British history is experiencing another crime wave, but recent work on the subject has divided into two contrasting approaches. On the one hand, there is a continuation of the social historical approach of the 1970s and 1980s, researching judicial archives and using statistical techniques to document patterns of prosecution and punishment. That such approaches appear outdated is unfortunate, for the difficult questions posed by the pioneering work in the field demanded lengthy investigations that have only now come to fruition. Notable recent books adopting this approach include those by Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Peter King, and, reviewed here, John Beattie's Policing and Punishment. Footnote 1 Reflecting historians’ “linguistic turn,” a second approach opened up in the 1990s, examining ideas and representations of crime and deviance using the methodologies of cultural history. This is exemplified in Malcolm Gaskill's recent study of perceptions of serious crime in early modern EnglandFootnote 2 and a book reviewed here, Donna Andrew and Randall McGowen's The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd. The two other books reviewed in this article, by English literature specialists Gillian Spraggs and Hal Gladfelder, adopt a similar approach. The challenge for historians of crime is to bring these two very different approaches together.

Evident in all the books under review is the fact that the best work in this field continues to focus on a particular time and place: London in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A rapidly expanding city of half a million inhabitants around the turn of the century, and no longer confined within the limits of the closely governed City of London, the metropolis not only witnessed considerable social change at this time but also a dramatic expansion of printed literature in which these changes were discussed and analyzed. The expiration of press licensing, together with expanded literacy, facilitated a huge increase in the volume and diversity of printed publications, a surprising number of which concerned crime, especially during the perceived crime waves of the 1690s, 1720s, and late 1740s and early 1750s. This literature took many forms, including ballads, broadsides, criminal biographies, “last dying speeches,” and printed trial reports, all of which laid the groundwork for the development of most interest to literary scholars, the advent of the novel. All these works provide evidence not only of considerable fears about the growth of crime, but also of popular interest in (and occasionally celebrations of) stories about notable criminals, often as a form of entertainment. They were no doubt a cause as well as a consequence of important changes in patterns of prosecutions for serious crime: not only were there more indictments, but, as John Beattie shows, a higher proportion were for property offences, and involved female defendants. The conjunction of such apparent changes in the nature of crime with an expansion of both printed and manuscript evidence makes eighteenth-century London an ideal place for crime scholars from all perspectives to gather.

Gillian Spraggs's Outlaws and Highwaymen has a much wider chronological perspective, tracing the development of myths about outlaws and robbers in England from the Norman Conquest to the nineteenth century, but many of the key developments in her story occurred between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries, and in London. Seeking to analyze “the national worship of the armed robber” (p. 12), Spraggs's aim is to demonstrate how legends of heroic outlaws changed over time, “corresponding broadly with changes in the nature of English society” (p. 184). Her story starts with the essentially aristocratic forest outlaws of post-Conquest England, moves on to Robin Hood myths that appealed to yeoman artisans in the late middle ages, and then focuses on the “mass popular traditions” of highway robbery in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In late sixteenth-century stories, Robin Hood becomes a gentleman, acquires a lover (Maid Marian), and begins for the first time to steal from the rich in order to give to the poor. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the highway robber is no longer necessarily a gentleman, but nonetheless becomes less violent and more courteous, and attention is called to his skills in horsemanship. Rather than attempting to right injustices, his motive for taking to the road becomes economic, to acquire the means to live like a gentleman. By the turn of the nineteenth century, as the actual phenomenon of highway robbery disappeared, fictional portrayals became nostalgic and romantic, notably in stories about Dick Turpin, which reinterpret his “fairly average” criminal record into stories about a daring, generous, and skilled Robin Hood figure.

This is a fascinating account of the malleability of popular legends, and in an appendix Spraggs uses her findings effectively to critique Eric Hobsbawm's theory of the allegedly timeless features of social banditry. But the analysis of the causes and significance of the changes documented in this study is disappointing. In order to understand why the image of the highwayman changed so dramatically, it is surely necessary to pay more attention to the substantial changes in genre and in the audiences for printed publications that occurred over the long period covered by this study. Implicit connections between long-term changes in the nature of robbery and their portrayal in fiction also need to be carefully studied, but this study pays only occasional attention to primary and secondary evidence of criminality. The argument that these legends shaped how robbers actually behaved is intriguing but unproven. Finally, while there is some recognition that attitudes toward the outlaw and robber were ambivalent, this study focuses excessively on the positive aspects of popular images, neglecting to give sufficient analytical weight to, for example, the considerable number of complaints expressed in print about the dangers of road travel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Hal Gladfelder argues, one of the reasons highway robbers were presented in such an idealized form was that potential victims wanted to think of them as less threatening than they actually were.

In seeking to tie the explosion of printed literature about crime in the late seventeenth century to the development of the novel, Gladfelder's book documents “multiple, conflicting attitudes towards violence and transgression” (p. xi). In a series of brief analyses of a wide variety of crime genres (such as criminal biographies and printed trials) published in the late seventeenth century, he argues that despite conventions that individual stories should be used to illustrate general moral principles, such works, by their adoption of realist narratives, allowed readers to identify with their deviant subjects. In careful rereadings of selected novels and other writings by Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding, as well as works by radical authors William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Elizabeth Inchbald written at the end of the eighteenth century, Gladfelder argues that the use of circumstantial detail and individual testimonies in such fiction (derived from crime reporting) undermined the dominant authorial voice and rendered these works open to contradictory interpretations. The (edited) first-person narrative in Moll Flanders (1722), for example, invites the reader to become complicit in her crimes, in spite of the overt moralizing in some parts of the novel. By allowing the reader to identify with individual criminal subjectivities, these narratives encouraged transgressive desires and in doing so facilitated “the emergence of a modern conception of the individual” (p. 17). Gladfelder argues that individual expression was by definition transgressive because it required a break with the “self-effacing narratives of identity which were the common cultural inheritance of the period.” Nonetheless, some readers may not be comfortable with the presumption that eighteenth-century readers were attracted to crime literature because there was “a widespread longing to be bad” (pp. 6–7).

The works of Fielding, who is often credited with a key role in the development of modern forms of policing, are not normally seen in this light by crime scholars, but Gladfelder's analysis of his late fiction suggests that Fielding came to realize just how difficult it was for magistrates and constables to ascertain the truth about crime and that personal intervention and bribery (in the form of rewards for informers) was more likely to lead to the identification and arrest of culprits than the enforcement of absolute moral standards through impersonal surveillance. John Beattie's analysis of policing in the City of London between 1689 and 1750 also calls Fielding's role as a pioneer into question, not only by showing how much Fielding relied on “thief-takers” (who were often corrupt), but also by demonstrating how Fielding's law enforcement techniques in Westminster had been anticipated by developments in the City over the previous half century. Indeed, many features of modern policing can be traced back to the innovations and lobbying of City governors before mid century, including the advent of salaried constables and night watchmen and the creation of public magistrates’ courts, as well as less enduring changes at the national level such as the systematic use of rewards for successful prosecutions (which encouraged thief-taking) and the adoption of transportation as a routine alternative to the death penalty.

Beattie's is very much a work of sociopolitical rather than cultural history, but, in explaining important developments in the way City magistrates, officers, and “thief-takers” arrested, tried, and punished suspected criminals, this carefully researched study demonstrates that major transformations in judicial and penal policy occurred incrementally in response to periodic concerns about crime waves in the City. In doing so this book draws attention to the key role public perceptions played in shaping responses to crime. It was not the nature of crime itself, but “what contemporaries thought changes in the levels of indicted crime actually meant” (p. 45) that shaped these new initiatives. This leads us back to the burgeoning crime literature that both reflected and helped shape Londoners’ fears of and responses to crime.

Despite their very different approaches, both Gladfelder and Beattie use representations of crime as a device to explain other developments: the early history of the novel and important innovations in policing and punishment. Crime itself is not the subject of their books. In contrast, Donna Andrew and Randall McGowen's study analyzes a vast body of printed literature concerning a single crime. The case concerned the forgery of a bond in 1775 and involved two gentlemen brothers (identical twins), Daniel and Robert Perreau, and Daniel's mistress, Margaret Rudd. Rudd admitted forging the bond in the name of a wealthy acquaintance, but claimed she had been forced to do so at knifepoint by the two brothers. Debate raged for almost a year, not only in successive trials at the Old Bailey but also in print, over who was responsible for the crime (in the end, Rudd was acquitted, and the two brothers were hanged). Andrew and McGowen argue that the case “preoccupied the public,” as it was extensively discussed in reports and correspondence in the newspapers, as well in numerous pamphlets, effectively creating a new genre, the sensational criminal trial. People found the mysteries and ambiguities of the case fascinating, especially as the characters involved were from respectable society, and opinions as to the guilt or innocence of the three participants varied widely. Even more than in the novels analyzed by Gladfelder, it seemed to be impossible to get at the truth.

In its detailed contextualization of this incredible story, this book sheds light on many aspects of late eighteenth-century London life, but it, too, seems more interested in analyzing how the case was variously represented in printed publications than in rooting it in Londoners’ actual experiences of crime (though the significant threat forgery posed to the financial system of the day is nicely explained). The argument that Londoners were “obsessed” by the case is proven primarily by the very existence of such a vast body of printed publications—one would like to know more about Londoners’ opinions of the case as recorded in their correspondence and diaries and about the manuscript judicial evidence left by the case.

All these books clearly demonstrate just how unstable eighteenth-century London life was, a world where epistemological and political certainties were undermined and everything seemed to be governed by appearances (as Andrew and McGowen write, London was viewed as a “scene of mass disguise” [p. 124]). It is not surprising that crime was a central theme of public debate and that, given growing concerns about social inequalities and the injustices of the judicial system, attitudes were so ambivalent. But as well as using the literature of crime to investigate wider social and cultural anxieties, it is necessary to pay more attention to how this literature was created in the first place. We need to know more about the audiences who read these publications, how they responded to them, and how considerations of audience shaped the way they were written. Historians also need to return to the study of crime itself and examine how incidents were first interpreted by the Londoners who experienced, witnessed, or perpetrated them. There are at least as many narratives of crime in manuscript as in printed sources, some of which were drafted at least in part by the accused themselves. They demand the same careful textual analysis that has been given to printed texts. These accounts were admittedly influenced by the conventions of printed literature, but they also helped to shape those genres, notably by their reproduction in printed trial accounts, which in turn were echoed in other publications.Footnote 3 If we are to understand fully eighteenth-century perceptions of crime we need to return to the archives.