Crime and the Victorians
By Professor Clive Emsley
Garrotting and the murders of Jack the Ripper provoked nation-wide panics during the 19th
century. Were the Victorians right to think that crime was in decline?
Statistics
The Victorians had faith in progress. One element of this faith was the conviction that crime could
be beaten. From the middle of the nineteenth century the annual publication of Judicial Statistics
for England and Wales seemed to underpin their faith; almost all forms of crime appeared to be
falling.
'...it was practice in the Metropolitan Police until the 1930s to list many reported thefts as lost
property.'
There are, of course, serious problems with official statistics of crime. How far might they be
massaged by the police forces that collect and collate them? We know, for example, that it was
practice in the Metropolitan Police until the 1930s to list many reported thefts as lost property.
How can we account for the 'dark figure' of crime that is never reported? Many in the poorer
sections of the Victorian community, who had little faith in, or respect for, the police, probably did
not bother to report offences. Nevertheless, unreliable as they may be, the statistics provide
historians with a starting point for the pattern of crime in the same way that they provided a
starting point for the Victorian's own assessments of crime.
Recognising the problems with the statistics, the overall decline in theft and violence seems to fit
with other social data from the nineteenth century. Assuming that theft can be generated by
economic hardship, the economic downswings of the second half of the nineteenth century were
generally not as serious, widespread, or life threatening as those of preceding centuries. Violent
behaviour was increasingly frowned upon, dealt with increasingly severely by the courts, and
seems, in consequence, to have been brought under a greater degree of control. The new police
forces, uniformly established across the whole country in the mid-1850s and subject to annual
inspections on behalf of Parliament, appear to have had some success in suppressing those forms
of public behaviour that respectable Victorians considered rough and offensive. In so doing they
may well also have had an impact on petty, opportunistic theft on the streets.
Sensational crimes
While the general pattern of crime was one of decline, there were occasional panics and scares
generated by particularly appalling offences. In the 1850s and early 1860s there were panics about
street robbery, known then as 'garrotting'. A virulent press campaign against garrotters in 1862
developed following the robbery of an MP on his way home from a late-night sitting of parliament;
and while the number of 'garrotte' robberies was tiny, the press created sensations out of minor
incidents. Parliament responded with ferocious legislation providing for offenders to be flogged as
well as imprisoned.
'Violence, especially violence with a sexual frisson, sold newspapers.'
The murders of Jack the Ripper in the autumn of 1888 were confined to a small area of London's
East End, but similarly provoked a nation-wide panic whipped up by press sensationalism.
Violence, especially violence with a sexual frisson, sold newspapers. But violent crime in the form
of murder and street robbery never figured significantly in the statistics or in the courts.
Most offenders were young males, but most offences were petty thefts. The most common
offences committed by women were linked to prostitution and were, essentially, 'victimless' crimes
- soliciting, drunkenness, drunk and disorderly, vagrancy. Domestic violence rarely came before
the courts. It tended to be committed in the private sphere of the home; among some
working-class communities it continued to have a degree of tolerance, while amongst other classes
the publicising of such behaviour, even, perhaps especially, in the courts, would have been
regarded as bringing a family's reputation into disrepute.
The press also made much of big financial scandals and frauds. A significant percentage of
company flotation's were fraudulent during the nineteenth century. Although the behaviour of the
corrupt businessman provoked outrage and, when caught and convicted, a hefty prison sentence,
he was usually described as an exception to the rule, a 'black sheep' or a 'rotten apple' in
contemporary parlance. He was not conceived as a member of those who, particularly in the 1860s,
the Victorians labelled as 'the criminal class'.
'Criminal classes'
Across the nineteenth century broad shifts can be identified in the ways that 'criminals' were
perceived. At the beginning of Victoria's reign key commentators like Edwin Chadwick tended to
equate the criminal offender with individuals in the lower reaches of the working class who they
considered were reluctant to do an honest day's work for an honest day's wage, and who preferred
idleness, drink, 'luxury' and an easy life; in their eyes the problem was a moral one. There were
also concerns about 'the dangerous classes' who were thought to lurk in the slums waiting for the
opportunity for disorder and plunder.
'There were also concerns about 'the dangerous classes' who were thought to lurk in the slums
waiting for the opportunity for disorder and plunder.'
By the middle of the century the term 'criminal classes' was more in vogue; it was used to suggest
an incorrigible social group - a class - stuck at the bottom of society. Intrepid explorers of the
slums and the 'rookeries' of the poor, like Henry Mayhew, often wrote of this 'class' as if its
members belonged to some distinctive, exotic tribe of Africa or the Americas.
Towards the end of the century, developments in psychiatry and the popularity of Social
Darwinism had led, in turn, to the criminal being identified as an individual suffering from some
form of behavioural abnormality that had been either inherited or nurtured by dissolute and
feckless parents. All such perceptions informed the way that criminals were treated by the criminal
justice system.
Penal policies
By the beginning of Victoria's reign the Bloody Code of the eighteenth century had all but
disappeared. Capital punishment only remained for murderers and traitors. Transportation to
Australia had reached its peak in the early 1830s; to all intents and purposes it ended in the early
1850s, not least because of the increasing hostility of colonists in Australia who objected to their
land being used as a dumping ground.
'...Victorian liberal ideas of improvement and philanthropy began to feed into penal policy.'
Various experiments were tried in the treatment of prisoners. During the 1830s and 1840s attempts
were made to enforce regimes of silence and/or isolation. If the problem was a moral one then,
leaving offenders alone with their thoughts and their bibles, requiring them to work (thus learning
of work's virtues), and providing them with occasional visits by the chaplain, was perceived as the
way to their reformation.
By the end of the century, as the understanding of the criminal changed, the doctor and the
psychiatrist had become at least as important as the chaplain. In addition, Victorian liberal ideas of
improvement and philanthropy began to feed into penal policy. 1895 was a significant year for
change in this respect. Sir Edmund Du Cane, a former officer of the Royal Engineers who had
stamped his domineering personality on prison management as Chairman of the Prison
Commissioners for nearly 20 years, resigned, and the Gladstone Committee published its report
confirming the shift to a new, more liberal penal policy. In comparative perspective, however, this
liberalism presents an interesting paradox. England had low murder rates in comparison with
much of Europe, especially southern Europe, yet while many European governments were
removing the death penalty, the abolition movement in England remained small and lacking in
influence. Similarly, unlike many of their continental European neighbours, the English clung to
corporal punishment as a penal sanction until well into the twentieth century.
Detective policing
The last years of the century were the years of England's most famous detective - Sherlock
Holmes - who was first put before the reading public in 1887 in A Study in Scarlet. True to
Victorian class perceptions, Holmes solved his cases through the mighty deductive powers of his
intellect, running rings around the simple, and lower class, officers of the police.
But then detective policing had never figured prominently in the role of the new police forces that
were established in England during the nineteenth century. For a long time detective police
officers, working in plain-clothes, were seen as symptomatic of an intrusive system of spies and
surveillance that was considered the hallmark of continental, especially French, police forces, and
something that had no place in England. The English police took the prevention of crime as their
watchword. The assumption was that the unskilled, working-class constable, patrolling his beat,
usually at night, at a regulation two-and-a-half miles an hour, would deter offenders. In some
instances it probably did, but it is always difficult to measure the extent and success of prevention.
Studying the history of crime and criminal justice in a society can tell us much about that society.
The Victorians' perception of criminal offenders was linked closely with their perception of the
social order in respect of both class and gender. Most offenders brought before the courts came
from the working class. It did not matter that their offences were generally petty compared with
the frauds committed by middle-class businessmen, it was the mass of petty offenders who
provided the data for the image of 'the criminal'. Most offenders brought before the courts were
male. This suited Victorian perceptions of the separate spheres, and ensured that women brought
before the courts, especially for violent offences, tended to be treated more harshly than men. Not
only had they transgressed the law, they had also transgressed the perceptions of womanhood.
Recidivism was more serious among women probably because it was more difficult for a woman
to live down the shame of a criminal conviction. Whether the Victorians were right to think that
crime was in decline must remain an open question. But, the periodic panics over sensational
crimes like 'garrotting' and the murders of Jack the Ripper, aside, perhaps they generally slept
better than their descendants.
Find out more
Books
Crime and English Society 1750-1900 by Clive Emsley, 2nd edition (Longman, 1996)
The English Police: A Political and Social History by Clive Emsley, 2nd edition (Longman, 1996)
The Emergence of Penal Policy in Victorian and Edwardian England by Leon Radzinowicz and
Roger Hood (Clarendon Press, 1990)
White-Collar Crime in Modern England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality 1845-1929 by
George Robb (Cambridge University Press)
Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London by Heather Shore (Boydell
Press/Royal Historical Society, 1999)
Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century: Media Panic or Real Danger? by Rob Sindall
(Leicester University Press, 1990)
The New Police in Nineteenth-Century England: Crime, conflict and control by David Taylor
(Manchester University Press, 1997)
Crime, policing and punishment in England 1750-1914 by David Taylor (Macmillan, 1998)
Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England 1830-1914 by Martin J Wiener
(Cambridge University Press)
Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England by Lucia Zedner (Clarendon Press, 1991)
Places to visit
The London Dungeons - 28-34 Tooley Street, London, Tel: 020 7403 0606. Detailing the darker
side of London life for the last 1500 years, the London Dungeons include a section on Jack the
Ripper and Victorian crime.
West Midlands Police Museum - Sparkhill Police Station, 607 Stratford Road, Sparkhill,
Birmingham. Tel: 0121 626 7181. The West Midlands Police Museum houses a wide range of
pictures, information and items to show the development of policing in and around Birmingham.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum - 221B Baker Street, London. The home of the greatest Victorian
sleuth, faithfully preserved as it would have been in the nineteenth century.
About the author
By Professor Clive Emsley, Professor of History at the Open University and currently President of
the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice. Educated at the
Universities of York and Cambridge, he has taught at the University of Paris and held visiting
posts in Australia and Canada.