In this book A. W. Ager tries to unpick the knotty relationship between poverty and crime in the context of enclosure, the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the nineteenth-century reforms of the criminal justice system. The criminal elements of the ‘poverty-driven economy of makeshifts’ that are examined are poaching, theft, vagrancy and prostitution. Ager focuses, in particular, upon Kent and Oxfordshire in the period 1830–1885: Ploughley Hundred in Oxfordshire was largely agrarian while the Medway basin was more industrial. Such an approach allows Ager to examine the differences by place and in terms of rural and urban criminal activity. It draws upon parliamentary papers, poor law records, local newspapers and journal articles. Records have been nominally linked in order to produce ‘offender profiles’.

The first two chapters offer a brief overview of the economy of makeshifts and the shift from the Old to the New Poor Law. Ager dwells upon the fearsome union workhouses; rather less attention is paid to who exactly was inside Oxfordshire and Kentish workhouses or to the outdoor poor (to whom payments accounted for three-quarters of relief). Chapter three considers protest and it is shown that the workhouse itself might engender criminal behaviour; Ager gives instances of vagrants refusing to undertake workhouse work (1845) and a ruckus over food in the house (1848). Such incidents criminalised the indoor poor. Other protests by ‘the poor’ include fence-breaking over enclosure at Otmoor (1830) (fence and hedge-breaking at enclosure have a long history), the breaking of threshing machinery (1824) and the Swing Riots (1830–1831), which swept much of the rural south-east.

The following two chapters examine other ‘crimes of poverty’: poaching, sheep stealing, vagrancy and prostitution. The Vagrancy Act of 1824 could be used against both vagrants and (but rather ineffectively) ‘lewd women’. The story is somewhat complicated by changes in the Game Laws, rising population, the introduction of the police force and the Contagious Disease Acts that aimed to control venereal disease amongst prostitutes (1864–1886). Chatham, Medway, had its own Lock Hospital and prostitutes could find themselves in the workhouse. Prostitutes in rural areas worked from private houses whereas in towns they more often walked the streets. While Ager shows that there was a correlation between prosecutions under the Game Laws and seasonality, as well as years of greater hardship, proving the link between poverty/hunger and crime remains elusive, since the profiles of most offenders rarely contain information on occupation (perhaps Quarter Sessions records would have given this information?). The profiles themselves could have been used to greater effect; they illustrate wider points but are not quantified to give a sense of representativeness, or even to show the sheer hard work that must have gone into assembling them. We do learn that most poachers were men under 30 years old and that prostitutes were aged between 21 and 26 years. The majority of crime, then, appears to have been largely restricted to able-bodied men and women in their twenties. These were the very categories of people who should have been excluded from outdoor relief under the New Poor Law. However, linking the fear of the workhouse (and reluctance to enter it) to criminal activity is problematic, and it is even more difficult to ascribe motivation to many of these law-breakers. ‘Vagrancy’ is the only category of overlapping pauper/petty criminal where an undisputed link might be presupposed.

There cannot be a study of nineteenth-century poverty and crime without an examination of the ‘criminal underclass’. Chapter six examines attempts to control this underclass through the courts, the slow introduction of a police force, the building of workhouses and prisons, and the continuation of transportation. It does not, however, consider the Victorian concept of the underclass, which has special significance in nineteenth-century Britain and was one reason why Charles Booth counted those in the ‘Lowest class. Vicious, semi criminal’. The cover illustration neatly contrasts Victorian representations of the cowering, ragged underclass with the tall, uniformed police officers.

This book will be of interest to historians of poverty and, particularly, crime in nineteenth-century Kent and Oxfordshire.