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.

It's Almost Time...

I appreciate that it has been some time since last I made a post and to be honest it's entirely my own fault.  I've been working my butt off trying to get my first chapter...or rather technically second chapter completed and I guess this is more an update than a proper post.  I do promise a proper full length post on my dear A.C.D at some point in the near future.  

 I decided against writing my first chapter for a myriad of reasons but really it's because I felt that it would be easiest to write at the end of this process since it sort of chronicles the entirety of the Victorian period rather than a distinct idea as the rest of the chapters.  So the second chapter it was! It is an examination of the expression legal procedural ideologies in 3 Victorian novels.  I was a little iffy on it at the start but it really gathered pace and I think is a long over looked reading of the Victorian novel. 

The Chapter's title is an adaptive process, since the thrust of the argument has developed as I wrote it the original title of 'A Trying Situation: The Writer and the Legislative Process' no longer applies and I am searching for a new one -although it is proving more elusive than originally anticipated. 

 

To say that I was nervous about feedback was something of an understatement, I've been climbing the walls for three days over it, waiting for someone to tell me it's terrible that I really need to reconsider my life choices and that KFC is still hiring.  In the end however, it was no where near as bad as anticipated, in fact, it was really rather affirming, with my supervisor, who is a George Eliot specialist telling me that he found my argument excellent and my topic 'brilliantly unique.' *cue excited blush*  From him, at least, it's high praise, a bit like Andrea Bochelli telling you that you can sing.   

My chapter in the end is 18,000 words in length, which seems over long as I intended to make each chapter between 10-12,000.  It seems overlong but I have assurances from my supervisor that there is nothing he would remove and that the length issue will sort itself out as I write other chapters, since there is room for cross over which will facilitate trimming the fat later. 

So my confirmation of registration Viva is in a few weeks, the 25th of be precise and while my feedback has calmed me somewhat I am still as nervous as heck about it.  I anticipate spending the next fortnight like a rabid dog, killing dead things and with rapidly diminishing sanity and patience.  In final news I got my studentship, 18k a year to help my research, including a fee waiver and a £1,000 budget for conferences and academic facilities I might need.  Very excited by that!

Getting Serious!

Okay! So I have been keeping a vague sort of thing on the go for ages now and thought it best to composite it all in one place and make it all a bit more focused - after all I have started my Phd which is all about Victorian law and it's affect on the literature of the age.  So I get to spend the next few years up to my eyes in the worst travesties of the Victorian legal system and lots of books - great right!?


The literature in question is a lot of the stuff you might expect really -Sherlock Holmes, Wilkie Collins, even a bit of Dickens for the civil law stuff.  I would have tried to cram in a bit of Poe but it might have been a touch too ambitious since the general focus is the operation of the UK legal system rather than the US one- although I am still in two minds over the inclusion of some traditionally 'Irish' Victorian writers since it was pre-1921 and as such they would have been subject to English law and as such fall under the auspices of the researches wider umbrella.

To say that it's not motivated by an overwhelming desire to hide from the job market while getting to read Sherlock Holmes over and over again and the rest of the canon of early detective fiction.  I might also be something of a creep for looking forward to trawling through the rather florid articles in The Illustrated Police News and the like - they shouldn't be amusing because they are depictions of actual events and incidents involving real people but the little drawings are so overly dramatic that I can't help but smirk at them.

Basically the purpose of this blog will be largely the same as the old postings but with a bit more focus, Ill be throwing things up that relate to Victorian law, Victorian literature or any sort of related bits and pieces that take my fancy - so it won't be changing that much just with a little more focus than before.  Granted I still might go off on tangents and post random things that seems totally unrelated, the truth is that they might well be but they have taken my fancy or have been sparked by some crazy thought process relating to my research.  So here we go!