Soon after Oliver Twist has been taken in by the elderly Fagin, he witnesses him and his friends playing ‘at a very curious and uncommon game’. The old man puts a snuffbox in one of his pockets, a notecase in another, a watch in his waistcoat pocket and a diamond pin in his shirt. He then puts a spectacle case and a handkerchief in his jacket pocket and begins strutting around the room brandishing a walking stick while two of the boys follow him around and manage to snatch all the items from him. ‘If the old gentleman felt a hand in any one of his pockets, he cried out where it was; and then the game began all over again.’Footnote ¹

This familiar scene is Dickens’ way of introducing the reader, and his protagonist, to the world of pickpocketing. Oliver does not fully understand the implications of the scene, but we as readers are only too familiar with this modus operandi, and so a crucial distance between ourselves and the poor hero is established. The pantomime game that Oliver observes appears mysterious, like a strange and carefully choreographed dance. The movements a person is thought to make in the street are imitated by the group. Fagin plays the part of the distinguished gentleman whose signs of wealth are prominently displayed. The walking stick and the handkerchief alone signal his social standing and the promise of rich pickings. The actions of the two boys are meant to be as inconspicuous and as dextrous as possible so that the victim of the theft does not notice anything strange about it. The perfect crime is the one where the victim remains unaware that it is being perpetrated.

I want, in this article, to study not pickpockets per se, but the pavement choreography that they endeavoured to blend into. This is an elusive topic, which forces the scholar to find roundabout ways of examining it. One way forward is to study pickpockets and their methods. The movements of people in the street have indeed been referred to as a dance. It was an American sociologist in the 1980s who first referred to the synchronized locomotion of pedestrians as ‘the great dance’. ‘Almost everyone is on a collision course with someone else, but with a multitude of retards, accelerations, and side steps, they go their way untouched.’Footnote ² Since the introduction into sociology of the study of pedestrian behaviour, several attempts at describing and charting the patterns of these movements have been made, continuously undermining the view of previous scholars that urban life and movement in cities is stressful and disorganized. The establishment of the term ‘space syntax’ opened up a whole new field of study which acknowledged the interdependence of built forms and social structure. Architect Bill Hillier was one of those who claimed that the spatial layout of cities determines social hierarchies. This area of research has mostly been used as a tool in urban planning and the mathematical prediction of human movements in urban space.Footnote ³ In some cases, however, it has been seen as an incitement to consider the cultural dimensions of street practice and movement patterns. Lyn Lofland, for instance, has viewed the simple fact that most people do not bump into each other or get run over by vehicles when moving about on the streets as an indication of an urban culture of co-operation and mutual respect for integrity.Footnote ⁴ That there is a meaning to pedestrian behaviour is clear, then, and this suggests that a study of its role and development would offer a fruitful new perspective in considering human responses to urban conditions. The uncovering of the history of this topic presents obvious problems, which force the historian to come up with strategies with which to observe it indirectly. This is where the pickpocket comes in.

Nowadays, we have come to associate pickpockets with crowds and gatherings, in which they hide their acts of pilfering among all the other impressions that distract a person's attention. It is this type of pickpocket we shall be concerned with in this article. But pickpockets have many ways of working, and through the ages their modus operandi is likely to have changed. Did pickpockets always exist, for example? Have they always relied on dexterity and discretion? Is it a distinctly urban phenomenon? Behind such questions lies the assumption that pickpockets as we know them have evolved with the emergence of the modern city and the growth of modern crowds. Looking at the etymology of the word ‘pickpocket’ its first dated appearance in writing in the sixteenth century is much later than the documentation of the words ‘pickpurse’ and ‘cutpurse’, suggesting an adaptation of the method of stealing to the way people wore their money about their person.Footnote ⁵ The pocket, being a relatively late addition to clothing, was preceded by the purse that was worn tied to the girdle by both men and women. The assumption that people have worn money or valuables on them in different ages, and that human crowds are not a feature exclusive to modernity, would suggest that the pickpocket or its equivalent is an ancient phenomenon. The poet Juvenal attested to the presence of pickpockets in ancient Rome. In seventeenth-century London, the success of the thief Mary Frith earned her the nickname of Moll Cutpurse.Footnote ⁶

But if we concentrate on the pickpocket as someone who operates in large crowds and removes items from other people's pockets without them noticing it by sleight of hand and by taking advantage of the mass of people into which one may disappear, then pickpocketing is primarily an urban issue and one that presumably proliferates with the growth of public crowding. Taking this factor as a starting point, it is probable that the choreographed movement of the pickpocket that Oliver Twist first bore witness to in Fagin's little room mirrors the choreography of other movements in the street, that it is an imitation of ‘normal behaviour’ but with a hidden agenda, and that, in order to be as inconspicuous as possible, it has to obey the same rules of conduct that other pedestrians adhere to. In that way, the methods of the pickpocket may be studied in order to detect processes that elude the historian due to a lack of immediate documentation, namely the minute and detailed movements that people engage in to navigate a crowd. As has been previously mentioned, this is an established topic in contemporary sociology, but by adding a historical dimension to the discussion, the analysis of human adaptation to the everyday conditions of the metropolis might be seen as a microcosm of the adjustment in daily life to the rhythms of change and innovation over a longer period, and thus serve to illuminate still unexplored aspects of practice and everyday behaviour in urban history.

Previous historical studies of pickpockets have mainly focused on them as a gateway to juvenile delinquency and poverty. As such, they have nevertheless drawn attention to the way the practice of pickpockets contributed to the construction of a distinctive street culture. Heather Shore juxtaposes the moralizing ‘city of vice’ discourse of much nineteenth-century literature with the culture of the pickpocket, created in the continuous circle of arrest, conviction and punishment experienced by petty offenders. Timothy Gilfoyle has also noted how young pickpockets in New York developed their own subculture which differed from the more restrained values of the adult world. The world of pickpockets was also highly gendered, not least in how they were treated by the justice system, but also in how they operated. Female pickpockets, most of whom were prostitutes, had easier access to more valuable items such as pocketbooks and watches, while men were more likely to operate in crowds, relying on dexterity. Likewise, female pickpockets mostly operated by night, in public houses or alleyways, while men generally worked during the day, in street crowds.Footnote ⁷ The study of pickpockets, then, makes us aware of some aspects of street life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it has not yet been used to shed light on the patterns and developments of pavement traffic.

The history of pedestrian behaviour has been added to indirectly, through studies of crowds, riots and everyday mobility. Most attention has probably been devoted to the eighteenth century and what was termed ‘the mob’ operating on the streets of London at that time. The depiction of eighteenth-century street life generally acknowledges its uproarious and rowdy nature, emphasizing how the upholding of norms of behaviour and codes of honour was carried out by the people themselves before, towards the nineteenth century, being increasingly left to policing authorities.Footnote ⁸ This overall picture corresponds to what Richard Sennett once called ‘the fall of public man’, i.e. the accelerating retreat of public life and sociability from the streets and public places of the city to the private realm during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the formation and centralization of organized urban bodies of control.Footnote ⁹ However, if we want to learn something more specific about walking the streets we should also consider literary representations of this subject and the scholarship they have generated. John Gay's long poem Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) has inspired scholars to analyse the role of the pedestrian in the eighteenth-century city. The picture gained from such research confirms the picture of street life in this century as intense, diverse and, as yet, relatively uncontrolled. He (and it usually is a he) who wished to traverse the streets of London would be wise to gain knowledge from other, more experienced walkers.Footnote ¹⁰ Although the streets at this time were socially mixed, there was a difference in how people from various social backgrounds conceived of their relation to the crowd. Respectability demanded that one presented oneself as apart from the crowd, while those who had no such aspirations saw themselves as part of the crowd.Footnote ¹¹

This social distinction is pivotal to works on nineteenth-century street life, and the walker of John Gay's poem is similar in many ways to the flâneur as described by writers around the turn of the twentieth century. What urban historians generally describe is an effective civilizing process of street life in the transition period from pre-modern to modern times. The rowdiness of the eighteenth century is contrasted by the demand for order and obsession with manners in the nineteenth century. Next to the matter of flânerie, which constituted a way of negotiating city streets while being mentally and emotionally distanced from it, stands the emergence of the ‘promenade’, the ordered thoroughfares where people from the higher classes strolled in order to flaunt themselves and engage in ritual interaction controlled by numerous rules of etiquette.Footnote ¹² Colin Pooley's meticulous study of everyday mobility and daily urban itineraries has illuminated the lives of the less well-off. In his account of the movements of a young woman around 1930s London, her everyday individual mobility reveals how the anonymity and complexity of the city might be an advantage to the way urban dwellers move about.Footnote ¹³ The distancing that John Gay and his contemporaries emphasized as necessary to negotiate the city, but which was difficult in the crowded atmosphere of the eighteenth-century street, has in the early twentieth century turned into the preferred method of being in public.

What the history of the street crowd lacks, however, is a more direct focus on pedestrianism and walking as traffic. The attention to more readily apparent topics in cultural history, such as flânerie, the promenade or rioting, only serves to catch the street crowd in highly specific endeavours, and not when it is doing what it does most: walking down the street. Pooley's approach is interesting, but as a history of pedestrian behaviour it principally establishes the overall structures of street walking, not the details of it. A more meticulous study of walking as traffic and how it has developed during the nineteenth century would shed light on oral and practised cultures that remain invisible in the written sources generally used by historians and, inherent in these cultural spheres, the adaptation to urban conditions by people in their most everyday of practices.Footnote ¹⁴

To get at such elusive corners of the past we must come up with creative ways of detecting them. My suggestion is to look at pickpockets. In the following pages I will analyse pickpocket cases from the proceedings of the Old Bailey and the London police courts, selected on the basis of their location in street crowds and traffic, in order to assess the ways in which the modus operandi of pickpockets is indicative of patterns and changes in pedestrian behaviour during the nineteenth century.

I will limit my discussion here to the last decades of the nineteenth century, but will begin with a brief overview of earlier cases, in order to sketch a few possible lines of development. The pickpocket began to be seriously debated as a social problem in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then mainly as a symptom of child poverty and deprivation. It was commonly believed that criminals started their careers as child pickpockets and that ‘pickpocket schools’ such as that of Fagin in Oliver Twist really existed. The concern surrounding pickpockets can be dated back to Elizabethan times, but takes centre stage from the eighteenth century onwards, presumably as a consequence of urbanization with its concentration of poverty and criminality and centralization of policing and punishment.Footnote ¹⁵ When it comes to preconditions of the urban public realm that facilitate pickpocketing, Clive Emsley has pointed to changes in fashion which made pocket contents more prominent and accessible, and the presence of attractions in city centres that created crowds.Footnote ¹⁶ This last aspect of the situation appears to have had some bearing on the way pickpockets operated, at least at the beginning of our period of study.

The frequency of pickpocket cases in the Old Bailey remains steady during the eighteenth century, but if we look more closely at these cases, we see that they differ from those recorded in later years. In early cases, the theft is still quite unconcealed and crowds are generally absent. Limiting our outlook to those incidents that occur in large crowds of people, we encounter quite a small amount of cases – no more than a few every year – during the eighteenth century and up to the first decades of the nineteenth. The most common location of this manner of pocket picking in the eighteenth century appears to be the church, targeting the crowd of people leaving or entering church, and the incidents documented in these earlier cases feature crowds assembled due to special events. Apart from churches, pickpockets take advantage of theatres, public executions, processions (especially the lord mayor's procession), fairs and public entertainments such as pantomimes or sporting events. The crowds that are gathered in these contexts appear substantial nonetheless, and people experiencing them bear witness to their uncomfortable and rowdy nature. As one witness of the crowd at a fair observes, ‘there was a great deal of bustling, crowding, and pushing’.Footnote ¹⁷ What is striking is the lack of cases in which the pickpocket takes advantage of the ‘natural’ crowdedness of a pavement or of congestion in pedestrian traffic. The first case of such a nature occurred in 1809 and involved a crowd of people stopping at a crossing in Cheapside due to passing carts. Despite the fact that the counsel during an interrogation stated that ‘we, that know Cheapside, know that there is a great concourse of people there about noon’, this case is an anomaly. During the hearing, it transpired that about 30 people assembled during the one and a half minutes it took for the cart to pass, but these people did not seem to be in much of a hurry, as the victim confirmed that someone who was more ‘inclined to go on’ might easily slip between the passing vehicles.Footnote ¹⁸

As we proceed into the nineteenth century, however, cases of this nature become more and more common, even though pickpockets during the first decades of the century mainly operated in crowds assembled for non-traffic related events. From about 1830, incidents taking place in traffic are commonplace. We must be wary of ascribing too much importance to figures, however. Statistics concerning the number of convicted pickpockets at the Old Bailey in every decade from 1700 to 1900 show an enormous increase in the total amount of convictions during the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s, from 143 convictions in the first decade of the nineteenth century to over 1,000 in the 1810s and over 2,500 in the 1830s, and from then on a decrease to under 200 cases in the last decade of the century. But the great number of cases in the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s must to some extent be attributed to a change in the law in 1808, in which the death penalty for pickpocketing was removed and a looser definition of the term meant that it did not, as earlier, have to be proved that the theft had been committed without the victim's knowledge, making it much easier to claim that a theft was a case of pickpocketing. The downward trend from the 1840s onwards is unaccounted for, however, and it must be said that the great increase from less than 10 cases every decade during the eighteenth century to over 100 in the nineteenth cannot only be attributable to changes in the law.

So why were there so many cases in the early nineteenth century? Was the increase connected to urbanization and a general rise in poverty and destitution? But why then was there a decline during the latter half of the century? The Juvenile Offences Act passed in 1847 prevented children under 16 from being tried in ordinary courts, which may explain the sudden drop in numbers between the 1840s and 1850s, but the number of juvenile pickpockets is not as large as to explain it altogether, and the decline is quite gradual, disqualifying explanations connecting it to a circumscribed event. Increasing awareness of pickpockets and thus greater wariness may have been factors, as well as the changing nature of crowds and assemblages of people, a point to which we will return. One could also ascribe more trifling details some relevance, such as changes in fashion. The transition from the frock coat and tail coat to the modern men's jacket might also be relevant.

This article is not meant to be a contribution to the debate on the rise of juvenile delinquency in the nineteenth century. Possible explanations for this rise have been provided by Peter King, who points to the interplay of an increasing number of young people in the cities who were in economic hardship and an emerging discourse of juvenile criminality as a social problem to be dealt with rather than ignored. King emphasizes the concurrence of several factors, but he also acknowledges the importance of the street scene and the tempting opportunities for theft it held for desperate individuals.Footnote ¹⁹ This aspect is the one under scrutiny here. We shall be content with observing the figures and use them as an admittedly speculative but necessary background to the question of changes in urban traffic and pedestrian behaviour. Based on the drop in frequency we might construct the hypothesis that the decrease in pickpocketing is associated with a change in the way people behaved in public and the way they conducted themselves as pedestrians, a hypothesis which can be tested through the following analysis. The locations in which people fell victim to pickpocketing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were, as indicated, very specific and connected with special occurrences. During this period, the working ground of the pickpocket was moved out into the common street throng and the pickpocket appears to have made increasing use of pedestrian traffic. The way his methods evolved with this change will be the focus of the following study.

I will start with a close examination of cases from the last three decades of the nineteenth century, when the number of incidents drops dramatically, in order to gauge possible connections with developments in traffic and interaction, and I will compare the observations with notes made upon the methods of pickpockets made by various social observers, in particular those of the journalist Henry Mayhew in his survey of the poor and rough classes of early Victorian London. Mayhew and others like him are problematic as sources on Victorian street life. In the way these writers recast the accounts given to them by people from the poor or criminal classes, dressing up the language in mock cockney or adding strokes of drama, the books they produced often verge on fiction.Footnote ²⁰ But what we may do, and what I will also do in the case of the trial reports, is to extract the statements of fact in the texts and sort out those statements that are unimportant to the journalist or to the interrogating counsel but which are included in the accounts only as padding. These notes in the texts, made in passing, can be seen as more believable and, when connected to other similar notes, serve as a gateway into observations on actions and behaviour.

A close study of the many cases of pickpocketing which occur in the Old Bailey proceedings indicate that pickpockets had to be well acquainted with how people behaved in large gatherings in order to use these situations and to develop a technique which would not get them caught.Footnote ²¹ There are some general patterns in pickpocket cases suggestive of what conditions made their work possible and how they took advantage of them. For instance, a great majority of the crimes are located in the most central parts of London, where crowds are a matter of course. Places which occur frequently in the cases include Mansion House, the residence of the lord mayor and the location of many processions and ceremonies, Tower Hill Station, Cheapside, Ludgate and the Strand. The types of places most often used as hunting grounds for pickpockets include pavements, of course, but also omnibus and tram stops, railway stations, gatherings at processions or street entertainments and in front of window displays, the latter a location that becomes more common towards the end of the century. The pickpockets seldom work alone, and the groups have often developed an intricate means of effectively going about their business, which can be gleaned from a few examples. Some of them work in other ways, violently snatching at men's watches or following lone young women into empty streets to rob them, but more interesting to us in this regard are those who attempt to work with sleight of hand so as not to be found out until the victim feels his or her pocket.

Several of the pickpockets we encounter take advantage of crowds waiting to get into omnibuses, trams or trains. When James Edward Britten was waiting for the omnibus with his wife near the Royal Exchange, there was a great crowd trying to get in so that Britten had to help his wife into the bus before climbing up himself. At that moment, however, he felt a hand reaching for his watch, and he grabbed the culprit and called after a policeman.Footnote ²² This turn of events is repeated in numerous identical cases.Footnote ²³ When John Farlow Wilson endeavoured to get into a train at Ludgate Hill Station ‘at an unusually busy hour’ two men stepped in front of him. When the train pulled up Wilson took a few steps forward, but the men did not move. ‘By your leave, gentlemen’, said Wilson, ‘I want to get in.’ One of the men put his hand on the carriage door handle and Wilson thought he was going to get in. The other man turned to Wilson, who, impeded by holding an umbrella and a newspaper in one hand and a bag in the other, felt ‘what I may describe as a suppressed tussle over my breast’. He looked down and saw his watchchain dangling without a watch.Footnote ²⁴ The physical intimacy of a crowd is used by the pickpockets in cases such as these, but even though it is possible to exploit the situation it seems that many people did not accept it when it became too intimate. ‘By your leave’, implored Mr Wilson. ‘You take up all the road’, cried one pickpocket when hustling past his victim. ‘How rude!’ exclaimed Mrs Taylor when another pickpocket bumped into her in Oxford Street.Footnote ²⁵ The well-known presence of pickpockets in such crowds seems to have made people more watchful as to the general behaviour of pedestrians, deeming any deviation from the norms of conduct a reason for suspicion. A victim of robbery in one trial explained how he was in the habit of feeling his waistcoat pocket after alighting from an omnibus to make sure that his watch was still there. A train passenger described how she had her hand in her pocket ‘to preserve [her] purse’.Footnote ²⁶

But unwelcome as this intimacy might be, it had to be accepted to a certain point, and that is where the pickpocket saw his chance. On 20 July 1879, James Earley was standing in the doorway of a public house when suddenly a man came up to him and snatched his watch from his waistcoat pocket. Committing this crime right in front of the victim might seem unprofessional, but the police officers who were around testified as to the intricate choreography of the thief and his accomplices. Outside the entrance to the public house was an omnibus stop and a narrow pavement. Detective Weatherhead observed how three culprits, all of whom he knew by sight, ‘moved about the pavement among the people, they then placed themselves nearly opposite the doorway’, and as two of the men were standing behind, they covered a third, who approached Earley. At the trial, it was debated whether the thief was pushed by his two confederates, so that it would appear he fell towards Earley. The accused thief himself claimed that he was unintentionally pushed.Footnote ²⁷ These unintentional movements which people make in a crowded situation allow pickpockets to operate, and their technique is built upon taking advantage of movements and gestures which are to be expected in crowds. The crime hides behind the acceptance of understandable and unintentional infractions of the code. In the case of James Earley, for instance, the perpetrators made use of the common phenomenon of being accidentally pushed, and the victim of a pickpocket in another trial says of the culprit's behaviour: ‘the nudging might have been an accident’.Footnote ²⁸

Not only do pushes and involuntary gestures open up opportunities for picking pockets, but also possibilities for moving about on pavements. In a different case, three thieves were seen walking up and down Ludgate Hill, one of the busiest thoroughfares of the City of London, trying to get at ladies’ handbags. When they had finally chosen a suitable target they surrounded her, one in front of her, one behind and one on her side. As the lady paused to cross the road, two of them stood in front of her while the third man ‘put his left hand under his right arm’ and snatched the bag.Footnote ²⁹ The strategic placement of the accomplices was presumably made to attract as little attention as possible, therefore designed to mimic the movements of ordinary people. A man and a woman who co-operated as pickpockets, also on Ludgate Hill, were being watched by a detective and described as ‘passing backwards and forwards in the crowd’, placing themselves next to possible victims and then moving away from the crowd to confer with each other before diving into the crowd once more.Footnote ³⁰ It is evident that their business could only be carried out in the midst of the densest crowd and that they needed to get a feel for the situation before actually trying to steal something. Then, by gradually closing in on the chosen victim, obstructing his or her path and co-operating closely in the actual deed, the crime might be pulled off.Footnote ³¹

Mayhew's extensive account of the lives and culture of London pickpockets contains some elaborate descriptions of how pickpockets went about pilfering various items.Footnote ³² He thereby provides us with an inventory of the objects most commonly taken by pickpockets as well as an account of the pickpocket's methods, more detailed than any we can hope to gain from trial records. The things that pickpockets generally stole, which can also be seen when studying trials, include handkerchiefs, pocket watches, pocketbooks and scarf pins.Footnote ³³ Each of these items required a special method of dexterity, which Mayhew proceeds to outline. In the act of stealing a handkerchief from a jacket pocket, the pickpockets co-operate in a manner reminiscent of that observed in the trials. While two follow alongside the intended victim another walks behind to keep a lookout for policemen or anyone noticing their actions. Then ‘one of the two walking close by the gentleman adroitly picks his pocket, and coils the handkerchief up in his hand so as not to be seen, while the other brings his body close to him, so as not to let his arm be seen by any passer by’. The purpose of the other man's presence, apart from hiding the actual thief's movements, is also to take the stolen handkerchief if the victim notices the theft. The lookout then walks on, and might even ask the victim what is the matter and pretend to assist him by telling him (untruthfully, of course) where the thief ran off to. A similar description of this method is given by a young criminal called ‘Alf’ who allegedly served as foundation for journalist Clarence Rook's book Hooligan Nights, which recounts the life and culture of one of the infamous juvenile delinquents of the late Victorian years. In one chapter, Rook relates Alf's advice concerning pickpocketing, the most important being his reluctance to work alone. ‘Free's best’, states Alf in the phonetic cockney which Rook persistently uses throughout the book when quoting him. It takes one to approach the appointed victim and ask him for a light, one to lift his coat while he is distracted and one to go through his pockets. ‘The boy what you see runs froo your pockets an’ passes the stuff to anuvver boy, an’ then they scoot different ways. An’ then I drops your coat an’ does a scoot anuvver way.’ ‘The risk’, Rook concludes, ‘is distributed.’Footnote ³⁴

In this carefully constructed ‘ballet’, the gang of pickpockets takes advantage of a number of what might be seen as contemporary conditions of pedestrian behaviour. First, the ability to work together in large numbers presupposes that the pavement is quite crowded and that three men walking in close proximity to one another is nothing out of the ordinary. Secondly, the ability to disappear in the crowd when the deed is done and thirdly, the natural helpfulness of passers-by makes it possible for the third accomplice to play his part without being suspected himself. Both Mayhew and Rook note that few pickpockets worked alone, and we see from the Old Bailey cases that pickpockets working together was common. Thus, they were quite dependent on the existence of crowds as camouflage, and there would have been enough opportunities in London at this time to work in crowds without one's behaviour being too suspicious or conspicuous. All the same, there are indications that pickpockets sometimes made up the entire crowd at the time of the theft, and, as noted, some more violent types of thieves surrounded their victims and closed in upon him/her before openly stealing from them.

When pickpockets relied on sleight of hand alone, they had to be as invisible and inconspicuous as possible. Some pickpockets are described as holding out a hand carrying a coat or something similar to hide what the other hand is doing; others even put their arms round people, which may be an indication that some pickpockets were not interested in discretion. But the gesture that seems to have been most common among them was to put the right hand under the left arm, or vice versa, thereby shielding the hand that does the deed and also perhaps avoiding facing the victim or moving in a way which might attract suspicion.Footnote ³⁵ But apart from the hands, which commit the crime, the overall behaviour of the pickpocket had to mimic ‘normal’ behaviour in a crowd, even though being able to do the crime necessitates a ‘heightened’ version of this normal behaviour. They did for instance take advantage of the fact that a man could ‘loiter’ in the street, but they drew attention to themselves, especially from policemen, by loitering a bit too long in one place or ‘loitering in a suspicious manner’.Footnote ³⁶ Likewise, they exploited the fact that people sometimes bump into each other or push through crowds, and sometimes policemen notice pickpockets when they push about in a crowd a bit too much in an obvious effort to draw attention from the thefts.Footnote ³⁷ The fact that some of them chatted with their intended victims or put their arm round them is also an implication that familiarity and outgoing friendliness was not unheard of even in a crowd.Footnote ³⁸ It is also worth noting how easily a crowd could be made to speak with one voice. When Edward Kemp was walking around Leadenhall Market one day, trying to pick several people's pockets, his behaviour eventually caused a mob to assemble around him to try and get him away. And when Frederick Fredericks, a travelling showman, accused a man in a crowd of stealing his watch, the crowd sided with the accused man so that a policeman had to ‘protect the prosecutor from the violence of the crowd’.Footnote ³⁹ Rook also relates a story told by young Alf, in which he claims that a crowd of ‘something like a hundred pursuers’ started running after him, and Rook notes that many of the people running after a thief ‘do not know whom they are chasing or why they are chasing him’, content with being part of the action and the excitement of the moment.Footnote ⁴⁰

A pickpocket must also adjust his act to the nature of the situation when it comes to movement. The hypothetical handkerchief theft described by Mayhew was carried out with a moving target. It is much easier, however, to steal from someone who is standing still, although the risk of being caught is presumably greater, and the role of the crowd more important. Mayhew mentions that a pickpocket generally only steals from a coat or jacket when the victim is moving, but might be bold enough to steal from a waistcoat pocket when the target is standing still. The way of doing this that Mayhew describes is familiar from the pickpockets in the trial accounts. ‘One of [the pickpockets] folds his arms across his breast in such a way that his right hand is covered with his left arm. This enables him to use his hand in an unobserved way, so that he is thereby able to abstract the watch from the vest-pocket of the gentleman standing by his side.’ Mayhew also mentions other ways of putting one arm under the other so as to hide the movement, but they are all done in large gatherings of more or less motionless people.

The great number of pickpocketings committed in standing crowds suggests that Victorian pedestrians were easily distracted from their business by things along their way. Alf explains how the job of some members of a pickpocket gang could be to gather a crowd, and the easiest way to do it was for two of them to start fighting with each other, as believably as possible. ‘Nothing collects a crowd so quickly as a fight, and few things interest it more.’ And while the fight was under way, the accomplices went around stealing from the crowd.Footnote ⁴¹ Mayhew describes two cases that had come to his attention, one of a gentleman whose watch was stolen when he watched a female acrobat cross the Thames on a highwire, and the other of a woman standing looking at a window display while a man placed himself next to her, pretending to admire the same display. Window displays are present in many of the Old Bailey cases, and might represent a later addition to the distractions found in many of the earlier cases – the street entertainments, the fairs, the pantomimes and such.Footnote ⁴² Although there seems to be an increase in rapidity and movement on the street, the pedestrian's hurry is just as easily forgotten at the end of the nineteenth century as at the beginning of it.

To move quite close to a stranger when in a crowd is another strategy that pickpockets made use of, and the way they did it suggests that people could get very close indeed on the Victorian street. Mayhew refers to the method of stealing scarf pins, the little metal pins that men of means sometimes wore in their scarfs and which were often decorated with a precious stone. This item the pickpocket steals, according to Mayhew, by pretending to wipe his nose while walking alongside the victim and when his right hand is held to his nose he places the other hand under the right arm, concealing it under the elbow. This gesture is quite elaborate and would, in order to succeed, demand some practice before it can be executed with discretion. To what extent it was actually used by pickpockets, however, is a question which depends upon how much we rely on Mayhew's account. But this is not the only mode of stealing that depends on extreme closeness to a stranger. Mayhew also refers to a strategem whereby one accomplice would push another to make it look like he had accidentally bumped into the victim, which we saw examples of in the Old Bailey trials, and the most difficult pocket for a thief to pick – the trouser pocket – is only picked ‘in crowds where people are squeezed together’, when a hand might be quickly inserted into the pocket while distracting the victim with a push.

All these notes on pickpocketing methods are mere indications by themselves, but taken together they point to some basic conditions of pedestrian life in late Victorian London. Crowding seems to have been generally disliked but put up with out of necessity, and although we cannot make a list of the specific rules of conduct, we can certainly detect their presence. There is a sense of mutual respect and attempts to keep the peace, and the pickpockets’ elaborate discretion was doubtlessly evolved as a way of getting round a ban on touch without obeying it. At the same time, however, the late Victorian crowd was decidedly more prone to riotous and violent behaviour than its counterpart a century later. It was not only pickpockets who pushed and shoved and tried to make their way through the throng with fervour. A crowd of people trying to board an omnibus would push forward and Old Bailey trials contain several references to ‘a crush’ wherein people press forcibly upon each other.Footnote ⁴³ A witness in one case said when describing a crowd that ‘it was surging to and fro, and I was lifted off my feet’.Footnote ⁴⁴ There appears to have been a clash of ambitions in crowd conduct. Some implore a sense of order – ‘By your leave, gentlemen’ – but there always seems to have been someone pushing.

It thus transpires that even though the pickpocket took advantage of a simultaneous closeness and distance between people in the urban public realm, where physical bodies are close together but the congregation is one of strangers, the immediate relationship between people was not as impersonal or unsocial as one might imagine, even though the social aspects of it were not always welcome. People crowded together and they pushed towards each other with little respect for bodily integrity at the same time as they were likely to exchange a few words with each other. The most skilled pickpockets, says Mayhew, are able to ‘accost a gentleman in the street, and while speaking to him, and looking him in the face, will quietly insert their hand into his vest pocket and steal his watch’. Picking a lady's pocket was done in the same way, ‘by stopping her in the street, asking the way to a particular place, or inquiring if she is acquainted with such and such a person’. A guide book of London from the 1860s advises the reader to ‘never enter into a conversation with men who wish to show you the way, offer to sell “smuggled cigars” or invite you to take a glass of ale or play a game at skittles’.Footnote ⁴⁵ To ask a stranger the way to somewhere could hardly be said to be a historically situated practice, but the ritual involved in pausing long enough for a pocket to be picked, while hats are tipped and a little conversation is conducted, implies an understanding of stranger interaction that differs from our own.

A number of details about what we learn of the pickpocket's method go together in creating this picture of a way of interacting typical of the day. Mayhew devotes special attention to the clothes and the way many pickpockets dress as wealthy people in order to get close to those worth stealing from. This factor is connected to the pickpocket's level of advancement. ‘The more dexterous they are, they generally dress in higher style, to get among the more respectable and fashionable people.’ But Mayhew is quick to point out that this is only a veneer. The ‘elegantly attired young man’ whom a lady encounters in the street without suspecting him of any irregularities, ‘she might find in the evening dressed as a rough costermonger, mingling among the low ruffians at the Seven Dials or Whitechapel, or possibly lounging in some low beershop in the Borough’. To Mayhew, it is vital to underline this act of fraud that goes on in the street. To us it might not be so different from other types of ‘impression management’ that people engage in with varying degrees of deception, but it is worthy of note that the pickpocket promptly realized the possibilities inherent in the importance of appearance. And if outer appearances are good enough it is easy to start a conversation with a person at a window display or pretend to be a sympathetic passer-by after a theft. Mayhew mentions the ‘swell mob’, which was the name given to those pickpockets who were able to dress well and move in finer circles without attracting suspicion.

But there were different ways of accosting and addressing a stranger in the street. Mayhew's outlook may appear narrow in that he seems to take for granted a situation in which the pickpocket and the victim come from two different social spheres, but cases from the Old Bailey do not immediately point to a larger number of wealthy pickpocket victims. Female pickpockets targeting male victims often seem to assume the technique of approaching them and starting a conversation, perhaps even accompanying them on their way. Such incidents might be redolent of the stereotypical behaviour of prostitutes. Prostitution and female pickpocketing were intimately connected, as is indicated by the case of Thomas Carlisle, a butler in Kensington, who while on an errand encountered a young woman who accosted him and started to ask him trivial questions. Carlisle stopped to talk with her and also admitted to putting his hand up her petticoats before giving her a shilling, but nothing more. Afterwards he was missing his watch and scarf pin.Footnote ⁴⁶ But the ease with which some people drifted into conversations might also be indicative of a more widespread type of stranger interaction. This type of interaction was mostly connected to public houses. Two men who are strangers to one another or who recognize each other as living in the same area meet on the street outside a pub and one offers to buy the other a drink. This scenario is quite common in the trial records and sometimes it ends with one of them missing a watch or a purse when the other has left.Footnote ⁴⁷

The behaviour that we see signs of here differs from the encounters characterized by courtesy and deference that pickpockets tried to emulate in Mayhew's description. This restrained but still interactive conduct may have been associated with wealth and might explain why some pickpockets would have dressed and behaved in such a way so as to get close to people worthy of robbing. That does not mean that poor people behaved in a manner devoid of rules or limitations, but maybe that there were different cultures of the street, and the one that prevailed among the impecunious was characterized more by outspoken and forthright behaviour. Despite the differences, though, pickpocketing depended very much on people's tendency to stop what they were doing and indulge in a distraction or have a short conversation, perhaps even share a drink, with a stranger, regardless of social standing. But does this overshadow the pickpocket's potential dependence on the traffic of pedestrians and the minute actions of the moving crowd?

Bustling crowds and hurried pedestrians were not as common as they became during the twentieth century. That an increase in pedestrian crowding would have an impact on pedestrian behaviour can be inferred from the changing nature of the locations of pickpocket crimes rather than from Mayhew's account. What both Mayhew and the examples from the Old Bailey suggest is that increasing traffic and crowding co-existed with interactive behaviour that was open to distractions. Perhaps the most characteristic aspect of it is the absence of hurry in this traffic. We must keep in mind how slowly Victorian traffic moved compared to today, both vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Sometimes it was faster to walk, depending on the level of congestion which, in the City of London and in Westminster, could be considerable. The fastest-moving vehicle in nineteenth-century traffic was the bicycle, which only became common in the last decades of the century, before being overshadowed by the introduction of the automobile. When pavements were at their most crowded, we must assume that they were as crowded as a city pavement becomes today. Brief moments of filmed London traffic from the turn of the century illustrate this point.Footnote ⁴⁸ But such crowds were still limited to a few places. The observations made about the pickpocket's methods here, then, may tell us something of how pedestrians adapted to and resisted the conditions of this traffic.

The way pickpockets operated in Victorian London is a good way of revealing what sociologist Erving Goffman would call the ‘traffic code’ of the nineteenth-century city, but it is not the only way. Other notes on the way people move about or congregate in the public areas of London made in passing in the Old Bailey trials as well as in memoirs or oral history interviews can help to create a more extensive picture, but in a small study like this it is thought-provoking to meditate from a limited set of evidence, and to extract information about a historical culture from its remaining details.Footnote ⁴⁹

Initially, I referred to sociological theorizing concerning pedestrian behaviour, pointing out how it might benefit from further consideration of pedestrian culture and the historical development of pedestrian behaviour. The sociologist who was among the first to direct attention to pedestrians on pavements was Erving Goffman, who identified a set of rules which people abide by when moving about on a crowded pavement. He identified the tendency for lanes to form and the way pedestrians tend to veer abruptly to their right when they meet someone, or to freeze in order to register the other's intentions. He also spoke of the process of ‘externalization’ whereby people in traffic gesture in a way which displays their intentions more clearly than normally, and of ‘scanning’, which means that the individual glances over the immediate area around and in front of her so as to adjust her own movements according to others.Footnote ⁵⁰ Lyn Lofland applies the term ‘cooperative motility’ to this phenomenon, stressing the co-operation that she claims is inherent in public urban interaction that on the face of it appears antisocial.Footnote ⁵¹

The specific way that people behave on crowded pavements is established, then, by sociologists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but what of its development and pre-history? Historians seem to agree that the interaction that urban dwellers engaged in in the early modern period was very different from its modern counterpart in its level of face-to-face interaction, first-hand knowledge of people and strong-tie networks based on units such as the neighbourhood, guild or parish.Footnote ⁵² Studies by such scholars as Richard Sennett and Robert Shoemaker state that the street lost its role as a venue for interaction during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The findings of my own research, however, would move this development forward. This discrepancy between our views is probably due to the narrow vision of Sennett, in particular, who focuses on literary depictions and written sources that leave out the urban experience of the illiterate[!] masses. The street cultures of the poor, who still largely depended on the public street for their livelihood, and whose cultural debris was transferred orally and can only be estimated indirectly, prospered throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. A socially contingent urban crowd has been explored by historians focusing on the eighteenth century, while the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been associated with curbing and civilizing, thus neglecting the fact that many aspects of the situation which are acknowledged in pre-modern times persist well into the modern age.

The sources used in this brief study should be handled with caution, and we must not overinterpret the indications that we have drawn from them. Social investigations such as that of Mayhew involve more conjecture and generalization than is apparent at first glance, and trial reports are always shaped by their judicial context. But if we want to find out things about everyday life in the cities of the past, we have to make do with sources such as these. Furthermore, it is dangerous to allow historical studies made of literary sources to shape our picture of urban history to too large a degree, since it obscures the urban experience of the illiterate and the poor.

Here, we have seen how a certain degree of sociability remaining in the public realm made pickpocketing possible. Street traffic and crowds grew and crowd behaviour became quite aggressive. There was crowding, pushing and bustling and few seemed willing to curb their forwardness. When the crowd was not as large, we are still in a pre-modern mode of behaviour. There was no need of ‘scanning’ or ‘externalization’, mainly because traffic moved so slowly. These aspects of the matter become visible because pickpockets emulated them and took advantage of them. It was possible for pickpockets to operate thanks to the slowness of pedestrian traffic, but also thanks to the fact that despite growing crowdedness a modern ‘traffic code’ had not yet emerged, and it was possible to interact more openly or to pretend to bump into someone as this openness or violence in movement was still quite accepted. Pickpockets also camouflaged themselves by way of the crowd, taking advantage of the presence of many people to hide their hands or make gestures out of sight of the victim. Such dexterity was still possible in this age, but the increasing rapidity and integrity of pedestrians presumably led to changes in pickpocket methods.

The drop in the numbers of pickpocket cases during the nineteenth century might also be taken to imply the pickpocket's growing refinement, but the numbers are secondary to the correlation of pickpocket and pedestrian behaviour with changes in urban traffic. The twentieth-century pavement has seen the emergence of what Goffman termed ‘civil inattention’, namely the private nature of pedestrians, which forbids too much interaction and conversation, but replaces it with a mutual respect of the other person's personal territory. In the words of Lyn Lofland: ‘Civil inattention makes possible copresence without commingling, awareness without engrossment, courtesy without conversation.’Footnote ⁵³ Such behaviour would seem alien to the Victorians. Indeed, we do not quite understand it yet ourselves, as we often mistake it for rudeness or lack of sensitivity.Footnote ⁵⁴ What the Victorian pedestrian would have experienced was a setting in which a growing public realm facing the threat of overpopulation clashed with old rules of conduct in which touch and face-to-face interaction were more accepted. In a bustling crowd, these factors become unacceptable, sooner or later, and perhaps we might even attribute some of these changes in attitude to the pickpocket who made such good use of them.