Streetlife in Late Victorian London: The Constable and the Crowd

Abstract

The study of Victorian cities helped foster the emergence of social history after 1945. From Asa Briggs to Tristram Hunt, historians demonstrated how cities became sources of antagonism but also machines in which commerce could thrive, the disorderly forces of dirt and disease could be overcome, and modern understandings of class society could emerge.1 Urban history also provided ample opportunity for dialogue with sociologists and others about the new ways of living that cities created and their networks of power and sociability. There was no shortage of sources but it was common to ransack investigators like Henry Mayhew and novelists who could recreate the maelstrom of nineteenth-century city life. There was, however, another figure who observed the Victorian city and indeed was paid to do it: the humble police constable. His notebooks and other police records make possible a different kind of urban history from below. This is the starting point for Peter K. Andersson's important book about street life in the later nineteenth century. Whilst his book can profitably be read by historians of crime, Andersson rightly spots that police records give us an effective point of entry into exploring quotidian behaviour. The book becomes a study of the ‘etiquette of street life’ (p. 204). Andersson deliberately focuses on the mundane and the ordinary, the patterns of behaviour evident as Victorians went about their daily business. The obvious objection to this source material would be that police records deal mainly with flashpoints and moments of conflict, which can skew the way we think about ordinary life. Andersson, however, argues convincingly that such records offer clues about social codes and notions of what was acceptable in human interactions. In the Victorian city, people could not always walk where they liked or behave as they pleased. They had to negotiate a series of social expectations.