• 1 For a thorough assessment of the debate, see Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900, (...)

1The assumption that a ‘criminal class’ lurked at the heart of the cities and was responsible for disorder and delinquency weighed heavily in Victorian conceptions about crime and disorder. The ‘garrotting panics’ of the 1860s, or the ‘hooligan’ scares, a generation later, came as a factual confirmation of what would have otherwise remained a rather vague notion. Ad hoc legislation was passed, such as the Habitual Criminals Acts of the late 1860s/early 1870s to counteract this ‘army of crime’, English style. The scares, however, faded out at the moment of WWI, so that the phrase ‘criminal class’ now bears an unmistakably Victorian flavour.1

• 2 See Jennifer Davis, ‘From “Rookeries” to “Communities”’, History Workshop 27 (1989): 66–85. Davis d (...)
• 3 Marie-Christine Leps; see also Geoffrey Pearson Hooligans. A History of Respectable Fears, London: (...)

2In the 1970s/80s, a host of historians, speaking from a Foucauldian-cum-Marxist perspective, interpreted this concern as a means for the ruling middle classes to comfort and legitimate their political and social hegemony by labelling certain lower social groups as a ‘criminal class’ (or ‘underclass’, or ‘residuum’) and making them the target of police and justice repression.2 A lot of attention has been paid to speeches in Parliament or to Punch cartoons.3 However, much less attention has been paid to the way this legislation was actually put in practice: did its harsher stance lead to an increasing severity of the courts? and, if not, how can we explain this discrepancy?

• 4 Various accounts of the Garotting Panics can be found in Jennifer Davis, ‘The London Garrotting Pan (...)
• 5 It attracted little attention at the national level and was only reported in James Bent, Criminal L (...)

4Table 1 offers a recap of the main legislation passed in Parliament during the 19th-century dealing with crime and violence. The 1860s (broadly speaking) stand in a pivotal situation, with no less than 5 Acts passed between 1861 and 1871. The 1861 Offences against the Persons Act singles itself out as a text of major importance as it restructured completely the penal code as far as offences against the person were concerned (hence the name . . .): only wilful murder remained a capital offence, making it the final stage in the movement towards abolition of the death penalty for any crime other than homicide; manslaughter, attempted murder, aggravated assault and common assault were punished by prison sentences of various duration, with or without hard labour. Any other piece of legislation seems partial compared to this wide-ranging statute. It shows clearly how important violence was in the definition of criminal behaviour and of the ‘criminal class’. For instance, the 1863 Security from Violence Act, known as the ‘Garrotters’ Act’, was passed just months after the London Garrotting Panic of the summer of 1862: the Metropolis faced an outbreak of violent street robberies perpetrated by small bands of thieves, where one of them would creep behind an isolated passer-by, wrap an arm around his throat and choke him, while he, or his accomplice, would swiftly seize the victim’s purse.4 London experienced 97 such nasty street attacks (labelled ‘robbery with violence’ in the Metropolitan Police returns) for the whole year of 1862, compared to a little above 30 for an ‘average’ year. There had been previous similar outbreaks, not only in London in 1851 and 1856, but also in Birmingham and Manchester (1851), and there was to be a fourth and final episode of garrotte attacks in Manchester and Salford in 1865.5

• 6 This is discussed in Emsley 73 sqq.

6What stands out first is the increasing criminalization of violence: such acts were part and parcel of the definition of what criminal behaviour was; the Garrotters’ Act did not deal with plain street robberies (‘robberies from the person’), but robberies with violence; this definition of criminals as primarily violent persons loomed large in subsequent legislation. Interpersonal violence had clearly become a social stigma, justifying more stringent measures of policing. Second, ‘habitual criminals’ were perceived as a ‘class’, or group, distinct from the rest of the population, with their own economy, their own language, codes of behaviour and, so to speak, their own polity; this was reflected in the writings of Henry Mayhew among others.6 This remained cause for concern long after the garrotting panics stopped in the late 1860s: attention focused eventually upon gangs of violent youths, be they Liverpool ‘cornermen’ (mid-1870s), Manchester ‘scuttlers’ (mid-1880s), or London ‘hooligans’ (1898–1910): these were the late-Victorian and Edwardian embodiments of the ‘criminal class’. However, no new piece of legislation was added to the Statute Book in response to these new ‘threats’, with the exception of the 1908 Prevention of Crime Act, which re-enacted and strengthened the provisions of the 1869 and 1871 Acts.

• 7 See Jennifer Davis, ‘Law Breaking and Law Enforcement: the making of a Criminal Class in Mid-Victor (...)

7The sustained legislative activity of the 1860s did not go unnoticed to the ‘revisionist’ historians of crime who reached prominence, both in academic circles and in the media in Britain (and the States) in the 1970s and 1980s. Generally belonging to the ‘New Left’, or largely influenced by it as well as by Foucault’s seminal Discipline and Punish, they interpreted it as a way for the ruling classes to strengthen their hold over the working classes. To quote Jennifer Davis, one of the major exponents of this interpretation in her work on ‘the creation of a criminal class in mid-Victorian London’7, the criminal class was:

• 9 Jennifer Davis, ‘The London Garrotting Panic of 1862’.

8According to this line of thought, these ‘criminal classes’ were literally ‘invented’ by a press acting as the ‘mouthpiece’ of the middle-classes9 and expressing their preoccupations with law and order; it was a ‘strategy’ to ‘divide and conquer the lower classes’, by creating an artificial division between the criminal poor and the rest of the poor but honest population, which justified increasing the control apparatus of the State (i.e. the police and justice).

• 11 The last one was sentenced to a £ 100 fine (PRO, ASSI 1/9–39).
• 12 PRO, ASSI 11/33.
• 13 PRO, Assizes Minutes Book, ASSI 11/9–33.

13With the exception of wilful murders and sexual offences, most judges and juries alike dealt very pragmatically when confronted to crimes of violence, the final decision having little to do with the actual provisions of the law. Nor was there any consistency: to stick with Birmingham, of the 14 husbands tried for assault upon their wife who are featured in our sample, 4 were given long prison sentences (over 5 years), 7 more lenient ones (under 18 months), and 2 were acquitted.11 In November 1880, in the same town, Dennis Smith was sentenced to 10 years hard labour for ‘shooting with intent to murder’ on his wife, but, 4 months later, John Jeffreys was sentenced to only 9 months in prison for the manslaughter of his own wife; in May the same year (1881), Stephen Smith was found not guilty of the same offence.12 In Birmingham, the average prison sentence for robbery with violence (i.e., the starting point of the 1850s-1860s ‘moral panics’ and the focus of much subsequent legislation) dropped from 9 years in 1860–61 to 15 months 10 years later, 24 months in 1880–81 (a slight increase) and 6 months in 1900–01.13

• 14 Philippe Chassaigne, ‘Le meurtre à Londres à l’époque victorienne: essai d’interprétation des modèl (...)
• 15 James A. Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship. Conflict in 19th-Century Married Life, London: Routl (...)
• 16 David Jones, Crime, Protest, Community and Police in 19th-Century Britain, London: Routledge and Ke (...)
• 17 PRO, ASSI.

14Another point is to gauge to what extent the people appearing in court actually belonged to any group likely to be labelled as ‘socially dangerous’. In fact, various elements suggest that the proletarian element stricto sensu was actually under-represented compared to either unskilled workers or the lower middle class: in London, one third of the people tried for wilful murder at the Old Bailey between 1857 and 1900 were artisans or shopkeepers; one fifth (21.5 %) were labourers and a little less than 15 % factory workers, builders, etc.14 A. James Hammerton comes up with rather similar figures for Victorian Preston in his well-known study of domestic violence:15 unskilled workers amounted to 43 % of people appearing at the police court, compared to 32 % being skilled workers; significantly, the proportion of textile workers fell from 56 % to 17 % between 1856 and 1913; artisans, shopkeepers, etc., amounted to about a quarter, which can easily be explained by the smaller representation of the lower middle class in an industrial city. David Jones has shown that in the mid-19th century, Merthyr Tydfil miners, navvies, portermen or publicans were more represented in common assault cases than steel workers.16 In Bristol, out of the 45 persons tried for sexual crimes in the assizes between 1885 and 1900, 18 % were labourers and 33 % shopkeepers or artisans.17

• 18 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Re-making of the English Working Class’, in Languages of Class, London: (...)
• 19 F. M. L. Thomson, The Rise of Respectable Society, London: Penguin, 1988.

15Such an underrepresentation of the strictly speaking ‘proletarian’ element in the people appearing in court for violent crimes begs questions of their own right, dealing with the theme of the ‘re-formation of the English working class’—to quote G. Stedman Jones18—, or the spreading of ‘respectability’ among the working class;19 the relative importance of the lower middle class element surely is something to ponder over; it could be argued that violent behaviours were comparatively more frequent in the social groups that lacked such ‘agencies of socialisation’ as trade unions or friendly societies. To stick to our present topic, however, it is quite obvious that the maintenance of law and order was by no means directed at one particular ‘class’.

• 20 Simon Stevenson, ‘The Habitual Criminal in 19th-Century England’, Urban History Yearbook (1986): 47 (...)

17Furthermore, Simon Stevenson has pointed out that the overall number of the ‘habitual criminals’, as defined by the relevant legislation, was small: they never amounted to more than 4,000 a year throughout the 1870s, which was in a large part due to the moderation displayed by professional magistrates to implement the law and their reluctance to give the criminals the label of ‘habitual’.20 We have seen above that this was still the case for at least one CCC judge in 1910. Such behaviour, by the way, is not really consistent with the image of a ‘ruling class’ using the full apparatus of the law to strengthen its hold over the ‘lower orders’.