Crime, Protest, Community, and Police in Nineteenth-Century Britain

David Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317369967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This study, first published in 1982, is concerned with the nature of crime in nineteenth-century Britain, and explores the response of the community and the police authorities. Each chapter is linked by common themes and questions, and the topics described in detail range from popular forms of rural crime and protest, through crime in industrial and urban communities, to a study of the vagrant. The author pays special attention to the relationship between illegal activities and protest, and emphasizes the context and complexity of official crime rates and of many forms of criminal behaviour. This title will be of interest to students of history and criminology.

1 Setting the Scene

contemporary views and historical perspectives

Background

One of the more intriguing developments in modern social history has been the explosion of interest in the history of crime. During the 1970s a score of articles, books and theses have been written on the subject. Three major books, including Edward Thompson's remarkable 'Whigs and Hunters', have dealt with crime in Britain between 1550 and 1800, and a fourth, by David Philips, is a statistical survey of crime in one region of Victorian England. Several other publications are in the pipeline, and new research projects are being launched. On a lesser scale, Alan Bainbridge and the present writer have completed a survey of Welsh criminal records, and Michael Beames has compiled a fascinating story of Irish resistance and crime between 1798 and 1852.¹

Some of this work has found its way to conferences in various parts of western Europe and America. In January 1977, John Styles, Geoffrey Parker and others presented papers on crime to the Social History Society at Birmingham. In the same year the American North-east Victorian Studies Association sponsored a conference on 'Crime and Punishment in Victorian England', and in the following autumn the seventh International Economic History Conference at Edinburgh devoted a section to 'Economic and social aspects of criminality in the past'.² Since then there have been many regional conferences on the subject, and various links have been established between scholars here and elsewhere. It can be argued, therefore, that among social historians crime has become something of a boom industry.

This new interest in the history of crime is not as surprising or indeed as retrogressive as some historians of the right and left would suggest. First, it is a fairly logical extension of trends in modern British social history. Much of this history has been concerned with conflict, and often violent conflict other than unionism and political disaffection. Thus George Rudé, David Williams, and many others have been preoccupied with 'primitive' forms of social behaviour: the role of the mob, the significance of Luddism, and various aspects of illegal protest in the countryside. Much of the recent work on the history of crime is a natural development from these pioneering studies, and has been considerably influenced by them. In Britain, Douglas Hay, Victor Bailey and others have brought to the study of crime not the dismissive reductionism of a Paul Hirst, nor the obsession with statistical curves which characterises some Scandinavian analyses, but a determination to place crime as precisely as possible within the changing economic, social and political context. This contextual approach to crime is important, for it marks a break with the old histories of crime and punishment, with their recitals of Acts of Parliament and state trials, and it contributes something to the contemporary debate within criminology.

The second reason for this new interest in the history of crime lies in the slowly blossoming relationship between the social scientist and the historian. Writers like Peter Linebaugh, David Philips and John Beattie are able to move comfortably across disciplines and can bring to their work a wide variety of sources and techniques. All of them use, to a greater or lesser extent, standard sociological works such as those by D. Matza, H.S. Becker and S. Cohen on labelling and the new criminology, D.R, Cressey and E.H. Sutherland on white-collar crime, M. Banton on the police, and T. Sellin and others on measuring delinquency. These studies have helped historians to define crime or violence, and have encouraged them to think more deeply about the relationship between control and crime in the state.³ For example, many historians find the labelling theory a useful device, though they are careful not to explain away all criminal behaviour and statistics by one simple formula.

Where historians and criminologists still have much to teach one another is in the area of criminal records. We do not yet fully appreciate that the great majority of records extant for the years before 1860 cover indictable crimes only, and that some of the debates over fluctuations in the rate of crime at a later period have also been based on inadequate evidence. In general, there are two important questions which have to be asked of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century sources. First, how reliable and accurate are the opinions and statistics which they contain? Second, do government records, in particular, reflect, faithfully or consistently, the level of crime in society? It is known, for instance, that it was some time before the population of Britain accepted or used the official legal system and even at a late date there were certain offences, like sexual crimes, infanticide and family violence, which remained largely hidden from the forces of law and order.⁴ It seems, therefore, that the most profitable approach is to use the widest range of sources and to doubt them all.

In recent years historians have made some informed guesses as to the size of the dark figure of unrecorded crime and the proportion of known cases which never came to trial. Professor J.M, Beattie believes that this dark figure rose during the late eighteenth century, especially in rural society. Indeed, at the turn of the century Patrick Colquhoun stated that only about one in ten offences actually came before the courts, a view which throws doubt on Professor Mingay's suggestion that there was only a small amount of serious crime in Hanoverian Britain.⁵ In the next century contemporaries still remained anxious about the level of unknown crimes, especially in backward rural communities and the most densely populated urban districts. Judges in mid and late Victorian Wales, for example, grew increasingly suspicious of the empty calendars. Even when crimes were known it has been estimated that in London and other parts of Britain at this time, up to 70 per cent of the indictable offences did not result in a trial. No doubt the police occurrence books, as yet largely untapped, will tell us more about the proportions and nature of non-indictable crime which was not 'proceeded with'.⁶

In view of these and other problems of evidence and interpretation, the relationship between the social scientist and the historian can be productive, and it already promises a significant advance on the traditional historical approach to crime. Perhaps one can see this best by comparing Professor Beattie, writing in the 1970s on the eighteenth century, with Dr Tobias, writing in the 1960s on the nineteenth century. Whereas Beattie uses a cross-section of evidence, Tobias rejects the 'pseudo science' of statistics for the intuitive safety of literary evidence. The result of Tobias's decision is less than satisfactory, for literary evidence, good as it is, suffers from common drawbacks in the field of crime. As it is often upper- and middle-class in character, such evidence tends to portray offenders as members of a lowly and distinct criminal class. Moreover, writers like Thomas Beggs or Edwin Chadwick could be highly selective, for they were seeking to establish their own views of crime and protest.⁷ And, finally, it is worth remembering that contemporary criminal literature was often based on statistics anyway.

Crime and Statistics

There is a major difference between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. For the years prior to 1805, we have to rely on assize and quarter session papers, together with exceptional finds in manorial and urban records. Some of the problems in using such material have been outlined by Alfred Soman and John Styles, but the more local studies that are made and the greater the intersection of evidence, the more sure we can be of the general pattern.⁸ In the nineteenth century, national criminal statistics began in the first decade, were extended in 1833-4, and were greatly improved in 1856-7 when the government at last began to document offences known to the police. Moreover, an increasing number of petty sessions and police records survive for this period, including some excellent and unused returns of crime in London and Manchester.⁹

In this area of historical statistics the key works are those by Professors Beattie and Gurr, and Doctors Gatrell, Hadden and Peirce. All of these writers claim that the criminal records can be used with some confidence to denote long-term trends. Briefly, their findings indicate a fairly gentle rise in the eighteenth-century crime rate, with particularly significant increases in the early Hanoverian period and a more sudden upward movement in property offences in the last three decades. This last rise became spectacular in the years 1815-17, and continued to cause alarm until the critical turning-point of the mid century. Just how much this statistical pattern was due to actual changes in criminal behaviour is still being debated, for clearly there was a new sensitivity to crime in this period and an improving machinery for dealing with offenders. What does seem certain, however, is that in the second half of the century, especially after the 1860s, there was a national decline in the number of offences against persons and property until the end of the century, and beyond. Of London, David Peirce ¹⁰ has written:

In the 1830s and 1840s there was much more thievery and assault ... than there was in the 1920s, perhaps five times as much relative to population, while in the 1970s the incidence of indictable crimes is some five times the recorded level of 50 years ago and rising fast.

These historians also indicate that there was a positive correlation between prices, wages, job prospects, war, and property offences in the eighteenth century, and between the trade cycle and property offences for much of the nineteenth. During the worst depressions of this period, such as 1740-1, 1815-17 and 1842-3, the level of crimes and protest was sufficiently high to produce a feeling of general crisis amongst informed observers. The following chapters, however, reveal the complexity of this relationship between economic conditions and crime rates, especially in urban areas, a point which becomes more obvious after the late 1850s. 'It will be a sad reflection to find that an increase in crime is a consequence of increased prosperity,' said Lord Chief Justice Campbell in 1855, 'and that crime must follow in the train of affluence.' In subsequent years the incidence of assaults and drunkenness was often high in comparatively prosperous times, and in the 1880s there were, so we are told, signs of a general shift from poverty-based to prosperity-based crime.¹¹

This picture of major long-term changes in criminal behaviour is complemented by much recent research in Germany, France, Sweden and other parts of the western world. What remains unclear, however, is how the rates and character of crime varied from one type of community to another. Did the urban and rural crime rates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rise and fall together? How did crime in an established town compare with that in a district experiencing the trauma of the industrial revolution? And what of crime in Bristol, Liverpool, Hull, and the other great seaports of this period? Unfortunately, apart from the contemporary investigations of Joseph Kay, Joseph Fletcher, Thomas Plint and John Glyde, very little comparative research has been completed on the subject.

In a sense, of course, true comparisons are difficult if not impossible for, amongst other reasons, there were different levels of sensitivity to certain offences in different communities. It was claimed that a considerable amount of violence in the countryside was ignored or not reported. Even so, as the urban apologists never tired of stressing, crime rates in the highly commercialised agricultural areas of Suffolk and Dorset were often higher than in selected manufacturing towns, and violence against persons and property formed an important element (up to 25 per cent) of the rural crime rate until the 1860s. Assaults in the countryside were of three main kinds: family conflicts, clashes between neighbours, and attacks on excise officers, policemen, poor-law officials, farmers, agents and keepers. Running parallel to this was the destruction of property, the common and under-researched practice of tearing down walls, fences, hedges, gates, and trees, and the spectacular outbreaks of arson and animal maiming which affected southern and eastern England from the late eighteenth century until 1868-9. The other important categories of rural crime were non-malicious property crimes (notably the theft of farm produce, livestock, and prodigious quantities of rabbits, game and fish), 'moral offences' such as drunkenness, vagrancy crimes, bastardy, desertion and sex crimes, and 'technical offences', including breaches of Public Health, Highways and Education Acts.¹²

British historians, studying the comparisons between rural and urban crime, have much to Learn from their counterparts overseas. Professors Tilly, Monkkonen and Zehr have shown the complex nature of the relationship between population size, the rate of urbanisation, crime and disorder. In early nineteenth-century Britain, towns undergoing both rapid expansion and important changes in economic structure frequently experienced social tension, a greater sensitivity to working-class delinquency, and a high crime rate. For example, the emerging boom towns of West Bromwich, Bolton, Merthyr Tydfil and the like were characterised by much popular violence, sometimes of a pre-industrial variety. But at an early stage modern urban life settled down to a reasonably peaceful existence. 'There was', says David Philips, who may exaggerate the pace of the change because of his reliance on assize and quarter session records, 'relatively little danger of criminal violence and death for the inhabitants' of the Black Country in the early Victorian years.¹³ G.R. Porter, Leon Faucher and others were making similar claims at this time for London, Manchester and the great cities, but, as we shall see in later chapters, common assahlt and disorderly conduct remained a prominent concern of urban life, at least until the 1870s.

The other dominant characteristic of urban crime rates over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the high proportion of property offences, notably larceny, which accounted for up to a third of summary proceedings and two-thirds or more of indictable. The typical urban offence was petty theft, and what worried the authorities was the involvement of women and juveniles, sometimes on an organised basis. It seems probable that the highest known incidence of property crimes was in the early Victorian years, though in London and Manchester the number of recorded felonies held up well until the 1860s. Thereafter, except in the case of break-ins, burglaries and some white-collar crimes, the rate of reported property offences in urban Britain declined sharply. Precisely why this happened remains a mystery. The prominence of simple larceny, assault and older forms of crime in the police returns was now being challenged by new commercial crimes, offences such as drunkenness and gambling, and breaches of Education, Highways and Police Acts. For example, about one-third of the people taken to court in London and Cardiff in the mid 1880s were charged with being drunk and disorderly and with not sending their children to school, being sufficient proof, in A.C. Hall's view, of the triumphant march of 'industrial civilization' in Britain.¹⁴

The other information gleaned from the statistics has been concerned with the character of the criminals. Such information, much of which was provided by the criminals themselves, must be used with care, but the pattern which emerges in both Britain and America in the nineteenth century is of a change from a young towards an older criminal population, In the 1830s and 1840s up to 50 per cent of prisoners were in the 15-25 age group; by 1890 some 60 per cent were over 30 years and these were more clearly representatives of the least literate and poorest sections of society. Moreover, much to the delight of those who posited a growing differentiation between the respectable working class and the residuum, there was just enough in the statistical evidence to support the view that in the second half of the century an increasing proportion of offenders (especially female) were already on the police files. Even so, the immensely popular notion of a well defined, and even hereditary, criminal class only made historical sense in special circumstances. Small communities of criminals did exist in some eighteenth-century towns, in small enclaves of Merthyr Tydfil or Ipswich, and within certain fraternities of vagrants, and there were some notorious poaching gangs and a few famous criminal families in the great cities who made small fortunes. But most crimes were committed by people in casual or full-time employment. An analysis of neglected charge and petty session lists in mid-Victorian south-west Wales, for instance, reveals that criminals and non-criminals were usually indistinguishable, and a large proportion of the persons actually proceeded against in Britain between 1857 and 1892 were returned as 'of previous good character'.. The concept of a large hereditary criminal class remained important, however, for it deflected enquiries into the causes of crime and seriously affected the policing and treatment of offenders.¹⁵

Contemporaries and historians have paid special attention to three groups of offenders: females, juveniles and middle-class criminals. According to Professor Beattie the number of known female criminals was very low in rural southern England during the eighteenth century, but in the towns women were responsible for a quarter of the offences.¹⁶ In the next century between one-fifth and one-third of all prisoners in England and Wales were females, the proportion being even higher in places like Liverpool and Merthyr Tydfil during the 1840s and 1850s. Doctors Gatrell and Hadden claim that the peak o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Setting the scene: contemporary views and historical perspectives
• 2 Arson and the rural community: East Anglia in the mid nineteenth century
• 3 The poacher: a study in Victorian crime and protest
• 4 The conquering of 'China': crime in an industrial community, 1842-64
• 5 Crime in London: the evidence of the Metropolitan Police, 1831-92
• 6 Crime and police in Manchester in the nineteenth century
• 7 The vagrant and crime in Victorian Britain: problems of definition and attitude
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index