‘Inventing’ the juvenile delinquent in nineteenth-century Europe

Abstract

The idea that the juvenile delinquent was legislated or ‘invented’ into existence in Britain during the nineteenth century has become a central paradigm in histories of crime. Thus the nineteenth century has largely retained its central place in the historical narrative of the somewhat sporadic reform of the criminal justice system. Moreover, while formal state mechanisms for juvenile justice were often not put into place until the early twentieth century, these systems were building upon a set of institutions and practices that were firmly rooted in the developments of the nineteenth. In the 1970s, the bare, Whiggish, histories of early juvenile justice were to be re-adorned through the work of Susan Magarey (1978) and Margaret May (1973). Taking a more socio-historical approach, this work suggested more complex ways of reading the interplay of factors which contributed to the serpentine processes at work during the early nineteenth century. Since then, further research has extended the chronologies of Magarey and May, and in particular focused on the pivotal importance of the 1810s, in the move towards a more formal system of juvenile justice (King and Noel, 1993; King, 1998; Rush, 1992; Shore, 1999). While it is important to recognise that this was a ‘formalisation’ rather than a ‘creation’ of a system, and in doing so to acknowledge the continuities between modern and pre-modern representations of delinquent and disorderly youth, the aim of this chapter is to reaffirm the importance of a nineteenth-century chronology by considering this history as part of abroader and longer set of historical processes. The flood of recent historical work has made it clear that simple teleological approaches to the history of juvenile delinquency will no longer suffice. Geoffrey Pearson’s classic text on hooliganism identified a series of ‘moral panics’ about youth and violence (1983). Pearson argued that successive generations of Britons voiced similar fears about social breakdown and moral degeneration, their fearful rhetoric embodied in the form of the hooligan, the garotter and the juvenile delinquent. Thus the primary purpose of this chapter is to explore this ‘chronology’ in a comparative analysis of British and European juvenile delinquency, but also in relation to both pre-modern and postnineteenth-century developments. In doing so, it will trace the contours of a new historiography which has emerged in the last decade, and which takes a more antithetical approach to the established discussions of juvenile delinquency by thinking about the nineteenth century as a series of pivotal ‘moments’ in the long evolution of European juvenile justice.