Violence and Crime in Nineteenth Century England

The Shadow of our Refinement

J. Carter Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134332465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Counseling

This book illuminates the origins and development of violence as a social issue by examining a critical period in the evolution of attitudes towards violence. It explores the meaning of violence through an accessible mixture of detailed empirical research and a broad survey of cutting-edge historical theory.

The author discusses topics such as street fighting, policing, sports, community discipline and domestic violence and shows how the nineteenth century established enduring patterns in views of violence.

Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of modern British history, social and cultural history and criminology.

1 “Speakable” violence

Mentality and violence, narrative and counternarrative

DOI: 10.4324/9780203391181-2

When the raw fact of violence is silenced in discussion, what emerges is not theory but worldview. Perhaps in employing this style of analysis people try to make the world a livable place for themselves by controlling what they fear is uncontrollable, speaking what they have been told is unspeakable. Of course, there is no reason to believe that violence is either uncontrollable or unspeakable – for how can we control that which we do not address directly; how can we speak of that which we have banished from our analyses?

Carolyn Nordstrom¹

Continuities in history always give the lie to assumed discontinuities. Moreover, people seldom fully absorb the lessons which the social world flings at them. All messages have to compete with collective memories, attitudes, and values bequeathed by past generations, as well as with individuals’ compulsions, defenses, and interests in the present.

V. A. C. Gatrell²

Although “unspeakable” is the word commonly paired with “violence,” violence has become one of the most discussed aspects of human life in the modern era. Speaking and writing about violence is ubiquitous, and all levels and kinds of violence generate efforts to put its experience into words. Across the spectrum, from individual or small-group interpersonal assault and murder through war and combat to the extremity of mass-slaughter and genocide, violence calls forth a torrent of words that serve a variety of purposes: condemning, justifying, explaining, obscuring or even obliterating its presence.³ These stories, or narratives, are the main sources for historians interested in violence. Whether in the form of detailed descriptions or abbreviated notations, they have long been compiled and categorized to explain specific incidents, explore police and judicial responses (or the lack thereof) to different kinds of violence, debate crime rates or compare historical levels of violence. All of these approaches have raised important questions and yielded numerous conclusions about the place of physical aggression in the past and in the present. Yet, it is the ambiguity of the phrase “speakable violence” that suggests the two conceptual foundations of my approach. First, it identifies the way that violent acts seem inescapably to generate narratives. Second, it points to the way that violence itself works like a language. People say many things about violence but also communicate with their violence. Violence “speaks”: it has various grammars, vocabularies, dialects and meanings, some of which are clear while others are more ambiguous. Individual violent encounters vary as widely as the particularities of countless conversations, yet overall syntaxes of social violence can nonetheless be discerned. I suggest that both aspects of “speakable violence” can help reveal the forces that shape the production and subsequent evaluation of violence, provide glimpses of coherent networks of attitudes toward it, disclose the interactions between the narratives and practices of everyday life and illustrate the social imagination of historical eras.

Collections of narratives about violence – along with the often incomplete and contradictory patterns that they constitute – form the bases of “mentalities” of violence. The ingredients that form mentalities of violence are many and come into contact with other kinds of attitudes regarding diverse forms of social interaction: violence, after all, is not the only component of a person’s view of the world. Nonetheless, mentalities of violence contribute to the ways that social life is shaped and maintained. In particular, I call attention to the centrality of conflict within mentalities of violence. They emerge not as pre-packaged cultural configurations – they are not simply a priori containers easily taken off the shelf – but develop out of processes of dispute and agreement over the boundaries of legitimate physical force. Moreover, mentalities are continuously re-formed and adapted to new social situations, and they help to define a more general landscape of cultural confrontation. As there is no single, stable and essentialized structure of attitudes toward violence, various mentalities will coexist in any given society at a particular stage of historical development. This is not to say that all mentalities of violence are equally significant: different configurations of beliefs will, at times, be more prominent than others. Furthermore, in recognizing that mentalities differ across cultures and time, I neither suggest that they operate as dictatorial networks of social control that deny choice and agency nor advocate a kind of cultural relativism in which all perspectives are equally good or bad. All people, including the present author, must inevitably take a position on the issue of violence; however, my interest here is in examining the frameworks (and limitations) in which those choices are made. Furthermore, as I will suggest below and at various points in this book, attitudes toward violence are linked to many factors not directly related to violence itself, and violence, along with its mentalities, can serve several purposes.

I have used this approach in examining violence in nineteenth-century England, at a time when self-identified civilizing forces undertook a determined offensive against alternative, customary attitudes toward violence. I do not suggest that these two aspects of a widespread cultural conflict over violence were able to develop comprehensive and unquestionable rulebooks of legitimate behavior, nor do I think that these disputes were neatly contained within precise chronological boundaries. Mentalities, after all, do not work that way. However, I have identified a distinctive configuration in violence mentalities between approximately 1820 and 1870. The lines between them could, in certain contexts, be porous. At times they were like subtly different accents of a common cultural vernacular; in other contexts they were more akin to foreign (and mutually bewildering) tongues. Clearly, when one speaks of violence one is not talking simply about words: there was also fear, pain, injury and blood. But acts of violence are inseparable from the narratives that alternatively shape and analyze them. Narratives have consequences, and their analysis suggests some of the dominant cultural fault lines in the nineteenth century while pointing toward useful approaches to violence more generally. The present chapter introduces and explores the main concepts and theories deployed throughout the remainder of this study.

Violence, narrative and mentality

Although “violence never solved anything” is a modern truism, violence has always settled many things: dominance within social groups, distributions of honor and status and the boundaries between the sexes, to name just a few.⁴ However, “violence,” in Raymond Williams’s understated phrase, is a “difficult word” with a wide variety of meanings.⁵ Thus, in analyzing it, some lines have to be drawn, and for this study I have considered “violence” that is physically injurious (rather than purely psychologically damaging) to human beings, small-scale and, in general, not “political” in the formal sense of being related to parties, electoral rituals, terrorism or demonstrations aimed at changing state policies. Of course, as a fluid term subject to many contested meanings, the margins between different sorts of violence are often very difficult to establish. Furthermore, the word “violence” tends to describe more than merely the use of physical force. Generally, a witness or victim also views that force as illegitimate.⁶ Physically aggressive acts that are in some way culturally legitimated are often labeled (at least by some groups) as something other than “violence,” such as when physical force used by police or military authorities – even when this results in fatalities – is referred to as the “restoration of order.” Thus, the term “violence,” particularly when used by the victim(s) and his or her (or their) supporters, is normally meant to point to a social transgression, even if one not everyone might recognize as such. All societies are fissured by competing understandings of what is or is not violent, who may use violence and in what circumstances, and the legitimate goals of deploying physical force. Such divisions can be drawn along the well-established categories of class, gender and race, but they might also vary according to geography, age and ideology, and they are built, reinforced and altered through an intermittent process of dispute, evaluation and re-evaluation. Although changeable, attitudes about violence are not freefloating and are instead shaped in reference to particular mentalities, akin to “mental maps,” with which we navigate the cultural terrain of violence; the maps, as well as the territories they represent, are subject to change.⁷ As a result of this systematizing function played by narrative-driven mentalities, violence as a social phenomenon can be investigated and understood through looking at the way that its narratives are created, maintained and how they interact.

What initially should be apparent is that the flexibility and contingency that characterize the history of attitudes to violence undermines the notion that there is a single “natural” mentality of violence. For instance, despite a distinctly modern view, there is little reason to automatically assume that violence is in fact “unspeakable,” indescribable, random or even irrational. In the eighteenth century, as Margaret Hunt notes, “violence was not something repellent, deviant or unspeakable as it came to be later on, and continues to be to this day, even for many of the people who are chronically victimized by it.”⁸ Even in our own time, a victim of violence will usually find ways of putting that trauma into words, however incomplete they may be in expressing the thoughts and feelings involved, thus contributing to the discourses that develop through the judicial system and in the media. An individual’s experience of a violent incident is to some extent unique; nonetheless, particular socially constructed epistemologies organize individualized experiences of violence into recoverable patterns. An episode in Nordstrom’s work on civil war in Mozambique describes a conversation with a group of children in a village under attack. She notes, It is here that experiences and mentalities of violence interact: although the actual experience of a violent act is interior and inaccessible, the narratives employed to make sense of it are cultural products available for study.

The narrative of the attack was not the actual experience of that violence, it was trying to find a meaningful way to deal with it. And this meaning, which changes over time, circumstance and speaker, is a cultural production.⁹

A large number of the sources in this book are narratives of violence, particularly those contained within pre-trial depositions given to the police. Such witness testimony usually appears to be composed of long, unbroken descriptions of what happened. However, the apparently solid narrative is in most cases actually an accumulation of responses to questions from the police officer or magistrate who was conducting the inquiry. Although we can no longer know the precise contours of the interview, depositions resulted from a two-way dialogue, one that was to some degree filtered through the written hand of the authorities. The vast majority of victims, witnesses and perpetrators were working class, and many of them were illiterate; however, they understood the language of violence and made judgments that allow one to reconstruct its social contexts. In presenting testimony about violent acts, I have tended toward emphasizing the words of those who witnessed them. This does not, of course, give us direct access to the experience of violence, as even primary sources are at least one degree removed that experience itself. However, without naively assuming that the past can speak for itself, sensitivity to the patterns of witness description can, I believe, be very revealing of processes of narrative construction and deserve, when appropriate, to obscure as little as possible. These are, furthermore, sometimes disturbing words; however, in many cases I have deliberately chosen to provide details of violence in the voice of witnesses in order to do justice to the nature of the events they were describing and to avoid the frequent tendency to blanket violence under layers of distancing narrative. It is important to remember that the people who speak in the stories that follow are describing events that had very real impact – terror, injury and often death – and to listen to the ways they viewed and came to terms with such events.

Although Nordstrom’s interviews with children in an African village emphasize the way that narratives of violence are formed after an event, narratives also actively shape violence before the fact, affecting the circumstances in which violence is used and the forms it takes. Rather than being inert stores of knowledge, mentalities may have to be called upon to guide action: one might be put into a situation in which he or she must evaluate the likelihood of violence being employed against them and the ways they might defend against it. Even if not directly a participant in, or victim of, a violent act, one may need to judge an event one has seen. There is also a more general social and political discussion of violence that one engages with as a citizen, social observer and voter. Mentalities of violence are the “social imaginaries” through which its experience is organized.¹⁰ Even within the sometimes blurred boundaries of a single mentality, this process of organization can be conflicted, becoming significantly more complex where different mentalities (sometimes with very different fundamental notions about violence) converge and struggle over certain events. The intricacy of these narrative engagements with violent events varied widely, and they are discussed with reference to different themes in the chapters that follow. However, along with recognizing that narratives shape the forms of and reactions to violence, there is yet another link between narrative and violence that highlights the linguistic nature of violence itself. That so many (and such varied) narratives tend to amass around violent events suggests that violence is a phenomenon very open to interpretation. Even where violence has become something generally abhorrent, we still expect it to “say” something, or we at least attempt to interpret the meanings that lay within it. Such interpretative imperatives are, I believe, assisted by the way that violence works in some ways like a language. As a physical act involving the most intense of human emotions and sensations (anger, fear and pain), violence makes an unmistakable entrance into any social encounter. Simply put, it is difficult to ignore. As David Riches notes:

The expressive function of acts or images of violence capitalizes, firstly, on the visibility of violence, and secondly on the probability that all involved – however different their cultural backgrounds – are likely to draw, at the very least, some basic common understanding from the acts or images concerned. These two properties of violence make it an excellent communicative vehicle.¹¹

Along with the “basic common understanding” that may inhere in nearly any act of violence, different societies shape and understand violence according to diverse cultural rules. Violence’s language-like structure thus accounts not only for aspects of its universality but also for its cultural specificity Violence and the reactions it demands are scripted by mentalities that provide a set of guidelines for what form aggression or violence (like any other utterance or social interaction) should take.

However, my suggestion that violence functions in ways analogous to a language is neither an attempt to constrain violence within the bounds of scientific certainty nor an effort to diminish its instabilities, contingencies and physical consequences. Violence, just like language, does not lend itself to being placed within such tidy boxes. In violence, just as in language, the “rules” are not always followed: conventions are broken – people sometimes “go too far” – and, because violence is a physically destructive act, injury and/or death may result. Nevertheless, the fact that violence does not always follow its script does not make it any less linguistic nor does it deny that violence can be seen as a rule-based social activity. The distinction between “rules” and “la...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front Other
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Casting shadows
• 1 “Speakable” violence: Mentality and violence, narrative and counternarrative
• 2 A useful savagery: Violence, civilization and middle-class identity
• 3 “Vigorous passions and decided actions”: Custom and the cultural contexts of violence
• 4 “The brave old English custom”: Dispute, recreation and ritual violence among working-class men
• 5 “The wrongdoing of the poor man is as open as day”: Built space, imagined space, knowledge and violence
• 6 “Heave half a brick at a stranger”: Strategies of violence
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index