Crime and the Victorians

Page 2 of 6

• 1. Statistics
• 2. Sensational crimes
• 3. 'Criminal classes'
• 4. Penal policies
• 5. Detective policing
• 6. Find out more
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Sensational crimes

While the general pattern of crime was one of decline, there were occasional panics and scares generated by particularly appalling offences. In the 1850s and early 1860s there were panics about street robbery, known then as 'garrotting'. A virulent press campaign against garrotters in 1862 developed following the robbery of an MP on his way home from a late-night sitting of parliament; and while the number of 'garrotte' robberies was tiny, the press created sensations out of minor incidents. Parliament responded with ferocious legislation providing for offenders to be flogged as well as imprisoned.

'Violence, especially violence with a sexual frisson, sold newspapers.'

The murders of Jack the Ripper in the autumn of 1888 were confined to a small area of London's East End, but similarly provoked a nation-wide panic whipped up by press sensationalism. Violence, especially violence with a sexual frisson, sold newspapers. But violent crime in the form of murder and street robbery never figured significantly in the statistics or in the courts.

Most offenders were young males, but most offences were petty thefts. The most common offences committed by women were linked to prostitution and were, essentially, 'victimless' crimes - soliciting, drunkenness, drunk and disorderly, vagrancy. Domestic violence rarely came before the courts. It tended to be committed in the private sphere of the home; among some working-class communities it continued to have a degree of tolerance, while amongst other classes the publicising of such behaviour, even, perhaps especially, in the courts, would have been regarded as bringing a family's reputation into disrepute.

The press also made much of big financial scandals and frauds. A significant percentage of company flotation's were fraudulent during the nineteenth century. Although the behaviour of the corrupt businessman provoked outrage and, when caught and convicted, a hefty prison sentence, he was usually described as an exception to the rule, a 'black sheep' or a 'rotten apple' in contemporary parlance. He was not conceived as a member of those who, particularly in the 1860s, the Victorians labelled as 'the criminal class'.

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Published: 2001-08-01