Key Reading

• Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, chapter 2

Primary Sources

• T Barwick Lloyd Baker, 'Abstract and inferences founded upon the official returns of England and Wales, 1854-9 with special reference to the results of reformatories', Journal of the Statistical Society, 1860, pp. 427-54
• James T Hammick, 'On the judicial statistics of England and Wales', Journal of the Statistical Society, 1867, pp. 375-426
• 'Discrepant criminal statistics', Journal of the Statistical Society, 1868, pp. 349-53
• William Douglas Morrison, 'The increase of crime', Nineteenth Century, 1892, pp. 950-7 and E Du Cane, 'The decrease of crime', Nineteenth Century, 1893, pp. 480-92
• Criminal Statistics of England and Wales, 1893

Scholarship on using crime statistics

• John Archer, 'Mysterious and suspicious deaths: missing homicides in North West England', Crime, History and Society, 12 (2008)
• Clive Emsley, 'An aspect of Pitt's "terror": prosecutions for sedition during the 1790s'. Social History, 6 (1981)
• V A C Gattrell and T B Hadden, 'Criminal Statistics and their interpretation', in E A Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth Century Society
• V A C Gatrell, 'The decline of theft and violence in Victorian and Edwardian England', in V A C Gatrell, B Lenman and G Parker, Crime and the Law
• D Hay, 'War, dearth and theft in the eighteenth century', Past and Present, 95 (1982)
• Peter King, 'Newspaper reporting, prosecution practice and perceptions of urban crime', Continuity and Change, 2 (1987)
• Robert Morris, 'Lies, damned lies and criminal statistics', Crime, History and Society, 5 (2001)
• David Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England
• Howard Taylor, 'Rationing crime: the political economy of criminal statistics', Economic History Review, 51 (1998)
• Howard Taylor, 'The Politics of rising crime statistics of England and Wales, 1914-60', Crime History and Society, 2 (1998)
• J J Tobias, Crime and Industrial Society, esp chapter 2 and appendix
• Chris A Williams, 'Counting crimes or counting people: some implications of mid-nineteenth-century police returns', Crime History and Society, 4 (2000)

General reading on statistics for Historians

• Pat Hudson, History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Methods (London, 2000)
• C. H. Fenstein and Mark Thomas, Making History Count: A Primer in Quantitative Methods for Historians (2002)

Questions to bear in mind:

• How do we measure the rise and fall of crimes in different periods?
  • Do particular crimes differ?
• What are the challenges of using crime statistics for the historian? Do historians agree about their utility?
• What sorts of figures are available?
• Are the figures manipulated by the authorities?