This book is exemplary in offering an engaging narrative and a clear argument, and openly inviting further debate and examination of the evidence. The fruit of Tim Hitchcock's and Robert Shoemaker's monumental online data archives, it is dedicated to everyone who helped to create the Old Bailey Online and London Lives websites. The text brings together the conclusions of many of the articles using these archives, which have been published in disparate journals and collections.
The linking of poor relief and criminal justice systems is novel, but makes sense in so far as their historical bureaucratic development went hand in hand, from the point of view of authorities, in controlling disorder. London lives explores the subject through the ‘role plebeian Londoners played in shaping the development of modern social policy’ (p. xi), where plebeians are defined as those at risk of falling into poverty or crime. To the extent that Londoners were on the receiving end of poor relief and criminal trials, their reactions to attempts at social control shaped the ways in which elites responded, and to a degree determined the success or failure of policy innovations over the century. Other historians have posited the agency of the poor in particular in negotiating for relief, but Hitchcock and Shoemaker here present a fully elaborated argument that all social policy over the eighteenth century resulted from the interplay between elite concern over expenditure and crime on the one hand, and the paupers and criminals on the other. The poor and the criminal bargained with the authorities from a position of relative weakness, but ‘acting both together and alone, [they] determined which policies and institutions would survive (and in what form) and which would collapse in chaos’ (p. 4).
The chapters are organised chronologically. ‘Beggarman, thief: 1690–1713’ assesses the growth of pauper badging and settlement certificates in response to the rise in poor migrants, the establishment of the London Workhouse, and the shift of poor law administration from parish officials to justices in order to police ‘unacceptable migration’ (p. 29). Paupers used this shift to their advantage by appealing directly to justice, creating a new kind of legal agency. The campaign for the reformation of manners is judged to have had relatively limited effect.
‘Protest and resistance: 1713–31’ looks at the divided politics and labour unrest of the early Hanoverian years. The increase in the number of capital crimes produced a reaction against hanging and a massive rise in transportation as an alternative punishment. The attempt to make workhouse admission the only form of poor relief was foiled by paupers refusing to accept it, and by those who did enter the workhouse calling attention to inhumane practices.
‘Vestries, justices and their opponents: 1731–48’ charts a period of relative calm and prosperity, and the end of the first reformation of manners campaign. But the pressure of criminal business led to the rise of trading justices; attempts to reward informers with pay provoked more criminal attacks on informers; and the period saw criminal defendants hire legal counsel for the first time. Workhouses increasingly provided medical care of necessity.
‘Reformers and their discontents: 1748–63’ covers the changing outline of the metropolis, with rapid southern expansion facilitated by the building of Westminster Bridge (12 salaried watchmen and 32 streetlights); the rise of Henry Fielding and his Bow Street Runners; and increasing use of transportation as authorities not only saw execution as impolitic, but also came to regard whipping and hard labour as ineffective and easily subverted. For the poor, the Foundling Hospital marked ‘the most expensive and murderous experiment in social welfare in British history’ (p. 255).
‘Finding a voice: 1763–76’ again deals with the crime wave that followed demobilisation, this time after the Seven Years’ War, the even more intense prosecution wave led by John Fielding, and the decline of the celebrity highwaymen whose stories appeared in print through the first half of the century.
‘The state in chaos: 1776–89’ reviews the crisis caused by the sudden cessation of transportation with the American Revolution, the Thames hulks that housed prisoners for more than a decade, widespread prison rebuilding, and the plebeian fury unleashed by the Gordon Riots.
‘Epilogue: the 1790s’ sees the conjunction of plebeian resistance and radical politics precipitating new forms of policing (stipendiary magistrates, the extension of vagrancy), punishment (the triumph of imprisonment), and surveillance. Pauper children, following the example of the Foundling Hospital, were now contractually apprenticed in the new textile factories of the north-west, safely transferring their legal settlement out of London in an alternate form of transportation.
Throughout the period, ‘[t]hrough violence and tactic, playing the system and occasionally employing professionals to play it for them, Londoners honed strategies’ (p. 269). The clarion call to make plebeian agency a pillar of analysis makes this a superb book to teach from, consistently highlighting shifting relationships – between migrants, vagrants, paupers, criminals, magistrates, parish officers, ratepayers, the bench, reformers and voluntary associations. The footnotes to case files at Old Bailey Online and London Lives can easily be consulted by students, figures can be checked using the ‘Statistics’ section of the Search function in Old Bailey Online, and the spreadsheets that underlie the tables are online through the Cambridge University Press website (currently located obscurely under the ‘Resources’ tab at multimediafluids.uam.elogim.com/9781107639942). Helpfully, these spreadsheets cover the longer timespan, rather than the chunks of the chapters.
The authors’ intention was for this to be a new type of ebook, ‘best read online, allowing you to click through directly from the primary sources cited and quoted in the text to transcriptions and images of the original documents’ (p. xi). However, readers of the ebook will find that that it is merely a pdf of the printed version, and so there is no click through. Shoemaker has commented on the publishing difficulties in a post on ‘The future of the (e)book’ available at http://www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/future-ebook/. Nevertheless, this book provides an excellent background for those of us who have already made use of the online archives, and offers to those who have yet to explore them inspiration to investigate the poor relief, hospitals, workhouses, removals, commitments, prosecutions, convictions, transportations, executions, and riots which in different ways affected so many plebeian Londoners in the largest city in western Europe.
