The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  The idea of a criminal class, as understood by the English in the 1830s, meant that a distinct social group “produced” crime, as hatters produced hats or miners coal. It was part mob, part tribe and part guild, and it led a subterranean existence below and between the lower social structures of England. The criminal class had its own argot, its hierarchies, its accumulated technical wisdom. It preserved and amplified the craft of crime, passing it on from master to apprentice. This idea emerged from the late-eighteenth-century perception that crime in England had risen so fast that Authority must deal with an orchestration, not just an accumulation, of criminal acts. The spectacular career of Jonathan Wild promoted a vision of “generals” of crime—criminal masterminds—leading “armies” of thugs. This proved a durable fantasy. It lasted right through the nineteenth century and culminated in the image of the pre-Mafia super-criminal—Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty.

  Stabs were made at guessing the size of this class. Patrick Colquhoun figured in 1797 that there were 50,000 whores and 10,000 thieves in London, along with more specialized citizens of the demimonde (Mud-larks, Bludgeon Men, Scufflehunters and dozens of other types) who brought the criminal total to some 115,000, more than 12 percent of the city’s population.11 He was guessing, of course, and his figures were ridiculed even then. The crime statistics assembled by the early Victorians were “harder,” more voluminous, but still misleading—for criminal statistics have little to tell us about crime and criminals in the nineteenth century.*

  The data of the early nineteenth century are further clouded by the prejudices of those who interpreted them at the time.12 Around 1800, the “mob” was seen, with every reason, as dangerous. It was fuel for the same revolutionary fire that had destroyed the monarchy on the other side of the Channel. Propertied Englishmen were obsessed with Jacobinism. In their eyes, it justified every resurgence of repression, inhibited every effort at reform, and deeply unsettled the poise with which they had hitherto contemplated the lower classes. It also lent a pervasive if unconscious tinge to all guesses about the nature and composition of the “mob.” Their fear of the political threat translated itself into repeated exaggerations of criminal nature. Thus, it was all too easy to assign criminal propensities to the marginal, the outcast, the rag-and-boner—in short, to those who might be seen as English sans-culottes. For that large tract where the unpropertied survived, where tricks of subsistence had to be invented from day to day, where the cunning, the illicit and the illegal blended into one another without fine distinction, they had only one name: the criminal class.

  Their tendency to invest the struggling and the low with an aura of criminality was sometimes amplified by Evangelical Methodism. If the lower orders were not frugal, humble, hardworking and devout, if they clung unrepentantly to their rum, rutting and fairs, the randy humor and coarse songs and all the other amusements that make life at the bottom of the heap intermittently tolerable, then they were on the Devil’s side, not God’s.

  The fear of crime itself cast an exaggerated solidity on “the distinct body of thieves, whose life and business is to follow up a determined warfare against the constituted authorities” and who “may be known almost by their very gait in the streets from other persons.”13 Was all crime as professional as such sentinels believed? Probably only a minority of thieves ran in gangs. Many thefts were spontaneous, desperate and often bungled efforts to relieve want and hunger. Crimes of violence were not always premeditated. There was a wide gray area between the “occasional” criminal, stealing a rabbit or a coat, and the hard-core professional whose strategies were evoked by the idea of a criminal class. The latter were taken to be permanently degraded, “members of a sort of criminal race,” as Sydney Smith’s Edinburgh Review expressively put it; the former, not. Although hard-core criminals did not drift into respectability, the respectable drifted into crime. For the official English morality of the early nineteenth century was far more absolutist than ours. Today’s orthodoxy is to look for the environmental excuse and to seek the roots of crime in nurture, not nature—that is, outside the criminal’s power of choice. One hundred and fifty years ago it was assumed that men and women chose a life of crime. The way to this life was seen—and its image was reinforced by the immense power of official and church imagery—as a sequence of irrevocable steps leading downward, the easy road to Hell. This accorded with the basic conservative tenet, that people are not “naturally” wise or good: We must be restrained by law, and frightened by punishment.

  Such ideas, however, were in themselves a harshly coercive part of the social environment and may have caused many people to give up the struggle—to let go, to be what society said they would become, and accept the only milieu that would not rebuke them: crime. The son of a well-off country grocer, caught stealing apples over a neighbor’s wall, might get a small fine and a heavy thrashing from his father and so, chastened, go on to respectability. The son of an Irish casual worker in a London slum, caught breaking a window, might experience no such change in the House of Correction. All people, but especially the young, tend to become what society says they are.

  Belief in a “criminal class” was self-fulfilling in other ways too—mainly because it made rehabilitation so difficult. Once off the edge, it was not easy to find another respectable job. Records were better in 1830 than in 1770, and they could be checked by any prospective employer.

  Many observers realized that crime does not appear in a social vacuum. From 1800 onward, a large literature—at first Evangelical in tone and rising at last to the power of Dickens’s encyclopedic vision of the city as ultimate social and moral compressor—sought to describe the causes of crime: poverty, lack of work, dislocation, vile housing, addiction, the death of hope. But the official inquiries into crime, drunkenness, prisons and transportation that were held between 1815 and 1840 tended to confirm the same view of crime: that its class nature mattered more than its causes. The criminal class, in the view of one writer in 1854, “constitutes a new estate, in utter estrangement from all the rest.”14

  But how threatening was it? And was there not hope for the respectable in its estrangement and apparent cohesiveness? The difference between the “criminal classes” of London and the classes dangereuses of Paris was that the English were not as dangerous; events like the Gordon Riots in London were the exception, not the rule. England had no tradition of riot and revolt abetted by outpourings of aggression from the criminal classes, whereas the French were used to such explosions from the “vile mob,” as the French minister Adolphe Thiers called it in 1850, that had brought “every Republic down in ruin.”15 But, despite the inflamed rhetoric of some Tory extremists, there had never been any alliance, natural or otherwise, between English criminals and English radicals—indeed, the latter took care to exclude the former from their ranks, always stressing their own respectability as workingmen.

  But if English crime, unlike French, seemed to present no political threat to the state as such, it certainly menaced its citizens—chiefly the laboring poor. The “criminal class” threatened middle-class property, but what most worried the authorities was the moral contagion it offered to workers and their impressionable children. They had tried to remove the bad apples from the lower classes before they could contaminate the good. The New Poor Law had tried to separate the independent laboring poor from the paupers; the ragged-schools tried to keep the offspring of the lowest and most depraved paupers apart from the “respectable.”16 Transportation sought to remove, once and for all, the source of contamination from the otherwise decent bosom of the lower classes, and ship it “beyond the seas” to a place from which it could not easily return. There it would stay, providing slave labor for colonial development and undergoing such mutations toward respectability as whips and chains might induce. The main point was not what happened to it there, but that it would no longer be here.

  The final aim of the transportation system, then, was less to punish individual crimes than to uproot an enemy cl
ass from the British social fabric. Here lay its peculiar modernity; its prediction of the vaster, more efficient techniques of class destruction that would be perfected, a century later, in Russia. However, it failed. Transportation did not stop crime in England or even slow it down. The “criminal class” was not eliminated by transportation, and could not be, because transportation did not deal with the causes of crime. And before we leave the generalizations that led authorities to their ideas about the “criminal class,” we should consider a voice from inside it. Written by the wife of a thief bound early for the Fatal Shore, it recounts in bare language the descent into a crime of desperation that must have been traced by thousands of convicts, in an England without pity for the “undeserving poor.”

  Isaac Nelson, clerk, has been sentenced to seven years’ transportation at the Stafford Assizes in 1789. He is now in chains at Portsmouth, cast for transportation on the Second Fleet. His crime was stealing “a Quantity of plated goods” (silver) from a former employer in Birmingham, Matthew Boulton, whom he had served “with the uttermost fidelity” for three years. After quitting Boulton’s service, he had come to London and worked for several employers (all of whom signed the letter as character witnesses). Nelson’s wife—only the initial of her Christian name, S, appears on the letter—begs to assure the authorities she is petitioning that her husband, after losing his last job with a Piccadilly optician,

  from that time was so unfortunate as to be Destitute of all kind of Imployment for upwards of Twelve Months in which Time we were redused to the uttermost Distress possible. Myself afflicted with Illness the whole time and in want of the Common Necessaries of life through a Long and Sevear Winter, and my Husband, the only one I had to look up to get Support, Deprived of the means to gain subsistence, and in this Deploreable Situation to Heap Up the Measure of our Misfortunes, I was Delivered of a Male Infant, who died in a few days from want of proper nourishment, My Self being in so weak a Condishion as not to be able to afford it any assistance.

  Think, most gracious Sir, the Feelings of a Husband who tenderley loved a Wife and had allways been used to afford a comfortable Subsistence, to see her in such a Situation, without the Possibility of releaving her Wants, and humbly hope the Gates of Mercy will not be shut against him.

  Isaac Nelson went back to Birmingham and got a job at Boulton’s for six weeks at 10s. 6d. a week, which was garnished to repay his coach fare and an employer’s advance. His wife in London was still destitute and frantic, and so “in a fitt of distraction” he stole the silverware, which was recovered later. Mrs. Nelson goes on to beg the home secretary that

  You will in Humanity to a poor unfortunate man be pleased to Interview with His Majesty to grant him His Most Gracious Pardon or … [that] he will mitigate his Sentence, by allowing him to stay the time of his sentence in England, or allow Your Petitioner the favour to accompany her husband in his exile, that she may be able to afford him some Consolation amidst his Afflictions as his long confinement joined to his other Trobles, being of a weak Constitution, has brought him into a deep Consumption that has nearly reduced him to the Grave.17

  The “Infinite Mercy and Goodness” of George III did not extend so far and Isaac Nelson sailed for Australia on the terrible Second Fleet.

  Such lives confirm the truth of E. P. Thompson’s bitter remark: The worst offense against property was to have none. We do not know, and never will, how many Isaac Nelsons figured in the “criminal classes.” At the same time, rising somewhat on the scale of culpability, people were transported for offenses that the law condemned but their communities tended to condone. Some popular codes stood at a sharp angle to law. Thus youths made heroes of highwaymen, and whole communities in Cornwall and Devonshire not only engaged in wrecking but claimed a traditional right to plunder ships.18 In smuggling communities along the Sussex coast, people used every shift to avoid the excise on rum and tea, despite the threat of transportation and the gallows. Poaching was another offense that few countrymen, if any, thought wrong, for the poaching laws were among the most corrupt of all English statutes; in sum, they forbade a man to kill a wild animal, even on his own land, unless he could show an income of £100 a year from a freehold estate. Since a laborer in 1830 might expect to make between £10 and £20 a year, the poaching laws were a constant theater of class conflict.

  The popular legend of transportation in Australia still insists that there were many convict poachers, but there were not. The number of men transported for poaching was infinitesimal, about the same as those sent out for buggering sheep or boys; those poachers who did get sent to Australia were usually convicted for resisting arrest or assaulting a gamekeeper, not just for the pheasant in the pocket. It was very hard to find witnesses in village communities. Nevertheless, the fact that authorities pursued country people for such morally insignificant crimes—and were quick to identify them with the “dissolute and idle” rather than the “working” peasantry—shows that there was as wide and ill-recognized a gray area between harmless offense and real crime (like sheep or cattle stealing, acts condemned by all villagers) in the country as in the town.

  iii

  THERE IS NO doubt that many Britons made their living, wholly or in part, from crime. At trial and again on the boat, prisoners had to give their trade or occupation; the two largest categories among the transported were “farm workers” (20 percent) and “laborers” (19 percent). The prisoners did not always use these descriptions themselves; they were more blunt about what they really did for a living. Peter Cunningham, remembering his first voyage to Australia as surgeon-superintendent of convicts on the transport Recovery in 1819, described how a seaman he had ordered to list the trades of the prisoners on board

  came to me in a doubtful mood, scratching his head and observing, “When I ask what their trades are, all the answer I can get from three-fourths of them is, ’a thief, a thief; shall I put them down as labourers, sir?”19

  Although we cannot speak of a “criminal class” with the same confidence as early Victorians did, there certainly was a subculture of crime in the British Isles, in London most of all. It expressed itself in common interests, cant language, specialization, loyalties. Its main character, to the journalist’s eye, was the fantastic range of “trades” it contained, as though the Industrial Revolution, breeding an ever-expanding range of products and specialists to make them, had brought forth an equal army of specialists to steal them. The arch-reporter of the underworld, Henry Mayhew, tabulated at least a hundred subspecies of London criminal by their argot names; a small fraction of his list runs as follows:

  2. “Sneaksmen” or those who plunder by means of stealth.

  [a.] Those who purloin goods, provisions, money, clothes, old metal, &c:

  i. “Drag Sneaks,” or those who steal goods or luggage from carts or coaches.

  ii. “Snoozers,” or those who sleep at railway hotels, and decamp with some passenger’s luggage …

  iii. “Star-Glazers,” or those who cut the panes out of shopwindows.

  iv. “Till Friskers,” or those who empty tills of their contents during the absence of shopmen.

  v. “Sawney-Hunters,” or those who go purloining bacon from cheese-mongers’ shop windows.

  vi. “Noisy-Racket Men,” or those who steal china and glass from outside of china-shops.

  vii. “Area Sneaks,” or those who steal from houses by going down the area steps.

  viii. “Dead Lurkers,” or those who steal coats and umbrellas from passages at dusk, or on Sunday afternoons.

  ix. “Snow Gatherers,” or those who steal clean clothes off the hedges.

  x. “Skinners,” or women who entice children and sailors to go with them and then strip them of their clothes.

  xi. “Bluey-Hunters,” or those who purloin lead from the tops of houses.

  xii. “Cat and Kitten Hunters,” or those who purloin pewter quart and pint pots from the top of area railings.20

  And so on. Argot, like all technical
jargon, set its users apart. English criminal slang was impenetrable to the “straight” ear. It described actions that did not exist in respectable society, high or low, but were known to “the family”—all those who lived “upon the cross.” A running-rumbler, around 1800, “gets a large grinding-stone, which he rolls along the pavement; the passengers hearing the rumble, get out of the way, for fear of its running against them, or over their toes; in this critical moment some of the gang give you the rum-hustle, or pick your pocket.”21 Amusers or puzzlers would throw handfuls of street filth in a victim’s eyes and run away while their accomplice picked his pockets. A horse-thief was a prigger of prancers or a pradnapper; a coiner, a bit-smasher, a bit-cull or a benefeaker. To clip coins and keep the gold-dust was to sweat them or to be in the diminishing way. If one stole loaves from a baker’s basket, one was said to be pricking in the wicker for a dolphin. There seemed to be no substance that could not be stolen: The black-spice racket consisted of stealing bags of soot from sweeps, and the word buff for skin gave rise to buffer—a man who killed dogs by running a sharp wire into their hearts and then sold their pelts to glovers. There was even a market for curls, or human teeth; they were used by some dentists to replace the lost molars of the living.

  These were low trades. But a man whose means are two pops and a galloper had real status as a mounted highwayman with a pair of pistols, fearless as Turpin in bailing up rattling-coves, or coachmen. Forgers drew the King’s picture in Georgian days or, in Victorian ones, dummied the old woman’s ticket. A shoplifter practiced the fam lay, sometimes palming a ring from a jeweler’s counter “by means of a little Ale held in a Spoon over the fire, by which the Palm being daub’d, any light thing sticks to it.”22 His female equivalent would cant the dobbin (steal rolls of ribbon) from haberdashers.