The Invention of Juvenile Delinquency in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract

By 1851 'juvenile delinquency' was established among journal reading, servant-employing Britons as a major problem in the condition of England. It was, wrote J. S. More, a professor of civil law, 'next to slavery . . . perhaps the greatest stain on our country'.2 Matthew Davenport Hill, recorder of Birmingham, described it as 'the head-spring of that ever-flowing river of crime, which spreads its corrupt and cor rupting waters through the land'.3 Dickens pictured it as a 'bog', and prophesied that its 'seed of evil' would yield a 'a field of ruin . . . that shall be gathered in, and garnered up, and sown again . . . until regions are overspread with wickedness enough to raise the waters of another deluge'.4 Such people saw the problem of juvenile delinquency as a recent development?'of 70 or 80 years' growth' observed a prison inspector in 1852,5 and one associated with the growth of major towns and industrial conurbations?'the soil in which the evil has taken deepest root' com mented two other prison inspectors in 1836.6 It prompted anxiety over 'the enormous expense, and the serious loss the country is put to, by the depredations these persons commit'.7 It evoked anguish at the state of the 'soul of the little ragged urchin in the streets'.8 It generated fear of 'a hostile power which has established itself within our citadel'.9 Juvenile delinquents were, announced one investigator, 'a Race sui generis, different from the rest of Society, not only in Thought, Habits and Manners, but even in Appearance; possessing, moreover, a Language exclusively their own'.10 The 'life and business' of that race, remarked another, 'is to follow up a determined warfare against the constituted authorities by living on idleness and on plunder'.11 Their condition, observed Lord Ashley in 1848, 'renders the state of society more perilous than in any former day'.12 They 'know very well,' wrote the master of a London ragged school in 1850, ' . . . that we are the representatives of beings with whom they have ever considered themselves at war'.13 In 1853 an article in the Westminster Review spelt out the menace that juvenile delinquency was thought to constitute, referring to 'the bloody