Crime and Punishment in Victorian London

A Street Level View of the City's Underworld

Ross Gilfillan

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Social
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781781593424
• eBook ISBN: 9781473834729
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Discover the seamy history of nineteenth-century England that has inspired countless crime novels and films.
 
Victorian London: All over the city, watches, purses, and handkerchiefs disappear from pockets; goods migrate from warehouses, off docks, and out of shop windows. Burglaries are rife, shoplifting is carried on in West End stores, and people fall victim to all kinds of ingenious swindles. Pornographers proliferate and an estimated eighty thousand prostitutes operate on the city's streets. Even worse, the vulnerable are robbed in dark alleys or garroted, a new kind of mugging in which the victim is half-strangled from behind while being stripped of his possessions.
 
This history takes you to nineteenth-century London's grimy rookeries, home to thousands of the city's poorest and most desperate residents. Explore the crime-ridden slums, flash houses, and gin palaces from a unique street-level view—and meet the people who inhabited them.

CRIME

CHAPTER 1

‘You’ve Got to Pick A Pocket or Two’
Embarking on a life of crime

Dick is a sad-looking man with a sallow complexion, whose beard and moustache age him beyond his 31 years. He’s already had a long life of picking pockets, and regular spells in prison – where he spent months in solitary confinement – have taken a heavy toll. His story is typical of many, but when Henry Mayhew (or his colleague, John Binny) interviews him at a low lodging house in 1861, this hopeless recidivist proves to be a well-read and intelligent man.

Mayhew believes that pickpockets are generally the products of neglectful or drunken parents, or parents who themselves are already thieves, but the man Mayhew calls ‘Dick’ bucks the trend – he has been brought up in a strict Wesleyan household near Shrewsbury. His father, a minister, forbade him to stay out late and held services of worship every evening. Despite being his father’s favourite, the wilful Dick rebelled and, before he was ten years old, he took the four sovereigns of pocket money he had saved and boarded a coach bound for London. There are more than a few parallels with Oliver Twist in what happens next.

“When I got to London I had neither friend nor acquaintance,” he says. “I first put up at a coffee shop in the Mile End Road and lodged there for seven weeks, until my money was nearly all spent.” His next address was a “mean lodging house” in Field Lane, Holborn, where he “met with characters I had never seen before and heard language I had not formerly heard”. He stopped there for almost three weeks, doing nothing but no doubt learning a lot, until his money ran out. The landlady allowed him to stay on for a few more days, after which he was turned out of doors, perfectly ignorant, he admits, in the ways and means of getting a living in London.

There’s a horrible inevitability about what happens next. “I was taken by several poor ragged boys to sleep in the dark arches of the Adelphi”, he recalls. Here, he “often saw boys follow the male passengers when the boats came to the Adelphi stairs”. When the passengers had finished disembarking from the boats, Dick finds that his companions generally have “one or two handkerchiefs”. The boys then introduce the young Dick to a shifty man called ‘Larry’, a meeting which takes place in the unusual location of a (presumably abandoned) prison van. Larry, as he discovers, gives the boys whatever price he likes for the handkerchiefs. If they don’t agree, he threatens to have them arrested.

Dick’s own initiation into the pickpocketing line is not long in coming. “The boys had been very kind, sharing what they got with me, but always asking why I did not try my hand”, he says. “I was ashamed to live any longer upon the food they gave me without doing something for myself”. There is, of course, someone on hand to help with his transition from penniless waif to budding criminal. His name is Joe and Joe is there to see that Dick goes through with his first pocket-picking. One evening, by the banks of the river, they see “an elderly gentleman step ashore and a lady with him. They had,” he adds, “a little dog, with a string attached to it, that they led along”.

Joe ‘fans’, or lightly feels the pocket of their victim, and then tells Dick to try his luck. “I went close to the gentleman’s side”, Dick says, “trembling all the time”. He remembers Joe standing nearby in the dark. Dick goes with his intended victim “up the steep hill of the Adelphi…Joe still following us, encouraging me all the time, while the old gentleman was engaged with the little dog”. Then Dick makes his move, dipping his hand into the pocket and retrieving its contents, apparently without the victim’s notice. “I took out a green ‘kingsman’”, he says, explaining that this is “next in value to a black silk handkerchief”. Immediately after the theft, they “went to the arches, where Larry was, and Joe said to him, ‘there is Dick’s first trial…you must give him a ray [1s 6d] for it.’ After a deal of pressing, we got one shilling”.

The successful result and easy money fill Dick with confidence. In fact, he appears to have discovered a natural talent. “In the course of a few weeks, I was considered the cleverest of the little band, never failing to get a couple of handkerchiefs from passengers of each docking boat”. His skills don’t go unnoticed: he’s befriended by contacts of Larry, two young and well-dressed men, who give the boy presents and encourage his activities. Then, after being caught red-handed, he is sentenced to two months in Westminster Bridewell. On his release, the young men have a cab waiting to drive him to their own home, where Dick will now live.

Under their tutelage, Dick becomes adept at robbing purses from ladies. To do this he must play the part of a gentleman’s son, and to this end, he is newly clothed in a little surtout-coat, trousers and a beaver hat. The outfit is completed by a black silk necktie and collar. Practising on Emily, one of the men’s girlfriends, Dick becomes proficient at stealing ladies’ purses and the men are soon benefitting from their charge’s skills. The booty is divided equally and one day, Dick finds he has netted himself £19, which he blows on a silver watch, a gold chain and an overcoat to carry over his left arm to cover his movements. He is unrecognisable as the starving urchin befriended by the boys of the Adelphi arches.

But it’s not long before he’s again apprehended and this time, he’s sentenced to three months in Bridge Street Bridewell at Blackfriars, during which time he is supplied with meat and pastries, sent in by his attentive new friends. Returning to his life of crime, Dick finds that theatres are a highly promising venue for his skills. “I have often had as many as six or seven ladies’ purses in the rear of the boxes”, he tells Mayhew, tipping him that it’s “easier to pick a female’s pocket when she has several children with her to attract her attention”. Crowded places have always attracted pickpockets, and in Victorian London, they operate successfully at busy railway stations, on riverboats and at any large events where their actions stand a fair chance of being obscured by the confusion of the crowd. Dick ‘dips’ in the well-attended Madame Tussauds and then at the Epsom races – where, trying against his better judgement to rob “two ladies as they were stepping into a carriage” after the Derby, he is apprehended and detained once again.

After four more months, he is released. Dick’s now 13 years old and this is when, he says, “I first kept a woman….She was a tall, thin, genteel girl about 15 years of age”. In the cramped and foetid world of the low lodging houses, it wasn’t unusual to find adolescents living together as man and wife. The sleeping arrangements for many residents appalled commentators of the time. Dick is honest enough to admit that he “often ill-used and beat her”. At this point he has seen only the Bridewells, or places of short-stay detention. His first real stretch of imprisonment is spent in Tothill Fields Prison, which is then operating a rigid silent system. For Dick, being forbidden to communicate with his fellow prisoners comes as an awful shock: “The silent system was very strict”, he says, “and being very wilful, I was often under punishment. It had such an effect on me that for the last six weeks of my imprisonment, I was in the infirmary”.

But neither this, nor a further stretch in Coldbath Fields, changes his ways and in April 1848, Dick is to be found among the Chartists on Kennington Common, where he takes “several ladies’ purses, amounting to £3 or £4” and then a gentleman’s pocketbook in which, amazingly, is a bundle of bank notes amounting to £135, a small fortune at the time. And his luck holds, or so he says. “The same afternoon I took a purse in Trafalgar Square with eighteen sovereigns in it”. The amounts are scarcely credible and it’s only because Mayhew (or his colleague John Binny) accepts this without question that we will have to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Dick joins the greatest crowds of 1851, preying on visitors to the Great Exhibition, but perhaps doesn’t do as well as he expects, because soon after this he is persuaded to join a team of cracksmen, or burglars. After a successful debut in which their booty, “silks, handkerchiefs and other drapery goods” are carried away by cab and quickly disposed of to a fence, they try a third burglary in the City, at a shop selling Geneva watches. Unfortunately, the proprietor has stayed late to do his accounts and is still on the premises at one am, when the break-in is made.

“On seeing us, he made an outcry and struggled with us”, Dick says. “Assistance came immediately. Two policemen ran up to the house…We tried to make for the door…I got away and fled, when I was stunned by a man who carried a closed umbrella. Hearing the cry of ‘Stop, thief!’ he drew out the umbrella and I fell as I was running”. This earns him 18 months in Holloway (not then a women’s prison) where solitary confinement again has a deleterious effect on his health.

Finally, Dick had had enough of a life which brought him as much stress and trouble as occasional riches and the prodigal returned home to Shrewsbury. We don’t know how he accounted for his time in London, nor anything of the suspicions his family must have had. But it was not long before this city thief tired of the country and returned to his old life in London. After a final stint in Coldbath Fields – and a warning that another court appearance would mean certain transportation – Dick gave up pickpocketing and at the time when Mayhew elicits his story, has settled for the life of a street patterer. Or so he claims.

Victorian Gang Violence:
the Elephant and Castle Boys and the Green Gate Gang

There’s nothing new about gang culture. The nineteenth century saw teenaged street gangs battling in London and in many of the country’s major conurbations. While the London gangs from the densely populated East End are particularly feared because they are apt to carry guns, gangs from Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester cause more mayhem.

Manchester’s street fighters are known as ‘Scuttlers’ and on one occasion, as many as 500 took part in a vicious clash over territory. Their weapons of choice are sticks, stones, knives and leather belts, which are wrapped tightly around their fists so that the heavy brass buckle makes an effective knuckleduster. Manchester’s gangs are easily identifiable by their uniform dress. Scuttlers wear pointed, brass-tipped clogs, bell-bottomed trousers and silk scarves. Their haircuts are distinctive too: short back and sides, with long ‘donkey’ fringes worn over the left eye. Peaked caps complete the look.

Gangs are named after their local streets and areas. If London has the Elephant and Castle Boys, the Green Gate gang from Hoxton and the Dove Row gang from Hackney, then Manchester has its Bengal Tigers (from Bengal Street) and Holland Street gangs. The Scuttlers are first recorded clashing in the streets in the 1870s, but this particular spate of gang street-fighting persists into the late 1890s.

Skirmishes with other gangs offer slum kids a taste of excitement, the chance to earn respect from their peers and to retain a sense of identity in overcrowded, industrial streets. Violence also offers them a fast track to Strangeways prison. In a heavy-handed reaction to what the modern media now likes to call ‘the rising tide of violence’, lengthy sentences are imposed, and some Scuttlers face the lash.

Andrew Davies, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool, has made a study of Manchester’s Victorian street gangs and notes that a very great many Scuttlers were jailed. ‘In the first 12 months of the so-called Rochdale Road War of 1870-71, around 500 Scuttlers were convicted and members of the local council were growing quite alarmed at the sheer number of 12 and 13-year-old boys who were languishing in prison. So, the resort to imprisonment was made very early, with sentences being handed out of 15–20 years. And somewhat to the astonishment of the authorities, this wasn’t enough to stamp the practice out’.

Interviewed by a Guardian journalist in 1898, four Ancoats gang members say they only feel safe on their own patch and only go into the city in groups to assure safety. The reporter asks how fights get started and receives the telling reply, “You just soap your hair over your left eye and put on a pigeon-board cap. Then you walk into Salford”.

Dick’s lodging house is much like the 200 others Mayhew counts in this and other low-rent areas. Homes for labourers, costermongers, pedlars and anyone else who can afford nothing better, some are actually quite clean and respectable places. The lower ground floor is often the common room, in which there may be deal tables and forms to sit on. A constantly burning fire provides somewhere for the residents to cook their meals – typically a bit of fish to go with potatoes, bread and a jug of tea – and a place to dry wet clothes.

The necessaries for an evening meal can sometimes be bought on the premises, while rooms and even beds might be shared. Mayhew visits lodging houses in some of the roughest areas and is surprised, at one such location, to find a man making delicate artificial flowers at one table and at another, someone quietly reading. This isn’t the scene at some of the more lively lodging houses he inspects in the protective company of a police officer.

The phrase ‘breeding places for crime’ perfectly describes the conditions in some low lodging houses, whose rooms are already filled with felons of one kind or another. It is as if, Mayhew says, there has been a tacit agreement as to which class of person the house will accept. As well as houses used by street sellers and other traders, there are establishments – ‘flash houses’ – inhabited almost exclusively by thieves and prostitutes. In the lodging house in which a “trustworthy man” is obliged to stay, “all was dilapidation, filth and noisomness”. In the morning, Mayhew says, he filled a basin from a bucket in order to wash. “In the water”, Mayhew says, “were floating alive, bugs and lice, which my informant was convinced had fallen from the ceiling, shaken off by the tread of someone walking in the rickety apartments above”.

From the outside, many of these places look much like ordinary houses, we are told, though they may well be dirtier. The grimy windows, as one resident tells Mayhew, “are not to let the light in, but to keep the cold out”. The proprietors of these houses have been able to launch their ventures on a shoestring, buying up furniture no one else will take – sometimes because it comes from houses in which cholera has taken hold – and using every inch of space. The more successful landlords “may be classed as capitalists”, Mayhew says. “One…has a country house in Hampstead”. The landlords will often employ deputies to oversee the running of their properties. This is not a function always, or even often, performed properly.

“Some of the lodging-houses”, Mayhew claims, “are of the worst class of low brothels, and some may even be described as brothels for children”. Mayhew is clearly shocked by “the licentiousness” he uncovers: “Men and women, boys and girls…herd together promiscuously”. Boys, he claims, “boastfully carried on loud conversations…of their triumphs over the virtue of girls, and girls have laughed at, and encouraged the recital”. Some lodging houses are fronts for fences, traders in stolen property, and the food cooked in the kitchens is often thieved from local markets by light-fingered lodgers.

The shock of finding oneself in such a place can be greater for those who have known something better. A man who “had filled a commercial situation of no little importance” but ruined himself through drink, left a rather pathetic description of the place to which his intemperance led him:

I myself have slept in the top room of a house not far from Drury Lane, and you could study the stars, if you were so minded, through the holes left by the slates having blown off the roof. It was a fine summer’s night and the openings in the roof were then rather an advantage, for they admitted air and the room wasn’t so foul as it might have been without them. I nev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Crime
• Punishment
• Glossary of Criminal Slang
• Bibliography