JOHN E. ARCHER. The Monster Evil: Policing and Violence in Victorian Liverpool. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 2011. Pp. xvii, 281. $34.95

Abstract

John E. Archer provides a fascinating and detailed analysis of violence in its myriad forms in Victorian Liverpool. As such, his book is part of a wider interest in violence and the “civilizing process” that has produced a flurry of recent studies of juvenile gangs in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool as well as broader examinations of the “underworlds” of the two major northwestern English cities. Such detailed local studies are a welcome addition to the important, but more general, scholarship on nineteenth-century violence by Clive Emsley, Martin J. Wiener, and J. Carter Wood. After a relatively brief introduction to the distinctive development of Liverpool, its reputation as “the most immoral of immoral places,” and the growth of the Liverpool borough police, Archer comes to his central concern: violent crime in the city, to which he devotes eight of the book's thirteen chapters. Given the distinctiveness of Liverpool—notably its docks (with their reliance on casual labor) and its proximity to Ireland—it would have been most surprising, he argues, if Liverpool had not been a violent place. The various forms of violence—male-on-male, female, domestic, sectarian, gang—are considered in detail, but the analysis rests on a thorough and judicious examination of quantitative and qualitative evidence, which is presented in a highly readable manner. As one might expect from his earlier work, Archer is rightly skeptical of recorded crime statistics as an accurate measure of actual crime, and he is fully aware of the difficulties in making meaningful assessments of changes in the incidence of violence in the longer term. The cases that Archer quotes often make for very grim reading. Nonetheless, he concludes that Liverpool appeared to share in the “English miracle” of declining violence in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, early twentieth-century Liverpool was still a dangerous place, with high levels of female violence and the persistence of vicious gang conflicts arousing particular concern. Indeed, he argues that in some parts of the city there had been no significant change in the levels of violence. Archer is also concerned with responses to violence, and, particularly in the conclusion, he draws attention to the relative leniency showed to certain violent criminals, including child killers, as well as the absence of media panic about pedophilia.