Criminality: An Introduction
From the end of the seventeenth century up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the act of punishing crimes in England followed an organised system, which was determined by a set of laws. The number of crimes and offences that were contained in this system gradually grew over time: while only 50 offences were punishable by death at the early stages of this period (among which figured murder, arson, or high treason), over 200 deeds, said to be criminal, were punishable by death at the turn of the eighteenth century.[1] This statute book was later referred to as the Bloody Code, because of the addition of a variety of property offences that the system deemed punishable by death, even if they could only be minor: “you could be hanged for stealing goods worth 5 shillings (25p), stealing from a shipwreck […] or cutting down a young tree”[2]. This set of laws was enforced by paid watchmen and constables on the local level, but there were no organised police forces until the late eighteenth century. [3] Once sentenced, the criminals were sent to the gallows to be publicly executed, but by the 1830s, sentences to executions were for the most part applied for murder.
As Home Secretary in 1822, Robert Peel introduced several reforms on criminal law, with a view to simplify it. In accordance with this, the Judgement of Death Act was passed in 1823, “enabling Courts to abstain from pronouncing Sentence of Death in certain Capital Felonies,[4]” if it was approved jointly by the King and Parliament; but this did not extend to murder. Peel is also behind the creation of police reforms: he introduced the Metropolitan Police Act in 1829, still in order to reorganise the established system into a more stable one.
Nineteenth century England was prosperous, due to the country’s early industrial revolution in the 1760s, in comparison to other European countries. British society was profoundly altered, and its economy was boosted. This had several effects: the landscapes gradually changed, cities such as Manchester or Liverpool grew considerably, there was a movement of population from the countryside to these cities because of the docks, which meant that there were more opportunities for people to be employed. There was a growth of the population in Britain, “from around five million people in 1700 to nearly nine million by 1801,” (White, “The rise of cities in the 18th century”, under ‘Population growth’) people came from across Europe to England looking for employment. This resulted in an increase of tensions in the cities, in particular in London, crowds of people quickly ended up in the streets, “House fires, accidents, fights and public executions […] drew huge audiences whenever they occurred, and added to the sense of excitement that was part of daily city life.” (White, “The rise of cities in the 18th century”, under ‘Crowds and people’).
It is also during the nineteenth century that the gap between the wealthy and the poor widened, as the industrial revolution mostly benefited the higher classes, and the working class was getting poorer, their living and working conditions were getting harder. This division between classes was further emphasised through the apparition of the notion of a ‘criminal class’, which represented a threat to social and moral order of British society at the time, although it was to be on the rise much later:
[Victor Bailey] convincingly argued that, in the second half of the century, the term ‘criminal classes’ was increasingly used as a way of separating the ‘respectable’ working class from the ‘rough’ working class and those suspected of living in, and perpetrating, a criminal culture. (Philips 1)
Even if they were less numerous owing to these reforms, public executions still managed to draw large crowds all across England, and some influential people were starting to become vocal about their opinions, whether they supported the idea of having these kinds of gatherings public or not.
Among them, British novelist and social critic Charles Dickens, and British novelist and essayist William Makepeace Thackeray. Throughout the 1820s, the conservative members of Parliament continued to defend the gravity and seriousness of some crimes even though they were not all considered as requiring a capital judgment. It is in the following decade that the question of capital crimes was reconsidered more thoroughly and debated upon.
[1] What was the ‘Bloody Code’?
[2] Crime and Punishment, The Bloody Code.
[3] The Bow Street Runners, especially after 1754 under Sir John Fielding, an English Magistrate.
[4] Judgment of Death Act
[4] Judgment of Death Act
PHILIPS, David. “Three “moral entrepreneurs” and the creation of a “criminal class” in England, c. 1790s-1840s” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies [Online]. Vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 79-107. 2003. [Accessed 23/03/2021] URL: https://journals.openedition.org/chs/612#tocto1n1
WHITE, Matthew. “The rise of cities in the 18th century”. The British Library [Online]. 15 May 2014. [Accessed 23/03/2021]. URL: https://www.bl.uk/georgian-britain/articles/the-rise-of-cities-in-the-18th-century.
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