The Fatal Shore

by Robert Hughes

  Of all the testimony offered to the Royal Commissions on factory labor, there is perhaps none more chilling than the evidence of Joseph Badder, a children’s overseer in a Leicester mill, to the Factory Commission of 1833. It has a prophetic ring: Here, the factory-induced dystopic visions of man as automaton that would run from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) are made pitiably concrete:

  I used to beat them.… I told them I was very sorry after I had done it, but I was forced to it. The masters expected me to do my work, and I could not do mine unless the children did theirs. Then I used to joke with them to keep up their spirits.

  I have seen them fall asleep, and they have been performing their work with their hands until they were asleep, after the billy had stopped, when their work was over. I have stopped and looked at them for two minutes, going through the motions of piecening fast asleep, when there was really no work to do, and when they were really doing nothing.5

  Such flat and distant voices confirm the rhetoric of William Blake: “Grace” is underwritten by constant, speechless suffering, and “culture” begins in the callused hands of exhausted children, weaving robotically in sleep, “going through the motions … when they were really doing nothing.” For the first time in human history, the machine dictates the term of organic existence to its servants; the body becomes an inferior machine. If respectability was to be judged by people’s endurance of such work, there is no surprise in the growth of crime. In a sense, the children of the mills were inoculated against the dread of punishment; “they appeared as complete prisoners as they would be in gaol,” remarked one observer to the Peel Committee.6

  But mill labor, at least, was regular and gave fairly steady employment. Not all workers in London had such a prospect. Home industries like weaving were prostrated by industrial competition. To be whip-sawed between long work-hours and patches of unemployment was deeply demoralizing. As Francis Place found, it bred the familiar torpor of the laid-off:

  I know not how to describe the sickening aversion which at times steals over the working man, and utterly disables him for a longer or shorter time from following his usual occupation, and compels him to idleness. I have felt it. I have been obliged to submit and run away from my work. This is the case with every workman I have known; and in such proportion as a man’s case is hopeless will such fits occur and be of longer duration.7

  A common solace was gin. After 1720 this white grain spirit flavored with crushed juniper berries became England’s national stupefacient, the heroin of the eighteenth century (but worse, because its use was far wider). Brandy, port, claret and Madeira, the rich man’s four tipples, were taxed on import and no workingman could afford them. But gin was made in England and cost next to nothing: “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence” meant what it said. Its consumption was eagerly promoted by the landed gentry, because England nearly always had a surplus of corn, which gin-distilling used up. Consequently there were no restrictions of any kind on making or selling the liquor until the Gin Act of 1751, by which time London was said to have one gin-shop for every 120 citizens. By 1743 the laboring poor of England were consuming 8 million gallons of gin a year, and they presented a most squalid appearance: “Lazy, sotted and brutish by nature,” a French visitor called them in 1777.8 The contrast between the new, degraded “mob,” sodden with gin, and the honest peasantry, merry with ale, was by now a commonplace with every moralist up to and including William Hogarth, who gave it memorable form in his engravings Gin Lane and Beer Street.

  The “mob,” as the urban proletariat was called, had become an object of terror and contempt, but little was known about it. It was seen as a malign fluid, a sort of magma that would burst through any crack in law and custom, quick to riot and easily inflamed to crime by rabble-rousers. This moral prejudice affected most efforts to find out about English crime and English poverty.

  Thus Patrick Colquhoun, in his Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (1797), made one of the first attempts to gauge the number of criminals in George III’s London. He claimed that there were 115,000 people living off crime in the city—about one Londoner in eight, which constituted a “criminal class” in itself. But who were they, and what did they do? Colquhoun lumped thieves, muggers and forgers, who clearly were criminals, together with scavengers, bear-baiters and gypsies, who were not, or at least not clearly so. He estimated that there were 50,000 “harlots” in London—about 6 percent of its population—but, as Edward P. Thompson pointed out, “[Colquhoun’s] prostitutes turn out, on closer inspection, to be ‘lewd and immoral women’, including ‘the prodigious number among the lower classes who cohabit together without marriage’ (and this at a time when divorce for women was an absolute impossibility).”9 If the same criteria of whoredom were applied to London today, how many “harlots” would a modern Colquhoun find?

  The fact that their superiors thought that such people were prostitutes is no guide: In social matters, Georgian Englishmen far preferred generalization to reportage, and there was no eighteenth-century Mayhew. A Spitalfields weaver, an Irish casual laborer and a Scottish ditch-digger might not even understand one another’s speech, let alone share any aspirations; but seen from above they all belonged to the “mobbish class of persons.” The “mob” was Georgian society’s id—the sump of forbidden thoughts and proscribed actions, the locus of the raging will to survive. Amid the general fear of Jacobinism that swept England after the French Revolution, it would seem an even greater menace. Then, the issues of crime and of revolution became conflated, and so the rising crime-rate—or rather, the belief that it was rising—became a potent issue. Accordingly, the Georgian legislators fought back against a threat which they believed came from a whole class. The criminal became the dreaded sans-culotte’s cousin. Georgian fear of the “mob” led to Victorian belief in a “criminal class.” Against both, the approved weapon was a form of legal terrorism.

  ii

  THE BELIEF in a swelling wave of crime was one of the great social facts of Georgian England. It shaped the laws, and the colonization of Australia was its partial result.

  Sending criminals to the far Antipodes was like sending them from one disagreeably fabled land to another. The slum areas of London seemed a foreign country of crime, and in 1751 Henry Fielding reflected that

  had they been intended for the very purpose of concealment, they could hardly have been better contrived. Upon such a view, [London] appears as a fast wood or forest, in which a Thief may harbour with as great security, as wild beasts do in the deserts of Africa or Arabia.10

  Crime was up in the countryside, too; “Our people have become what they never were before, cruel and inhuman.”11 The reasons, Fielding thought, were gin, gambling and the love of “luxury” that had caused men and women to reject their traditional stations, even among “the very dregs of the people.” The helpless begged, while those “of more art and courage” stole. The innocent lived in a state of siege.

  A quarter of a century later, things seemed no better. In 1775 Jonas Hanway indignantly exclaimed that

  I sup with my friend; I cannot return to my home, not even in my chariot, without danger of a pistol being clapt to my breast. I build an elegant villa, ten or twenty miles distant from the capital: I am obliged to provide an armed force to convey me thither, lest I should be attacked on the road with fire and ball.12

  Two centuries later one can see broader reasons for this growth of crime. English society was violently changing, under the stresses of industrialization, the growth of towns, and a soaring birthrate. From 1700 to 1740, the population of England and Wales remained almost constant at about 6 million people. Then it started rising fast—so fast that between 1750 and 1770 the population of London doubled—and by 1851 it stood at 18 million. This meant that the median age of Englishmen kept dropping and the labor market was saturated with the young. No mechanisms existed for the effective relief of mass unemployment; it was
not a problem England had ever before had to contend with on this scale. The Poor Laws had been written for a different England. Parish relief and the workhouse were the primitive devices of a pre-industrial society; now they were overwhelmed. But crime is, was and always will be a young man’s trade, and English youth, rootless and urban, took to it with a will.

  They found easy pickings, especially since Georgian England had none of the tools for catching criminals that the twentieth century takes for granted. Official crime records and registers of criminals were primitive, and there would be no fingerprinting until 1885. Artists made sketches, for popular consumption, of famous offenders like Dick Turpin or Jack Sheppard, but one could no more recognize a felon from such semi-devotional effigies than pick St. Paul from a crowd by consulting a Byzantine icon. Identification of wanted men had to be made from verbal descriptions in the police gazettes, circulated to mayors and magistrates after the early 1770s: “Benjamin Bird, a tall thin man, pale complexion, black hair tied, thick lips, the nail of the forefinger of his right hand is remarkably clumsy, comes from Coventry, and is charged with several forgeries, the last at Liverpool …” Sketchy as they were, such descriptions did produce some arrests, mainly in villages where people noticed strangers. Some officers of the law had long memories. Henry Fielding’s sightless half-brother John, a magistrate known at Bow Street as the “Blind Beak,” was said to be able to identify 3,000 different malefactors by their voices alone. But on the whole, it was easier for criminals to escape scot-free in the 1780s than it would ever be again.

  There was one main reason for this: England had no effective, centralized police force and would not form one until Peel’s Police Act of June 1829. Law and order on the street was left to the parishes and wards; hence those enfeebled butts of every street urchin, the “Charlies” or parish watchmen. There were about 2,000 of them in London in the late eighteenth century, “poor old decrepit people” as Fielding bluntly put it, charity cases who had cast themselves on the mercy of the parish because they no longer had the strength to do other work. From the parish, each Charley got a greatcoat with three capes, like a coachman’s; a lantern, to light his tottering progress through the alleys; a wooden rattle to summon help; and a staff to defend himself. He would bang its butt rhythmically against the cobbles as he walked, to give thieves plenty of warning. Thus the embarrassment of a meeting between Law and Crime could be averted. He was easily bribed, with sixpence or a quart of gin. Charley’s deterrent power was therefore slight.

  In practice, the magistrates preferred an older way of catching suspects: a graduated scale of rewards for information. This reward system was the eighteenth century’s chief way of detecting crime. It pressed private enterprise into service against its Other, the criminal.

  The pickings were large enough to support a whole subclass of informers, police narks and thief-takers. Suspects could bribe the informer not to lay information against them. Thus there was hardly a petty trade conducted in the London alleys whose members did not sell gin on the side, and few of them bothered to pay—or could afford—the price of a liquor license. Instead, they paid the nark £10 or so not to denounce them. If paid by the courts, informers could squeeze sap from every twig of the huge, ramifying tree of English criminal law. Nineteen separate offenses relating to the use of hackney coaches in London carried a reward of 50 shillings for informants; from there to the exalted levels of murder and grand larceny, each crime carried its reward.

  One could grow prosperous by informing, but not rich. The larger profits went to a more daring and astute kind of professional, the thief-takers. In theory, the thief-taker was no mere informer. He tracked down criminals and, at his own risk, intrepidly brought them to court. He was the eighteenth-century ancestor of the private eye, a detective with no official standing and, of course, no police protection. No niceties about laws of evidence or suspects’ rights governed the thief-takers’ forays into the “alsatias” (criminal purlieus) of London. They had a vested interest in fostering crime, for it kept up the flow of rewards. By playing both ends against the middle, they invented a new pattern of English felonry, thus presenting the good Georgian citizenry with a new and extraordinarily threatening spectacle: organized crime. The archetype of the thief-taker had been Jonathan Wild (1683–1725).13

  The perception of organized crime would not go away, and in time it became more and more frightening to property-owners. A single criminal could be singly met. The householder, armed with blunderbuss and paired horse-pistols, defended by locks, grilles, bells, man-traps and loyal servants, could drive him away. But a collective of thugs and thieves, a united “criminal class” working together in gangs—that was quite another matter. It was a largely fantastical notion, exaggerated and nourished by deep-rooted territorial instincts. Gangs certainly existed in Georgian England, but they were only responsible for a fraction of the deeds that the law defined as criminal. Crime was still a cottage industry, a jumble of individual acts of desperation. The failure of language—the tyranny of moral generalization over social inspection—fed the ruling class’s belief that it was endangered from below.

  iii

  YET THE PEOPLE who had most to gain from a police force opposed its founding, tooth and nail. Despite the unrest that smoldered in England throughout the eighteenth century—the mobs at Tyburn, the Penlez riots of 1749, the Wilkite riots of the 1760s and the Gordon riots of 1780—there was no concerted Parliamentary move to set up a police force until the nineteenth century was a quarter gone. Georgian authorities preferred to rely on thief-takers for dealing with individuals, the Riot Act and the militia for dealing with groups. This was a source of wonder to foreigners, especially the French. “From sunset to dawn,” wrote one such visitor in 1784, “the environs of London become the patrimony of brigands for twenty miles around,” but the government did not improve the police because it was hampered by “clashes of interest” between people and King.14 When the Duc de Levis asked his friends in 1814 why they had no maréchaussée—the rural police, the powers of arbitrary pursuit and arrest, that had all but stamped out brigandage in the French provinces—he was firmly told that “such an institution is not compatible with liberty.”

  There lay the nub. The English refused to create a regular police force because they had seen what lay across the Channel, where no Frenchman’s home was his castle. “I had rather half-a-dozen peoples’ throats be cut in the Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years,” wrote one returned traveller, “than be subject to the domiciliary visits, spies and the rest of Fouche’s contrivances.”15

  There were limits, of course, to this bluff libertarian attitude, and they showed up wherever the issue of class was involved. Those who opposed a police force did so from concern for the rights of property, not those of suspects. Modern precedents governing arrest and search, such as the Miranda decision, would have struck them as insanely favorable to the criminal. There was distress at the “tenderness” of the English legal system. “The regard shown to offenders falls little short of respect,” complained Sir John Hawkins, a Middlesex magistrate of the 1760s.16 Georgian justice may look fierce to us, but seen from Europe then it was lenient. The suspect had basic rights not recognized in France, Italy or Germany: He could not be tortured until he confessed; he could not be held indefinitely without bail or trial; and he was innocent until proven guilty. The liberalism of the English Common Law, compared to their own systems based on Roman and Canon Law, astonished European visitors. They noticed that, although it reduced the likelihood of an innocent man’s conviction, it also made it easier for the guilty to escape.

  The English knew this, too; hence the draconic laws they created to avenge their sense of a disturbed social order. Against the relative fairness of British trials, one must set the most striking aspect of Georgian law—the sheer scope of its capital statutes. If detection and arrest were feeble and trials tenderly fair, what punishment could keep men from crime? Only the extreme one: hanging without benefit
of clergy. During the reigns of the first three Georges, law enacted death upon what seemed a limitless variety of human deeds, from infanticide to “impersonating an Egyptian” (posing as a gypsy). Between the enthronement of Charles II in 1660 and the middle of George IV’s reign in 1819, 187 new capital statutes became law—nearly six times as many as had been enacted in the previous three hundred years. Nearly all were drafted to protect property, rather than human life; attempted murder was classed only as a “misdemeanor” until 1803. These grapeshot laws scattered death impartially. Why must forgers hang? Because the increase of paper transactions in eighteenth-century banking and business—checks, notes, bonds, shares, as distinct from concrete transfer of bags of gold—had made property of all sorts more vulnerable to forgery. Why was it death to “steal an heiress”? Because, like a queen bee swollen with jelly, an heiress was property incarnate; her abductor went to the gallows not for rape but for his theft of a family’s accumulated goods and rights.

  Some capital statutes were very broad. The most notorious of them was 9 Geo. I, c. 22, otherwise known as the Waltham Black Act. It had been drafted ostensibly to repress some minor agrarian uprisings in 1722–23 near Waltham Chase in Hampshire, where rural laborers, moving at night with blacked faces, had taken to poaching game and fish, burning hayricks and posting threatening letters on their landlords’ gates. The act, passed by the Commons without a murmur of dissent, prescribed the gallows for over two hundred possible offenses in various permutations. One could be hanged for burning a house or a hut, a standing rick of corn, or an insignificant pile of straw; for poaching a rabbit, for breaking down “the head or mound” of a fishpond, or even cutting down an ornamental shrub; or for appearing on a high-road with a sooty face. As Sir Leon Radzinowicz remarked, “The Act constituted in itself a complete and extremely severe criminal code which indiscriminately punished with death a great many different offences, without taking into account either the personality of the offender or the particular circumstances of each offence.”17