Nineteenth century crime: sources

Victorian crime can be examined through three main sources[1]. Annual statistical returns have been published as Parliamentary Papers since 1805; a wide range of contemporary literary sources offer comment on criminal behaviour and provide valuable insights into Victorian concepts of crime; the formal records of court proceedings can often be supplemented by local newspapers.

Criminal statistics

Annual returns were significantly expanded and improved in the mid-1830s and the late 1850s. Before 1837 the figures related only to national committals for indictable offences but after that statistics at both national and county level were introduced for indictable and summary offences. The County and Borough Police Act 1856 presented the statistics by police districts, thus facilitating regional study. A number of changes occurred in 1893, the most important of which was the change from a year ending on 29 September to one coincident with the calendar year. There are certain problems in using statistics:

1. Particular administrative districts do not necessarily provide the most useful base from which to study crime. Counties contained extremely varied social and economic characteristics that render the search for conclusive explanation difficult if not impossible
2. There are difficulties with the categories used by compilers of statistics
3. Changes in policing could affect the statistics of crime. The establishment of new police forces from the 1830s almost invariably produced local increases in the number of people committed for public order offences like drunk and disorderly and vagrancy. Directives to individual police forces to clamp down on one offence could produce sudden peaks in local statistics. For example in the year 1867-8 105 vagrants were apprehended in Bedfordshire but the figure the following year was 291 falling back to 117 in 1869-70
4. Changes in the law could also affect the statistics. New laws also meant new crimes. The Education Act 1870 resulted in over 96,000 parents being brought before the courts in the first year and allegedly half a million were prosecuted in the first twenty years of the legislation.
5. There is a difference between 'official' crime, as found in statistics, and 'total' crime or actual crimes committed

In the light of these problems, it has been argued that the annual statistics are worthless for the study of criminal activity, though a strong case for their value as a source has been made.

Literary sources

Most of the conceptions of crime in Victorian England were the 'official' and perhaps essentially middle class views of politicians, civil servants, clergymen, magistrates and law officers. Consequently, the literary sources offer a narrow and biased view of the problem. Furthermore, since law is created, and therefore crime defined, by the ruling elite, it can be argued that all law must reflect its prejudices and protect its privileges. Popular fiction and drama in, for example, the 1830s and 1840s, including Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, highlighted and seemed to support important aspects of the factual discussion on crime:

1. The perception that crime existed in a world of its own. This criminal ‘world’ mirrored the respectable world as a nightmare mirrors the day world. Moral issues were very clear and criminality was dramatically at war with virtue
2. The youthfulness of the criminal world.
3. Many of these works were characterised by a fascination with and an intense horror of violence.

This did not mean that the whole of society agreed about the law that defined crime. Legislation against trade unions and poaching are two of the more obvious examples of class law. It is, however, debatable whether laws can run too far ahead of public opinion. To argue that all law was class-based is to ignore the fact that most crime was committed against members of the working classes.

Court and police records

The principal courts involved in the prosecution of crime were the Court of Assize and the Court of Quarter Sessions. In all cases, it is normal to find registers of cases and files associated with specific prosecutions. Increasingly during the century, the Court of Petty Sessions emerged to deal with minor offences at the local level, but they were not courts of record and the survival of any materials is likely to be fortuitous.  The survival rate of local constabulary records varies, but, at their best they offer valuable insights into official attitudes to crime through chief constables' quarterly and annual reports to Quarter Sessions, the papers and minute books of Police Committees and the records of occurrence books.

Given that most, and from 1857-8, all of the statistical and official sources refer to local and regional units, much of the research has been carried out at that level[2]. Taking the various sources available the following pattern emerges[3]:

1. The eighteenth century saw a significant ‘crime wave’. Contemporary writers all commented on the increase in theft and violence. As a result a large number of small offences were made hanging offences. This became known as the ‘Bloody Code’.
2. The steep rise in theft and assault continued after 1825 at a steady rate until the late 1840s. For the second half of the century there was a gradual decline in theft and violence, though housebreaking and burglary remain at a constant and proportionally higher level
3. The most common crime -- well over half and often more than three-quarters -- throughout the period was small-scale theft
4. The great majority of offenders -- generally three in four -- were male and there was a strong concentration of young men in their teens and twenties

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[1] The best introduction to statistics is V. Gattrell and T.B. Hadden 'Criminal statistics and their interpretation' in E.A. Wrigley (ed.) Nineteenth Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of History, CUP, 1972 but see also the discussion in J.J. Tobias.

[2] D. Phillips Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1835-60, Croom Helm, 1977 is one of the most successful in combining the types of records from separate jurisdictions.

[3] There are parallels between the Victorian experience and the current experience and perception of crime.

The context and nature of crime

During this period of a century and a half Britain underwent major changes. These are normally associated with the Industrial Revolution. It is important to keep the following points in mind when looking at this issue.

1. In 1750 England had a total population of around 6 million people. By 1901 this had risen to over 30 million. In 1750 about a quarter of the total population lived in towns and cities. By 1901 this had risen to three out of every four people. This process of urbanisation put considerable strains on existing systems of law enforcement. It saw the gradual end of the face-to-face society of early modern England. Town life was more anonymous. By the mid-nineteenth century most people lived and worked in towns and cities. This concentrated population.
2. The French Revolution, which began in 1789, created considerable fear among the ruling classes that a similar revolution would take place in Britain. The working classes did not have the vote and their demands were seen as ‘revolutionary’ even when they were reasonable. Activities, like food riots that in the early modern period were seen as crimes were now defined as revolutionary.  The authorities increasingly feared the working classes as a threat to public order. As a result even small crimes were punished harshly.
3. There were important changes in attitude towards crime and punishment.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the ground-rules of conduct and behaviour were laid down by the Law and government policy, but the actual form and contents of the game was left to the influence of voluntary associations, local communities and often custom. The matter was one of social control. This was defined in middle class terms of 'respectability' and threats to 'public order'. The aim of this module is to explore the nature of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how it was detected and prevented and how those found guilty of offences were punished.

The nature of crime

There has been an unprecedented growth of academic research and publications in the history of crime[1]. Until recently, most books dealing with crime tended to be 'popular' rather than narrowly 'academic' and concentrated on particular, notorious events or personalities and many depended on largely anecdotal and literary sources[2]. Since the 1970s historians have increasingly turned their attention to crime and how former societies understood it and sought to deal with it.

Some historians have made a distinction between 'real crime' such as murder, rape and theft and 'social crime' or offences that had a degree of community acceptance or that can be linked with social protest. John Rule has suggested that it is useful to think of two main types of social crime during the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century:

1. Crimes that drew collective legitimation from their protest nature. In this category he includes rioting over the high cost of food, over enclosures, recruiting for the army or navy or over turnpike tolls.
2. Crime that, though actions against the law, were not regarded as criminal by those who committed them. 'Perks' or the appropriation of things from the workplace became increasingly the object of criminal prosecution by employers in the nineteenth century. Poaching fell into the same category. The poor did not look upon it as a crime[3]: 'they almost universally look upon game, when in a wild state, as not being the property of any individual.'

The degree to which the state criminalises certain types of behaviour and not others has always been a matter of debate. The traditional view is that humanitarian reformers like Sir Samuel Romilly and Sir James Mackintosh gradually created an awareness both inside and outside Parliament that England's Bloody Code needed drastic revision. While such men stressed the barbarity of the legal code, other reformers like John Howard paved the way for improvement in the prison system. This picture fitted well with the Whig idea of history as progress. This view implies a logic that neglects the economic, social and political context of change.

Eighteenth century Parliaments tended to pass laws for local problems but gradually the government saw crime in its national context. Sir Robert Peel's reorganisation of the criminal law during the 1820s was symptomatic of this change. Yet national laws still had to be implemented at local level by local people, whose perceptions were not always the same as those in Parliament. The law may have been seen as impartial. However, it had to be interpreted and enforced by local agents who had their own assumptions, interests and prejudices and who could be, on occasions, at odds with each other.

Offenders could be brought before three main kinds of court during the nineteenth century:

1. The least serious offences or misdemeanours could be dealt with summarily by magistrates, sitting alone or in pairs on the bench, in petty sessions. The number of offences that could be tried summarily increased in the nineteenth century with the passage of the Juvenile Offenders Acts in 1847 and 1850 and the Criminal Justice Acts of 1855 and 1879. In the larger towns and cities stipendiary or paid magistrates, acting in what were increasingly referred to as 'police courts' took on more and more of the burdens of summary justice.
2. More serious offences or felonies were prosecuted on indictment and were heard at Quarter Sessions that met four times a year in both counties and corporate towns.
3. The most serious offences were tried before judges at Assizes. In the early nineteenth century there were two assizes per year held in the major county towns of most counties at Lent and during the summer. Emergencies, such as food riots or other types of public disorder, could lead to a special assize being called. The metropolitan equivalent of the assizes was the court at the Old Bailey that was holding eight sessions a year during the 1750s. In 1834 it was enlarged and re-housed in the new Central Criminal Court.

Magistrates and judges were not the only agents of the law who were called upon to interpret the law. The nineteenth century saw the creation of a new police force in Britain. The police had some discretion in identifying some behaviour as criminal or not and in deciding what action to take. It was largely victimless crimes that were open to such discretion: drunkenness, prostitution, street gaming and especially Sunday street selling.

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[1]  C. Emsley Crime and Society in England 1750-1900, Longman, 2^nd ed., 1997, 3rd ed., 2005 is the most recent general text and is worth reading in full.  It should be read in conjunction with C. Emsley Policing and its Context 1750-1870, Macmillan, 1983, his 'Crime in Nineteenth Century Britain', History Today, April 1988, V. Gattrell 'Crime, authority and the policeman-state' in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950: volume 3 Social Agencies and Institutions, CUP, 1900, pp.243-310 and the older study by J.J. Tobias Crime and Industrial Society in the Nineteenth Century, Penguin, 1972.

[2] The classic case of this kind in the nineteenth century was the 'Jack the Ripper' murders in 1888.

[3] A Bedfordshire JP to the Select Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions, Parliamentary Papers 1826-7, vi, page 34.