Crime and the Victorians

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• 1. Statistics
• 2. Sensational crimes
• 3. 'Criminal classes'
• 4. Penal policies
• 5. Detective policing
• 6. Find out more
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Statistics

The Victorians had faith in progress. One element of this faith was the conviction that crime could be beaten. From the middle of the nineteenth century the annual publication of Judicial Statistics for England and Wales seemed to underpin their faith; almost all forms of crime appeared to be falling.

'...it was practice in the Metropolitan Police until the 1930s to list many reported thefts as lost property.'

There are, of course, serious problems with official statistics of crime. How far might they be massaged by the police forces that collect and collate them? We know, for example, that it was practice in the Metropolitan Police until the 1930s to list many reported thefts as lost property. How can we account for the 'dark figure' of crime that is never reported? Many in the poorer sections of the Victorian community, who had little faith in, or respect for, the police, probably did not bother to report offences. Nevertheless, unreliable as they may be, the statistics provide historians with a starting point for the pattern of crime in the same way that they provided a starting point for the Victorian's own assessments of crime.

Recognising the problems with the statistics, the overall decline in theft and violence seems to fit with other social data from the nineteenth century. Assuming that theft can be generated by economic hardship, the economic downswings of the second half of the nineteenth century were generally not as serious, widespread, or life threatening as those of preceding centuries. Violent behaviour was increasingly frowned upon, dealt with increasingly severely by the courts, and seems, in consequence, to have been brought under a greater degree of control. The new police forces, uniformly established across the whole country in the mid-1850s and subject to annual inspections on behalf of Parliament, appear to have had some success in suppressing those forms of public behaviour that respectable Victorians considered rough and offensive. In so doing they may well also have had an impact on petty, opportunistic theft on the streets.

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Published: 2001-08-01