 'respectable' peers. Scholars refer to the 'subjectification' or construction of juvenile delinquency by legislators, magistrates, and police.⁹ In this respect, then, juvenile delinquency is as much an index of perceptions as a catalogue of behaviours. Today as always, after all, most people sail through their youth and rarely cross swords with governors, picking up no 'grave cultural damage' in the words of Bennett Berger.¹⁰ Juvenile delinquency and youth are not synonymous, however much they cannot be interpreted apart from each other.

Nevertheless, it is arguable that a more balanced and nuanced account of the 'rise of juvenile delinquency' is now long overdue. A more context-secure and source-sensitive narrative would reach back to the sixteenth century (and before) and trace ideas about generational disorders to unpick the roots of later semantic twists in discourses about young offenders. It is most certainly the case that a few recent writers on these matters now imagine a nineteenth-century 'rise' or 'evolution' of juvenile delinquency in a far longer time-span than ever before, though their formulations of order and senses of development through time are on occasion fuzzy .¹¹ John Gillis puts the point neatly: 'concern with juvenile delinquency', he notes, 'has been a recurring problem since at least the sixteenth century'. Hugh Cunningham comments that street children are 'a centuries old problem'. While Martin Neumeyer writes that 'juvenile delinquency is an old problem'.¹² It is frequently felt, however, that this generational threat was much more menacing, long-lasting, and far-reaching after 1800, though it is questionable whether the right sort of work has been completed on the patchier sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to allow us to pass emphatic generalisations of this sort with confidence.

'Youth were never more sawcie', Thomas Barnes moaned in 1624, 'yea never more savagely saucie, the ancient are scorned, the honourable are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded'. Several decades earlier, the professional complainer Philip Stubbes asked his readers to consider whether there was 'ever seen less obedience in youth of all sorts, both mankind and womankind, towards their superiours, parents, masters and governors'.¹³ These generational blasts are staple propaganda wars in most societies, but though apparently timeless and routine calls to order, their particular preoccupations differed in both time and place. Early modern social commentaries certainly articulated 'problems' of youth in broad brush-strokes, referring in the most general and unspecific terms to a threatening or lost generation that let loose a galaxy of disorders. It was the young who stretched the patience and exercised the policy think tanks of magistrates and moralists more than any other social group. They swelled the ranks of rootless vagrants,¹⁴ raised fevered concern in towns about pockets of criminal youth,¹⁵ contested or flouted moralities articulated by the church courts in the largest numbers,¹⁶ provided the biggest number of thieves prosecuted before the courts,¹⁷ and they were also arguably the major target of the recurring struggles to reform manners in early modern society.¹⁸ Contemporary social commentaries were also perfectly capable, however, of locating particular 'problem' groups like single women who flocked to the trouble-torn towns with their poisoned chalice of opportunities in rising numbers towards 1700, or a vagrant flock of young street-Arabs.¹⁹

Above all, however, and by way of contrast to nineteenth-century descriptions of 'problems' of youth, early modern anxieties about youth were in large part shaped by the politics and pressures of service. So much so, that waves of panic about the perceived crimes of servants could sweep through elites, and understandings of the lack of participation implicit in conceptions of marginality were frequently focused upon service and the household. Thus when Lawrence Johnson was spotted on the streets late at night by the watch in 1635 and it emerged that he was 'in noe service nor is anie housekeeper', the clerk of London Bridewell reported that he 'therefore is thought to be a vagrant'.²⁰ This was to some extent a question of numbers and characteristic experiences; the great majority of people of the lower classes spent most of their youth in service or apprent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Series Editors Preface
• Introduction Re-inventing the Juvenile Delinquent in Britain and Europe 1650-1950
• 1. Juvenile Delinquency in Time
• 2. On Not Becoming Delinquent: Raising Adolescent Boys in the Dutch Republic, 1600-1750
• 3. Before the Reformatory: A Correctional Orphanage in Old Regime Seville
• 4. ‘Crimes inexplicables’: Murderous Children and the Discourse of Monstrosity in Romantic-Era France
• 5. Testing the Limits: Redefining Resistance in a Belgian Boys’ Prison, 1895-1905
• 6. Border Crossings: Care and the ‘Criminal Child’ in Nineteenth Century European Penal Congresses
• 7. Gender, After-Care and Reform in Inter-war Norway
• 8. Absent Fathers and Family Breakdown: Delinquency in Vichy France
• 9. Race, Delinquency and Difference in Twentieth Century Britain
• Index