Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City

Abstract

This book provides the first detailed study of policing and civilian crime control in nineteenth-century England. It provides a sustained, empirically rich critique of existing accounts, which present the modern history of crime control as a process whereby the state wrested governmental power from the civilian public. According to the orthodox interpretation, the formation of new, ‘professional’ police forces in the nineteenth century is integral to the decline of an early modern, participatory, discretionary culture of self-policing, and its replacement by a modern, bureaucratic system of crime control. This book critically challenges the established view, and presents a fundamental reinterpretation of changes to crime control in the age of the new police. It breaks new ground by providing a highly detailed, empirical analysis of informal, civilian crime control—which reveals the tremendous activity which ordinary people displayed in responding to crime—alongside a rich survey of formal policing and criminal justice. With unique conceptual clarity, it seeks to reorient modern criminal justice history away from its established preoccupation with state systems of policing and punishment, and move towards a more nuanced analysis of the governance of crime. More widely, the book provides a valuable vantage point from which to rethink the role of civil society and the state in modern governance, the nature of agency and authority in Victorian England, and the historical antecedents of the pluralized modes of crime control which characterize contemporary society.