Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T15:33:58.033Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Bustling, crowding, and pushing’: pickpockets and the nineteenth-century street crowd

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2013

PETER K. ANDERSSON
PETER K. ANDERSSON*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Lund, Sweden
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The history of walking in the city has long been neglected, and the existing scholarship is largely concerned with rioting, flânerie or urban geography. This article aims to detect the behavioural patterns of pedestrian traffic in the late nineteenth century through a close study of the methods of pickpockets in London streets, with information gleaned from trial reports and writings on pickpockets. By analysing the most common ways in which pickpockets operated, as described in numerous accounts, we can see how they adapted to nineteenth-century pedestrian norms, and through this method acquire a rough outline of what pedestrian traffic looked like, and thus how urban dwellers living in a critical historical period adapted and reacted to urban conditions on an everyday level. The evidence shows that pedestrian traffic through the century remained highly interactive, and that the modern aspects of cities identified in theories of civilizing or impoverishment of the public realm had a very limited impact at this time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 291 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 C. Dickens, Oliver Twist, ch. 9.

2 Whyte, W.H., City. Rediscovering the Center (New York, 1988), 67Google Scholar.

3 Hillier, B. and Hanson, J., The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gehl, J., Life between Buildings. Using Public Space (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Hillier, B., Penn, A., Hanson, J., Grajewski, T. and Xu, J., ‘Natural movement: or, configuration and attraction in urban pedestrian movement’, Environment and Planning, 20 (1993), 29–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Lofland, L.H., The Public Realm. Exploring the City's Quintessential Social Territory (New Brunswick, 1998), 29Google Scholar.

5 See Oxford English Dictionary, entries: cutpurse, pickpurse, pickpocket.

6 Africa, T.W., ‘Urban violence in imperial Rome’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1 (1971), 3–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reynolds, B. and Segal, J., ‘The reckoning of Moll Cutpurse. A transversal enterprise’, in Dionne, C. and Mentz, S. (eds.), Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (Ann Arbor, 2006)Google Scholar.

7 Shore, H., Artful Dodgers. Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Gilfoyle, T.J., ‘Street rats and gutter snipes. Child pickpockets and street culture in New York City, 1850–1900’, Journal of Social History, 37 (2004), 853–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Palk, D., Gender, Crime and Judicial Discretion, 1780–1830 (Woodbridge, 2006), 81–6Google Scholar.

8 Shoemaker, R., The London Mob. Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 2004)Google Scholar.

9 Sennett, R., The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1992)Google Scholar. See also Amato, J.A., On Foot. A History of Walking (New York, 2004), 156–64Google Scholar.

10 Whyman, S.E., ‘Sharing public spaces’, in Brant, C. and Whyman, S.E. (eds.), Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London: John Gay's Trivia (1716) (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar. See also Corfield, P.J., ‘Walking the city streets. The urban odyssey in eighteenth-century England’, Journal of Urban History, 16 (1990), 132–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Heller, B., ‘The “mene peuple” and the polite spectator: the individual in the crowd at eighteenth-century London fairs’, Past and Present, 208 (2010), 131–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Forgione, N., ‘Everyday life in motion: the art of walking in late nineteenth-century Paris’, Art Bulletin, 87 (2005), 664–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bedarida, F. and Sutcliffe, A., ‘The street in the structure and life of the city. Reflections on nineteenth-century London and Paris’, Journal of Urban History, 6 (1980), 379–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scobey, D., ‘Anatomy of the promenade: the politics of bourgeois sociability in nineteenth-century New York’, Social History, 17 (1992), 203–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Pooley, C.G., ‘Getting to know the city: the construction of spatial knowledge in London in the 1930s’, Urban History, 31 (2004), 210–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 A call for a ‘new history from below’ in keeping with the ambitions I outline here has been expressed by Hitchcock, T. in History Workshop Journal, 57 (2004), 294–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Oja, L. and Sennefelt, K., ‘En ny historia varifrån? Om perspektivvalet i forskning om tidigmodern tid’ (‘A new history from where? On choice of perspective in research on the early modern period’), Historisk tidskrift (Swedish Historical Journal), 126 (2006), 803–10Google Scholar, in which the unwillingness of English historians from below to move beyond class discourse is criticized.

15 Shore, H., ‘The idea of juvenile crime in nineteenth-century England’, History Today, 50 (2000), 21–9Google Scholar; Emsley, C., Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 (Harlow, 1987), 51, 130Google Scholar.

16 Emsley, Crime and Society, 88, 130.

17 t18010701–1. References to trials from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey are limited to the individual trial's reference code, for reasons of space. All trials are available in full text from www.oldbaileyonline.org.

18 t18090215–62.

19 King, P., ‘The rise of juvenile delinquency in England 1780–1840: changing patterns of perception and prosecution’, Past and Present, 160 (1998), 116–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 On Mayhew as a writer, see Himmelfarb, G., The Idea of Poverty. England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984), 312–46Google Scholar.

21 The following discussion is based on a consideration of all pickpocket cases from the years 1870–1900, with special attention to those that are connected to street crowds and traffic.

22 t18770917–701.

23 See, for instance, t18730113–137; t18740713–486; t18740817–534; t18810523–555; t18820109–170; t18841117–79; t18950909–691.

24 t18841020–999.

25 t18861025–1102; t18840623–727.

26 t18820130–260; t18741026–462.

27 t18790805–746.

28 t18831015–917.

29 t18830910–811.

30 t18720408–347.

31 We find several other cases where the pickpockets place themselves in a crowd and surround their victim in this manner: t18701212–69; t18720819–600; t18721028–733; t18740608–383; t18750503–349; t18760918–400; t18801213–130.

32 The references to Mayhew come from Mayhew, H., London Labour and the London Poor, vol. IV: Those that Will Not Work (London, 1862), 303–24Google Scholar.

33 On items stolen by pickpockets, see Palk, Gender, Crime and Judicial Discretion, 82.

34 Rook, C., The Hooligan Nights, Being the Life and Opinions of a Young and Impenitent Criminal Recounted by Himself and Set Forth by Clarence Rook (London, 1901), 164–5Google Scholar. (The book was originally published in 1889.)

35 This gesture is mentioned in t18720226–243; t18720819–588; t18740608–383; t18780311–346; t18790210–291; t18950325–327.

36 t18720819–600; t18740608–442; t18790526–573; t18910209–228. During the nineteenth century, the police acquired increasing jurisdiction in apprehending idle or disorderly persons in the street. The eventually common charge of ‘loitering with intent to commit a felony’ was introduced in 1783 regarding private property, but was extended to apply to streets and public places in 1802 and was in common use by the 1830s. The Vagrancy Acts of 1822 and 1824 also made it possible for the police to arrest people who were moving about the streets and ‘not giving a satisfactory account of themselves’. Cocks, H.G., Nameless Offences. Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2003), 56Google Scholar.

37 t18700502–405; t18711023–773; t18730818–549; t18760918–400; t18810802–721.

38 t18700919–741; t18740504–346; t18740608–385; t18801213–129; t18910209–228; t18930501–466.

39 t18780311–346 (see also t18701121–4); t18880423–489.

40 Rook, Hooligan Nights, 168–9.

41 Ibid., 166–7.

42 See t18680706–628; t18721028–723; t18790210–291; t18861213–97; t18950325–327; t18970726–517.

43 t18740608–385; t18790526–546; t18801123–57; t18890304–325; t18910209–228.

44 t18841117–51.

45 Pardon, G.F., Routledge's Popular Guide to London and its Suburbs, with Original Illustrations and Map (London, 1862), 36Google Scholar.

46 t18700228–271. See also t18750301–204; t18790805–724; t18870725–813.

47 See 18700502–429; t18750201–177; t18750201–184; t18810912–782; t18810912–836; t18880109–231; t18880423–456.

48 Films include London Street Scenes, 1903, and Blackfriars Bridge, 1896, both available through the British Film Institute.

49 I am doing this to a larger extent in my doctoral thesis, ‘Streetlife in late Victorian London: the constable and the crowd’, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan (Basingstoke). These concluding remarks are to some extent based on my observations there.

50 Goffman, E., Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order (New York, 1971), 10–11Google Scholar.

51 Lofland, The Public Realm, 29.

52 See Wright, L., ‘Speaking and listening in early modern London’, in Cowan, A. and Steward, J. (eds.), The City and the Senses. Urban Culture since 1500 (Farnham, 2007)Google Scholar; Muldrew, C., ‘From a “light cloak” to an “iron cage”: historical changes in the relation between community and individualism’, in Shepard, A. and Withington, P. (eds.), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000)Google Scholar; Smail, D. Lord, Imaginary Cartographies. Possession and Identity in Late-Medieval Marseille (Ithaca, 1999), p. 183Google Scholar.

53 Lofland, The Public Realm, 30.

54 See Jerram, L., Streetlife. The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2011), 386Google Scholar.