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.

Grammar and public schools and universities after 1870

In the twenty-five years between the Endowed Schools Act 1869 and the appointment of the Bryce Commission to look at secondary education four main developments had taken place:

• The endowments and management of the grammar schools had been widely reformed.
• The curriculum of grammar schools had become subject to greater scrutiny and change.
• The middle class character of the schools had been further reinforced though a narrow ladder had begun to be erected for the recruitment of a small number of working class children to the secondary system.
• Secondary education for middle class girls had made considerable advances.

In spite of the reforms, however, many schools remained insecure. The Bryce Commission found in the 1890s many of them, mainly smaller schools, were prone to fluctuating numbers and decline. It was the question of access to secondary schools that was on the point of becoming a major issue. The Education Act 1902 was central to the process of change for grammar schools.

The Endowed Schools Commissioners had power to make provision for girls and was widely used by them. By the time of their demise in 1874 they had made schemes creating 27 schools for girls; schemes for another twenty were in the pipeline. The Charity Commissioners proceeded at a much slower pace but as further 45 girls’ schools had been added by 1903. Parallel to these developments went the creation of proprietary schools for girls. In 1892 a Girls’ Public Day School Company was formed and by 1880 it had opened eleven schools in London and eleven elsewhere. A handful of new girls’ schools, such as Cheltenham, Wycombe Abbey and Roedean, were boarding, modelling themselves more or less on boys’ public schools; but the vast majority were day schools.

The elementary and endowed and private school systems remained broadly defined by the criteria of social class. It is not surprising that the public schools managed to maintain their social identity though criticisms continued to be levelled against their traditions and preoccupation with games and athleticism. The public schools perpetuated an aristocratic element in English education and the proprietary and endowed schools continued to uphold it as an educational ideal. The sons of the expanding commercial and industrial middle classes were trained in the older traditions and codes of gentlemen, an education that left them ill prepared for their role in an increasingly competitive world. Modern subjects were often left optional and between 1860 and 1880 games became compulsory, organised and eulogised at all the leading public schools. There was no overall change in their structure, objectives or curriculum until after 1918.

Higher education after 1870

The vast growth in and attempt to systematise secondary education was paralleled by a significant, though relatively small, growth and innovation in the university sector. Higher education was still only accessible to a tiny minority. There were changes in the composition of the university population, in the structure of university government and in the curriculum.

1. The 1870s saw the arrival at Oxford and Cambridge both of Nonconformists and of women. The 1871 legislation abolishing university tests untied both undergraduate places and fellowships and in the process allowed fellows to marry. The growing regiment of dons’ wives was augmented by a small file of women students. Girton and Newnham at Cambridge in the early 1870s were joined by Somerville, Lady Margaret Hall and St Anne’s at Oxford in 1879 followed by St Hugh’s and St Hilda’s in 1886 and 1892 respectively. But numbers were small: in 1900-1 296 women students at Cambridge and 239 at Oxford compared to 2,880 and 2,537 male students respectively. Women did not become full members of the university in Oxford until 1919 and in Cambridge until 1948 whereas they were admitted to all the University of London degrees in 1878.
2. The Royal and Statutory Commissions of the 1850s had begun the process of overhauling college statutes and strengthening the central organs of university government. This was continued in the 1870s but the more ambitious plans were spoiled by the fall in colleges’ income brought about by the agricultural depression. At the same time, a reassertion of control over teaching and pastoral responsibilities by many colleges counter-balanced such trends towards centralisation very powerfully.
3. The breaches in the dominance of Classics and Mathematics towards the end of the 1840s continued and in the early 1870s separate courses in History and Law emerged and the 1890s saw the arrival of courses in English and Modern Languages. Parallel to this was the emergence of research as a systematic postgraduate activity.

Changes in Oxbridge, however, were only a pale reflection of the changes outside it. By 1900 there were more students, women as well as men, in higher education in Great Britain outside than within Oxford and Cambridge. The sequence of foundations was as follows: Newcastle 1871; University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 1872; Leeds 1874; Mason College, Birmingham 1874; Bristol 1876; Firth College, Sheffield 1879; Liverpool 1881; Nottingham 1881; Cardiff 1883; Bangor 1883; Reading 1892; Southampton 1902.  Many of these institutions began by taking external London degree examinations before seeking Royal Charters to enable them to grant their own degrees.

Other institutions, often also exploiting the external London examining umbrella, grew in London itself: medical schools attached to the teaching hospitals; in South Kensington the Royal School of Mines, the Royal College of Science and the Central Technical College formed the great Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1907; the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895; and the women’s colleges, Bedford [1849], Westfield [1882] and Royal Holloway [1886]. But the University of London only acquired a teaching as well as an examining role in 1899, following the University of London Act 1898 that brought all these and other institutions together in a complex and uneasy federation. By 1900-1 full-time students outside Oxford and Cambridge totalled almost 8,000 in England and a further 1,250 in Wales.

Funding the civil university movement proved problematic and most universities were operating on a shoe-string compared to the endowments of Oxbridge. In individual cases, university colleges benefited from the generosity of local business: in Birmingham, for example, the Chamberlains played a central role. But this was not enough. From 1839 the University of London had a small recurrent grants in recognition of the imperial and colonial as well as the domestic function of its examining role. In 1883-4 the Welsh parliamentary lobby succeeded in securing short-term grant aid for the three Welsh colleges; and in 1880 the Treasury finally conceded the principle of grant aid to the English institutions outside Oxbridge. By 1906 direct Treasury grants to universities amounted to £100,000.

The full-time student population in all English and Welsh universities in 1914 only accounted for one per cent of the age group. Universities still catered for an elite. The advance of the new professional middle classes gradually reduced the dominance of the landed gentry and clergy. And outside Oxbridge, by 1914, the children of the lower middle classes and skilled artisans were beginning to appear.

Some conclusions

The development of education between 1830 and 1914 was largely a reflection of the class basis of English society. The working classes, if they were schooled at all before 1870, went to elementary schools. The middle classes filled the grammar schools while the public schools remained the preserve of the upper classes. There were links between these three stages, a situation made more obvious after 1902 and the ‘free-place’ system, but movement from elementary school to grammar school was the exception rather than the rule. Children of all classes and of both sexes were better educated in 1914 than in 1830 but this did not have any real impact on the class bias of that education. Education mirrored the pyramidal nature of society rising to the one per cent who received a university education by 1914.

The growing intervention by the state, first with grants to voluntary schools and then with its school boards and local education authorities, marked a recognition that education for all was increasingly seen as a social service not something that ought to be provided by religious and voluntary organisations. The policy-making initiative moved from localities to central government. Acceptable standards were imposed from the centre and administered locally. Education was finally perceived as being too important to be left to chance.