It could be argued that the title The London Mob, in Robert Shoemaker's latest monograph, is misleading. Rather than simply revisiting ground memorably explored by the likes of George Rudé and Nicholas Rogers, Shoemaker's aim is to explore the mobile vulgus, the movable or excitable crowd. He does this in several chapters that travel between thieves, defamers, duelers, and the infamous London “monster,” Renwick Williams. The “mob,” for Shoemaker, embodies the range of behavior that the poor, the criminal, the deviant, the disorderly, and the lawmaker and lawbreaker engage in on the London streets. What he presents us with is a social history of street life in eighteenth-century London. However, this is not simply an exercise in trawling through picturesque examples of metropolitan street life. The chapters hang around a central argument about street space in the eighteenth century. It was from the late seventeenth century that the street became the chaotic and crowded space that Shoemaker describes.

The dramatic rate of population growth during the eighteenth century (from 575,000 in 1700 to 900,000 in 1800 [10]), comparable with the rate of growth of today's Tokyo or Beijing, gives us some sense of the “thronging” of the streets of London. The combination of demographics with the growth of the market, consumption, trade, and finance fueled urban culture, and hence London's growth. It was also an intensely mobile city, and as such, one in which traditional, parochial systems of social relations had to become more fluid. Shoemaker traces the conflicts and tensions in this urban culture, which, by the eighteenth century, used the street as its main stage. Thus Habermas's public space is here interpreted as one in which a wide range of social discourses, social conflicts, and sexual exchanges become themselves, “public.” How well does Shoemaker do this? He leaves little uncovered in his exploration of street life; the visceral public engagement in the “hue and cry” tells of the extent to which justice was both broken and pursued in a very public arena. Thieves, prostitutes, street robbers, highwaymen, and beggars inevitably crowd any picture of the metropolitan streets. For Shoemaker they are certainly central characters. There is little room in this account for the polite. This is not the London of Steele or Addison, and despite some exploration of dueling, Shoemaker's metropolis is owned overwhelmingly by the mob. As he points out, “Violence was never far away on the streets of eighteenth-century London” (153).

On the whole Shoemaker's account is successful. He interweaves short chapters with bright bursts of texture, critique, and humor. By mixing contemporary commentary with judicious use of the Old Bailey Session Papers (of which he is a director, along with Tim Hitchcock), he presents a broadly holistic account of London street life. This is not a book that seeks to add anything startlingly new to the established historiographies of crime, riot, and violence; rather he draws these themes together in order for us to see the London street as a public space. However, Shoemaker argues that the relationship of the “mob” with, and behavior in, that public space shifts over the course of the eighteenth century; hence, street life moves indoors. This theme is implicit in the earlier chapters. Thus in chapter 2, “Stop Thief!”policing is explored in its broadest sense as being a public and communal activity: the mob was raised in the shout of “stop thief!” witnessed, gave information, and sometimes dispensed its own justice or discretion. In July 1739, near the Royal Exchange, the mob apprehended a well-dressed gentleman accused of taking a handkerchief from a woman, “but it being believed she was a person of ill-fame, the mob discharged their prisoner” (32). By the end of the century this had changed. As Shoemaker points out, during the course of the eighteenth century, there was a “general withdrawal of Londoners from participation in street conflict” (49). In the case of suspected persons, the gradual professionalization of law enforcement, salaried watchmen, and constables meant that financial incentives and public duty were no longer relevant. Equally, defamation and public insult were increasingly considered impolite as the century wore on. The neighborhood, like the mob, had a declining role in policing individual behavior; “many people came to see honour as a private matter, unsuitable for public discussion” (74–75). The movement of punishments from the street to indoors, the decline of riot and crowd protest, and the intolerance for public violent conduct have been well covered in the historiography. Shoemaker builds on these themes to conclude that this was a period in which the relationship between the individual and the community changed. Public opinion and public demonstration gradually lost their power in a society that increasingly drew distinctions between public and private life. Not that Shoemaker is content with truisms of “public to private.” Indeed he argues that any easy, deterministic model of the emergence of the private and professional is unsatisfactory. As he points out in chapter 8, “Going to the Law,” the unwillingness of the populace to air its dirty linen in public does not result in going to the increasingly visible and public justice. While the law had provided an alternative to street conflict in the earlier part of the century, Shoemaker argues that ordinary Londoners were increasingly alienated from justice. Thus professionalization may have changed the position of the law in English culture, but it did not replace the street as the site for resolving conflict.

Superficially, as the jacket proclaims, this book offers a portrait of public life in the metropolis. However, much more than this, Shoemaker attempts to unwind some of the now orthodox models of public and private, alongside notions of space, negotiation, and discretion, all fluid concepts in the new social environments that were developing in eighteenth-century London. Thus, while the threat of the mob might be the organizing theme of this book, it is his dissection of the relationship between the individual and the community that really stands out.