London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City (31 page)

in Late Victorian London

The Whitechapel murders represent an extraordinary crime for any period of history but contemporaries believed that the area in which they occurred was a breeding ground for criminality of the basest sort. We have already considered Victorian attitudes towards murder and prostitution and touched upon other forms of violent crime when looking at the Irish community in the East End and at the garrotting panics in the mid-century. This chapter will look at crime more generally and in particular at property crime in the late nineteenth century. In doing so we will explore attitudes towards all forms of theft including highway robbery, burglary and housebreaking. The role of the police courts, where magistrates such as the much despised Mr Lushington presided, will be examined to see how they operated both as disciplinary institutions and as arenas for the resolution of disputes between neighbours living in the packed slums of the East End. We will then turn our attention to the more formal courtroom at the Old Bailey where more serious property crimes were tried. Using the trial records and the reports of cases in the London press this section will analyse the nature of crimes committed, look at what was stolen and how, and try to understand victims' responses. The role of the police will be left to Chapter 8 so this chapter will close by studying the way in which the criminal justice system dealt with those found guilty of all forms of theft in the nineteenth century and show that by the 1880s the main weapon in the state's armory was the prison. How did we reach this situation when at the beginning of the century some thieves were being executed for very similar acts of crime?

There is a rich secondary historiography of crime and criminality for the nineteenth century that has examined the ways in which society attempted to explain criminal behaviour. In the early part of the century criminal actions were considered to be personal failings - in much the same way that we saw reformers characterize poverty as an individual malaise rather than a societal problem. By the last quarter of the century, however, contemporaries were beginning to view criminal behaviour as resulting from the collective activities of a distinct group within society. In particular the notion prevailed that a criminal class existed in the period - a subclass below the respectable working classes that lived entirely by criminal activity and had rejected the Victorian work ethic in favour of the easy pickings available from those better off than them. This was largely a fiction, created by the writings of Henry Mayhew and others, that has to some extent been perpetuated by historians who have relied too heavily on contemporary texts. This chapter will use more recent work to undermine the concept of the criminal class and discuss the reasons why it may have been a useful tool for the Victorian authorities to enforce harsher disciplinary practices.

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE IDEA OF A CRIMINAL CLASS

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the science of criminology and the attempt to understand criminal behaviour. Earlier in the century the idea that personality and behaviours could be understood by analysing cranial shape (phrenology) and that patterns emerging from data analysis (statistics) could throw light on all manner of criminal activity had gained a foothold in contemporary consciousness. Both enabled a new discourse of criminality to take root as offenders began to be regularly described `in terms of the external factors acting upon their will - their social environment, their physical and psychic constitution, or a mixture of the two' As Martin Wiener has suggested this scientific approach `led gradually to a subtle weakening of moral judgment of the individual'! This contrasted with the views of earlier in the century, which had tended to see criminality as the manifestation of personal failings in the individual.

This new scientific approach allowed for new ways of dealing with the problem of crime and criminals. In short, if the problem was in society or the environment in which the offender had grown up or inhabited then these could be changed; if the problem was within the individual's head or body then perhaps that too could be altered. Failing that, the logic of this new science was that criminality had to be eradicated: bred out over time or driven out by reformatory punishment. The identification of what we might characterize as `genetic' blueprints of criminality had another important consequence for contemporary attitudes towards crime. As criminal deviance was increasingly constructed as occupying a distinct place in Victorian society - a parallel society at odds with the honest hard-working one as espoused by Samuel Smiles - it appeared that a criminal class had been created to live parasitically upon the fruits of Victorian industrial success. In 1861 Henry Mayhew published his study of the poor and criminal of London in which John Binny declared:

Thousands of our felons are trained from their infancy in the bosom of crime; a large proportion of them are born in the homes of habitual thieves and other persons of bad character, and are familiarised with vice from their earliest years; frequently the first words they lisp are oaths and curses. Many of them are often carried to the beershop or gin palace on the breast of worthless drunken mothers, while others, clothed in rags, run at their heels or hang by the skirts of their petticoats. In their wretched abodes they soon learn to be deceitful and artful, and are in many cases very precocious. The greater number are never sent to school; some run idle about the streets in low neighbourhoods: others are sent out to beg throughout the city

Later in the century the eminent Victorian psychologist Henry Maudsley described the criminal class as the `step-children of nature, morally hamstrung by the environment in which they had been born and with little prospect of dragging themselves out of it without outside assistance. Charles Booth drew a similar conclusion from his extensive statistical study of the working classes, viewing much criminality as hereditary.' The Rev W. D. Morrison, a prison chaplain and long-time critic of the prison regimes of the nineteenth century, wrote in 1891:

There is a population of habitual criminals which forms a class itself. Habitual criminals are not to be confounded with the working or any other class; they are a set of persons who make crime the object and business of their lives; to commit crime is their trade; they deliberately scoff at honest ways of earning a living, and must accordingly be looked upon as a class of a separate and distinct character from the rest of the community.'

That the patterns of behaviour displayed in later life were learned in infancy was very much a feature of Victorian discourse. Thus, children and youth were corrupted by exposure to poverty, immorality, idleness and crime, and themselves drawn in to the whole sorry business of delinquent behaviour. Older criminals taught younger ones, gangs of pickpockets infested the city streets, hiding away from the arms of the law in the tenements and rookeries that so worried polite society. Binny described how:

Many of these ragged urchins are taught to steal by their companions, others are taught by trainers of thieves, young men and women, and some middle-aged convicted thieves. They are learned to be expert in this way. A coat is suspended on the wall with a bell attached to it, and the boy attempts to take the handkerchief from the pocket without the bell ringing. Until he is able to do this with proficiency he is not considered well trained.

This lively description, which could be Fagin's den, has sometimes been swallowed whole by subsequent authors without considering the extent to which this discourse was a useful one for those pressing reformist agendas in the second half of the century. For the Victorians the concept of a criminal class was intrinsically linked with growing urbanization. The cities and towns of mid-nineteenth century England were seen, with their desperate poverty and squalid slums, as a breeding ground for crime and we cannot separate the notion of criminal classes from the fears about the Victorian town and city that were discussed in Chapter 3. The chaplain of Preston Gaol wrote in 1849 that:

It is the large town to which both idle profligates and practised villains resort as a likely field for the indulgence of sensuality or the prosecution of schemes of plunder. It is the large town in which disorder and crime are generated.

Mayhew and his contemporaries saw a hierarchy of criminals that formed the so-called `criminal class' At the top was the `swell mob, the more successful pickpockets and thieves that appeared to ape the behaviour of the middle classes, dressing in fine clothes and promenading at church on Sundays. These individuals feature in many of the contemporary reports and accounts such as that of James Greenwood. As a youngster Greenwood had been introduced to the world of Victorian journalism while working as a compositor in a printing works. In 1869 Greenwood published his main work, The Seven Curses ofLondon, in which he explored the themes of neglected children, professional begging, prostitution, gambling, drunkenness and crime. He did so with a sense of curiosity and offered solutions that reveal a strong link to contemporary middle-class values and beliefs. Greenwood was particularly concerned with the effect that cheap literature, the `penny dreadfuls' as they were called, had on impressionable youth. He equated this `poison-literature' with the spread of disease. `A tainted scrap of rag' he stated, `has been known to spread plague through an entire village, just as a stray leaf of "Panther Bill"; of "Tyburn Tree" may sow the seeds of immorality among as many boys as a town can produce'.5Greenwood told his readers of an `army of male and female thieves, twenty thousand strong' and of the poor `hard-worked policeman who must have such a terrible time of it in keeping such an enormous predatory crew in anything like order'. 6 He described their language - the thieves cant - with terms such as sinker (forged coin), bug hunters (thieves who robbed drunks at night), fine wirers (long-fingered thieves adapt at emptying ladies purses) or the charming practice of going snowing (stealing linen that was hung out to dry). Greenwood was able to distinguish between the hardened criminals who he believed were beyond the reach of reform, and those that could be set on the right path. The message of reform was being clearly and firmly put. Greenwood, in common with many of his contemporaries, believed that education, work and religion could help many other offenders return to the straight and narrow.

Henry Maudsley had made links between those suffering from mental illness and the criminal elements in society. He had argued that deviance was not a personal choice but a product of heredity and environment. His work built upon the investigations that had been ongoing since thel 860s by medical professionals working within the prison system. After 1865 all prisoners were subject to medical examination under the terms of the Prison Act and phrenology was a particular feature of their work. Dr George Wilson studied the heads of 464 prisoners and claimed that `moral imbecility' could be discerned in a large proportion of convicts. In 1870 James Bruce Thomson declared that the `physical organization of the criminal is marked by ... a singular and stupid look'.' Thomson found both mental and physical defects in the prisoners he studied, along with a lack of intelligence and a propensity for violence.

On the Continent the idea that a person's physicality could provide insights into their mental and moral health were at the heart of Cesare Lombroso's 1876 work, The Criminal Man. Lombroso, an Italian physician and psychiatrist, outlined the theory of the `born criminal' with which he developed a new branch of criminology that he termed `criminal anthropology'.8 History has not been kind to Lombroso: he has been labelled racist and his ideas ridiculed, especially after the Second World War when the evidence of Nazi atrocities, perpetrated on the grounds of heredity and biological race, were exposed. However, while Lombroso, himself a Jew, may have been simplistic in his interpretation of his data it was not out of place during this period. As Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter have suggested, `many of Lombroso's views were standard for the time and rooted in humanitarian impulses'. They seem crude and in some ways silly to a twentieth-century audience but they echo the work of Wilson and Thomson and others who believed that a criminal class existed in the nineteenth century and wanted to find ways to reform and combat it. Lombroso's interest lay in studying the criminal rather than the crime they had committed. Like Maudsley he saw crime as a 'natural' activity rather than an individual choice, and therefore something that `would always remain part of the human experience'.9 As he developed his research over the last quarter of the century Lombroso classified criminals using physical features such as head shape, eyes, facial hair and tattoos. Some of his findings are frankly bizarre: arsonists, he declared, were generally effeminate and possessed luxurious hair while he stated that nearly `all criminals have jug ears, thick hair, thin beards, pronounced sinuses, protruding chins, and broad cheekbones, characteristics that must have been common to many members of the Italian working and peasant classes? Lombroso was not alone in his findings; in London a sketch writer at The Graphic was keen to point out the physicality of the criminal class, as he watched the comings and goings in the London police courts. He observed that the `out-standing ear is one of the signs of the criminal class, precisely as the ear close to the head is the sign of civilization and peaceful tendencies"' Ears that protruded were clear examples of criminality as were bullet heads and jutting jaws.

Lombroso's work on tattoos attracted the amused attention of the Pall Mall Gazette who commented that it `is rather curious that people who are often "wanted" by the police should voluntarily identify themselves by almost indelible marks' before going on to conclude that this form of personal adornment demonstrated that `savagery is always very close to our civilization, and that the criminal and the indolent easily glide back into the manners of Australians and Red Indians', while accepting that there were notable differences between the tattoos of felons and those of native peoples." The Glasgow Herald was also clear that there was a world of difference between the use of tattoos by criminals which might be to `conceal a brand of shame' such as the `D' for deserter from the armed forces) and the `heraldry of the savage' which marked the body of the Maori king.13 The Gazette undertook a more detailed analysis of Lombroso's work in an article in 1887 entitled `The science of crime' summing up his conclusions as follows: