Identity, Language, and Resistance in the Making of the Victorian “Criminal Class”: Mayhew's Convict Revisited

Abstract

T 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. 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