CHAPTER 8
Victorian and Edwardian crime
Changes in society
Social changes in the nineteenth century began to alter the public perception
of both crime and punishment. Many towns, such as London, had‘rookeries’–
ramshackle areas of poor, crowded housing, dissected by dark, narrow alleys,
where criminals could be more or less sure of support and concealment. Areas
such as Clerkenwell, Pentonville and St. Luke’s in London were places the
police did not dare enter. People lived in cheap lodging houses or squatted,
sometimes several families at a time, in cellars. Violence, drunkenness and
prostitution were common features of their miserable lives.
For the first time, people became aware of‘youth crime’. The behaviour of
children in public places, even those from middleclass families, was a cause
for concern. There was noise, vandalism, bad language and even violence
committed by gangs of children in parks and in the streets. By 1898, the word
‘hooligan’began to be used in the press to describe packs of teenagers with
distinctive clothing and haircuts, forcing people off pavements, swearing and
brandishing sticks and clubs. In Manchester during the 1870s and 1880s, gangs
of‘scuttlers’roamed with homemade weapons and engaged in mob fights,
with perhaps up to 500 youths involved, egged on by girls as young as fourteen.
They took over music halls, and rival gangs decked out in‘gang colours’of
scarves and caps fought each other with sharpened belt buckles and knives.^1
Further evidence of youth misbehaviour in parks has been collated by Ruth
Colton at the University of Manchester. Conceived as civilising places, urban
parks were also places for young people to‘hang out’and get into trouble.
Groups of youths would swear at other park users, fish illegally in the ponds
and steal fruit from the trees. Excavations in Whitworth Park in Manchester
have found the remnants of games such as marbles, but also remains of food
and alcoholic drink containers, at a time when eating and drinking in the parks
was forbidden.
Nevertheless, crime rates started to fall from the 1840s onwards (annual
crime statistics had been published since 1810). Crime statistics in London for