I.

In 1839, the Constabulary Force Commission, created by Parliament to study the conditions of crime and policing beyond London and to make recommendations for jurisdictional reforms, published its findings in the First Constabulary Report. To illustrate for readers the necessity of establishing constabularies modeled after London's Metropolitan Police Force in counties and boroughs throughout England and Wales, Edwin Chadwick, utilitarian reformer and principal draftsman of the Report, interwove the Commission's recommendations with numerous testimonies from representatives of the so-called criminal classes that pervaded nineteenth-century society.Footnote ¹ These sometimes graphic confessions were calculated to shock as much as persuade, which made for popular reading, notwithstanding widespread political opposition to the Commission's proposals (Philips 69). Section twenty eight, for example, contains the account of “J– R–,” a nineteen-year-old ex-sailor from Manchester who had committed a series of petty larcenies before turning to more serious burglaries of homes and businesses, at which he became quite adept. This young-but-seasoned offender's confession included what were intended to be alarming revelations about the physical vulnerabilities of English houses. JR testified that he had “[f]ound none or very few difficulties in the way of committing crime. The readiness with which property was got . . . was an encouragement” (Lefevre, Rowan, and Chadwick 27). In recounting the details of his crimes (and citing anecdotal evidence from fellow thieves), he pointed out that most houses were entered easily with the use of skeleton keys or through cellar windows, and that householders and servants practiced few if any serious security precautions (27–28). JR concluded that he did “not know of any places or kinds of property so protected as to induce depredators to refrain from attacking them” but added, no doubt with pressure from the interviewer, that the “most important obstruction which could be placed in the way of depredations is a more efficient police” (29).

I bring up JR's confession not because it is particularly notable – his tenure as a burglar was in fact typical, according to Chadwick (26) – but because in commenting on the confession, Chadwick called attention to the need for an extra-juridical form of crime deterrence. While he acknowledged that some readers might object to the candid “disclosure” of specific points of insecurity, he justified publication by observing:

Leaving aside the fact that Chadwick blithely accused a sizable segment of the population below the middle-class threshold of latent criminality, his recommendation that the propertied classes should be alerted to the threat of crime and should take a more responsible, active role in deterrence is remarkable because it ran counter to an already entrenched attitude among government authorities that prevention fell exclusively within their jurisdiction. As Daniel Gilling puts it, officials concentrated their efforts primarily on preventive policing and then on penal reform but had little “interest in harnessing the community's potential contribution to crime prevention. [T]here was a pervasive belief that the new criminal justice institutions would prevent crime alone, and propaganda to the effect of their capacity to do this was an important element in their legitimation” (71). Somewhat ironically, given his bureaucratic disposition and advocacy of expanded policing powers, Chadwick sought to enlist the community as a partner in the fight against crime; his recommendation was in effect a call for public education in what criminologists today refer to as situational crime prevention or target hardening, terms which denote initiatives, most often undertaken by individuals, to protect life and property against criminal acts by removing or at least reducing vulnerabilities in the built environment with security mechanisms such as locks, bars, bolts, grilles, gates, safes, and alarms (South 42; O'Block, Donnermeyer, and Doeren 303).Footnote ² Although Chadwick saw this as a pedagogical task for officials and included in the Constabulary Report advice on security from thieves as well as an appendix that explained various weapons, tools, and methods used during home and business invasions and recommended target-hardening measures (210–15), the British government would not begin working with the community until the latter half of the twentieth century.Footnote ³

However, despite Chadwick's admonition on one hand and bureaucratic reserve on the other, the Victorian middle class was arguably the most security-conscious (if not security-obsessed) society in the western world. Indeed, from at least the 1830s target hardening was an increasingly common practice, especially in London, as noted by observers and satirized in fiction and the periodical press; and evidence suggests that the level of security consumption was generally high.Footnote ⁴ This phenomenon was driven largely by writing on situational crime prevention, which emerged and proliferated in various unofficial discursive settings, and which constantly warned (and often complained) that people did not do enough to secure their homes. Like the Constabulary Report, this literature was often calculated to provoke anxiety, inundating readers with accounts of housebreaking and burglary and advising them on the best methods of deterrence; moreover, it fused crime prevention with the self-help ethos to engender what have become, as Ann Dupuis and David Thorns observe in a recent essay on the contemporary phenomenon of gated communities, widely accepted notions in much of western society that situational crime prevention is an element of middle-class propriety and primarily an individual's responsibility (152, 154). Although Dupuis and Thorns as well as the scholars cited in their study tend to regard these attitudes as symptomatic of increased failure of confidence in public institutions to provide security in post-industrial late modernity (149–55), such attitudes originated and in fact flourished at a time when the Victorian public's trust in the effectiveness of institutionalized forms of protection was far from complete. Punch complained in 1850, for instance, “that if the Police were only to bestow one half the zeal in preventing a robbery, which they generally display in finding it out, many thousands of pounds, and probably a few lives, would be saved in the course of every year” (“Prevention”). By way of a rejoinder, George Cruikshank's Stop Thief; or, Hints to Housekeepers to Prevent Housebreaking (Reference Cross1851), to take one example from the crime-prevention literature, sets out to demonstrate how, through individual target-hardening initiatives, “society may be secured against depredations; to allay . . . all cause for fear . . . and to give such a feeling of security, that even nervous persons may lay down their heads upon their pillows at night without apprehension of damage to their property or violence to their persons” (2–3). After explaining (and illustrating) the methods by which burglars commonly attack houses and guiding readers through various strategies of home defense, Cruikshank observes:

By suggesting that those who rely solely on police protection and do not themselves take proper preventive measures are culpably negligent, Cruikshank implicitly expresses a thesis reiterated with notable frequency in nineteenth-century crime-prevention writing: an Englishman's home is his castle – but only to the extent that he fortifies and defends it.

I would argue that situational crime prevention constitutes an important but largely unexamined chapter in the cultural history of the built environment, notwithstanding the considerable attention scholars have devoted to the production and organization of Victorian domestic space.Footnote ⁵ I would note, as well, that invoking the Englishman's castle requires coming to terms with a tendency in the scholarship to interpret that metaphor in conjunction with the mandates of privacy. Studies of nineteenth-century housing have focused largely on the formative influence of the separate-spheres ideology, which did unquestionably establish privacy as a cardinal doctrine of bourgeois respectability, whereas crime prevention has figured as, at most, a peripheral concern. This has been the case, I think, because scholars have understandably placed great emphasis on architectural and domestic discourses, in which target hardening was not, as a rule, the priority that “privacy and protection from the public gaze,” as Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall put it (365), clearly was. Without questioning the valuable and much needed work produced in this body of scholarship, I want to argue that the conceptual (if not always the material) framework of the Englishman's castle was, more often than has been acknowledged, constructed of two constituent elements, security and privacy, though accounts of middle-class enclosure have tended to rhetorically envelop security within the category of privacy and privilege the latter.Footnote ⁶ This is not to suggest that target hardening and the protocols of bourgeois respectability did not converge in important ways. But distinguishing (however strategically) between anxieties about crime and anxieties about exposure to the public's gaze, as I hope to demonstrate, will enable us to see the extent to which situational crime prevention was a distinctive, deeply embedded, and influential cultural discourse in its own right.

II.

To consider briefly a prominent example of the scholarship, in Apartment Stories Sharon Marcus begins an analysis of mid-Victorian middle-class housing by pointing out that William A. Thomas's 1851 Household Words essay, “An Englishman's Castle,” punctured boasts that the English enjoyed greater privacy and domestic peace than the apartment-dwelling French and called into question the ostensible boundary between the separate spheres (3). A short time later, she sets up the argument for a chapter on middle-class housing, claiming “that although the ideology of the separate spheres infused almost all representations of Victorian London, and all the houses built there, it did not generate a corresponding set of dwelling practices in the metropolis” (5). Marcus returns to the Englishman's castle when she observes that the phrase denoted an individual's political liberties when Edward Coke used it in 1644, but that it took on a new meaning in the nineteenth century. Repeatedly, the Victorians employed the phrase “primarily in domestic contexts that transmuted its original political and legal import; and it was commonly modified to emphasize its national component – ‘an Englishman's home is his castle.’” She thus reads Victorian redactions of Coke's metaphor as evidence of “the extent to which nineteenth-century discourses shifted the terms of Englishness from men's enjoyment of political liberties (keeping authorities out) to their engrossment in an impregnable space (keeping themselves in)” (91). Marcus demonstrates persuasively that domestic ideology played a crucial role in producing such an effect in theory if not always in practice. But I would suggest that what she refers to as the discourse of “domestic complaint, which showed how legal conventions, building conditions, and dwelling practices all prevented London's homes from coinciding with the domestic ideal” (108), could, and in fact should, be understood to include crime-prevention writing, which stressed keeping out not merely authorities, which went without saying, but also what many perceived as a class of especially skilled and cunning predators always lurking just beyond the domestic threshold.

Indeed, further consideration of Thomas's use of the metaphor in Household Words reveals a more complex notion than the mandates of domestic privacy alone could apparently accommodate. As Thomas put it, “I rather think the idea of a place where one can repose, after the rude combat of daily life, as well as the idea of strength and security, is meant in the expression that ‘An Englishman's house is his castle’” (323). In this passage, the domestic castle figures as a haven from what John Ruskin, in his well-known passage from Sesame and Lilies (Reference Ruskin1865), called man's “rough work in open world” (87) as well as a fortified refuge. That is, privacy and security, articulated as discreet categories, have distinct semantic values: protection from the gaze of public life on one hand and defense against even more serious external threats on the other. Coke himself made much the same distinction in his original dictum: “the house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose; and . . . if thieves come to a man's house to rob him, or murder, and the owner or his servants kill any in defence of himself and his house, it is not felony” (qtd. in Arnheim 203). Nineteenth-century legal as well as cultural texts reiterated Coke's differentiation. In his Law Dictionary (Reference Tomlins1835), for example, Thomas Eldyne Tomlins explained in a lengthy entry on burglary, “[e]very man's house is considered as his castle, as well for defence against violence and injury, as for repose.” The legal importance of this distinction is evident in Tomlins's observation that one could still legitimately use deadly force to defend his home: “To violate this security is considered of so atrocious a nature, that the alarmed inhabitant, whether he be an owner or a mere inmate . . . is . . . expressly permitted to repel the violence by the death of the assailants, without incurring the penalties even for excusable homicide” (xciv).

However much Victorian domestic discourse may have attempted to transmute the legal implications of Coke's dictum, some continued to regard martial defense of the castle as not merely a right but also as a duty and even a public service. The author of “The Prevention of Robbery and Murder Made Easy” (Examiner 1850), for instance, dismissed the efficacy of special door fasteners and alarms but applauded the action of a “vigilant and courageous” butler who, earlier that year, not only stopped burglars from entering the Regent's Park residence of his employer but also shot one of the intruders as he attempted to flee and was “crying for quarter.” The author described the shooting as the “most effective” preventive measure available:

Advocating armed resistance when there was no question that one was firing upon a criminal, the London Review (1865) put the matter even more trenchantly: “To shoot a real burglar in flagrante delicto, is . . . as meritorious an act as to shoot a rabid dog, and there need be no more scruple in one case as in another” (“Homicide” 604). This level of aggression points toward the fact that security is a critical component of selfhood, which, when threatened, provokes a potentially violent reaction. Inhabiting a secure, controlled environment fosters a sense of individuality and place and ownership, whereas burglary violates these, initiating something akin to an ontological crisis that forces the victim to reevaluate a legitimating framework of his or her identity (Chapman 134–37). Given this ontological vulnerability, the Quarterly Review observed in 1870 that burglaries, while rare “compared” to the size of London's population, “probably occasion more terror than all the other offences against person and property combined” (“Police of London” 60). Thus beyond the loss of property, both legal and social commentators saw burglary, which consisted of breaking and entering with the intent to rob, kill, rape, or commit some other felony between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., and which, as Tomlins wrote, is committed in “the dead of night, when sleep has disarmed the owner, and rendered his castle defenceless” (xciv), as an especially egregious invasion of domestic space.

Citing the ability of burglars to exploit this weakness, observers also invoked Coke's metaphor to highlight the critical gap between a house's legal status and the actual physical protection it afforded. “However much of castles houses may be in law,” John Wade argued in A Treatise on the Police and Crimes of the Metropolis (Reference Wade1829), “they prove weak defences when opposed to the burglar. [We] are convinced that if mechanics and builders would direct their attention to the subject, such precautions might be devised as would defeat any attempt at housebreaking” (194). Similarly, a writer in All the Year Round complained in 1891: “There is a proverbial saying, which always seems to bear with it a certain smack of constitutional law, to the effect that an Englishman's house is his castle. Castles in the good old days were – or at least were reputed to be – hard to get into, a characteristic which the house of the contemporary Englishman, according to the reports from the suburbs, which alarm us every year at the beginning of the burglary season, does not share” (“Living in Boxes” 464). Throughout the century, commentators protested that houses, particularly those constructed by speculative builders in suburban London, were poorly built and insecure. These faux country villas, in contrast with the “dull and gloomy” but nonetheless substantive and “tenantable” structures of the city, were “cheap” and “fragile,” according to The Building News (1862). Inveighing against the widespread use of sub-standard building materials, the author claimed that the suburban house was “a painted sepulcher” with unstable walls, malfunctioning locks, and other problems that required costly and “endless repairs”; and he estimated that only one out of every hundred suburban houses was well built (“Suburban Villas”). Cruikshank complained that builders fitted windows, shutters, and doors with insecure “common fastenings,” and that they constructed doors and shutters from deal, an inexpensive, insubstantial softwood “as easily cut through as a piece of cheese” (3, 13); to resist burglars’ cutting tools, he recommended studding the wood with nails and lining it with sheets of iron (5–6). Along the same lines, the Furniture Gazette (1883) warned that weak doors were the norm and a point of particular vulnerability:

Sturdy doors capable of resisting a burglar's attack were no longer marketed, the article noted, and could “only be procured to order, and at much additional cost above ordinary prices” (22). The situation was no better with regard to locks. Francis Cross's Hints to All About to Rent, Buy, or Build House Property (Reference Cross1851) cautioned that builders used “an inferior and cheap description of locks and fastenings” and advised would-be householders to sub-contract the purchase of better quality hardware and have builders install it for them (65–66). George Hayter Chubb explained in Protection from Fire and Thieves (Reference Chubb1875) that most house locks were still constructed on a principle that had been superseded in the late-eighteenth century with the invention of theft-resistant lever locks and were thus insecure and worthless (14). “At a very low computation at least three-fourths of the houses in London can be entered by false keys,” he warned, “and it is simply owing to the vigilance of the often-abused police that robberies are not more constantly effected” (15). In A Treatise on Fire and Thief Proof Depositories, and Locks and Keys (Reference Price1856), Midlands safe manufacturer George Price observed that frightened householders “frequently expend from two to three pounds in the purchase of a brace of pistols, or a gun, as a means of preservation from the attack of burglars, when for less than half that amount spent in secure outer fastenings, the citadel might be kept perfectly safe against unwelcome intruders” (231). And a writer in The Sanitary Record (1882) claimed that “the very unsafe manner” in which builders constructed suburban houses made “it a matter of necessity for the householder to find some reliable means by which he may hope to checkmate the attempts of the modern burglar to enter his domicile.” Those unable to afford “expensive safeguards, in the way of costly shutters and such kindred appliances,” could nevertheless “guard . . . against nocturnal visitors by attaching to such windows or doors, where an entry is likely to be effected, a simple apparatus in the form of a burglar-alarm” (“Manchester Smoke” 425).

As these comments suggest, security was not a priority in the building trades, and scholarship reflects the fact that this was the case with architects as well. Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, for example, introduce an engaging analysis of the complex cultural semiotics of Victorian walls with this observation: “Victorian domesticity was as much a spatial as an affective obsession. Increasingly, to imagine a flourishing private life was to articulate space, to secure boundaries, and to distribute bodies. . . . To create material defenses against exposure and to design the interior of the household as a series of safe boxes were architectural imperatives prompted by a cultural longing” (143). Given the title of the chapter in which this passage occurs (“On the Parapets of Privacy”), it is perhaps not surprising that domestic privacy functions as the governing concept in service to which “secure boundaries” and “material defenses” are subordinate and indeed derivative terms. Chase and Levenson reinforce this idea in a companion chapter, which traces architect Robert Kerr's efforts to redesign the flawed Saxon original of the Englishman's castle according to the nineteenth-century domestic ideal in his book The Gentleman's House (1864). As they demonstrate, Kerr valorized privacy, treating it as the protagonist of a quasi-evolutionary “drama” of English architectural progress that culminated in the mid-century cloistered household (162). Considering their emphasis on such texts, one can see how Chase and Levenson are perhaps justified in subordinating security to privacy. Indeed, although they do not cite this particular passage, Kerr described privacy as the “first principle with the better classes of English people” in a rather elaborate taxonomy of qualifications that houses had to meet to pass his “test” of architectural fitness (67). And while Kerr did mention the need to guard the family plate in a safe and keep the household stores “under lock and key” (222, 226), security did not make his list.

III.

Yet as the principles of bourgeois culture went, it would be an understatement to say that security could reasonably vie with privacy for a claim to preeminence. Expressing what could be taken as a creed of the nineteenth-century middle class, a writer in the London Magazine commented in 1829: “The security of life and property is the foundation of all society; and accursed be that man who would do aught to infringe upon either” (“One Subject” 315). With this the architects of political economy (if not always of the built environment) agreed. In Utilitarianism (Reference Mill1861), for example, John Stuart Mill described security as “to everyone's feelings the most vital of all interests.” Security, he asserted, “no human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from evil and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment, since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us if we could be deprived of anything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves” (53). Rather than limiting its application to the “better classes,” Mill presented security as a universal human right that affords personal safety, the realization of value, and prospection. He then pushed the point further, insisting that to ensure “this most indispensable of all necessaries, after physical nutriment . . . the machinery for providing it [must be] kept unintermittedly in active play” (53). In describing security in such urgent, unequivocal terms, Mill simply reiterated what was by mid-century an axiom of liberal political philosophy (Neocleous 142; see also Burke 9). And like many Victorian commentators, he saw crime prevention as a legislative priority and had earlier stated in On Liberty (Reference Mill1859) that it was “one of the undisputed functions of government” (89).

In reality, though, deterrence was a policy more honored in the breach for much of the century. In the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, Robert Peel instructed constables “at the outset, that the principal object to be obtained is the prevention of crime,” rather than “detection and punishment.” To that end, constables’ “vigilance and activity” should make “it extremely difficult for any one to commit a crime within that portion of the town under their charge” (“Metropolitan Police” 4–5). Yet this mandate had more political than practical value. As Gilling points out, prevention, which would in theory reduce the necessity of incarcerating offenders as well as decrease government expenditures for detection and prosecution, helped the utilitarian architects of reform win the debate over the establishment of a centralized police force (108–09). Policing comprised “part of the matrix of deterrence, in which a uniformed, visible presence ideally reminded any potential miscreant of the certainty of apprehension. In this regard, the model of prevention was primary, based principally on police patrolling” (109; also see Taylor 577–78). Nevertheless, evidence that officials manipulated crime statistics dramatically downward throughout the latter half of the century suggests that effective policing as envisioned by Peel was more illusory than real (Taylor 580–81). Moreover, the County and Borough Police Act of 1856 requiring the establishment of forces throughout England and Wales, though driven by the logic of prevention, ironically catalyzed a decisive shift toward detection, for it also required accountability in exchange for partial funding from the central government (which provided constabularies with one-quarter of the costs for officers’ uniforms and salaries). Under the arrangement, local officials had to demonstrate to inspectors from the Home Office that constabularies were operating efficiently, and they soon came to realize that they could more readily do this by placing emphasis on detection and arrests rather than prevention. Consequently, Peel's mandate was abandoned and detection became the guiding principle of British policing until the mid-twentieth century (Gilling 111; O'Malley and Hutchinson 383; and Steedman 25).Footnote ⁷

Even before this re-prioritization, proponents expressed reservations that the Metropolitan Police could effectively prevent property crimes, which comprised roughly eighty percent of all “indictable” offenses in mid-century London, according to an 1852 article in the Edinburgh Review (25). Although the author of “The Police System of London” credited the force with rendering the capital more decent and tranquil than in recent memory and with making it safe to walk London's streets “by day or night” (23), he also admitted that theft posed an almost intractable problem for authorities:

In light of the fact that prosecution costs, some of which fell on victims of theft, were quite often prohibitive; that sentencing was guided by penal reformers’ rejection of retributive justice and the subordination of victims’ demands for severe punishments; and that the government would begin phasing out transportation in the 1850s, the situation for frightened property owners often looked bleak indeed (“House-Breaking and Burglaries”; “Police of London” 61–64; Sindall 53; and Taylor 573, 577). And if advocates of the Metropolitan Police regarded theft prevention in such pessimistic terms, the problem was compounded by the notoriety of English burglars and housebreakers, whose expertise with specialized tools was a widely acknowledged fact.Footnote ⁸ As W. H. Wills put the matter in “The Modern Science of Thief-Taking” (Household Words Reference Wills1850): “If thieving be an Art (and who denies that its more subtle and delicate branches deserve to be ranked as one of the Fine Arts?) thief-taking is a Science” (368). Notably, Wills's title foregrounds detection, and this is true of much of the essay's content, which evinces little or no confidence in the work of the proverbial Bobby, personified by the hypothetical “X49,” an inept Cockney who bungles a case of housebreaking, and who bears little resemblance to Peel's vigilant constable supposed to form the front line of prevention (368).Footnote ⁹ Little more than a decade later criminal competency had graduated from art to science in public opinion. According to Alfred H. Guernsey's “Robbery as a Science” (Harper's New Monthly Magazine Reference Guernsey1863), “robbery, pure and simple, has been brought to the perfection of a system with well-established rules, cunning implements, and able professors.” “To study this science thoroughly,” he observed, “one must go to London, just as the young surgeon should study in the hospitals of Paris, or the young artist in the galleries of Rome.” And as London was “the school of the robber,” he reasoned, “the person who wishes to guard against his performance needs to look to London for the means” (738). The London guardian against theft to which Guernsey directed his readers was not to be found at Scotland Yard, however, but at St. Paul's Churchyard, where one could visit the showroom of Chubb and Son, manufacturers of patent locks, burglar-proof safes, and strongboxes (742–43).Footnote ¹⁰

As the official focus shifted toward detective policing, criticism mounted even among former supporters, who expressed categorical lack of confidence in the beat cop's ability to deter crime. For example, the London Review, the journal that had published Chadwick's “Preventive Police,” observed that the burglar “laughs at policemen”; the police “may track him after his task is done, but not once in a hundred cases are they able to prevent it” (“Homicide” 604). With even greater acerbity, Dickens observed in “The Ruffian” (All the Year Round Reference Dickens1868) that he could easily spot the ruffian, a term used synonymously with thief in much of the essay, and predict the actions of this habitual criminal; he then posed an angry rhetorical question, the logic of which worked from his presumption of guilt: “Now, when I, who am not paid to know these things, know them daily . . . is it surprising that I should require from those who are paid to know these things, prevention of them?” (422). Dickens's anger intensified as he rhetorically nursed his complaint: self-governing, law-abiding citizens were at the mercy of violent criminals but “constantly admonished from high places . . . that we are not to take the law into our own hands, but are to hand our defence over to it” (424). By the end of the essay, Dickens, formerly a staunch advocate of the police, berated the force for its incompetence, concluding that it dealt “so inefficiently and absurdly [with the ruffian] that he flourishes, and multiplies, and . . . pervades the streets with no more let or hindrance than ourselves” (424).Footnote ¹¹ During the London garroting panics of 1856 and 1862, which were generated more by increased reporting than escalations of crime, criticism was particularly sharp and crime prevention became an even more urgent cause in the press (Sindall 351). In November of 1862, the Times called for the reestablishment of transportation and warned readers: “Now the long nights are coming we shall have to buy revolvers and carry them” (qtd. in Sindall 356). Henry W. Holland in “The Science of Garotting and Housebreaking” (1863), one of a series of articles on criminals and crime prevention that he published in the Cornhill Magazine in the early 1860s, claimed that the supposed crime wave had caught authorities off guard and argued that as “[b]urglary also is alarmingly frequent . . . for that, too, there appears no immediate remedy beyond the courage and caution which every man may exercise in his own defence” (82).

Dickensian invective notwithstanding, public perception of the problem was not that the police were incompetent necessarily (though commentators repeatedly questioned the competence of penal reformers and the judicial system), but that they were undermanned and thus unable to adequately patrol an area as large as London. As John Binny informed readers of the fourth volume of London Labour and the London Poor, the constable's round averaged “fifteen to twenty minutes,” allowing thieves to time their entries and exits without risk of detection, which made it imperative that householders protect themselves (336; see also 350 and 354). “Give an experienced burglar a quarter of an hour's security from a surprise on the part of an inmate of a house, or passing policeman or other person outside,” the Furniture Gazette warned, “and your modern suburban hall-door and window-sashes will give way to the leverage he applies [with a jemmy] if he lacks a sharp-cutting or opening tool, which he seldom does in the form of ingenious pocket-knives, skeleton keys, &c.” (“Hall-Doors” 21). Holland used this window of opportunity as a frame for narrating a quasi-hypothetical case of burglary compiled from confessions he had heard as a prison chaplain. He writes:

Although not a representative of the security industry, Holland deploys in this passage the sort of representational strategy characteristic of modern security marketing. Sociologists have noted that security is a commodity derived from physical objects such as locks, safes, alarms, and even firearms, yet itself lacks material substance; the process of converting security into “marketable form” therefore entails symbolically producing it as well as physically producing the mechanisms that generate it (Spitzer 51). To market security, producers rouse and focus potential consumers’ fears of insecurity rather than their desires for a given product (55).Footnote ¹² “The Science of Garotting and Housebreaking” exemplifies how crime-prevention writing, even more than Victorian advertisements for locks, safes, and alarms, pioneered this process of symbolic production. Given that Holland is merely reporting what he has learned from confessed burglars, this home-invasion scenario has an air of authority about it and, in light of the apparent ease with which the burglars outwit the police and make their entrance, is calculated to induce anxiety. Holland solicits the reader's imaginative and emotional investments in target hardening by narrating the crime in present tense (the reader helplessly watches the crime as it unfolds) and positioning the reader as the victim (“If you have a watch-dog . . . if you have a corruptible servant”). These rhetorical strategies lend persuasive force and a feeling of urgency to Holland's advice that readers refit their homes with high-security patent locks, secure valuables in strongboxes or safes, line doors and shutters with sheet iron, and sleep with “a pair of loaded pistols” close at hand (84–89, 92). The housebreaker will avoid the fortified home, Holland reassuringly concludes; “he has easier prey for the seeking, and he much prefers it” (92).Footnote ¹³

“The Science of Garotting and Housebreaking” also illustrates the literature's tendency to conceptually circumscribe security, thereby sacrificing social unity, an ostensible aim of bourgeois political philosophy, for the sake of personal safety. Sociological studies of burglary point out that victims not only “tend to ‘harden’ the physical boundaries of their home[s]” after being invaded, they also tend to “harden their attitude towards ‘outsiders’, so indicating a withdrawal or lessening of trust in strangers and neighbors in general” (Chapman 142). Holland's essay characteristically reverses this causal relationship; that is, in suggesting that householders probably cannot trust servants and would do well to be suspicious of strangers, it encourages readers, before burglars strike, to cultivate a hardened attitude toward others, no matter how “innocent” they may seem, in order that they will take proper precautions. Although situational crime prevention practiced en masse would ideally have broad social benefits (Chubb claimed, for instance, that “[i]f householders would but perform their part as well as the police do in this matter, robbery . . . would be of the rarest occurrence” [27]), Holland's concluding advice demonstrates that target hardening encodes the logic of self-interest onto the built environment and is thus preventive in only the narrowest sense: it simply displaces crime from one location (the fortified home) to another (the home of “easier prey”), leaving the root problems of crime intact and leaving every Englishman to defend his own castle to the best of his means and ability. In contrast with Mill's emphasis on the putative universality of security, this reasoning was at least partly responsible for creating a siege mentality that was evident to nineteenth-century social observers. “Everyone turns his house into a fortress to defend himself – under the protection of law – from the depredations of his neighbors,” Friedrich Engels commented in 1844, diagnosing the vigilance of urban householders as a symptom of “social conflict” and “class warfare” (31). Engels's fellow German journalist Max Schlesinger was similarly struck (if not as morally outraged) by the elaborate home-defense strategies of the English when he visited London in 1851. Protected from the street by an “iron stockade,” the domestic citadel, Schlesinger wryly noted, was siege-ready: “To observe the additional fortifications which every Englishman invents for the greater security of his house is quite amusing. It is exactly as if Louis Napoleon was expected to effect a landing daily between luncheon and dinner, while every individual Englishman is prepared to defend his household gods to the last drop of porter” (3–4).Footnote ¹⁴

IV.

Foregrounding what Schlesinger described as a national “mania for fortification” (4), Victorian writers satirized the sometimes painstaking target-hardening efforts of householders in texts which illustrate that residing in a detached single-family house might have fulfilled the privacy requirements of an idealized domesticity but also raised another set of potentially more pressing concerns. This was the case, for example, in Edward Mayhew's “Midnight Mishaps” (Bentley's Miscellany Reference Mayhew1837), which traces the relocation of Jacob Tweasle, a retired London tobacconist, and his family to Hornsey. In addition to the rural appeal of their newly acquired “Italian villa,” Tweasle's fortification strategies are a defining feature of their suburban home. The narrator observes:

Although Mrs. Tweasle places more confidence in her police rattle than her husband's armory, Tweasle assures her that with such safeguards in place, “the thieves will know better than to come where we are” (198). His comment sets up the principal irony of Mayhew's story: crime ultimately follows the hapless retiree (and by extension the middle class he represents) on his exodus to the suburbs. On the day of the move, Tweasle sends his family and servants ahead while he remains in the city to collect a £300 debt. As his wife sets out, he is accosted by “a florid muscular mendicant,” who receives “a few pence” and “some very profound remarks on the Vagrancy Act” for his effort. Fearing the beggar's intentions, Tweasle loudly calls to his departing wife: “‘don't make yourself uneasy, but set the steel-traps. I have pistols, – mind that, love, – I have pistols!’ for, afraid to acknowledge his own terror, he found relief in supposing that others were more timid than himself” (200). After completing his business in London, Tweasle walks to Hornsey, but en route, as he passes from the lighted streets of the city into the nocturnal gloom of the suburbs, the clock at St. Paul's strikes midnight and Tweasle hears a donkey, which he mistakes for a thief, moving in the hedges. After he calls out that he is armed and brandishes his pistols, quiet temporarily ensues and Tweasle thinks to himself, “They didn't know I was armed . . . it was lucky that I showed them my determination” (201). When the donkey moves closer, Tweasle panics, fires his pistols (we later learn that he kills the animal), drops them, and sprints for home. Before he reaches his destination, though, he is assaulted by the London beggar and two accomplices who have trailed him from the city. They empty his pockets, strip him of his clothing, and discover the money hidden in his waistcoat. After striking and kicking him repeatedly, the thieves depart, leaving a battered and humiliated Tweasle to make his way home. Upon his arrival, the members of his household mistake him for a thief as he “violently” shakes and bangs on the front door, “using his best endeavours to force the entrance” (204). As Mrs. Tweasle and the maid scream for help and the son sounds a police rattle, Tweasle moves to the rear of the house, scales a glass-embedded garden wall, and is subsequently immobilized by “one of the man-traps” that he had ordered to be set (205).Footnote ¹⁵ Tweasle's son fires at him with a blunderbuss (but misses) before venturing into the yard to discover that the intruder is his father. After a short convalescence, Tweasle learns that the owner of the donkey has offered a £5 reward for information on the shooter, and he sends that amount to recompense the loss, commenting “with . . . much feeling on ‘What that poor ass must have suffered!’” (206).

Simon Joyce describes “Midnight Mishaps” as “a curiously modern parable of suburban life, which neatly captures the tension between the desire for ostentatious display and a countervailing paranoia that manifests itself in elaborate security measures.” The dichotomy, he maintains, indicates in “[p]art . . . a bifurcation within the ideology of suburbanization itself.” Citing Donald Olsen's argument that the ideological split subsisted “of ‘two coexistent but incompatible Victorian ideals: individual privacy and public accountability,’” Joyce puts the focus on privacy and the concomitant political irony that emerged with the Victorian middle class's flight to the suburbs and its efforts to keep the urban poor safely contained and “under a steady surveillance” (55).Footnote ¹⁶ Observing that the suburb to which Tweasle relocates was “relatively safe,” Joyce suggests that Tweasle is a victim primarily of “his own siege mentality, which causes him to invest in steel traps, weapons, and household alarms.” Mayhew's “joke,” he claims, “is not simply that these defenses work against [Tweasle], but also that he has directly brought the threatening shadows of crime with him from the city, in the modest form of an opportunistic beggar attracted by Tweasle's own suspicious behavior” (56). From the vantage point of the separate-spheres ideology, Joyce makes a compelling case that “Midnight Mishaps” “might constitute a cautionary tale not just about the suburban unconscious, but the failure of an entire strategy of urban planning and segregation” (56). Yet I would argue that Tweasle's behavior is not “curiously modern,” if by that Joyce means something akin to the “siege mentality” currently reified in the gated suburban community but somehow out of place in the 1830s. To the contrary, Mayhew employs topical ironies to caricature an aspect of bourgeois culture and consciousness that was beginning to take shape by this time, particularly with the development and expansion of suburbia, and that would have been not merely apparent but perhaps also rational to readers in 1837.

Throughout the nineteenth century, burglary comprised a majority of reported offenses and, next to murder, was the most feared of all crimes. The London Magazine put this dread into perspective in 1829, designating burglars “the worst of all criminals” and observing, “[t]he security of your dwelling is set at nought; property to the value, perhaps, of half your worth in the world is stolen; and it is by no means improbable that your brains may be beaten out into the bargain” (“Diary” 72). That same year, Wade's popular Treatise contended that in “no country [is] burglary and housebreaking . . . so common as in England,” where the increase of wealth “excite[s] the cupidity of the criminal mind” (191). Regardless of burglars’ skills, a successful burglary, Wade argued, “is a matter of astonishment, and must be imputed in a great measure to the culpable negligence of individuals. People confide too much in the power of the police, and seem to think it will take care of them, though they take no care of themselves” (192). This generalization is of course misapplied in Tweasle's case; indeed, it seems likely that he has read and acted on the warnings contained in “treatises” such as Wade's as well as in texts such as Helps and Hints How to Protect Life and Property (Reference Berenger1835), written by Cruikshank's friend and sometime-collaborator Baron de Berenger (Charles Ransom), which sought to educate readers in the effective use of swords and firearms and other defensive tactics. Berenger recommended to travelers that “a moderate display on the road and at dusk, of firearms, such as may show that you are perfectly ready, may prevent an attack; but, unless you are both determined and able to use them, and properly too, even the carrying of arms had better be left alone” (75). Further, he advocated the kind of aggressive domestic defense that Tweasle presumably plans to put in practice when keeping house in the suburbs: “should you hear thieves in a house . . . you should immediately turn out well armed to search it” (246). Although Tweasle declares repeatedly his determination to use his pistols to defend himself, he proves ultimately unable to do so properly, indicating that he is one of those who should refrain from carrying firearms altogether – and, for that matter, using man-traps.Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, this comedic cohort of the vigilant householders mentioned by Engels and Schlesinger cannot be accused of the sort of “culpable negligence” with which Wade reprimanded his readers, for he seemingly does everything in his power to ensure that his castle is more than a merely legal designation.

It is important to recognize, too, that criminals followed the middle class as a whole to the suburbs – and not simply or even primarily because of bourgeois ostentation. Statistics for 1837–38 published by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner's office suggested that housebreakers, burglars, footpads, and highway robbers had diverted much of their attention from the city to the suburbs, allegedly due to the effects of vigilant policing and better situational prevention in London (“Police of the Metropolis” 97; Platt 322).Footnote ¹⁸ Police propaganda aside, this explanation rings at least partially true considering that suburban houses were soft and therefore attractive targets due to their generally poor construction, as I discussed above; moreover, the relative isolation of suburban houses from one another enabled breaking and entering with a minimal risk of detection.Footnote ¹⁹ As carousing burglars declare in the same number of Punch that criticized preventive policing: “The house that yonder stands alone / Invites to burglary” (“England in 1850!”). Thus when a house agent describes the villa to Tweasle as “particularly ‘snug and retired’” (197), his comment registers at once the promise of privacy and the increased likelihood of burglary. Even if Tweasle's new neighborhood may appear “relatively safe,” as Joyce observes, such an assurance would have offered little consolation to wary householders. Indeed, the Quarterly Review's observation, noted earlier, that terror of being burglarized was disproportionately greater than the number of actual cases, applied equally in the early, mid-, and late Victorian periods. Although burglars never invade Tweasle's suburban villa, and though he may end the story feeling like an ass, his fear of crime and efforts to defend himself and his home, given the warnings and advice he has apparently heeded, would have seemed no less warranted for that. Notable in this regard, “Midnight Mishaps” implicitly justifies Tweasle's refusal to, in Wade's words, “confide too much in the power of the police”: he is the victim of a fairly brutal street crime, though constables are nowhere to be seen; and despite the concerted screams of the women, the repeated use of the police rattle, gun fire, and Tweasle howling in pain when caught in his own trap, authorities never come to investigate. To be sure, Mayhew's story speaks to the vexed cultural politics of suburban privacy, as Joyce demonstrates; but it also illustrates both that from the early Victorian era privacy was only one variable in the formula of domestic enclosure and that the discourse of situational crime prevention while not perhaps having reached a point of cultural saturation in 1837 was well on its way, even before publication of the First Constabulary Report.

In a similar vein, Edmund Yates and N. H. Harrington's farce A Night at Notting Hill, which ran for more than a hundred performances at the Adelphi Theatre in 1857, and which is set during the garroting panic of 1856, focuses on the household of a retired alderman who, following the advice of the press, secures his house with man-traps, spring-guns, reinforced shutters, alarms, and detonating crackers, sleeps with a pistol, and even enlists a dragoon to stand guard at night. After the housekeeper informs him that there has been another burglary in the neighborhood, the alderman exclaims: “Notting Hill! Garroting Hill, you mean! Talk of an Englishman's house being his castle – it's nothing of the sort! An Englishman's house is his place of execution!” Reproaching his neighbors for “not tak[ing] the proper precautions,” the vigilant alderman vows that “the villains shall not catch me unprepared” (282). As it happens, the only intruder on this night is a constable who is in love with the maid, and who clandestinely enters the house through a window with her assistance. After repeatedly and narrowly avoiding discovery by the alderman, the constable detonates one of the crackers upon making his exit and alarms sound throughout the house. Thinking that he is being burglarized, the alderman attempts to hide in a closet and, like Tweasle, is caught in a man-trap. The play concludes as hysteria grips the household and the alderman declares his intention to “give up housekeeping and go for a lodger” (285).

A Night at Notting Hill ridicules the alarmist press and, more importantly, those readers who took target hardening to the extreme but nevertheless makes a salient point about the logic of situational crime prevention. Much like Mayhew's story two decades earlier, the play illustrates a paradoxical psychological effect of intensive security practices that Dupuis and Thorns attribute to the late-modern subject's attempts to manage life in a post-industrial “risk society,” but which, again, was already evident in the industrial nineteenth century: “as forting up increases so do anxiety levels and the attendant need for yet more devices” (154). In other words, excessive target hardening generates a self-defeating form of paranoia, as the alderman discovers when he steps into the trap he has set for burglars who never invade his home, initiating a kind of tropic conflict. Metonymically signifying the alderman's target-hardening efforts, the trap finally razes (in this case, at least) the already destabilized metaphor of the castle. The house, no longer able to function as the sanctum of repose, becomes unlivable, as demonstrated by the alderman's intention to abandon his detached suburban residence for the less private and less respectable but more secure environs of a lodging house. His concluding comment evokes a tension between privacy and security, suggesting that, rather than interchangeable terms, these could become competing demands, the mutual accommodation of which sometimes required strenuous spatial as well as psychological negotiations if not always a choice between one or the other.Footnote ²⁰

This tension was evident in fact as well as in fiction. Take, for example, the case of Frances Power Cobbe and her partner Mary Lloyd, who in 1865 set up housekeeping at 26 Hereford Square in Kensington, at the time a fashionable enclave of “artists, intellectuals, and liberal social activists” (Mitchell 149). Anticipating domestic felicity, Cobbe wrote to her friend Mary Somerville, “[o]ur little house is very nice & bright & I think we shall be very comfortable & happy by & bye” (qtd. in Mitchell 148). The following year, however, she published “The Terrors of the Suburbs” (Once a Week 1866), in which it is clear that the bloom of the suburban idyll has faded as a result of burglars striking repeatedly homes in Cobbe and Lloyd's Kensington neighborhood and even on one occasion entering their back garden. “If an Englishman's house be his castle,” she complains in yet another skeptical citation of Coke's dictum, “it is a castle usually in a state of siege.” Cobbe writes of the steps that she and Lloyd had taken to secure their house:

Much of this passage, which mixes a good measure of self-deprecating humor with what is clearly the influence of crime-prevention literature, is notably similar to the accounts of Tweasle and the alderman; if anything, Cobbe and Lloyd, who suffered from the same sort of escalating paranoia, went to even greater lengths to protect their home.

Moreover, Cobbe's frustration with the apparent futility of such elaborate strategies reflects a wider dilemma of Victorian householders, who often received conflicting signals from the press, forcing them to choose between resigning their security primarily to the police (obviously not a preventive force in Cobbe's essay) or taking decisive measures to ensure their own protection. On one hand, as burglary tactics grew more sophisticated in response to target-hardening innovations, some claimed that burglars were more or less unstoppable, and that home fortification might ultimately prove counterproductive. The Quarterly Review, which continued to champion the preventive efforts of the London constable, observed: “The skilled cracksman is accomplished in the handling of tools, jemmies, wedges, spring-saws, braces, and centre-bits. Give him time and he will make his entry anywhere – though iron or through wood. In short, no dwelling can resist the skilled burglar determined to get in” (“Police of London” 60). Similarly, the author of “The Burglary Season” (All the Year Round 1892) pointed out, “[t]he best informed on such matters say that you cannot keep the burglar out if he is determined to enter, and that the precautions you take in the way of shutters, electric bells, and other devices, only excite the burglar's cupidity, by giving him the notion that there is something very valuable thus defended” (439). Advocates of situational prevention, on the other hand, insinuated that security was a matter of bourgeois propriety and insisted that properly vigilant householders could effectively deter home invasions. In spite of “the cunning, ingenuity, or violence of the professional burglars,” Chubb asserted, “means are at hand by which they may be effectually baffled” (14). In addition to refitting doors with high-security patent locks and using a burglar-proof safe, Chubb's “remedies” for the vulnerable house included carefully vetting servants, “or all other precautions are unavailing”; installing plate-glass windows (as opposed to traditional sheet-glass); replacing shutters on ground-floor windows with “strong bars built into the stone or brickwork, not more than five inches apart”; keeping a dog in the house; placing “no reliance” on alarm devices; and leaving “as little property as possible . . . lying about” the house (16–17). There were very few cases of burglary, he maintained, “in which proper care combined with the use of the best safeguards would not have prevented all loss” (21). Along the same lines, Herbert Howard declared in “Burglar Proof – and Otherwise: Seasonable Hints for Householders Gleaned from a Reformed Burglar” (Harmsworth London Magazine Reference Howard1902): “The need . . . for securely guarding the house against uninvited visitors is one that appeals forcibly to everyone who values his own goods and chattels and is willing to take a little trouble to protect them” (587). Comic exaggeration notwithstanding, texts such as “Midnight Mishaps,” A Night at Notting Hill, and “The Terrors of the Suburbs” make it evident that following the advice of crime-prevention writers could require more than “a little trouble” from householders but also suggest that such advice nonetheless significantly influenced the production and representation of nineteenth-century domestic space.

My point here, and throughout this essay, is not that we should privilege this influence in analyses of the built environment; rather, it is that we might generate even richer, more culturally and historically perceptive accounts of spatial discourses and practices by incorporating the formative influence of target hardening into the analytical framework. Having said that, evidence of the degree to which the Victorians implemented the recommendations of the writers on crime prevention is largely circumstantial. The powerful mandate of domestic privacy, Marcus observes, excluded the middle-class home from the documentary gaze of urban journalism (107) – unless of course the journalist happened to be someone such as Cobbe, reporting her own wearying efforts at home fortification. Satires such as “Midnight Mishaps” and A Night at Notting Hill are also suggestive in this regard, for they work only to the extent that they successfully mock readily recognizable attitudes and behaviors. Indeed, Victorian fiction in general attests to a pervasive cultural preoccupation with security. Locks and keys, for example, appeared more often and in more literary contexts than nearly any other consumer goods of the period (Altick 229); and even a cursory reading of most nineteenth-century novels demonstrates that target hardening was as important on the inside of the home as it was on the outside. From cellars, cabinets, closets, cupboards, pantries, and bedrooms to caddies, cases, chests, trunks, desks, and strongboxes, middle-class Victorians seemingly secured nearly every available space and object under lock and key. Commenting on the management of this intricate network of enclosures in “A Few Thoughts on Keys” (Cornhill Reference Hay1865), Helen Selina Hay wryly remarked of the mistress of the house with her basket of housekeeping keys, both that she “is all keys” and that “she has all sorts of outlying and isolated keys; keys in partibus infidelium; colonial and collateral keys; keys that lock out, and lock in, and lock up – everything lockable – especially keys” (623). Elizabeth Langland has noted that “all those keys to interior drawers, closets, and doors, helped to secure the household goods from servants, presumed to have an interest in stealing them” (53). And while it is true that the Victorian middle class saw servants as potential threats, it is important to recognize that interior security, even in houses without servants, was also perceived as necessary, particularly where money, plate, and jewelry were concerned, “so that if a thief should overcome all obstacles to entrance, he may not find much ready to hand” (Chubb 17).Footnote ²¹

For many readers and scholars of nineteenth-century fiction, the first image evoked by Coke's metaphor is John Wemmick's fortified cottage, with its ersatz drawbridge and faux gothic fixtures, in Great Expectations (1860–61). Wemmick's diminutive suburban castle, described by Marcus as the “maxim's most familiar rendition in Victorian literature” (91), embodies the doctrine of domestic privacy pushed to its comedic limits. As Wemmick explains to Pip: “the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go to the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me” (162; book 2, ch. 25). Dickens's novel anatomizes domestic ideology and the spaces it produced, and the humorous depiction of the law clerk's effort to architecturally literalize the separate spheres, Monica F. Cohen observes, “plays on Ruskin's idea of the home as a shelter from the ‘anxieties of the outer life’” (70). But if, as I have argued, these anxieties were of (at least) two kinds and incited, in a strict sense of the terms, the need for security as well as for privacy, then perhaps an equally salient image of the domestic citadel is Satis House, the home of the tragically reclusive Miss Havisham, whose local reputation is that of “an immensely rich and grim lady who lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers” (44; book 1, ch. 7). Conspicuous security is the initial impression that Satis House makes on Pip and the novel's readers. Even before he first passes through the front gate, Pip – in a passage reminiscent of Engels's and Schlesinger's descriptions of the bourgeois home – notes that the house “had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a court-yard in front and that was barred; so we had to wait, after ringing the bell, until someone should come to open it” (48; book 1, ch. 8). After Estella grants him admission and “lock[s] the gate” behind them, Pip remarks “the high enclosing wall” that surrounds the property and “the great front entrance [which] had two chains across it outside” (48, 49). For Miss Havisham, the goal of obsessive fortification is the deterrence of time rather than crime, which at once inverts Mill's insistence that security guarantees the possibility of a future and enables her self-transformation from an agential subject into what Steven Connor calls “an object which she can . . . possess and control” (130). Her ultimate failure in this regard indicates that Satis House (Latin for “enough”) belies its name. This is not to say that privacy and security necessarily belong, respectively, to comedic and tragic modes, only that the way in which Great Expectations abstracts these suggests that each functions according to a distinctive logic. Nonetheless, the themes of possession and control and anxieties about insecurity, ontological and otherwise, ironically link Miss Havisham as well as Wemmick with the proverbial Englishman, who, according to the discourse traced out in this essay, did not do enough to transform his castle into a hard target against the pervasive dangers of the outer world.