Heather Shore

‘Constable dances with instructress’: the police and the Queen of Nightclubs in inter-war London

The campaign against the nightclubs in the 1920s metropolis, headed by the crusading Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks, is well known in popular histories of the inter-war period.1 This woul...

'The reckoning': Disorderly women, informing constables and the Westminster justices, 1727-33

The study of criminal prosecution has been the touchstone for a generation of historians who have sought to understand the administration of crime and policing and the interactions between the police and the policed in the eighteenth-century metropolis. Given the top-down nature of the sources, this work has focused most centrally on the systems that governed the control of crime and disorder rather than the nature of the crime itself. In particular, Douglas Hay’s seminal chapter, ‘Property, authority and the criminal law’, published in 1975, remains a powerful and complex exploration of the ways in which social order was manipulated and ultimately maintained by the rulers of eighteenth-century England. Hay demonstrated how the criminal justice system was used to maintain ‘bonds of obedience and deference’ and to legitimize the status quo. To do so he focused much of his attention on the social elites and on the complex web of relations and practices with which they controlled the criminal justice system. Hay’s argument has not gone unchallenged. Peter King, John Langbein, Thomas Green, Joanne Innes and John Styles have contributed both correction and refinement to Hay’s thesis, greatly expanding our knowledge of the legislative process. King’s work has particularly sought to uncover and understand the discretionary elements within the judicial system: ‘It remains unclear . . . precisely which social groups, social interactions, and discursive formulations were decisive in shaping many important arenas within the judicial process’. While this work has analysed those who used the law, why they used the law, and how this was negotiated in the context of eighteenth-century social relations, much of it has tended to

Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison: By Jerry White. Pp. xxiv + 364. London: Bodley Head, 2016. £20.00. ISBN 978-1-847-92302-8. Hardback.

The Marshalsea Prison’s most famous inmate was William Dorrit, the ‘father of the Marshalsea’ and father to the eponymous Little Dorrit (1855–57), the youngest of his daughters. In Charles Dickens’...

Print Culture, Crime and Justice in 18th-Century London

‘Personal character’, Morris claims, was increasingly the key criterion for ‘a political leader’s fitness to rule’ (15). While this makes the complex notion of ‘character’ a central theme of the book, Morris provides no analysis or definition of what ‘character’ meant at the time, nor, despite her aim to map continuity and change, any consideration of whether this meaning shifted throughout the century, let alone today. (On recent understandings of the concept of character see, for example, Thomas Ahnert (ed.), Character, Self and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (London, 2011).) The complexity of the notion is illustrated by the private writings of two women ‘on the sidelines of the political world’, Gertrude Savile, in the 1730s, and Fanny Burney, in the 1790s. Savile, afflicted by an ‘embarrassing skin condition’, had never been presented at court, while Burney was a courtier, albeit ‘reluctant’, and a writer. Savile, a depressive with a marked inferiority complex, was not just obsessed with George II but felt possessive and protective of him, while Fanny Burney staunchly defended Warren Hastings, whom she judged to have ‘an elevated mind and character’ (195). Savile’s personal estimation of George II and Burney’s defence of Hastings are very different, but they both judge character on the basis of personal opinion. Savile divined George II’s ‘inner life from his appearance’ and sensed his tiredness and his distaste for ceremony as if he was an intimate, while Burney’s defence of Hastings was based on ‘her own impressions’, having met him socially. Morris attributes Savile’s possessiveness of the king to her ‘boundless imagination’ but, with puzzling parti pris, condemns Burney’s defence of Hastings as resulting from ‘biases’ about his private character and behaviour, which clouded her judgement. Although this relates directly to Morris’s argument, there is no further analysis. This is the key problem of the book: the case histories are presented as if they self-evidently and unambiguously support Morris’s assertions and argument. While the book’s strength lies in the range and detail of the materials brought together, it leaves the reader wanting more substantial reflection. Strong on narrative but ‘lite’ on analysis, it is ultimately disappointing.

‘Now we have the Informing Dogs!’: Crime Networks and Informing Cultures in the 1720s and 1730s

The criminal career of Jonathan Wild, executed at Tyburn on 24 May 1725, has for many commentators become a fixed point in the history of the underworld.2 Wild was a criminal, an informer, a thief-taker and a thief-maker; a man who artfully navigated the entrepreneurial justice system of the early eighteenth century. Our knowledge of Wild’s activities is shaped by the long repetition of his story in the print culture that he was said to have courted.3 His most thorough biographer, Gerald Howson noted, ‘Certainly he resembled the gangster of the twentieth century more closely than he did his famous contemporaries in Europe … He was the first criminal to become a “celebrity” …’.4 Indeed, Wild’s story is frequently re-imagined through the lens of later twentieth-century gang culture (in itself a constructed narrative), which reframes Wild as an eighteenth-century criminal mastermind.5 In this chapter I am less concerned with the reiteration of his story and more with the significance of the era as one in which Wild and his associates were able to thrive, and in which the ‘underworld’ narrative would find a more stable niche.

‘The pickpockets and hustlers had yesterday what is called a Grand Day’: Changing Street Theft, c. 1800–1850

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries established models of robbery and new definitions of pickpocketing combined in a form of street theft that fashioned novel ways of referring to the dangers of public streets. The writing of journalists and social investigators, the evidence of police, victims, witnesses and the accused, contributed to a shifting rhetoric of robbery. It was no longer solely the dark alleys and quiet dead ends in which danger lurked. Rather, the crowded thoroughfares of the developing metropolis presented the potential for daylight robbery. As one provincial journalist noted in 1820, ‘the state of the metropolis is become dangerous and disgraceful. There can be no concourse of people without the most atrocious robberies’.2 Street robbery has been the subject of a number of studies by historians who are interested in the relationship between violent street theft and the ways in which print culture has shaped the terminology and representations of such crimes. Whilst forms of street robbery have been a perennial feature of the urban criminal milieu, the visibility of the footpad, the highwayman and the garrotter reflect the periodic fusing of the forces of print culture, public anxiety and criminal justice policy: identifying them as ‘public enemies’.3 Through these various incarnations the robber has remained a significant and persistent actor in the underworld narrative.

‘There goes Bill Sheen, the Murderer’: Crime, Kinship and Community in East London, 1827–1852

In the early nineteenth century, despite the popularity of low-life narratives such as Pierce Egan’s Life in London or the memoirs of the pick-pocket and swindler James Hardy Vaux, the taste for more traditional forms of criminal biography had waned.1 Nevertheless, late Regency and early Victorian readers’ enthusiasm for deviance was far from dead; rather it had shifted from the life-narratives of robbers and thieves to bloody spectacle. As Rosalind Crone has demonstrated, the Victorians would absorb gruesome, graphic re-enactments of violence into their mainstream print culture.2 However, whilst criminal biography may have been a moribund form, the lives of individual criminals continued to be documented in detail in early-nineteenth-century print culture as well as in the writings of reformers and other investigations into crime and poverty. Parliamentary Select Committees and inquiries into crime and policing proliferated in the early decades of the nineteenth century, with reformers, practitioners and politicians seeking tofind common ground between local and state strategies to deal with what were perceived as the increasing social costs of urbanisation and migration.3 As a result, a number of documents survive that specifically refer to individuals, public houses, police officers and crime events that can be corroborated in conjunction with court records from the Old Bailey and contemporary press reports.

‘The Terror of the People’: Organised Crime in Interwar London

In the 1920s and 1930s the London and national press reported extensively on what appeared to be outbreaks of gang crime bearing a similarity to the forms of organised crime that had recently been reported in Italy and North America. At the start of the 1920s, home-grown gang violence had been mainly confined to the racecourses and cast largely as an unwelcome development of traditional forms of racecourse criminality. By the middle of the decade the incursions of the racing men onto the London streets provoked intense report-age.2 In London, violent street conflicts were characterised by press, police and politicians as a form of terrorism. The Evening Standard, for instance, described a tense search for ‘racecourse terrorists’ in the West End, ‘While Scotland Yard is thus rigorously engaged in hunting down the terrorists, the “enemy” is employing a sort of secret service to ascertain the movements of detectives.’3 The Daily Mail presented the conflicts as an underworld threat, levying fear on the lives of civilians, ‘There are many people walking about London maimed because they fell foul of the gangs.’4 Moreover, ‘terrorism’ and organised crime would be linked in reports of illicit gambling economies and violent street gangs in other British cities in this period.5 Most notably, from the later 1920s, the ‘reign of terror’ associated with the violent conflicts between Glasgow’s street fighting gangs would lead to inauspicious comparisons with Chicago.6

‘A Noted Virago’: Moll Harvey and her ‘Dangerous Crew’, 1727–1738

Gallows confessions and criminal biography provided eighteenth-century readers with unparalleled access to a version of criminal enterprise and confederacy. This unprecedented circulation of crime print culture enables historians to catch sight of the criminal through a series of interactions with justice, albeit a somewhat selective version of events.2 Through these interactions we can capture fragmentary evidence of plebeian Londoners negotiating the criminal justice system, dealing with law enforcers and experiencing sanctions such as the pillory, the House of Correction, transportation and the gallows. As Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker have argued, ‘the tactics of the poor and the criminal are in direct, imaginative and constructive dialogue with the institutions and individuals which administer criminal justice and poor relief’.3 Often, the most detailed criminal lives and most sustained connections with criminal justice come from those ‘notorious’ offenders whose lives end at Tyburn. However, other criminals, who were not amongst the condemned, gained a public and visible reputation through their encounters with the criminal justice system.4 Mary ‘Moll’ Harvey was such an individual. Between 1727 and 1732, she was as much an object of public curiosity as her fellow ‘criminals’, such as James Dalton, Mother Needham and the aristocratic rake Colonel Charteris.

‘A new species of swindling’: Coiners, Fraudsters, Swindlers and the ‘Long-Firm’, c. 1760–1913

During the long nineteenth century new paradigms of organised and professional crime were framed through the changing prosecution of fraud and forgery, coining and other forms of financial crime. As previous chapters have argued, the records provide only fragmentary evidence of criminal networks and confederacies, suggesting that the existence of organised criminal gangs is far from clear-cut. However, from this period, in the records of the police, the press and the writings of social investigators, a language evolved that described gangs of swindlers, coiners and fraudsters through the rhetoric of criminal organisation, perpetuating an increasingly dramatic shadow world of professional criminals. From the later eighteenth century, financial crimes were seen as increasing in pace with the growth of commerce and banking in the metropolis. Thus, in 1796 Patrick Colquhoun lamented, ‘It is not to be wondered at in a country where commerce and manufactures have arrived at such a height, and where from the opulence of the people the interchange of property is so extensive, that forgeries and frauds should prevail in a certain degree.’2