Crime and Punishment in Victorian London PDF
Preview Crime and Punishment in Victorian London
Book-Crime and Punishment_Crime and Punishment 07/01/2014 11:42 Page i CRIME AND PUNISHMENT in VICTORIAN LONDON Book-Crime and Punishment_Crime and Punishment 07/01/2014 11:42 Page ii For Harris, Gilly and Bagel Book-Crime and Punishment_Crime and Punishment 07/01/2014 11:42 Page iii CRIME AND PUNISHMENT in VICTORIAN LONDON A Street-level View of the City’s Underworld Ross Gilfillan Book-Crime and Punishment_Crime and Punishment 07/01/2014 11:42 Page iv First published in Great Britain in 2014 by PEN AND SWORD HISTORY an imprint of Pen and Sword Books Ltd 47 Church Street Barnsley South Yorkshire S70 2AS Copyright © Ross Gilfillan, 2014 ISBN 978 1 78159 342 4 The right of Ross Gilfillan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any formor by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. Printed and bound in England by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Typeset in Times New Roman by CHIC GRAPHICS Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select, Social History, Transport, True Crime, and Claymore Press, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper, Praetorian Press, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Wharncliffe.. For a complete list of Pen and Sword titles please contact Pen and Sword Books Limited 47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk Book-Crime and Punishment_Crime and Punishment 07/01/2014 11:42 Page v Contents Introduction vi CRIME 1. 'You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two': Embarking on a life of crime 3 2. On the Streets: 'The lowest class of women' 39 3. Sharp Practises: swindles and scams 59 4. Murder and Mayhem: Panic on the streets of Victorian London 72 PUNISHMENT ‘Help, Police!’ 110 5. ‘From the Hulks!’ Prison life, afloat and ashore 114 6. The Rope's End: The long and short (drop) of capital punishment 137 Glossary of Criminal Slang 149 Bibliography 153 Index 155 Book-Crime and Punishment_Crime and Punishment 07/01/2014 11:42 Page vi Introduction he dark side of Victorian life continues to grip the popular Timagination. Turn on the television, go to the movies, or browse in a bookshop and you’ll be sure to encounter some work of the imagination or of diligent research, which summons up once again the ramshackle doss-houses and brothels of the East End, the festering stink of the slums and the blood-stained streets of fog-bound, murderous Whitechapel. Heartless confidence tricks, vicious assaults and villainous homicides are still being re-enacted more than a century after they were committed. It’s as though under the modern map of London still lies the palimpsest of an older, apparently more dangerous city, which has never quite gone away. Authors have fed on this peculiar fascination for the underbelly of Victorian life since the days when the world they described was still fresh in the mind. Charles Dickens knew the value of bringing the seamier side of London on to his pages. Dickens populated his novels with the poor, the hungry and the criminal characters that better-heeled London preferred not to see – unless safely served up in serialised fiction, or in the newspaper columns of journalist Henry Mayhew’s long-running exposé of life on the streets of mid-century London. Dickens shocked readers with stories of callous fiends preying on homeless children, tragic suicides fished from the Thames and the brutal murder of Nancy by the thuggish burglar Bill Sykes. Drawing on his own experiences of visiting hellish places like Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey, Dickens gave middle-class readers a glimpse of life on the other side of the recently-laid tracks. Just as Mayhew did, he gave voices to people on the streets, from pickpockets like the Artful Dodger to trouble-beset innocents like Little Dorrit, and even to Jo, a lowly crossing sweeper. But Dickens wasn’t writing only to draw attention to social evils. vi Book-Crime and Punishment_Crime and Punishment 07/01/2014 11:42 Page vii INTRODUCTION He readily perceived that with his unorthodox characters drawn from this unseen side of London life, he had tapped into a suppressed and sometimes ghoulish appetite. It was an appetite that he and others like him were ready to satisfy. Other possibilities also offered themselves. With Sergeant Rose and Inspector Bucket, Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins introduced the first detectives into fiction. Dickens and Collins, and later, Conan Doyle, were among a body of writers who realised that the work of the new detective force could add narrative drive to their fiction. They gave birth to a genre whose popularity shows no sign of diminishing, and is one reason why the world they described remains such a fertile ground for writers, too. Recent years have seen authors drawing on the legacy of their Victorian forebears and finding a ready readership for stories set in an age that is alien in many respects but which, with its insistent drive towards modernity, is still recognisable as the foundations of our own. Popular books which have faithfully recreated the era include the best- selling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, and the suitably Victorian- length novels, The Quincunx and The Crimson Petal and the White. Screen writers frequently revisit this milieu: Sherlock Holmes has had both TV and film updates, Dr Who regularly slips back to nineteenth century London, while the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper will always, it seems, provide fodder for fiction. The period we cover has its main focus on the the middle years of the nineteenth century, the 1850s and 1860s. Yet it also reaches back to the beginning of that century – when the murders on the Ratcliff Highway shocked London and woke minds to the idea that something must be done to improve the ad hoc policing of the capital – and to the century’s last years, when the Ripper stalked the streets of Whitechapel. Between these ghastly events are 60 or 70 years during which many of the factors making London a lively, often dangerous place changed dramatically. Roads were driven through thieves’ rookeries, Forster’s Education Act provided elementary education for all children between the ages of five and twelve, and the justice system was radically overhauled. By mid-century, the 200 capital crimes on the vii Book-Crime and Punishment_Crime and Punishment 07/01/2014 11:42 Page viii CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN VICTORIAN LONDON books in 1800 had been reduced to a mere handful. Criminals no longer upped their game on the grounds that they ‘might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb’ and juries were less likely to let off a man to avoid seeing him hang. Capital punishment continued to be applied, but executions (after 1868) no longer made grisly spectacles and provided free entertainment outside the walls of Newgate. Attitudes to crime and punishment see-sawed: flogging for instance, was on the way out before the garrotting panic of 1862 caused an increase in its application. There were even voices speaking out against capital punishment per se. Prison sentences replaced hanging and transportation as the most common punishments, new prisons were built, and well-meaning experiments with solitary confinement were made. A succession of seismic changes were wrought in this age, not only in social conditions but also in the city itself. Some of the neighbourhoods which bred the crime that made the city dangerous – or were perceived as such by an expanding, increasingly sensation- hungry press – were wiped from the map. Government bodies, philanthropic individuals, religious and other charitable institutions gradually brought about their own improvements to the common lot. However, there was still widespread poverty and concomitant social evils by the century’s end. This often turbulent century had coped, or tried to cope, with social unrest and hunger caused by the introduction of machinery into industry, the Corn Laws, (which made the buying of cheap foreign grain prohibitively expensive), and the new Poor Laws (which allowed relief for the poverty-stricken only through the harsh workhouse system). The towns and cities had an influx of agricultural workers untrained for urban industrial occupations and refugees from the famine in Ireland. No wonder there had been an explosion of crime on the streets. Taking the century as a whole, though, it was probably safer to live in London during the nineteenth century than it had been in centuries past. It might not have seemed so, of course, now that crime was accounted for in figures and its details rapidly and widely disseminated, but by the century’s end, there was an operational police viii Book-Crime and Punishment_Crime and Punishment 07/01/2014 11:42 Page ix INTRODUCTION force, which didn’t just deter but now also tried to solve crimes, and a more humane approach to punishment. Despite this, preceding centuries have signally failed to fascinate succeeding generations in the same way the nineteenth century so evidently has. One reason for this is because this century has left much more of an imprint. In the newspaper archives, in surviving photographs and in public records are the first-hand accounts, the documented histories and sometimes the faces of people who got through their hard lives as best they could. There are records too, of what happened to them when it all went awry and they faced the ‘full majesty of the law’. The crimes and calamitous mistakes of this century, originally reported in newspapers and broadsides, or only gleaned from ballads and melodramatic renditions in theatres, have been passed down almost as folkloric stories, entering the oral tradition and then being rediscovered and reused by successions of writers for their own purposes. Within this book you’ll meet – and often hear from in their own words – some of the people whose circumstances and actions gave birth to the stories and legends that make this dark side of London’s history memorable for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps the best and certainly the most exhaustive accounts of people like these come from Henry Mayhew, whose extraordinarily detailed writings, and illuminating interviews with London’s poor and dispossessed, were collected and published in four volumes as London Labour and the London Poor in 1851. So it is with Henry Mayhew that we must begin... On a warm September evening in 1852, the journalist Henry Mayhew prepares to ascend from London’s Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in a hot air balloon. These flights are still novel enough to get star billing on advertising posters and a small crowd has gathered to witness the spectacle. Faces in the basket glow, ruddy in the fiery light from burners inflating the great balloon, which strains against taut ropes. When the last stragglers have joined the spectators and it seems that the balloon might tear itself from the earth at any moment, a gun is fired and the ropes are loosed. ix
The list of books you might like
