Since John Tobias published his pioneering work on urban crime and policing almost forty-five years ago, historians have opened up the field considerably. In recent years, regional studies drawing on police and trial records, national and local archives, and newspaper accounts have proliferated. John Archer has presented a well-documented study of violent crime in Liverpool in the second half of the nineteenth century, making his account the most complete for any English city. He discusses male-on-male violence, gangs, women as victims and perpetrators, domestic violence, sexual violence, and violence by and against children. He is careful to put these in the context of time and place, with due regard for class, gender, religion, and even racial considerations. His concentration is on Liverpool’s slum areas that were notorious for poverty, chronic underemployment, and poor housing conditions.
Archer questions whether Liverpool’s violent reputation, fed by the contemporary press, was deserved, and the answer is yes, but only in some poor parts that defied the general decline of violence in the latter part of the century. It would have been surprising if Liverpool had not been a violent place, given its status as Britain’s main port, with a huge casual labor market and roughly 30,000 sailors ashore at any time looking for entertainment. As Britain’s second largest city, its population doubled between 1841 and 1891, with 22 percent being Irish, the highest percentage in any English city. Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments (even in the police) were evident, and Orange marches in the city only exacerbated sectarian tensions.
The murder figures reached their peak in the late 1860s with a rate of 5.65 (per 100,000), only slightly below that of New York City with 5.8. The rate for London was 0.41 in 1868. Thereafter, the rates in Liverpool and London declined. The high numbers had to do with the murder of infants and children who died by various means, as coroners’ inquests show. In fact children under a year old were by far the largest group of homicide victims in Britain. Such crimes, often involving neglect or “accident,” were hard to prosecute.
Much of the book is given over to personal violence, which was usually fueled by heavy drinking. Male culture involved drinking and buying drinks for others. Dockworkers were often paid in pubs or beer houses, which were on practically every corner. When wages were high, the liquor flowed even more, resulting in an increase in drink-related violence and assaults on police. Wife and child beating were common, expressing the man’s traditional right to chastise his family in the privacy of his own home. Police and neighbors were often reluctant to intervene into the “sanctity” of the Victorian family, a “mind your own business” ethic. Some of the most appalling domestic brutality that stopped just short of homicide drew surprisingly short prison sentences. Pedophilia did not occasion any moral panic, and a child molester might expect a year or two in prison at most. Rape was relatively infrequent, and there were ninety-nine cases reported between 1862 and 1892. Rape figures are always suspect, however, as a woman would have to establish her virtue and show proof of resistance to be a convincing rape victim. Still, the conviction rate of 29 percent is reasonable by our current standards.
The “fair fight” with fists or feet was part of the male notion of manliness and honor, although sailors from other nations played by different rules, using knives, for example. The man-on-man violence increasingly clashed with the middle-class notions of self-restraint, nonviolence, keeping the Sabbath, and even temperance. Women too got drunk, were violent, and got into fights like men, but drunken and violent women were an affront to prevailing notions of femininity, traitors to their sex.
The Liverpool police are a major part of the book. They were formed in 1836 as a consolidation of day and night constables and the dock police. Liverpool was the most heavily policed city in Britain. In 1858, 60 percent of the police were English, 24 percent Irish, 10 percent Scottish, and 6 percent Welsh. Many of the English constables were Protestant and Orange in their affiliations and were scarcely neutral when they policed Irish areas. Constables faced rough and dangerous working conditions and low pay with virtually no training, and so turnover was very high. Many in working-class areas saw the police as overbearing and an unwelcome presence. Assaults on police were common. Walking a drunken and violent prisoner back to a police station was dangerous business, only made easier with the introduction of police wagons in the 1890s. As recruitment standards were increased, and police behavior was more closely controlled, there was a greater public acceptance of the police.
The civilizing process worked to some extent, and Liverpool started to lose its lawless image by the end of the century. Violent crimes and drunkenness declined as drinking moved out of the pub into the home. Male violence and juvenile gangs came under greater public disapproval, and statistics show a marked drop in reported crime, consistent with other cities. Some areas, however, remained as violent as they had been a half century before. Children too were increasingly protected, and Liverpool was one of the first cities to make this official with the Liverpool Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, formed in 1883. Children who broke the laws were thought to be redeemable, and sentences were often lenient.
Archer ends his book with a fascinating account by the journalist Hugh Shimmon, who accompanied police on a night shift in the Rosehill area in 1857. The author draws on Shimmon’s perceptive observations throughout the book. Overall, the book is well written and perceptive. The accounts are often grim, but nonetheless fascinating, and the book should appeal to a wide audience.
