Update

feature
Who's afraid
of the Victorian
underworld?
— ANDY CROLL The Victorian underworld continues to fascinate. Works of popular history that
take readers to the heart of the slums of nineteenth-century London are avidly
consumed. Movies about gang warfare in 'old' New York are box office hits. And a
whole army of 'Ripperologists' pore tirelessly over the evidence in search of the
identity of the serial killer who struck in Whitechapel in 1888. Yet against this
Editors Introduction
insatiable popular appetite for the latest horror stories from the citadels of vice and
to go here
crime, one may be forgiven for thinking that academic historians have lost their
nerve. Many no longer seem willing to contemplate the underworld as a social
reality, preferring instead to conceive of it as a 'mythical', 'imagined' construct. The
idea of the 'criminal classes', so beloved by Victorians themselves, is generally
rejected as a bourgeois stereotype. And some even doubt our ability as historians
ever to recover the experiences and perceptions of the criminal and the vicious
themselves. Histories of crime 'from below', some now argue, are just not possible.

For a short while, it should be noted, a number of academic historians entertained

no such fears. They ventured bravely into the criminal districts, treating their
chosen underworlds as unproblematic 'realities'. In the late 1960s, J.J. Tobias was
convinced that there was a class of ne'er-do-wells that made its living from crime,
that was trained (often from an early age) in criminal ways, and that had turned its
back on 'civilised' norms. Other writers concurred. Kellow Chesney introduced his
readers to all manner of underworld characters, including gonophs, footpads and
swell mobsmen. Meanwhile criminal enclaves were discovered in urban settlements
far removed from the great metropolitan centres. Thus, historians showed how
Merthyr Tydfil, a booming Welsh iron town, possessed its very own criminal class.
The 'China' district of the town was replete with its own leaders ('Emperors' and
'Empresses'), kidsmen (real-life Fagins), bullies, Rodnies (juvenile offenders) and
numerous 'nymphs of the pave' (prostitutes). These outcasts were so dominant that
'China' remained a 'no-go' area for the authorities well into the 1860s.1

To Garotters - 'Cave Tomkins',
Punch, (either 13 or 20 December 1862).
Such historians of crime were inspired by the 'new' social history project that came
to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s. Consequently, they were often interested in
writing a history of the underworld 'from below'. They fully acknowledged how
difficult such an undertaking was. The sources at their disposal were almost
invariably penned by middle-class observers and had to be read 'against the grain' if
they were to reveal anything about the experiences of the criminals themselves.
Archival silences had to be made to speak and the conclusions one reached were
necessarily tentative. As Tobias himself remarked, 'In this field we learn at best the

30... The Historian / Winter 2004


opinions of those who themselves
did not possess the information we
seek…We are dealing with
intangible, immeasurable evidence
which is very difficult to assess.' We
must be content, he wrote, with a
history that was constantly
qualified by 'probabilities and
possibilities'.2
Notwithstanding these significant
caveats, Tobias felt confident
enough in the evidence to push
strongly the idea of the 'criminal
class'. He did so because of his faith
in Victorian 'social explorers' and,
particularly, Henry Mayhew. The
literature of social exploration came
into its own during the nineteenth
century and Mayhew was an
undoubted master of the genre. The
son of a solicitor, he began
contributing shocking exposés of
the social conditions of London's
slums to the Morning Chronicle
newspaper in 1849. This formed
the basis of his London Labour and
the London Poor, a massive multi-
volume survey of the 'street folk' of
the metropolis that was based on
Gustav Doré, 'Wentworth Street, Whitechapel', from
G. Doré and B. Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage (1872).
countless interviews with the poor.
It contains some of the most
famous descriptions we have of
London's criminal underworld.
It is easy to see why scholars
interested in 'history from below'
were drawn to Mayhew's work. It is
packed full of the urban poor –
including members of the 'criminal
class' – all ostensibly speaking for
themselves. And many hold
Mayhew to be the social explorer
The Historian / Winter 2004 ...31
 Update Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1837-39) did
much to shape Victorian conceptions of
the underworld and the 'criminal class'.
George Cruikshank, 'Oliver introduced to
the respectable old gentleman', Oliver
Twist.
evidence, a very different picture
emerged. For instance, the number
of 'habitual' criminals known to the
authorities in the 1870s was
estimated to be a few thousand, a
much lower figure than that
peddled by Victorian
commentators. Moreover, scholars
drew attention to the manner in
which the criminal class was always
assumed to be drawn from the
lower reaches of the working class.
Was it tenable to think that those
'criminals' who found themselves
before the courts were really
dedicated thieves, garotters, and
magsmen, and not simply members
of the urban poor who stole when
the need, and the opportunity,
arose? Increasingly, the
historiographical tide turned
against the idea of a criminal class.
par excellence. Donald Thomas, author of a popular history of the As Clive Emsley put it, 'The notion
underworld, relied heavily on Mayhew's evidence, and did so because of of a criminal class was, indeed,
'Mayhew's skill'. Thanks to him, Thomas noted, 'the men and women of remains, a convenient one for
[the] streets still tell their stories…in words as clear and vigorous as if insisting that most crime is
they had been spoken yesterday.'3 Kellow Chesney admitted that committed on law-abiding citizens
Mayhew had his faults, but concluded that his survey was an by an alien group. The more
'indescribably rich description of the lives of almost every kind of urban historians probe the notion, the
underdog'.4 Meanwhile, no less a scholar than E.P. Thompson referred more it is revealed to be spurious.'7
to Mayhew as a 'systematic empirical sociologist', and praised him for
his 'matchless ear for the stress of feeling within colloquial speech…, his Such criticisms were well placed,
ability to identify during the interview, to break down the distance and they highlighted how even the
between gentlefolk and poor'.5 Anne Humpherys neatly summed up best of the social explorers were
the thoughts of many social historians when she remarked that often unable to break free from
although 'Mayhew's accuracy of information will never be completely their own prejudices and
demonstrable, nearly all readers from 1849 to the present have trusted preconceptions. Recently, this
him'.6 critique has been developed even
further. Earlier writers, like Tobias
Today, it seems few academic historians of crime 'trust' Mayhew and his and Chesney, were willing to note
fellow social explorers in the way that Tobias and others of his the failings of Mayhew and his
generation once did. Take, for instance, the 'criminal class' – that counterparts (namely, their
centrepiece of Mayhewian analysis. By the 1980s, questions were being tendency to exaggerate,
raised about the credibility of the idea of the majority of crimes being misunderstand and even
perpetrated by a distinct group of professional criminals who resided in sensationalise), but trust their
discrete criminal districts. As historians began to dig behind the literary descriptions of the underworld.

32... The Historian / Winter 2004

 Who's afraid of the
Doré's juxtaposition of the dark and
Victorian underworld?
dangerous rookeries with the well-lit
respectable spaces of the city illustrates
how many Victorians had highly
'moralised' understandings of their
urban landscapes.
Gustav Doré, 'View from the Brewery
Bridge over tenement roofs to St Paul',
from G. Doré and B. Jerrold, London: A
Pilgrimage (1872).

Many historians now argue that this

approach is methodologically and
theoretically untenable. Alan
Mayne, for example, in his study of
slums (the reputed home of the
criminal underworld), took to task
those scholars who claimed to be
able to adjudge some social
explorers more reliable than others.
How can we ever know? Instead,
we should recognise that middle-
class descriptions of slums can tell
us much about the highly
moralised ways in which the
bourgeoisie perceived the urban
poor, while revealing nothing about
the nature of working-class life
itself. It is more useful to see slums
as 'myths', 'constructions of the
[bourgeois] imagination', than
environmental and social realities.8

Similar arguments have been

expounded by Rob Sindall in his

Henry Mayhew

study of nineteenth-century street dimensions of a 'moral panic', but

violence. He insists that historians
who try to discover how criminals
perceived their activities, or who
try to describe the reality of the
problem of street robberies, are
bound to fail because the sources
simply cannot be relied upon.
Middle-class reports of the
garotting scare of 1862 can only
provide us with reliable evidence
about middle-class perceptions, not
about the true scale of the problem
of street violence itself. As such,
newspapers and criminal statistics
may be used to map the
should not be employed to describe
a distinct type of criminal, the
garotter. According to Sindall, the
'dangerous' or 'criminal class' is best
analysed as yet another 'middle-
class myth'.9
This re-evaluation of middle-class
sources can open up refreshing
perspectives on the documents
themselves. In an examination of
Mayhew's London Life and the
London Poor, Roger Sales
sidestepped debates about the
reliability of the text. Instead, he

The Historian / Winter 2004 ...33

 Update
asserted that we should see the
encounters between the observer
and the observed as 'essentially
theatrical occasions during
which…poverty was performed in
either overstated or understated
ways'. The interviews were often
held in front of crowds, and it was
generally assumed that interviewees
would be paid for their troubles.
Consequently, there were plenty of
reasons to exaggerate, to entertain
and to fabricate. Only by
recognising the dramatic nature of
the encounter between Mayhew,
the poor and the 'criminal', can we
fully appreciate The London Labour
and the London Poor, namely, as 'an
open-ended Victorian soap
opera…[which] creates the illusion
of gritty, and at times very dirty,
documentary realism and yet is
primarily a highly theatrical text'.10
However, not all historians are
content to shift discussions of the
34... The Historian / Winter 2004
underworld fully into the realm of
myth, perception and imagination.
In a major study of New York's 'Five
Points' slum, Tyler Anbinder
acknowledges the important
contribution of those scholars
whose work reminds us 'that much
of what was written by
contemporaries was simply not
true'. Nevertheless, he is concerned
that 'in their well-intentioned
efforts to identify prejudice, these
writers have…lost sight of some
unpleasant truths'. Brothels were
ubiquitous features of the
neighbourhood; alcoholism was
rife; violence – including that
directed against women and
children – was an everyday
occurrence.11 His book attempts to
hold onto the possibility of
accessing some of these realities.
Likewise, in her studies of juvenile
criminals in early nineteenth-
century London, Heather Shore
persuasively argues that it is
Newspapers did much to fuel the 'garotting'
scare of 1862, but historians differ over these
middle-class sources reveal to us about the
'reality' of street violence.
'Going out to tea in the suburbs',
Punch's Almanack for 1863.
possible to catch glimpses of how
real-life 'Artful Dodgers'
experienced their law-breaking
activities. She carefully analyses
interviews conducted with boys
incarcerated on a prison hulk.
Along the way, her work highlights
the dangers of collapsing the
underworld merely to the level of a
bourgeois myth, as she
demonstrates that there were
networks of criminality organised
by 'fences' and receivers that
worked to exploit the juvenile
'thieves'.12 Her approach pays due
attention to the problematic nature
of the sources, whilst not giving up
on the ambition to write
meaningfully about working-class
experiences of crime and
criminality.

Whether or not one is happy to
'trust' the bourgeois social explorers
depends upon the sort of history
one wants to settle for. For those
unwilling to pepper their prose
with 'probabilities and possibilities',
a study of middle-class perceptions
of crime, criminality and
underworlds is undoubtedly the
safest option. But for historians
who have not yet given up on the
idea of 'history from below' such an
ultra-cautious approach is
unappealing. Moreover, Heather
Shore's work demonstrates that
there are still untapped sources in
the archives which might yet allow
us to hear 'underworld' voices from
below. Ultimately, our knowledge of
past societies is necessarily partial,
contingent and open to
interpretation; therein lies one of
the delights of studying history. An
ambitious study that gets some
things wrong, may still reveal more
truths than a more circumspect
study that gets everything right.
Andy Croll is principal lecturer in
History at the University of
Glamorgan where he teaches –
amongst other things – a course on
the history of crime, vice and
underworlds. He is author of
Civilizing the Urban: Popular
Culture and Public Space in Merthyr,
c. 1870-1914 (University of Wales
Press, Cardiff, 2000), and articles on
various aspects of nineteenth-century
social, cultural and urban history.
I would like to thank Rachel
McNaughton, David Turner and
Chris Williams for their comments
on earlier drafts of this essay.
When 'Jack the Ripper' struck in 1888,
many made the connection between
poverty and crime.
'The Nemesis of Neglect',
Punch, 29 September 1888.
Who's afraid of the
Victorian underworld?
References
1. Kellow Chesney, The Victorian Underworld
(History Book Club, London, 1970); Keith
On the Web
Strange, 'In search of the "Celestial
Empire"', Llafur: The Journal of Welsh
Labour History, 3, 1 (1980); David Jones,
'The conquering of "China": crime in an
industrial community', Llafur: The Journal of
Undermentionable
Welsh Labour History, 2, 4 (1979).
2. J.J. Tobias, Crime and Industrial Society in
the Nineteenth Century (Batsford, London,
1967), 10-11 It is surprising that, for all its allure and stereotypes
3. Donald Thomas, The Victorian Underworld
(John Murray, London, 1998), 12. in the modern mind, the Victorian Underworld
4. Chesney, Victorian Underworld, 34. remains comparatively under-represented on the
5. The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the
Web: 50.600 entries on 18 November 2004.
Morning Chronicle, 1849-1850, ed. E.P.
Thompson and Eileen Yeo (Merlin Press, Perhaps the very nature of its formatted presence
London, 1971), 45. in contemporary culture is an explanation of this
6.
Anne Humpherys, Travels into the Poor
Man's Country: The Work of Henry Mayhew dearth.
(Caliban Books, Firle, 1977), 47.
7.
Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England
1750-1900 (Longman, London, 1987), 133.
Nevertheless, it continues to spin its own yarn of
8.
Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper personalities, as found in 'chicklit: paperjam.
Representation in Three Cities (Leicester Queen of the Victorian Underworld. A Chat with
University Press, Leicester, 1993), 1-3.
9.
Rob Sindall, Street Violence in the Sarah Waters, by Anna Carey'
Nineteenth Century (Leicester University (www.chicklit.com/paperjam/paperjam48.html).
Press, Leicester, 1990).
Of course, the personalities themselves are set in
10.
Roger Sales, 'Platform, performance and
payment in Henry Mayhew's London Labour the class-structured pattern of a light-and-dark
and the London Poor' in Journalism, faceted society which underpins the concept of a
Literature and Modernity: From Hazlitt to
Modernism, ed. Kate Campbell (Edinburgh decent and/or forbidden world: 'NYU Press
University Press, Edinburgh, 2000), 55, 69. Presents A Vivid Account of Victoria's "other
11.
Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth-
Century Neighbourhood that Invented Tap
England" '
Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's (www.nyu.edu/publicaffairs/newsreleases/b_NYU_
Most Notorious Slum (Plume, New York, 2001), 4. P7.shtml). Some of those aspects were undeniably
12.
Heather Shore, 'Cross coves, buzzers and
general sorts of prigs: juvenile crime and the dark: 'Morbid Outlook - Victorian Mourning Garb'
criminal 'underworld' in the early (www.morbidoutlook.com/fashion/historical/2001
nineteenth century', British Journal of
Criminology, 39 (1999), pp. 10-24. Also see
_03_victorianmourn.html).
her Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in
Early Nineteenth-Century London (The On the other hand, there is the chance of
Royal Historical Society, London, 1999).
equivocating, with 'The Timetravellers' Guides
from Watling Street' and 'The diary of Queen Vic
(the woman, not the pub)'
(www.trafalgarsquarebooks.com/books/TempusFal
l04/1904153062.html). Or of sublimating some of
the issues to 'The Supernatural World. Spring
Heeled Jack. Kellow Chesney in his book The
Victorian Underworld says that Jack [the Ripper] is
'pure legend' - perhaps the invention of servants
reluctant to admit negligence'
(www.thesupernaturalworld.co.uk/index.php?code
=02&file=spring_heeled_jack:php&title=Spring%2
0Heele). Or, finally, of remaining serious and
interesting with topics such as 'AM - Witness
intimidation in Vic police force'
(www.abc.net.au/am/content/2004/s1223789.htm).
Rafael Manuel PEPIOL
The Historian / Winter 2004 ...35