Doctoral theses have always had an important place in the historiography of crime, and indeed much of the discipline's most influential research has emerged from postgraduate study. For many years, the investigation of crime and justice in Britain was a staple topic of doctoral research, and theses by members of E.P. Thompson's ‘Warwick School’ had a shaping influence on the early debates of the discipline.Footnote 1 In the British context, these early debates were concerned with questions about who could access the law and the extent to which the courts were used to enforce the values of particular social groups.Footnote 2 More recently, scholars have given an increased amount of attention to the influence of newspaper reporting on perceptions of crime, and on the importance of printed accounts of crimes, trials and executions as texts which represented the function and effectiveness of the law in particular ways.Footnote 3 Furthermore, over the last few decades our knowledge of policing and punishment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe has greatly expanded, providing important insights into two very important aspects of the judicial process.Footnote 4
Many of these studies have taken cities and towns as their area of focus. While some might be classified as works of ‘history from below’ which seek to rescue and reconstruct the everyday experiences of ordinary people, this is by no means the most common approach. Instead, historians’ work on urban crime and policing has often approached the topic from an administrative dimension. As early as the 1980s, Joanna Innes and John Styles remarked that the study of crime had increasingly involved the study of the administration of the law, rather than of crime itself.Footnote 5 There is no particular problem with this, since institutions and administration are important subjects for enquiry, and their study has revealed a great deal about how the pre-modern criminal law was actually enforced. Moreover, the study of police services, courts, prisons, charities, and so on, can tell us a great deal about civic life in cities, and the way that urban institutions evolved alongside and interacted with the cities in which they existed. However, in studying crime and justice from this perspective, the discipline of urban history – that is, the approach which places the city itself at the heart of the analysis – has been of limited influence. While it is true that this journal regularly publishes articles concerning crime, historians of crime in cities have usually been interested in crime as a subject in itself, rather than what crime can tell us about the city at large. This is not necessarily a criticism. For instance, studies of urban policing which are primarily concerned with the administration of police services, rather than what they tell us about ‘the city’ more generally, can still produce important insights into the functioning of the law and the development of attitudes towards criminality. Yet, as this review argues, recent theses suggest some ways that we can build closer connections between the disciplines of criminal justice history and urban history. The need to appreciate the place of the police and the courts within the context of political and social life in the city, and the value of considering the spatial and social context of crime, are two particularly important ways that this gap may be bridged.
Crime, culture and the city
Alongside studies of particular criminal groups – such as prostitutes or pickpockets – one fruitful area of enquiry is the examination of the representation of urban crime in popular culture. Richard Ward's ‘Print culture and responses to crime in mid-eighteenth-century London’ (University of Sheffield, 2010) focuses on the interaction between reports and representations of crime in print, and the responses this provoked. Ward's research has produced several valuable outcomes, not least evidence that newspaper reporting was able, to some degree, to produce demonstrable changes in prosecution rates – a phenomenon that historians have identified in other areas.Footnote 6 Going beyond this, Ward argues that printed crime reporting shaped readers’ perceptions of the prevalence of certain types of crime in the metropolis. Furthermore, printed crime reports even had an important influence on major shifts in public policy. On the former point, he argues that the increase in crime reporting in London's newspapers which occurred in the mid-eighteenth century was seized upon by figures such as Henry and John Fielding, who were eager to use heightened fears about crime to encourage victims to use the Bow Street magistrates’ office and the formal prosecution process to pursue criminals, rather than resorting to informal methods of investigation and negotiation. By emphasizing the efficacy of the city's nascent police services and courts, Ward argues that newspapers exacerbated the decline of community-based responses to crime, while potentially encouraging the increased use of public officialdom, such as the nightwatch, constables, Bow Street Runners and the formal prosecution process. While links between crime reporting and changing prosecution rates have been identified by historians in several contexts, Ward's attempt to consider exactly why formal prosecution rates increased as the result of newspaper-driven ‘moral panics’ is a valuable contribution to this debate.Footnote 7 Particularly important is his attempt to consider the ways in which changing institutional options for victims of crime interacted with changing representations of theft. His recognition of the influence that urban crises – such as moral panics about robbery – could have on the nature of policing and the use of the courts accords well with other historians’ observations about the role that similar panic about crime and disorder in the 1780s had in stimulating major change in policing and governance.Footnote 8
Ward's work engages with a well-established set of questions which consider the influence of factors such as war, print culture and moral panic on attitudes towards crime.Footnote 9 But as a recent article by James Sharpe in Crime, Histoire & Sociétés has argued, the patterns of crime reporting seen in London and the south-east of England were not repeated in the north of the country, with newspapers from cities such as York giving only limited attention to crime news.Footnote 10 Further doctoral research on crime reporting outside the south of England could perhaps shed more light on why these variations occur, and the topic seems ripe for international comparative study. As Carl Estabrook has argued, some cities fashioned their identity through the reporting of crime from ‘other’ places, such as by representing rural areas as backward or by depicting rival towns as dangerous and ill-governed.Footnote 11 A better understanding of how these representations were constructed – perhaps with particular emphasis on the ways that newspapers described the location of violent crime – would be a helpful addition to the existing literature.
Studies of capital cities such as London often produce interesting results, but always leave the question of the extent to which their findings are relevant to understanding the experiences of other cities and towns. Marion Pluskota's ‘Prostitution in Bristol and Nantes, 1750–1815: a comparative study’ (University of Leicester, 2011) directly responds to this problem by creating an international, comparative study of prostitution in two European provincial port cities, while simultaneously examining the geography of prostitution within the urban context. To some extent, her work reveals the difficulty of conducting comparisons on an international level – the source material for Nantes in France, especially the monthly censuses of prostitutes produced after 1804, offers a much more detailed account of prostitution than the quarter sessions papers from Bristol in England. As Pluskota argues, reported instances of prostitution were densely clustered in particular locations. The reasons for this included population density, proximity to potential clients, opportunities for public sociability, the layout of the city and the impact of policing. While prostitution is an activity which existed, and continues to exist, in all cities, Pluskota shows that these common factors which influence the geography of prostitution produce unique configurations in each place.Footnote 12 In particular, civic concern about prostitution was followed by actual action against prostitution to a much greater extent in post-revolution France than England, which accounts for why the source materials from Nantes are so much more detailed. In Nantes, as Pluskota argues, the way that prostitutes were treated by the authorities in the early nineteenth century became more severe, to some extent reflecting a national change of mood and regional strife. While there are important continuities between Bristol and Nantes – both saw increasingly vociferous concern about prostitution, and both were port cities in which prostitution was clustered near to their docks – the precise nature of the distribution of prostitutes, and the way that it was perceived and acted against as a social problem, were contingent on the interaction of several distinctively localized factors. The analysis of continuity and difference can, therefore, bring us much closer to understanding the factors that shaped the geography of particular categories of urban criminality.
As Deirdre Palk has shown in her doctoral research, categories of crime such as ‘pickpocketing’ or ‘shoplifting’ conceal considerable differences between men and women in the nature, timing and locations of crime.Footnote 13 Theft from the person, for instance, was a highly gendered offence, and men were much more likely to commit this offence at night or in certain social situations than women. It was also a crime that was by no means evenly distributed through the city. Instead, it was particularly closely associated with crowds, fairs, theatres, congestion and the rowdy sociability of the alehouse. Talking about ‘urban crime’ or seeing offences such as pickpocketing as being a distinctively urban phenomenon might, therefore, be somewhat problematic, since these offences were highly localized and thus whether they reflect typical experiences of life in the city is questionable. While Palk's work does not contradict or even question previous scholarship that uses ‘urban crime’ as a broad category of analysis, her study of gender differences and spatial variations does suggest that ‘urban crime’ was by no means experienced across the city in a uniform way.Footnote 14 Pluskota has perhaps come closest to applying a similar analysis, since it is clear that prostitutes were by no means evenly distributed across Bristol and Nantes. Few other scholars have attempted this approach. This is somewhat surprising, since research by Drew Gray, ‘Summary proceedings and social relations in the City of London, c. 1750–1800’ (University of Northampton, 2006), and myself, ‘Property crime in late eighteenth-century Bristol: contexts of theft in the pre-modern city’ (University of Leicester, 2012), has shown that policing could be highly variable in British cities. In both Bristol and London, it is possible to examine policing on a ward-by-ward basis, revealing how differences in the administration of policing could produce dramatic variations in the number of constables or nightwatchmen who were employed in each jurisdiction. It is likely that this affected the way that criminals’ strategies of crime were enacted, but quite how the geography of policing interacted with the geography of crime is not something we currently understand.
In some ways, this presents a way forward for historians of urban crime. Even when we have a fairly well-developed understanding of the way that the courts functioned and the sorts of crimes which were prosecuted in cites, we lack an understanding of how crime within certain legal categories varied according to time, space and gender. If Palk's research shows that such variations existed in shoplifting, this raises the question of how violent crimes such as murder or robbery varied in the city. And while Palk's research has suggested general differences in location, few scholars have attempted to examine the agency of space in a more theoretical way. This is somewhat surprising given the ways that scholars of other aspects of life in cities have approached their topic. Justin Colson's recent thesis, ‘Local communities in fifteenth century London: craft, parish and neighbourhood’ (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2011), for instance, on communities in medieval London uses GIS mapping and methodologies drawn from social geographers – such as ‘space syntax analysis’ – to examine the ways that particular configurations of the built environment influenced how people moved through and used urban space. The relative lack of uptake by historians of crime of similar methods is particularly surprising given that digitized resources such as the Proceedings of the Old Bailey have been available for several years, while the records that historians of crime use – such as newspaper reports, police records or depositions – are ideal candidates for mapping.Footnote 15 A study of how the layout of roads and buildings influenced street crime, for instance, would be a very appealing area of study, as would an attempt to map the reported locations of violence in a large city.
While studies of the geography of crime within cities can produce some interesting insights into the relationship between crime, governance and urban space, another important line of enquiry is the ways in which changes to a city's environment, economy and society lead to changes in the types of crime that they experience. Céline Regnard's doctoral research on crime and violence in nineteenth-century Marseille has done just this.Footnote 16 Regnard argues that rapid and substantial economic change, coupled with dramatic population expansion, created particularly acute problems for the city. Moreover, the massive migration of Italian workers to Marseille – France's main entry point for foreign workers and Mediterranean commercial traffic – was associated with significant increases in reported violent crime, particularly in the 1880s. While the demographic characteristics of these migrants – they tended to be young, single men who worked in low-paid manual occupations – may be an important explanatory factor here, we cannot rule out the effect of another ‘moral panic’ about increases in crime perpetrated by foreigners. In its totality, Regnard's work represents an attempt to delineate how changes in a city's size, economic activity and social composition produced changes in the levels of crime that it experienced and reported. One outcome of this is that while we can associate crime rate trends with long-term social and economic processes, this relationship is by no means a simple one. Levels of reported violence did not always rise with increases in population or with heightened economic strife, for instance. Instead, a mixture of anti-immigrant sentiment and the effects of changes in the administration of policing also appear to have contributed. As in Ward's work on eighteenth-century London, close attention to the interaction between cultural, institutional and economic factors is essential if we are to understand changes in reported crime rates in cities undergoing periods of dramatic transformation.
The doctoral theses discussed in this review by no means represent all the postgraduate research that has been written about crime in cities over the last few years. There are several recent doctoral studies which take crime in a particular city as their subject, but which do not say a great deal that is pertinent to the discipline of urban history, and thus are not discussed here. One thesis that does contain material that is of potential interest to readers of this journal is Thierry Pastorello's study of male homosexuality in Paris, ‘Sodome à Paris: protohistoire de l'homosexualité masculine fin XVIIIème – milieu XIXème siècle’, University Paris Diderot–Paris 7, 2009). While much of Pastorello's attention is devoted to examining changing public discourses about homosexuality, he constructs several detailed accounts of the meeting places of homosexual men before the French Revolution and in the nineteenth century, using police reports to examine their social networks and mental geographies of homosexual encounter. In the early nineteenth century, the Parisian police focused their attention on what they perceived to be homosexual meeting places, such as public gardens and parks, cabarets and theatres, revealing a second set of mental geographies about where Parisian homosexuals could be found. The testimony of particular police and prison officers reveals what appears to be a vibrant and distinctively urban working-class homosexual subculture, which was not dramatically perturbed by the repressive tactics of the police or, as it seems, particularly influenced by contemporary condemnations of homosexual activity. This raises a broader question: if emerging anti-homosexual discourses were only being slowly absorbed by the urban working classes, then how else were they resistant to new ideas or attempts to control their behaviour?Footnote 17 Pastorello's work is a challenging thesis, and offers an insightful account of interactions between a seemingly ever-changing police force and a group of men they tried to construct as social deviants.
Crime, policing and institutions
Alongside these studies sit doctoral theses which examine the relationship between crime and urban institutions such as police forces, courts and prisons. Particularly important in recent scholarship has been the attempt to consider how offenders and victims typically interacted with urban institutions, and what influences shaped the nature of these institutions. These studies are useful not just for what they tell us about crime, but because they allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of governance in cities, and to unpick the extremely complicated interactions between the myriad groups which were involved in the administration of urban life.
One thesis which is strongly engaged with this idea is David Churchill's study of crime and policing in nineteenth-century Leeds, ‘Crime, policing and control in Leeds, c. 1830–1890’ (Open University, 2012). Using newspaper evidence alongside the records of civic administration, Churchill argues that the new police force that was introduced in 1836 made very limited progress in preventing crime, and found its greatest success in arresting drunkards and dealing with traffic offences. Furthermore, while the reformers of the early nineteenth century may have aimed to establish a mechanically efficient and accessible police force, Churchill demonstrates that responses to crime continued to involve victim-led, discretionary responses long after the reforms of the 1830s. Central to Churchill's argument is an emphasis of the significance of a diverse collection of institutions which were all involved in the policing and prosecution of crime. In Churchill's work, the professionalized Leeds Police are joined in their fight against crime by community-organized police associations, privately employed police officers and guards and even local branches of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
As Drew Gray's work has shown, other institutions such as summary courts could have a crucial influence on shaping individuals’ typical interactions with the law, as well as being deeply involved with other areas of urban governance.Footnote 18 In his thesis, Gray makes clear just how closely linked the City of London's summary courts were with the powerful Corporation of London, whose aldermen were empowered to act as summary justices, and who were involved in other areas of urban administration. These courts provided a location in which even the poorest victims of crime could obtain justice. In addition to dealing with allegations of theft, the summary courts were closely involved with the regulation of the urban environment and the prevention of ‘nuisances’ in the city. These ‘nuisances’ encompassed a very diverse range of activities, including drunkenness, bad driving, prostitution, begging and crowd events such as lotteries. In this way, the problem of crime and the challenge of regulating the urban environment were closely intertwined, and while the summary courts may have offered poor people affordable access to justice, they were also increasingly involved in regulating popular culture. Gray's study also reveals the close connections between policing and justice, since in the City of London both the court system and important aspects of policing were ultimately under the control of the lord mayor. However, Gray also shows that both policing and the courts were administered by numerous forces which interacted and, at times, competed. The administration of the day constabulary and nightwatch, for instance, was highly fragmented across the city, and these officials had to work alongside numerous other groups who policed central London in some way. Similarly, the justices in the summary courts were mindful of the heavy workload of the city's more powerful courts – this engendered highly discretionary treatment of cases which may have breached the law. The value of the work of Gray and Churchill is that they both provide insightful accounts of how policing and justice were being implemented ‘on the ground’, at times when major shifts in attitudes towards urban disorder, the nature of policing and the efficacy of policing were taking place.
Michelle Abraham's thesis, ‘The summary courts and the prosecution of assault in Northampton and Nottingham, 1886–1931’ (University of Leicester, 2012) on summary justice in nineteenth-century Northampton and Nottingham provides a useful complement to Gray's work. First, it is a comparative study, which allows the influence that the specific characteristics of both towns had on crime and justice to be delineated; secondly, it extends some of the ideas about summary justice developed by Peter King and Drew Gray into the nineteenth century; and thirdly, it takes a similar line of argument to David Churchill's work, arguing that discretionary responses to crime endured long into the Victorian era. Particularly interesting is Abraham's analysis of the relationship between violent crime and weekly social routines. In Nottingham and Northampton, for instance, the weekend was associated with increases in violence as a result of drinking cultures which revolved around the cessation of work. Violent crime was not, therefore, necessarily the simple consequence of poverty, but of the work routines of those who were gainfully employed. Much like Pluskota's argument that prostitution was highly localized, or Gray's emphasis on the dramatic variations in policing across urban space, Abraham's argument is that violence was particularly strongly associated with certain spatial and temporal contexts. In addition to revealing the very fruitful results which can be obtained from examining the work of the summary courts, Abraham's work reveals how violent offending was by no means a phenomenon that was separated from other aspects of urban life. Drunkenness might be the result of rigid work routines, but the routines of social activity also produced concentrations of violence. Many assaults were reported to have happened in the home in the hours around midnight, for instance, when drunken men returned home. In this respect, Abraham's findings bear some similarity with those of Pluskota, who argues that prostitution occurred when a particular set of conditions – such as availability of clients or lack of policing – were in place. Moreover, it is clear from the work of both Abraham and Gray that the summary courts were as much involved in regulating public behaviour as they were concerned with crime. This fits with Churchill's observations that policemen in Leeds were most successful when dealing not with theft and serious offending, but minor public nuisances.
Finally, there are other types of urban institution which have been the subjects of recent Ph.D. theses. Studies of borough prisons have reflected some of the same themes in theses about summary courts, situating the details of their construction and administration within the wider context of urban governance and politics. Trevor Pearce, in his study of Bristol, ‘A divided elite: governance and prison reform in early nineteenth century Bristol’ (University of the West of England, 2009), argues that public opposition to prison reform in the nineteenth century reveals a form of interaction between local government, social reformers and the public which is very different in its nature to reform movements in other English cities. In Bristol, the city's Corporation – which possessed a wide range of administrative powers backed up, in this case, by a parliamentary statute – was unable to rebuild and reform the city's prisons in the manner that it saw fit. The reason for this was that members of the city's social elite mounted a concerted effort to oppose the Corporation's plans, through existing civic structures such as the parish vestry. Meanwhile, Nicholas Arber in his study of Norfolk County Gaol, located in the city of Norwich, ‘The Norfolk County Gaol 1764–1887: “a good and sufficient prison”?’ (University of East Anglia, 2009), has shown that the fabric, layout and function of the prison were repeatedly altered as the local authorities struggled to implement prevailing ideas regarding the reformation of criminals.Footnote 19 In this case, a key problem was not local political opposition, but the difficulty of constructing an effective prison on an ancient site in the middle of a city. Both these accounts complicate narratives of prison reform, by showing how the environmental and political context of imprisonment profoundly influenced the way that changes in attitudes towards incarceration actually fed into the development of prisons themselves. In Churchill's and Gray's theses, policing is revealed to have involved a large number of organizations which produced a multivalent response to crime – in a similar manner, studies of prison development have shown that responses to crime often occurred as the complex interaction of local government and popular political forces.
Conclusion
The study of crime in the urban context has been a popular area of research for many years. However, there are still ways in which urban history – as a discipline – can build better connections with scholars whose work considers urban criminality. While many scholars have examined crime in towns and cities, it is only in a limited number of cases that issues relating to attitudes towards the urban environment, to social disorder and to the role of local governance in counteracting crime have been explored. Many studies of crime, and particularly those using the records of metropolitan courts such as London's Old Bailey, all too often fail to consider the wider environmental and social contexts in which the archives of the law were produced. The study of crime is a worthwhile topic in itself, but what the records of policing and the law can tell us about other aspects of life in the city is a question that sadly receives limited attention. Conversely, there are things which urban historians could learn from recent studies of urban criminality. David Churchill's work on the impact of police reform in Leeds has shown that theory often deviated dramatically from practice, and that responses to crime continued to involve a variety of informal institutions at a time when the importance of these responses was supposed to be in decline. Thierry Pastorello's work on homosexuality in Paris reaches similar conclusions about the discordance between governmental ideology and the attitudes possessed by ordinary people. As recent theses show, for historians who wish to reveal the social phenomena produced by urban transformation, or the functioning of urban governance, or the influence that place and environment had on the experience of life in the city, the study of crime can be a uniquely fruitful approach.
