Key Texts

• Heather Shore, 'Crime, policing and punishment' in Chris Williams (ed.), Companion to Nineteenth-century Britain
• V. A. C. Gattrell, 'Crime, authority and the policeman state' in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol 3
• Special issue on crime and history, British Journal of Criminology, 39 (1999):
  • • A. Davies and G. Pearson, 'Introduction'
    • H. Shore, 'Cross coves, buzzers and general sorts of prigs: juvenile crime and the criminal 'underworld' in the early nineteenth century'
    • J. E. Archer, 'Poaching gangs and violence: the urban-rural divide in nineteenth-century Lancashire'
    • S. D'Cruze, 'Sex, violence and local courts: working-class respectability in a mid-nineteenth-century Lancashire town'
      B. Godfrey, 'Law, factory discipline and 'theft': the impact of the factory on workplace appropriation in mid to late nineteenth-century Yorkshire'
      A. Davies, '"These viragoes are no less cruel than the lads": young women, gangs and violence in late Victorian Manchester and Salford'
      J. K. Walton, M. Blinkhorn, C. Pooley, D. Tidswell, and M. J. Winstanley, 'Crime, migration and social change in north-west England and the Basque country'
    • P. King, 'Locating histories of crime: a bibliographical study'

     

• A. L. Beier, 'Identity, Language, and Resistance in the Making of the Victorian "Criminal Class" : Mayhew's Convict Revisited', Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005)
• Carolyn Conley, 'Wars among Savages : Homicide and Ethnicity in the Victorian United Kingdom', Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005)
• M Ignatieff, A just measure of pain, the penitentiary in the industrial revolution
• Randall McGowen, 'Civilizing punishment: the end of public execution in England', Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994)
• Howard Taylor, 'Rationing crime: the political economy of police statistics since the 1850s', Economic History Review, 1998
• David Taylor, 'Conquering the British Ballarat : The Policing of Victorian Middlesbrough', Journal of Social History, 37 (2004)
• Preeti Nijhar, 'Imperial Violence : the "Ethnic" as a Component of the "Criminal" Class in Victorian England', Liverpool Law Review, 27 (2006)

Seminar Questions

• What were the characteristics of the 'criminal classes' (gender, class, race, age etc) in the minds of middle-class Victorians?
• Search the Old Bailey Online or nineteenth-century newspapers? Are there typical victims/perpetrators?
• Do perceptions of crime match crime rates in Victorian England?
• What were the changes in policing and what effect did these have?
• Should prisons be viewed as instruments of 'social discipline, the products of class conflict and the stresses of a market economy'?
• How effective were Victorian instruments of punishment?

Sources

• Old Bailey Online, 1674-1913
• The Times
• British nineteenth-century newspapers
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [biographies of criminals and law enforcers]
• Modern Records Centre resources

Further Reading

V Bailey (ed.), Policing and punishment in 19th century Britain

K Chesney, The Victorian Underworld

Andy Croll, 'Who's afraid of the Victorian underworld?'. The Historian, 84 (2004)

J Davis, 'A poor man's system of justice: the London police courts', Historical Journal, 1984

Clive Emsley, Policing and its context, 1750-1870

Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900

David Englander, 'Henry Mayhew and the Criminal Classes of Victorian England : The Case Reopened', Criminal Justice History, 17 (2002)

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prisons

V. A. C. Gatrell (ed.), Crime and Law

V. A. C. Gattrell, The Hanging Tree: execution and the English people, 1770-1868

J Gillis, 'The evolution of juvenile delinquency', Past and Present, 1975

Peter King, 'The rise of juvenile delinquency in England 1780-1840: changing patterns of perception and prosecution', Past & Present, 1998

Andrew Mangham, Violent women and sensation fiction : crime, medicine and Victorian popular culture

Randell McGowen, 'The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England', Journal of Modern History, 59 (1987)

Randell McGowen, 'A Powerful Sympathy: terror, the prison, and humanitarian reform in early nineteenth-century Britain', Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986)

David Philips, Crime and authority in Victorian England

David Philips and Robert Storch, Policing provincial England, 1829-56

P. Priestley, Victorian prison lives: English prison biography

George Rudé, Crime and victim: crime and society in early 19th century England

R Sindall, Street violence in the 19th century

R Storch, 'A plague of blue locusts: police reform and popular resistance', International Review of Social History, 1975

Roger Swift, 'Urban policing and social control', History, 1988

Roger Swift, Behaving badly? : Irish migrants and crime in the Victorian city

David Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750-1914

J J Tobias, Crime and police in England, 1700-1900

Martin Wiener, Deconstructing the criminal

Sarah Wilson, 'Law, Morality and Regulation : Victorian Experiences of Financial Crime', British Journal of Criminology, 46 (2006)

Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody