There is widespread agreement that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the articulation of a concept of a “criminal class”—a group of offenders allegedly drawn to crime because of moral degeneracy rather than being driven to it by their material circumstances. They were “the marginal people among the urban poor—the vagrants, street-folk, prostitutes, and thieves,” and they were perceived to constitute “the main danger to the social and moral order” in the period. The concept of a “criminal class” was voiced by a great variety of members of the respectable classes, including the magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, the political radical Francis Place, the poet Robert Southey, statistical societies, and the Constabulary Report of 1839. As in previous eras of social upheaval, including the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these respectable fears generated a literature of roguery purporting to describe this underworld. The concept of a “criminal class” enjoyed such potency that it continued to flourish into the 1850s and 1860s.Footnote 1

In recent historiography Michel Foucault was a leading figure in observing the power of the concept of a “criminal class.” In early nineteenth-century France, he wrote, “the myth of a barbaric, immoral and outlaw class … haunted the discourse of legislators, philanthropists and investigators into working-class life.” There, he found contemporary observers reporting that crime was “almost all from the bottom rank of the social order” and that “nine-tenths of murderers, thieves and idlers come from what we have called the social base.”Footnote 2 Foucault's chief concern was to understand the development of the penitentiary and, more generally, what he thought was the rise of a “closer penal mapping of the social body” than had been true under the ancien régime. His theory was that from the late eighteenth century there developed “penal interventions at once more premature and more numerous,” particularly regarding economic offenses, which were accompanied by the notion of a permanent, delinquent class, leading ultimately to the creation of the modern prison system and, more generally, to a “carceral archipelago” that included schools, hospitals, moral improvement groups, private charities, public relief organizations, and lodging houses.Footnote 3

Whether one accepts Foucault's theories or not, there is no denying that recent British scholarship has confirmed the perception of a “criminal class” in the period and the development of new institutions to police it. V. A. C. Gatrell argued in 1990 that, as in France, crime in Britain was increasingly viewed as a class phenomenon associated with the poor and working classes; that it was an “artificial construct” that was defined by the new “policeman-state,” in particular by the institution of centralized policing.Footnote 4 Other scholars have found that the redefinition of crime included a new theory of juvenile delinquency that focused on street crime, especially theft, but also cast its net more widely to include immorality, alcohol consumption, popular entertainments, and violence. Moralists blamed urban crime on uncontrolled emotions and the decline of reason into “savagery,” “instinctualism,” and “moral insanity.”Footnote 5

Few historians today believe in the existence of an organized, numerous, and dangerous criminal class.Footnote 6 They question whether contemporaries were correct in depicting a criminal class with distinctive mores, a “world of its own” that inverted respectable society in a subculture or “culture of poverty.”Footnote 7 Further, there are indications that prosecutions and policing were key elements in swelling convictions in the crucial period between 1805 and 1842. Moreover, once “habitual offenders” were systematically recorded from the 1870s, their global numbers do not seem all that significant.Footnote 8 Fears of criminals becoming politically “dangerous classes” were voiced in the 1790s, in the 1830s and 1840s, and later in the 1860s and 1880s, but it remains to be seen how real these threats really were to public order.Footnote 9

Beyond these empirical issues, there remains a more general normative problem about the definition of reality in nineteenth-century views of crime. Even if the criminal class was in part constructed by the respectable, whose perceptions stereotyped and exaggerated the gravity of the threat, the effects of the construction were no less “real” to those who created it and to those who felt the brunt of the criminal justice system. As Martin Wiener has perceptively remarked, “criticism of the early Victorians for failing to have twentieth-century notions of realism does not take us very far.” It is misleading to assume that they “had access to a reality free from moral or sensational characteristics,” because for most of them social reality “was moral, was sensational in its nature.”Footnote 10

Yet the argument that crime is socially constructed, that there are no “facts of crime,” only a “judgmental process,” tends to produce a top-down paradigm with several potential pitfalls. It leads to teleological interpretations that may take too little account of historical contexts and events. On the one hand, crime and the responses to it may be treated as the “onward march of surveillance and control” in which their history is mainly treated as indicators of power relations exerted from above.Footnote 11 On the other hand, crime and criminal policy may be represented as marks of a “civilizing process” in which crime, particularly homicide, is brought under elite control in economically advanced societies.Footnote 12

Another difficulty with these top-down models is an overconcentration on opinion makers and policy makers with too little attention to the criminals themselves, their social background, and their experiences in the judicial and penal systems.Footnote 13 Of course, it is important to realize that respectable members of the public actively campaigned in the press, in parish meetings, and in Parliament to combat the perceived threat of the criminal class; moreover, they prosecuted, judged, and punished criminals in efforts to get them off the streets.Footnote 14 But we may forget that even if the criminal class was a constructed reality, it was one that was very real in its consequences for those at the sharp end of prosecution and punishment. Because of the hostile witnessing of the respectable, we may take away a distorted view of offenders, who are chiefly described through the eyes of their enemies, with a resulting dehumanization. Criminals are then viewed as objects, people without culture or consciousness. The result, exemplified in the work of Oscar Lewis, is to perceive them existing in a “culture of poverty,” the most striking feature of which is actually hopelessness or a “poverty of culture.”Footnote 15 Foucault's insight that new systems of incarceration assumed the existence of a class of career criminals or “delinquents” was a brilliant one, but his focus on reformers and their plans for incarcerating the criminal class largely ignored how their projects worked in practice, what offenders’ experiences in institutions actually were, and what convicts were like when they emerged from them. It is all well and good to posit the existence of “a prison-machine,” a set of “complete and austere institutions,” but Foucault actually gave little attention to whether they actually produced the “docile bodies” they were designed to.Footnote 16 The top-down models may represent a criminal class as a dreadful nuisance or just a sad casualty, but one that is chiefly significant as an object, whether of social dysfunction, penal controls, or civilizing processes.

Yet crime can also be seen “from below.” Historians of hanging have shown the limitations of a top-down approach by demonstrating the active roles taken by both the convicted and the crowds at executions.Footnote 17 This study focuses on the experience of one convict, David Evans, who, though in some respects a victim, was not a passive one. He is an interesting case, because he fought the penal system during his years of incarceration and, once he was released, embraced an identity as a criminal and convict. He was a convicted thief who was transported to Van Diemen's Land for fourteen years in 1823, who returned to London between 1848 and 1850 as a ticket-of-leave man, and whom Henry Mayhew interviewed in a “low lodging-house.” The results were published on 29 January 1850, in the series on “Labour and the Poor” that Mayhew and a team of assistants compiled for the Morning Chronicle. The interview was reprinted in subsequent editions, including London Labour and the London Poor (1861).Footnote 18

Based on the Evans interview and impressive archival work, in 1979 F. B. Smith raised questions about the credibility of Mayhew's publications on the London poor of the 1840s and 1850s.Footnote 19 Smith's study is remarkable on a number of counts. It is a masterful piece of historical detective work because it identifies an anonymous informant using archival sources ranging from the Home Office files in the Public Record Office in London to Convict Conduct Registers in the Archives Office of Tasmania. Apart from a few rare cases in which Mayhew named informants, this is the sole instance in which there is fairly full, independent biographical information about one of his subjects. Smith's essay is also significant because of Mayhew's colossal importance as a source for mid-nineteenth century social history. Even though there have long been doubters as well as enthusiasts about the value of his work, since Smith's article scholars have become even more skeptical about Mayhew, most notably in Gertrude Himmelfarb's major monograph, The Idea of Poverty.Footnote 20

Prima facie, Evans provides a host of reasons for questioning the veracity of Mayhew's publications on the poor and the criminal. By comparing Evans's statements with public records, Smith found that the interview contained numerous lies and exaggerations by Evans, together with some special pleading by Mayhew for his own pet projects. Mayhew suspended disbelief, uncritically accepting wildly inaccurate statements. He employed leading questions and seemed content to achieve picturesque rather than accurate portraits of his subjects.Footnote 21 Although Mayhew claimed that Evans was “selected at random” and that he had “confirmations” showing that the convict's statements were “altogether truthful,” it seems that the author's sampling techniques and corroborating sources are suspect.Footnote 22 Quite simply, Evans lied and Mayhew published the falsehoods as the unvarnished truth, which makes the writer “gullible, careless, or both.” The mendacity runs through the whole of Evans's narrative. Smith concluded that the Evans story makes it difficult to put much faith in Mayhew's evidence, particularly where it concerns the public sphere. We should be skeptical about Mayhew's references to “public characters and events, to places, prices and wages,” including “the Clerkenwell workhouse experiences of the ‘Reduced Tradesman,’ the costers’ ‘Chartism,’ or the ‘world of wisdom’ Mayhew found in the Asylum for the Houseless Poor.”Footnote 23

This essay contends that another reading of Evans is possible that provides insights into the processes whereby a criminal identity was constructed. When the Evans narrative is closely examined, we find a complex, layered account in which several voices are heard. One of the main players certainly was Mayhew, who framed his portrait of Evans with reference to the stereotype of a Victorian underworld and who used the interview to push items on his personal agenda, particularly the curbing of low lodging houses and prison reform. Another influence on the narrative was the system of criminal justice, which helped to shape the man Evans became by imposing an exceptionally harsh sentence even by the standards of the day, and a penal system that put the emphasis on rigorous punishment for minor offenses. Although he was a petty offender at all stages of his criminal career, the upshot of that experience seems to have been that Evans came out of the penal colony identifying himself as a bona fide member of a “criminal class.” For Evans, too, had his say, and in telling his story he constructed an identity through various modes of communication, especially language. The concluding section of the essay suggests that language was an important key to people like Evans in this period, because they used it to shape their identities and as a means of expressing resistance to authority and the dominant culture.

The “authors” of Evans's narrative of crime and punishment included Mayhew, who had his own reasons for interviewing the man. The journalist subscribed to the concept of a criminal class and regularly used the even stronger expression “dangerous class” to suggest that criminals posed a serious political threat.Footnote 24 Later in his career in the fourth volume of London Labour and the London Poor (1861), Mayhew produced an elaborate taxonomy reminiscent of the literature of roguery in which he distinguished five main categories of offenders, which were further subdivided into twenty groups, and which he broke down still more minutely into 113 different types of crook. He described the whole lot as “the dishonest members of society … known more particularly as the criminal class.”Footnote 25

Mayhew had further reasons for interviewing Evans. His purpose in the Morning Chronicle piece on Evans was to show that “low lodging-houses” were hotbeds of immorality and crime where the criminal class found refuge. Mayhew found Evans in “one of the most respectable” of the houses, where he “had always hidden safely there during the hottest search.” Evans recounted that a policeman failed to recognize him in the house because of the “thick, bad atmosphere of the place giving his features a different look.”Footnote 26

In relating Evans's tale Mayhew took up another of his pet projects, that of prison reform. To promote his principle of rehabilitation, Mayhew quoted Evans as saying he “was so sick of the life he was now leading, that he would, as a probation, work on any kind of land anywhere for nothing for a year, just to get out of it.”Footnote 27 Mayhew also cited Evans's mention of Alexander Maconochie's rule in the penal colony, even though Maconochie was actually in charge at Norfolk Island after Evans's period of servitude. Whoever was lying, the tale suited Mayhew's praise of Maconochie's appointment in October 1849 as a reforming new governor of Birmingham Gaol.Footnote 28 Apart from observing the brutal conditions in the penal colony, Mayhew in no way excused Evans's career in crime and endorsed conventional assessments about the origins of his misdeeds. In fact, viewed in the entirety of Mayhew's writing for the Morning Chronicle and London Labour and the London Poor, he represented the convict as one of the most criminal of his interviewees. Mayhew's hostility to Evans reflected the author's endorsement of the conventional Victorian belief that saw crime arising from the failure to work.Footnote 29 In light of the writer's antagonism, it is all the more amazing that Evans was able, through his own narrative and his employment of language, to construct an identity.

Mayhew and Evans were not the only authors of the drama, for the judicial and penal systems also shaped the convict's character. We must be wary, of course, of accepting either side of the nature versus nurture debate that characterized much nineteenth-century speculation about the origins of crime. Some posited that criminals such as Evans were “corrupted from birth,” while others like Mayhew supported an environmentalist model, recommending the separation of offenders from society, either through “colonial remodeling” by transportation or through the separate system in prisons.Footnote 30 To adopt either theory as the whole truth seems inherently dangerous, but one thing about Evans's experience seems certain. However good or bad Evans was on the occasion of his initial encounters with the judicial system, his subsequent experiences of it did not improve his character.

Beginning with his sentence at the Old Bailey, Evans had a vexed relationship with the authorities. He told Mayhew that he had expected to be acquitted, and so his sentence of fourteen years’ transportation must have come as a shock. It was harsh by the standards of the sessions held that day. Of the fifty-one men tried at London and Middlesex sessions on 14 April 1823, seventeen were acquitted or found not guilty, another sixteen were given jail sentences ranging from two months to a year, three got death sentences (one was recommended to receive mercy), three received fines of 1s., and twelve were transported. Among the latter, Evans apparently received an exceptionally lengthy sentence, for his offense was less serious than some of the others’, leading Smith to describe his sentence as “savagely disproportionate.”Footnote 31

The handkerchief he was alleged to have stolen was valued at 2s., while among those receiving seven years' transportation were two convicted of stealing 38s. worth of lead from a building site and others who had purloined a writing desk worth 30s., fabrics worth £4.3s., and an oil cloth valued at 18s.Footnote 32 Similar anomalies appear among those simply imprisoned or fined. Thomas Bamfield was convicted of stealing a looking glass valued at 20s. but was jailed for just three months. Thomas Webb was found guilty of stealing a saw worth the same amount as the handkerchief taken by Evans but was given two months, while William Hudson was fined 1s. for taking sheets from a lodging house after he “pleaded distress.”Footnote 33 Admittedly Evans was possibly known to be a repeat offender, by his account having previously been in the Horsemonger Lane Bridewell for theft, but this earlier offense was not mentioned in the Old Bailey trial, and in later reports he was listed as “not known to the police.” Courts meted out stiff sentences to reoffenders, but the ambiguity of the record must leave it an open question whether this was a factor in Evans's fourteen-year sentence. Certainly the absence of previous convictions was used to justify mercy in other cases in the same session.Footnote 34

Evans's run-ins with the authorities did not end with transportation. His interactions with the penal system in Tasmania suggest that he found it difficult to reform, for he led a life of disobedience and drunkenness, combined with petty theft, during his years as a convict. Official records show he was found guilty of theft on two occasions, was drunk six times, drunk and disorderly twice, simply disorderly once, disobedient two more times, absent from his duties six times, and neglectful or “prevaricating” on the job twice.Footnote 35 Such resistance was not unusual in Van Diemen's Land. The same registers that recorded Evans's offences listed similar instances of multiple infractions by other young offenders, often involving trivial complaints such as talking during a muster, hiding potatoes, and fishing without permission. In the theory of colonial remodeling, the policy was to confine rather than corporally punish, and Evans's record, cited above, shows fourteen sentences involving confinement, fines, or reprimands versus seven involving the lash. But the big picture shows “a long battle with authority by many of the boys,” “a trail of confrontation and resistance” that included absconding, drunkenness, gambling, insubordination, neglecting duties, and thieving.Footnote 36

Similar patterns of resistance to authority appear in documentary and archaeological evidence of female transportees in Tasmania who were sentenced to solitary confinement for committing fresh crimes that included “illegitimate pregnancy, public drunkenness, insubordinate behavior, homosexuality, inciting riot, or trafficking in goods forbidden to convicts—particularly alcohol, tobacco, and money.” Even placing them in cells measuring four feet by six feet did not halt their resistance, which included arson, vandalism, and illicit trading. As regards smuggling, archaeological evidence from the cells shows that inmates had access to bottles for alcoholic drinks, clay pipes, and currency, including an 1823 copper farthing.Footnote 37

It is not surprising, therefore, to find in Evans's case a pattern of habitual, if petty, criminal behavior. He was not as hardened a felon as he portrayed himself to Mayhew, but he was apparently something of a handful. After completing his sentence, Evans had two further scrapes with magistrates in Tasmania, the first when he disturbed the peace in January 1842, for which he was fined 5s., and a second in which he was drunk in February the same year, which brought the same penalty. In 1843, he married a sort of mail-order bride, Catherine Nicholson, herself a transportee for theft from Ireland, and by 1848 they had a child according to the census. Evans was apparently alone in the London lodging house where Mayhew interviewed him, so we might add the abandonment of his family to his list of misdeeds.Footnote 38 Without endorsing the absurdities of phrenology or modern “profiling,” his appearance does suggests a hard life and brutalization. According to a description in the Tasmanian Archives Office, he had a scar on his underlip, another large one close to his left ear, and several more on his forehead. Mayhew ignored the scars but did mention that Evans had experienced great physical and mental anguish.Footnote 39

From the foregoing account it would be easy to take Evans at face value and as he was represented by Mayhew and the criminal justice system—as an exceptionally hard case, a habitual criminal, albeit one brutalized by a harsh sentence and by the rigors of the penal regime. The assessment that Evans was “a dogged resister with a touch of dumb insolence, and much sheer incompetence, caught in a brutal system” seems a fair one.Footnote 40 His career as a London thief lasted nearly three years. He went astray, by his account, between the ages of twelve and thirteen, spending fifteen months with a group of eight other boys stealing handkerchiefs and the occasional pocketbook until he was caught in St. Paul's and was sentenced to the Horsemonger Lane Bridewell. Thus far, his life of crime had lasted about two and a half years, at which time he claimed to have turned to false banknotes (four months), crooked gambling (six months), and the occasional mugging, which would bring him to the age of sixteen at the time of his transportation.Footnote 41 Despite his youth and even if the last ten months of his career was fabricated, as Smith suggests, Evans's life of crime was not apparently a brief one.

Yet we should resist the temptation to consider Evans to be exceptional among juvenile criminals transported from London, for the likely upshot would be to undervalue still further the significance of his statements. In most respects he was typical of metropolitan juvenile delinquents and of those who were transported. In 1823, he was one of a group of fifteen boys ages eleven to sixteen who were dispatched to the hulks, some of whom were later transported, after the Home Office conducted one of its regular searches for young offenders. Evans even looked the part, for his appearance was that of “a typical London convict of the period: 5 feet 4 1/2 inches tall, brown hair, grey eyes.”Footnote 42

We also know from Heather Shore's excellent monograph on London juvenile delinquents in the early nineteenth century that in numerous ways Evans was a textbook case. Typical were his previous committal to a house of correction; his discovery that theft was more profitable than working; his involvement in a gang of youths who spent their time thieving, gambling, and wenching; and the evidence from his statements (commonly found in such narratives) that his upbringing by his parents was not to blame for his offenses, except that they were possibly too soft with him; that he mostly committed theft without violence; and that he took up crime between the ages of twelve and thirteen and was convicted at age sixteen. His sentence, although extreme, was also characteristic of a classic case, because it reflected the authorities’ belief that picking pockets was a very serious offense, especially when it involved reoffenders, whose sentence was also commonly transportation.Footnote 43

Yet Evans was more than an invention of Mayhew or a creation of the criminal justice system, for he took the opportunity of the Morning Chronicle story to craft an identity for himself. He reported a life of crime that was exaggerated, even invented. He told Mayhew that he was convicted for circulating false banknotes, when in reality he was transported for stealing a handkerchief valued at 2s. He also reported a career as a highwayman, although the only evidence to support the statement is his claim to have mugged elderly men on the roads.Footnote 44 He boasted, too, of his early life of crime—“money was no object; it was like picking up dirt in the street”—and reported making as much as £3 a week stealing handkerchiefs. He chose not to work, running with a gang of nine other male youths, all of whom, he reported, ended up being transported. He had a regular girlfriend, a shoplifter who was loyal to him: he “never found that she wronged me in any way.” They frequented the public houses, or “the Free and Easy,” where they danced and sang. When he ran a gambling fraud, he “lived as well as any gentleman in the land.” Evans had no fear, he said, of the judicial system: “the gallows had no terrors for people in my way of life”; of the whippings he received in Tasmania, he reported that “I can take it like a bullock.”Footnote 45

Evans also embellished his experiences as a convict. He told Mayhew that he had seen a fellow prisoner flogged to death, when there is no surviving record of such an event. He claimed himself to have received 875 lashes on various occasions, whereas the official records show him suffering a total of 300—no mean achievement, but still a wild exaggeration. He reported that the thongs used in whippings were six feet long, when in reality those employed in Van Diemen's Land were about four feet in length. Tall tales about floggings were not limited to Evans's account: “vivid, horrifying accounts of the cat-o’- nine-tails … are standard set pieces in the English street literature of transportation.”Footnote 46

Evans bragged, moreover, that he had twice escaped the penal colony at Launceston, Tasmania. During his second escape he claimed to have joined a gang of bushrangers, but his story was flawed by a number of factual errors.Footnote 47 Here was a man prepared to boast, lie, and even tell the truth—some, at least, of his statements are verified—about a career of crime and transportation. Why open up to a middle-class journalist about such matters and then have the story appear in a leading daily newspaper? The answer is that, apparently like many of Mayhew's interviewees, Evans was attempting to create an identity.Footnote 48 He may have found it highly gratifying to be able to report his life to a respectable party and have it published in a leading national newspaper. Personally, Evans's stories showed that he had a life, a history, even if it was half invented. Talking to Mayhew afforded him the opportunity to show off, to boast of his crimes, real and imagined, in short to invent a tough guy image and maybe also to lie to an interviewer and get away with it. There was certainly a touch of melodrama about the man, who told tales of a penal colony where, in Mayhew's words, life was “so extreme, that men thought little of giving others a knock on the head with an axe, on purpose to get hanged out of the way.”Footnote 49

In part, Evans communicated his identity to Mayhew and the world at large through what is today fashionably termed “body language.” The journalist thought that he looked like a man used to punishment and fear, someone we might see as an exemplar of Foucault's culture of surveillance: “his face presented that collected and composed expression which is common to men exposed to habitual watchfulness from constant danger.”Footnote 50 Yet above all, Evans constructed his identity through language. A recent study of speech in colonial New England has observed that we can see through language to observe social relations but that we can also see it for itself, “full on, as a subject worth studying in its own right.”Footnote 51 The comment is particularly apropos for Evans, who through his use of rhetoric and slang seems almost a creation of his own speech. This is true at two levels, the first, as we have seen, in puffing himself up to be a worse villain than he really was; the second, as will now be shown, in his employment of cant or criminal slang to embellish that image.

If Evans created an identity for himself, he did it above all through the word. Linguists including Dell Hymes have hypothesized that “styles, speechways, [and] more generally communicative ways” can provide useful ways of analyzing behavior.Footnote 52 Historians of language have found that words are a significant defining feature of people's identities, whether as groups or as individuals. Roy Porter observed that language acted as “the midwife of individual identity, the bearer of autobiography” and that the emergence of “modern subjectivity” might be traced in both private and public spheres.Footnote 53 In a study of northern dialect, Patrick Joyce argued for the “active role of language in the formation of group and individual identities,” observing that “linguistic phenomena are social realities, the outcome of social changes, which they both reflect and shape.”Footnote 54 If Evans's “communicative ways” extended beyond common or garden-variety lies, what were those modes of communication, and what do they tell us about the man and the construction of criminal identities?

Evans's employment of cant raises questions about the linguistic component within the concept of a “criminal class.” In England cant was a key element in the representation of underworlds from “The Highway to the Spital-house” in the 1530s to the Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s. In addition, numerous authors from Thomas Harman to Charles Dickens compiled glossaries and dictionaries of the vocabulary.Footnote 55 In these texts cant was represented as a secret terminology that allowed its users to communicate covertly about their malevolent deeds and plans and that provided them with a sense of solidarity against a hostile world. Although these authors frequently plagiarized and probably invented cant terms, it was not a purely “literary” phenomenon. Judicial records contain instances of real-life suspects using it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; popular songs of the eighteenth century included cant, showing, according to Gatrell, that it was “rooted deeply in plebian life”; and a magistrate's notebook and official interviews of juvenile delinquents recorded it in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 56 Nevertheless, questions remain about cant, particularly in Mayhew's time, and about broader issues of linguistic solidarity among the populace. Was there a fairly standardized vocabulary that bridged the many occupational and criminal groupings examined by Mayhew? Does the Evans example show any evidence of wider cohesion among those groups? If not, what purpose did it serve for him? Did cant survive among the populace in 1830s and 1840s, when it is thought that the lines between the criminal and the respectable were increasingly sharply demarcated, and when its use in ballads became part of a “suppressed tradition”?Footnote 57 Were there other forms of linguistic solidarity and resistance; like cant, did they possibly travel to the antipodes with convicts such as Evans?

As usual, Mayhew was complicit in the storytelling. The writer had a sharp eye for the racy quotation and was fascinated with the slang of the criminal class, which he diligently recorded, and which added rhetorical effect and credibility to his stories. Like other men of letters, he may have found having access to underworld argot “glamorous.”Footnote 58 But Evans's use of criminal slang, just like his mendacity, is part of his attempt to create an identity that, however disreputable, was proof of his “bona fides,” of his “gameness” as a man.Footnote 59 Page for page Evans used more cant terms than any of Mayhew's other interviewees. In two or three pages of text (depending on which edition is consulted), Evans used nineteen cant expressions. For someone whose criminal career was supposed to have ended years earlier, linguistically Evans was still very much “in the game.” He described virtually his entire life of crime in cant terms. His line of theft was picking pockets, with a specialty in “snotter-hauling,” or handkerchiefs, usually from gentlemen's pockets, for which he was eventually incarcerated in “the Old Horse,” or the Horsemonger Lane Bridewell.Footnote 60 His leisure time was spent playing the popular game of “cock-shies,” or cock throwing, and frequenting “free and easies,” or singsongs, in public houses. While he picked pockets, his girlfriend was “on the lift,” or shoplifting from market stalls and shops. Whether or not he really enjoyed a career as a passer of false notes, he knew the jargon, referring to the crime as “to do a little soft” and the passing of “finnies,” or £5 notes. As a crooked gambler he and his confederates frequented horse races, but between contests they committed highway robbery, or, as he called it, to “go out into the roads,” where they “propped,” or mugged, elderly men.Footnote 61

The next phase of Evans's career was also described using cant. After allegedly passing three bad banknotes, he went to London to buy some hawker's stock “to take the down off,” or to remove suspicion, where he was “pinched,” or arrested, for the notes and was “fullied,” or committed, to “the Start,” or Newgate prison, to await trial. At his trial one person was “topped,” or executed, while he himself expected to be “turned up,” or acquitted. Evans described his life as a convict, too, with a liberal peppering of slang and bravado. Despite his frequent floggings, he stated, he refused to “sing,” or confess, because he was as hard as a “pebble.” If he had “sung,” he claimed, his fellow prisoners would have drugged him with “some lush with a locust in,” or alcohol with laudanum, and then given him a fatal blow to the head that would have “laid me straight.” After running away to Hobart, he was returned to Launceston where he was again “fullied” by magistrates and received one hundred lashes.Footnote 62

Whatever his actual experiences as a criminal, Evans's narrative showed him—as, of course, he apparently wished to present himself—as a member of the criminal class, as someone acquainted with a wide range of crimes and knowledge of the criminal justice system, including life as a convict. Smith was correct that Mayhew's construction of the Evans narrative was probably a trustworthy source for the study of cant, but he was wide of the mark in assuming that Evans's argot was twenty-five years old and out of date by the time the author met him.Footnote 63 Despite the efforts of lexicographers, it is difficult to fix precise dates on word usages, since they inevitably list the first written examples, which are probably delayed records of the spoken word.

Nevertheless, Evans's use of cant shows him able to draw on vocabulary from various periods, which again would tend—as he no doubt wished—to reinforce his identity as an experienced criminal. He employed some terms that were centuries old, but also ones dating from his youth in Regency London, others from his time as a convict, and still more from the period of his encounter with Mayhew in the late 1840s. Some of his constructions were extremely old, such as “on the lift,” the verb “to lift” and the noun “lifter” dating from the late sixteenth century. To play at “cock-shies” and to drink “lush,” or alcohol, had eighteenth-century origins, as did ending up at “the Start” and being “topped.” “To sing,” “snotter-hauling,” “do a little soft,” and “free and easy” were current during Evans's youth in London. Still others such as “down” for suspicion and “turned up” for acquittal seem also to come from the early 1800s but may have an Australian convict connection through James Hardy Vaux, reportedly twice transported to New South Wales, who published memoirs and a glossary of cant in 1819.Footnote 64 But some of the rest of Evans's argot probably postdated his transportation. According to Partridge, “finny,” or “finee,” date from the 1830s, and the “Old Horse” from approximately 1850. To be “pinched,” or arrested, first appeared in 1837 in Central Criminal Court records, while to be “fullied” originally cropped up in 1849 in sessions papers.Footnote 65 Evans's command of cant was impressive in its chronological range. Unlike other Mayhew interviews, the journalist himself appears to have added little to the text in the way of cant.

Scholars have given considerable attention to the subject of slang but have perhaps underestimated how it might have empowered the likes of Evans. Linguists consider a jargon to be a “powerful social marker” and, in the case of criminals, to reflect participation in an “antisociety,” that is, “a society that is set up within another society as a conscious alternative to it.”Footnote 66 For their part, sociologists observe that youth deploy slang to differentiate themselves from the adult world, indicating their resistance to that world and its hegemonic culture.Footnote 67 Historians of language have found that thieves and beggars have used jargons since the Middle Ages to disguise their illegal activities and as a form of solidarity.Footnote 68 But rarely have researchers been able to observe close up, as the Evans case allows, how a self-appointed member of the criminal class employed cant. It can hardly be surprising that the convict used the argot so extensively. It polished his image as a hardened criminal. It made him somebody, rescuing him from the oblivion of life in a “total institution” such as the military or prisons, which seek to submerge personal identities, and where jargon acts as a means of inclusion of one's fellows and the exclusion of the authorities.Footnote 69

It remains to be seen how far, besides the case of Evans, there was a common linguistic identity among criminals of the 1850s. In the Morning Chronicle articles and London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew listed several hundred slang terms used by interviewees. Mayhew claimed to be recording people's speech as they spoke it, which he probably in some measure did. But their statements were frequently responses to the author's leading questions, and we have no way of knowing how much he embellished what they said.Footnote 70 The interviews do not suggest that a common vocabulary existed among the different groups of criminals and street traders that Mayhew and his collaborators interviewed, raising doubts about a common linguistic identity of a “criminal class.” Of course, there are well-known cant or slang dictionaries from the period, such as Hotten’s.Footnote 71 Nevertheless, despite its lengthy pedigree of cant lexicography, England is perhaps not well placed for the study of “marginal” languages, because the material was rapidly commodified in publications such as Hotten’s, which means that the “auditor” is already at several removes from the original speaker.Footnote 72

In these circumstances the historian of language is fortunate to have documentation from Australia, which provides fascinating evidence of the power of marginal languages. The Australian example is interesting because its early population came overwhelmingly from the ranks of convicts. In New South Wales, three-quarters of the population in 1819 were either current or former convicts or their descendants. By 1828, the proportion had risen to 87 percent, and while it declined thereafter because of free immigration, it still stood at 59 percent in 1851. In 1822, 58 percent of the non-Aboriginal population of Van Diemen's Land were convicts. Cockney, a dialect of London's working class, flourished in the penal colonies, as contemporaries noted from early in the colony's history. They observed how Cockney convicts, very much in the mold of Evans, used their powers of speech, including oratory, to take a dominant position among prisoners and to resist authority. Penal colony officials described Cockneys as “townies” and reported that they were “beyond all dispute the worst” of the convicts. A dozen of them were “enough to infect a thousand of the country yokels.” A handful could “keep a hundred of the others in subjection.” They did it “by the manner in which they cling together, and from their overwhelming oratorical skills.” The immediate result, the writer advised, was that “the strong hand of power” was required to check Cockney domination. If the strong hand was extended, it did not work, because the long-term effect of the townies’ domination was that Cockney became the basis of Broad Australian, which in turn became one of the two principal linguistic strands of modern Australian English.Footnote 73

Other forms of language besides Cockney played a role in the penal colony, often expressing the hostility between convicts and the authorities. One of them was cant. As early as the 1790s, “the military in charge of convicts in New South Wales needed interpreters to translate convicts’ evidence in court, so thick was their slang.” Criminal argot, one contemporary complained in 1845, played a role in fostering solidarity among convicts and was incomprehensible to those running the system. Convict farmworkers “have a strong esprit de corps, which is kept up by their speaking a language so full of cant expressions as to become a separate dialect.” Prisoners were also reported to employ foul language as a form of resistance. Still other marginal languages spoken in the colony included Gaelic and Irish English, the latter possibly giving Australian English one of its best-known greetings—“Good on you.”Footnote 74 There is even some indication that cant spread to native peoples in the South Pacific, for whom it may also have served as a form of resistance and survival in their encounters with the intruders in their midst.Footnote 75

In part, the authorities’ hostility to Cockney in New South Wales reflected culture wars being fought back in England, for this period saw “the rise of accent as social symbol.” There were a number of prohibited utterances if one aspired to gentility—lengthened sounds, dropping or adding the letter “r,” and dropping the “h.” These practices were referred to as “the preserve of the ‘vulgar,’ the ‘ignorant,’ the socially unacceptable,” and, of course, the Cockney. Even John Keats was accused of being illiterate for dropping an “r” when he rhymed “thorn” and “fawn.”Footnote 76 Yet the proliferation of dialect, which was spoken, sung, written, and published in northern working-class communities, was a home-grown parallel to the growth of cant and Cockney in the antipodes. Like cant and Cockney, dialect provided its practitioners with a sense of identity. Dialect developed in “the effort to create identity” and because “working people deliberately identified their language as the central symbol of their culture”; it “endowed the poor with knowledge and a kind of control over the circumstances of their lives.”Footnote 77 David Evans would have understood such strivings.

The foregoing suggests that the construction of the concept of a “criminal class” was a complex process. It included labeling and fearmongering by “moral entrepreneurs” such as Colquhoun and Mayhew, and a generation that has seen public campaigns against “gangs” and “terrorists” will not underestimate the power of such stereotyping. In the case of Evans we also observe the powerful roles that prosecution and judicial and penal systems played when it came to dealing with a perceived member of a “criminal class.” The offended party in the handkerchief theft could not have known that Evans would receive a sentence of fourteen years transportation, but it is worth asking what prompted him to prosecute over a stolen ‘kerchief in the first place and then for the jury to convict him. According to John Beattie, the answer in an earlier period was that those involved in prosecution acted according to what “each took the state of crime to be,” while the propensity of juries to convict “varied with the number and the seriousness of offenses before the court.”Footnote 78 In some measure it was Evans's misfortune to be accused of thieving in a period of increased vigilance by the authorities and, possibly, heightened fears among the public. A select committee reporting on policing in 1822 observed that the previous year had seen an “alarming increase of street robberies within the Metropolis,” that is, the area outside the city, so that a beefing-up of the Bow Street foot patrols was instituted with a salutary effect. The object was to subvert “the evil designs of those who gain their livelihood by habitual plunder,” that is, the “criminal class.” This would be done by the ability of the foot patrols “to harrass [sic] and banish the offender, by a persevering and annoying scrutiny, and thus to prevent the commission of crime.”Footnote 79

Whatever the institutional intention, it is appears that the achievement fell short of the mark, which provides a corrective to Foucault's concept of an overpowering carceral archipelago. As regards judges, however draconian they might be—and Evans's case suggests sentencing that was exceptionally harsh even by the standards of the time—it seems that they saw fewer prosecutions than they might have wished. Even with the creation of the Metropolitan Police in 1839, Stephen Inwood finds that efforts to reform popular culture and morality through policing and prosecution were inhibited by a lack of personnel and by the unwillingness of commissioners and constables to upset relations with the populace too greatly.Footnote 80

As regards the penal project of “colonial remodeling,” the case of Evans suggests that it was counterproductive. Sentence an adolescent harshly, uproot him from his native land, send him several thousand miles away for punishment to a colony largely peopled by other prisoners, put him in a system that was “frequently both brutal and brutalizing,” and what was the result?Footnote 81 In the case of Evans, it produced someone prepared to resist the system and, then, to embrace, even fabricate, an identity as a member of a “criminal class,” the very phenomenon the penal project was supposed to eradicate.