In this fascinating book, Heather Shore offers an analysis of the concept of London’s criminal “underworlds”, from the early eighteenth century to the interwar period, setting this within the wider context of the evolution of print culture; the development of the police and law enforcement; and the theme of urban space and territory. She provides case studies of criminal lives, and covers a range of criminal activities, including robbery, pickpocketing, swindling, street crime, youth crime, and gangsters. Thus, the criminal underworld is seen here as both a social and cultural concept – the book provides a narrative of the imagined underworld alongside the actual lives of working-class Londoners, especially at the moment when they encountered the criminal justice system as offenders, victims, and witnesses.
Shore’s Introduction notes the fluidity of the boundaries of the underworld. She argues that “criminal organization” is culturally and politically constructed, and – in place of simplistic notions of “gangs” – proposes a more flexible and fluid set of relationships. Set within the context of four themes (print culture, public crime, criminal networks, and criminal territory) the focus here is on specific individuals and the creation of stereotypes. Her aim is to use a case study approach, a series of snapshots, to explore the overlapping communities of the underworld.
Chapter 2 explores crime networks and cultures of informers in the 1720s and 1730s. It features individuals such as Jonathan Wild, notorious for his double-role as both thief and thief-taker, but also explores the interaction of print culture, law enforcement, and criminal activity. Moral reformation, especially of prostitution, is another theme in a period when law enforcement was seen less as a civic duty (as it would subsequently become) than as an opportunity for income through paid office and other activities. Informers could thus include both informing constables and characters such as the Willis Brothers, people who spanned boundaries and who saw informing as both a business opportunity and a way of settling grievances. With a focus on the problem of criminal confederacy – networks not only of criminals and informers, but also law enforcers – that was arguably unprecedented, these decades emerge as key decades in the development of the underworld narrative. The next chapter then turns to the personality of Mary “Moll” Harvey in the period 1727–1738, drawing on criminal biography to illustrate one version of criminal enterprise and confederacy. Noting the importance of face-to-face relationships in criminal justice systems, Shore shows how Harvey was able to take advantage of flexibility and discretion. In the period leading up to the 1730 Disorderly House Campaign, when strenuous efforts were made to tackle houses (such as brothels) where the activities of their inhabitants were likely to become a public nuisance, celebrity criminals were created by the painter and printmaker William Hogarth and others within the context of print culture. Some typical elements and common features of an eighteenth-century criminal biography emerged subsequently in the public imagination, such as foreign journeys and colonial transportation.
Chapter 4 looks at street theft in the period 1800–1850, exploring new definitions of pickpocketing and tracing how “hustling” (when victims were surrounded by large groups of young men) peaked in 1819–1820. New concerns about public space, and growing anxiety about the crowd, especially the political crowd, and about radical mass politics and processions, were reflected in the publicity given to the “West End Fair Gang”. At a time when larceny, pickpocketing, and violent robbery all overlapped, “the swell mob” was perceived as an important element in the “criminal class”. Shore thus shows how increasing intolerance of street disorder was reflected in the expansion of the police, and contests over territory. The following chapter further examines crime, kinship, and community in East London, 1827–1852, revealing the circuitous relationship between criminal networks, policing strategies, and print culture. Tracing the links between print culture, community and family networks, as well as individual lives and street-level law enforcement, Shore reconstructs the criminal history of both the Sheen family and the community within which it lived. She shows how the characters of Fagin and Bill Sikes in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (serialized 1837–1839) may have been based on the Victorian criminal William Sheen.
Chapter 6 looks at “coiners”, fraudsters, and swindlers in the period 1760–1913. After 1850, the increase in the financial crimes of fraud, forgery, and embezzlement was reflected in the formation of a Detective Branch within the Metropolitan Police (1842) and the expansion of the Criminal Investigation Department (in the 1870s). In the context of concern about coiners, plain-clothes officers were increasingly employed from the 1830s, in an effort to frustrate forgery and swindling gangs. Thus, the period featured such characters as the notorious counterfeiter “Jim the Penman”, and also long-firm fraud. While fraud cases certainly featured at the Old Bailey, England’s central criminal court, and were aided by the expanding railway network, Shore is not as convinced as contemporaries that they were committed by “foreigners” or were a “middle-class crime”. While the sources ultimately are unreliable about many of the possible attributions, what they make evident are the complex relationships between defendants, witnesses, and the police. The period thus saw the development of financial instruments, increased reporting of prosecutions, the evolution of laws, and a growing belief in professional and career criminals, but also striking continuities with older forms of criminal activity.
The penultimate chapter explores “hooligans” and street gangs in the period 1882–1912. Here, Shore places the hooligan panic within the broader context of concerns about street violence and disorder. She is sceptical about the occurrence of “gangs”; instead, she shows how this notion was used to police Londoners in their daily lives – by law enforcers, the press, and civil society. Noting that there was little evidence of any real increase in violent crime, and questioning the extent of gang conflict, she argues that it was territory that instigated these conflicts. Moreover, while there was certainly increased reporting of disorderly youths in the 1870s, these young men seem to have been mostly workers. Although it is true that gangs were associated with clearly defined spatial territory, and it is possible to identify key street- and area names over time, evidence suggests they were relatively disorganized. Such gangs as the “Lambeth Lads” and the “Somers Town Gang” had long roots, close to music halls and street markets, but also using new weapons that included revolvers. Did participation in gangs reflect involvement in more sustained criminal activity? Overall, Shore is more concerned to place youths within the broader context of their communities. In the 1880s, with new model dwellings and slum clearance, and the arrival of migrants, the places where the gangs fought were also changing.
Chapter 8 traces organized crime in interwar London. Gang violence of the 1920s, including on racecourses, was not only notorious at the time but also served as inspiration for novels such as Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938). Families such as the Sabinis in Clerkenwell reveal the significance of kin, residence, and occupations. Was this a moment of modernization? Contemporaries often made comparisons with the United States, and with protectionism and gambling. Nevertheless, criminal networks again overlapped, and members of gangs were also working-class, involved in bookmaking, or on the fringes of it. In the 1920s, such gangs were extending their territory, and proximity to good transport links was important for them. However, fears about “new” gangsters were voiced in the context of a continuing history of contested territories and communities. Certainly, the victims of gangs were mainly other gang members.
Heather Shore’s journey as a historian is only finally revealed in the Conclusion. Her original aim, she says, was to write a history of the underworld, placed between sensationalist “true histories” and historical studies of crime. Yet, in the course of her research, she started to think more laterally about “something that does not exist in a concrete form” (p. 192), and began to use core narratives to reconstruct, through “thick description”, the relationships, networks, and spaces inhabited by groups and individuals. With “a selectivity that is ultimately highly personal” (p. 193), the themes that emerged, underpinning her understanding of criminal organization and confederacy, were: expanding print culture; the interactions between the public and the publicity of crime; and the evolution of networks and territory. What the book offers is a series of “snapshots, moments and episodes in the making of the modern underworld” (p. 193), an underworld that does not exist, but is constructed, and whose discursive power acts as a shorthand for commentators who sought “to describe the worlds of the criminal, deviant and the poor, and to keep them at arm’s length” (p. 195).
This, then, is a very interesting book, drawing on the digitization of the Old Bailey records and other archival and published sources. At times, its arguments seem somewhat elusive, and the emphasis on print culture, criminal networks, and criminal territory slightly repetitive. Some sections offer empirical narratives that are overly detailed, and there is no sustained exploration of the “criminal class”. While Shore employs a long time-frame, whether the events of the 1720s or the 1920s were a case of a break from the past, or of continuity, remains unclear. And as the author is the first to admit, the book relies heavily on the records of the Old Bailey, so we hear much less about the experience of other cities. Nevertheless, the basic premise of the book – that the underworld was both a cultural and a social construct – is an appropriate one, and the case study approach offers one way of revealing its overlapping communities. While actual levels of crime in working-class neighbourhoods are not reconstructed here, and probably cannot be, this book goes far towards mapping the changing contours of London’s criminal underworlds.
