This is truly a history from below, arguing that the ‘lowest’ plebeian Londoners – the poor and the criminal – took an active role in shaping welfare and criminal justice policy in western Europe's first million-person city by 1801. Despite being ‘the most vulnerable of Londoners’, argue Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, by ‘acting both together and alone, [the poor and criminals] determined which policies and institutions would survive (and in what form) and which would collapse in chaos’ (p. 4). Poverty and crime were ‘clearly interrelated social phenomena’ (p. 12). This research is a culmination of many years’ work for Hitchcock and Shoemaker, drawing as it does upon their monumental London Lives and Old Bailey websites, both of which have made thousands of original documents available online and key word searchable. It also draws upon their respective expertise – Hitchcock on the history of urban poverty and Shoemaker on the history of metropolitan crime – and their continued collaboration provides new insights into the experience of being a ‘pauper’ and a ‘criminal’ in eighteenth-century London.

The eighteenth century was a period of transformation in criminal justice as the system creaked under the weight of the ‘Bloody Code’ and new forms of punishment had to be found, while there was a tripling of poor relief expenditure in the city. London was also the site of innovative philanthropic endeavours, including the Foundling Hospital, the Marine Society and the Magdalene Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes. The poor and criminal in London displayed a particular flavour of agency, it is argued, which was not just urban but metropolitan, and which was enacted within a complex and over-lapping system of criminal and poor law jurisdictional boundaries.

There were many ways in which the poor and criminals subverted, undermined and forced the reshaping of social policy: through settlement certification; badging for ‘belonging’ rather than deterrence; petitioning justices for relief; ‘abandoning’ their children to the Foundling Hospital; continued resort to begging; becoming, using or exploiting thief-takers and rewards; employing a lawyer for defence counsel; lack of deference in court, outright defiance at the gallows, or refusal to accept a pardon; rioting and escaping from Newgate and the hulks; and contributing towards the crumbling of the principle of deterrence applied to the new urban workhouses by medicalizing them whilst also ensuring the extension of outdoor relief. The experiences of ordinary people loom large (the authors have assembled c. 3,000 ‘sets’ of ‘fragments of lives’) and Hitchcock and Shoemaker weave personal stories into the weft of the larger story, opening with Thomas Limpus, who spent time not only in the workhouse of St Martins in the Fields, but also on the hulks, in the house of correction at Tothill Fields, in New Prison, and was sentenced to transportation not once but twice. Others have the most fantastic names, such as Mary Cut-and-Come-Again, ballad singer and thief. Although this is a history from below, those at the top making policy also feature, such as the author and magistrate Henry Fielding and his half-brother John Fielding, also a magistrate, who together initiated the ‘Bow Street Runners’, the forerunners of Robert Peel's 1820s metropolitan ‘bobbies’, and Jonas Hanway, merchant, writer and philanthropist who initiated a system whereby workhouse infants and children were nursed in the countryside.

One strength of this book is the interleaving of all these stories with a range of quantitative evidence on offences, prosecutions, legal counsel, commitments and punishments at Bridewell and the Old Bailey; workhouse admissions and parish poor law expenditure; the number of escapees from prisons, hulks and transports. Supplementing these graphs are images of ballads, workhouse plans and engravings and cartoons by William Hogarth, Henry Fletcher and James Gillray. A weakness might be that assembling ‘fragments’ in a place the size of London must surely be problematic (and given common names and numerous aliases) and the book perhaps required further explanation of the methodology. In addition, in terms of poor relief policy the study draws upon the records of just four parishes out of hundreds; but, of course, source survival is sporadic at best and a wider survey might have been difficult.

The book takes a chronological approach with six substantive chapters covering the period 1690–1789 and a shorter postscript devoted to the 1790s. Each analyses approaches to criminal justice and welfare policy within a sub-period whilst keeping to the central theme of the reshaping of welfare policy and criminal justice from the bottom. Topics include the reformation of manners campaigns, the Riot and Transportation Acts of 1715 and 1718 respectively, the ‘lawyerization’ of the trial by criminals such as the Black Boy Alley gang, tussles for the corpse at Tyburn, workhouse cruelty and vagrancy. The authors believe that they have produced a book that draws upon as many publicly available primary and secondary sources as possible. They had intended the book to be read online and onscreen so that readers could click on references and go straight to the original source. It is a great shame that such an edition did not come to fruition. Nonetheless, readers can relatively easily locate the references – particularly those held on www.londonlives.org and www.oldbaileyonline.org, which largely underpin its conclusions – since the London Lives and Old Bailey individual document references are given as well as instructions for locating the individual biographies (‘sets’). The bibliography is arranged so that publicly available sources can be found.

This is a very readable and yet densely researched book and one that provides the poor and the criminal with even more agency than that awarded by other historians in recent years. It will be of particular interest to readers of Urban History given the location of its focus and its insistence upon the peculiarity of London. It will be of use to students undertaking undergraduate and postgraduate courses and to scholars researching the metropolis in the eighteenth century. This is a book about crime waves and moral panics, the rule of the mob, the gin craze and a broad spectrum of ‘celebrities’ from the highwayman James Maclene, the thief-taker general Jonathan Wild and the first high-profile lawyer William Garrow, and the ‘new’ ‘celebrities’ of the authors’ making: Thomas Limpus and Mary Cut-and-Come-Again.