Industrial Sprawl and Crime Rates

The social and industrial growth of England during the Victorian period is generally well known, cottage industry and small mercantile ventures were replaced with industrialisation and manufacturing on a massive, and previously unprecedented, scale. The growth in employment opportunities in towns and cities prompted a mass exodus from rural areas into the rapidly industrialising towns. 

The social problem novel permeates the literary output of the Victorian period, whether a literary scholar or not, most people are familiar with at least one novel of the period which can be said to fall into the category of 'social problem' -from Oliver Twist to North and South the social condition of England as a result of industrialisation and urban expansion was firmly on the fore front of public consciousness.

By 1851 half of the population of Britain lived in towns, and by 1901 this had risen to 3/4, and it was this rapid growth which was considered the major cause of crime, as population density in cities caused the over crowding of slum areas and a concentration of poverty and subsistence living.  The anonymity and isolationist nature of sprawling slums precipitated and facilitated the rise of crime levels within the jurisdiction.  Without the careful scrutiny of a smaller, and more intimately acquainted, society these masses of the poor were inclined towards lawlessness and illegal behaviour - they were free of what was termed 'natural policing.' 

In 1852, M.D Hill (1792-1872), brother of Rowland Hill, the postal reformer, who had been a judge in Birmingham for 30 years, was examined by a House of Commons Committee on Juvenile crime and reported that:

A century and a half ago...there was scarcely a large town in this island...[by a] large town I mean [one]  where an inhabitant of the humbler classes is unknown to the majority of inhabitants...by a small town, I mean a town where...every inhabitant is more or less known to the mass of the people of the town...in small towns there must be a sort of natural police...operating upon the conduct of each individual who lives, as it were, under the public eye; but in a large town, he lives...in absolute obscurity...which to a certain extent gives impunity.

When this is viewed in light of the content of the social problem novel, we see it all but born out.  For example in Oliver Twist, we see a young man who's very name implies the operation of social determinism which will make him a criminal, the name Twist, referring to the hangman's noose which his namers believe he will ultimately meet, and when he is exposed to the slums of London, and their many inhabitants, he is capable of disappearing from his former masters and later being hidden from those friends who would seek to protect him from the criminal masses which are presented as thriving in those impoverished parts of the city.  

The social determinism, which Oliver overcomes with the revelation that his birth and parentage are not as abject as he had been led to believe, was considered a major motivation factor behind crime in urban London.  The poor, and ill educated, by virtue of their class of birth or parentage were more inclined than the wealthy towards acts of criminal behaviour because of the operation of biology and that it slum areas it was almost impossible to keep the honest poor from being exposed to the criminal poor, who were already acting upon their inborn, and here to fore, latent criminal proclivities, which their entire class possessed.  Andrew Mearns (1837- 1925) the chief author of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor(1883) wrote:

Few who will read these pages have any conception of what these pestilential human rookeries [the worst housing districts] are, where tens of thousands are crowded together amidst horrors which call to mind what we have learned...of the slave ship...One of the saddest results of this over-crowding is the inevitable association of honest people with criminals...Who can wonder that every evil flourishes in such hotbeds of vice and disease. 

As already mentioned, Contemporary analysts did not believe that it was poverty alone that caused crime, rather it was a motivating factor which allowed latent criminal tendencies to surface.  In the Report of the Royal Commission on a Constabulary Force [1839] the social reformer Edwin Chadwick wrote:

We have investigated the origin of the great mass of crime committed for the sake of property, and we find the whole ascribable to one common cause, namely, the temptations of the profit of a career of depredation [theft], as compared with the profits of honest and even well paid industry...the notion that any considerable proportion of the crimes against property are cased by blameless poverty...we find disproved at every step. 

A narrow view, certainly, and an almost echoing, in tone, of Scrooge's interrogation of the charity workers demanding 'Are there no prisons, no poorhouses?' Assured in the expectation that the poor should voluntarily enter such places, but it was well known to Dickens, and his socially minded contemporaries, that these placed were often worse than the streets; with living conditions and hygiene so poor that death and

disease were rampant.  While these social institutions were in place to 'care' for the poor and prevent them from having to turn to crime as a means of survival, it should be noted that they might have been more honest, but they were certainly no safer.

Gin and Justice

William Hogarth; Beer Lane and Gin Street

When one thinks of the underbelly of Victorian London the first thing that springs to mind is the image of the shadowy alleys of Whitechapel, where slum dwellers slink in gin soaked corners and their predilection for alcohol causing all sorts of criminal behaviour, as can been seen in this earlier image where the drunk and idling mother is allowing her child to fall from the steps in her stupor.  It was a condition of English poor life which

drew much contemporaneous attention, with critics such as William Hoyle in 1876 writing that alcohol had been responsible for turning England into a 'land of drunkenness, crime....[and]insanity.'  -

This was a view that was not entirely erroneous; the Reverend J.W Horsley (1845-1921), who had served as chaplain of the Clarkenwell Prison, London, engaged in an examination of the motivating and mitigating features of the criminal acts committed in his jurisdiction in his 1898 study Prisons and Prisoners.  He found that:

            ...half the cases of common assault, three-quarter of the assaults on the police and half the aggravated assaults were committed by drunken persons...Cruelty to animals...and children...of these, half might fairly be considered drink caused, as also might be half of the cases of malicious damage...and half of  such military and naval offenses...as come before the police courts...Then             [consider] the cases which are indirectly caused by drink, for example thefts     by or from drunken persons, and one arrives at the conclusion that half of all crime directly and an addition one-fourth as indirectly drink caused, is a moderate estimate...

Horsely argued, that while 170,000 people per year were charged with being drunken disorderly, there were other satellite crimes which were caused indirectly because of the consumption of alcohol or by people who were seeking access to alcohol.  He cited a number of case studies

            Stealing a pony and cart - a young man out on his employers business spends some of the money he has collected in a public house, and therefore fears to  face his master, recollecting the devil's proverb, 'As well be hung for the sheep as the lamb,' he sells the pony and cart.  As he expressed the matter to me, 'the  first word of your mouth when you're drunk is you don't care for nothing...

            Larceny-A married woman, aged 35, stole 30 shillings from her landlady to get drink...

            Begging- A woman, aged 44, seven out of ten children alive, her husband   fairly well to do, begged simply to get money for drink*. 

There is, of course, the argument that Horsley, as a leading temperance reformer, had an ulterior motive for blaming the condition of England's poor, and the high levels of criminal behaviour among (and involving) the Glasgow, consulting with police officers about the numbers of drunk individuals that were to be found on the streets of Glasgow in a given evening.  His study found that the average officer estimated that between 500-600 drunken individuals were to be found on Argyle Street, a major high street, on any given evening.  Over all, excesses of 9000 people in Glasgow were charged with drunk and disorderly behaviour, some in a condition of such stupor that they had been brought to the police station in wheel barrows. 

poorer classes on alcohol.  However, in 1858, a writer who called himself 'Shadow' wrote a study of

Despite the damning figures of Shadow and Horsley, the annual report of the Liverpool Head Constable for 1898 indicated that drunkenness was on the decline finding that:

          

  766 fewer cases of...drunk and riotous [behaviour] etc...Licensing Acts - the number of licenced-houses in the city had been decreased by 18 public houses and 2 beer-houses, and increased by 5 off-licenses...the number of licenced  premises...is:

            Public House: 1,865

            Beer House: 244

            Off-License: 153

            Total: 2,262

            Drunkness -

            The total number of arrests during the year: 4,292

            On a given night of the week:

            Sunday: 294

            Monday: 703

            Tuesday:544

            Wednesday: 452

            Thursday: 401

            Friday: 501

            Saturday: 1,398

This was a trend which was identified by the social critic Charles Booth, in his London based survey from 1902, which clearly identified that the number of arrests related to or involving alcohol were dropping as the new century progressed. 

*On  a side note, I find it interesting that the women both have the qualifying notes of being married and that one has a high number of living children, as though to state that these are otherwise 'good' women who have fallen low through the vice of alcohol- but that could be my personal hobby horse.  

Empirical Evidence in the Age of Empire

The Victorians valued empirical evidence in much the same way as it if valued today, as a way of measuring, dispassionately, an objective standard, ' what I want...' says Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times 'is facts.'  There was a prevalence, during the period, of the publication of statistics in magazines and periodicals for public consumption.  

There is a difficulty with these statistics because of the problems of ascertaining the truth behind them.  It is hypothesized that a significant portion of modern crimes go unreported, and statisticians posit that a significantly higher portion of Victorian crime also went unreported to the police.  One statistician posited that London crime statistics during the period are at least 50% higher than recorded.  

There is also the complex issue of identity, the number of individual offenders may well be lower than reported because of the extensive use of aliases.  The severe sentencing practices meant that many offenders went to great lengths not to be associated with their past misdeeds.  As Reverend J.W. Horsley noted in his 1887 book, Jottings from Jail:

            We take very little notice of names and ages in prison, as from various reasons they are apt to alter with each entrance.  Thus Frederick Lane, 15, has just been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment.  He has previously been in custody as Alfred Miller, 15, John Smith, 16, John Collins, 16, John Kate, 16, John Klythe, 17, John Keytes, 17.  

As the Quarterly Review 1874 found that:

...our readers in comparing the numbers of criminals in more recent years with those of an earlier period must...remember the additions which have been made to the population of the country.  The number of criminals is not much more than half in 1873. out of 23 millions of people, of what it was in 1841, out of 16 millions...In other words, whilst the growth of population has been nearly 45%, crime has actually diminished by about 25%. 

Frederick Engles (1820-95) blames the rise and expansion of the proletariat in industrial towns like Manchester and London for the rise in crime statistics from 1805 to 1842.  The Condition of the Working Class in England, (1844/45) by Engles, found that in 1805 there were 4,065 crime reported in England and Wales, but by 1842, 4,497 arrests were made in Lancashire alone, and 4,094 in Middlesex, including London.  The reported arrests for these two regions formed a quarter of the entire crime statistics for the country but their populations did not form a quarter of the entire population of England and Wales.  

However, from 1848 on-wards there was an almost year on year fall in those committed to penal custody, with the exception in 1854.  This fall is posited as the result of the higher level of police control during the period, their expanded powers and effectiveness facilitating a fall in penal sentences and crimes committed.   

Quarterly Review, October 1874

By 1840 the number of police officers employed by the Metropolitan Police force has risen to over 3,500 and police powers had been expanded inline with social needs, as the Judicial Statistics 1856-1873 reflects:

The commitments for trial in ...1856 show an unprecedented decrease...this must...be largely attributed to the extended powers of Justice of the Peace [i.e Magistrates] to deal summarily in cases of larceny under the Criminal Justice Act 1855.