19th Century Social Reform

Despite the evidence for pre-modern concerns about juvenile crime, a number of historians have argued that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a pivotal period of change in the treatment of juvenile criminals. Accordingly, a traditional approach to the history of crime has argued that during the nineteenth century there was an ‘invention’ of juvenile crime, and that, henceforth, the foundations were laid for the juvenile justice system of the later nineteenth century, and, indeed, for our modern system. The key features to be enshrined in this system were the axiomatic tension between systems of punishment and reformation, the separation of juveniles from adults at all stages of the criminal justice system, and (at least in the nineteenth century) the removal of the child from what were seen as debilitating domestic environments.

The story of these developments can be found in many social histories of the period, particularly since they were taking place in parallel with other developments in social policy. According to traditional histories, it was no coincidence that these developments occurred at the same time as changes to the Poor Law system, change in the workplace, relating particularly to women and children, and changes in the policing of society, evidenced by the passing of the Factory Acts, the Metropolitan Police Act, and the New Poor Law in the first half of the century.

Models of Delinquency

While the development of the state and of social welfare is certainly significant in discussing juvenile crime in this period, a number of other factors need to be considered. Firstly, the extent to which there was not so much an ‘invention’ as a ‘reconceptualisation’ of the juvenile offender. Secondly, the level of detailed insight into the experience of this group within the criminal justice system afforded by the rich material that has survived in nineteenth-century records. Thirdly, to what extent a particular construction, or constructions, of the deviant child influenced the development of legislative and penal policy towards juvenile offenders.

During the early modern period there were frequent panics about crime and more general delinquency. These concerns resulted in legislation and some institutional initiatives, until fears about vagrants, disorderly apprentices and idle youth again subsided. However, from the late eighteenth century in Britain there seems to have been a wholesale transition of such panics into a much more central place in political policy. This was partly a response to mass urbanisation and the pervasive and seemingly relentless presence of the poor and the criminal. Policing, prisons and punishment were the subjects of various texts and commentaries and, increasingly, the raison d’être of a number of parliamentary select committees. In 1777, John Howard published his controversial report on the State of the Prisons in England and Wales, to be followed by Patrick Colquhoun’s Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis in 1796. Such publications appeared at a time when a backlash towards public execution and the death sentence had begun to engender the search for secondary punishments.

During the early nineteenth century a number of offences that had previously been punishable by death, at least on the statute book, were reduced to non-capital crimes. Picking-pockets, a crime historically associated with the young and nimble, was punishable by death until 1808. Transportation to Australia had started in 1787 and while removal to the colonies was hardly a new concept, the sense of finality presented by such a distance, was.

Juvenile crime seems to have come most strongly into focus around the end of the Napoleonic Wars. From c.1815, at least in urban areas, there was a rise in the numbers of children aged sixteen and under indicted for felony. As with all criminal statistics there are problems in interpretation, but there does seem to have been an increase in concern over juvenile crime around this period. Which came first, the rise in indictments or the rise in concern, is open to debate. However, a pivotal year was 1816 when the Report of the Committee for Investigating the Alarming Increases of Juvenile Crime in the Metropolis was published. The report said little that was new, many of its arguments having already been presented in the pamphlets of the Philanthropic Society (formed in 1788), but it does seem to have sparked a parliamentary debate about such crime. Perhaps more important were the individuals behind the report. The Committee which had produced it contained a number of Quaker social reformers who have their place in the broader history of criminal justice: Thomas Fowell Buxton, an evangelical Whig politician, who campaigned for an end to capital punishment in all cases but those of murder; Peter Bedford, the Spitalfields philanthropist well-known for his work among the deprived silk workers of that area; Samuel Hoare, Quaker banker, Chairman of the Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline, and brother-in-law of Elizabeth Fry; and William Crawford, from 1835 one of the first Inspector Generals of Prisons. The Friends did much to put criminals, and particularly women and child criminals, at the centre of political debate. Despite their lack of qualification to take part in the political process (Fowell Buxton excepted), their role in the engineering of social and domestic policy was formidable.

19th Century Commentators

From the late 1810s, juvenile crime was increasingly the concern of commentators. What occurred in this period might crudely be described as a convergence of the public and the private sectors in many matters of domestic policy. Private initiatives set up to deal with juvenile crimes, such as the Marine Society (1756), the Philanthropic Society (1788), the Refuge for the Destitute – not exclusively for juveniles but strongly involved with the rescue and reform of the young (1804) – and private individuals (such as Mary Carpenter, Sydney Turner, Matthew Davenport Hill), mirrored the ideological leanings of parliamentary penal policy. Individuals involved in the voluntary sector became enmeshed in the public machinery of juvenile justice. Parliamentary committees and commissions did not consist solely of government officials, magistrates and constables, but also took evidence from the voluntary sector. In many ways, it was from these people that the penal professionals of the later nineteenth century were descended.

These commentators and activists promoted a more child-centred approach to juvenile criminals. Though early modern policy makers and welfare practitioners had not been unaware of the specific needs of children, truly separate institutions for youngsters, both at the level of trial and punishment, were an innovation of the nineteenth century. The Juvenile Offenders Act of 1847 allowed children under the age of fourteen to be tried summarily before two magistrates, thus making the process of trial for children quicker and removing it from the public glare of the higher courts (the age limit was raised to sixteen in 1850). Then, between 1854 and 1857, a series of Reformatory and Industrial School Acts replaced prison with specific juvenile institutions. These acts represent the culmination and codification of both public and private initiatives, which from the late eighteenth century increasingly corresponded.

The Figure of the Criminal

Much historical research on crime has hitherto focused on the development of penal institutions and policy; recently, however, the figure of the criminal has come to play a more central role in such studies. Historians are starting to think more about how reformers and social commentators constructed the particular model of the juvenile criminal which became prevalent in the nineteenth century. It seems that a number of factors influenced the way in which policy makers imagined and understood the &145;problem&146; of juvenile crime. According to the 1816 report the main causes were:

• The improper conduct of parents
• The want of education
• The want of suitable employment
• The violation of the Sabbath and the habits of gambling in the public-streets
• The severity of the criminal code
• The defective state of the police
• The existing system of prison discipline

These &145;causes&146;, particularly the first four, became a mantra for the majority of commentators, whatever their background or interests. In debates over the following years about the emergence of summary trial for juveniles, and the establishment of the industrial and reformatory schools, these causes fluctuated little. Later in the century social Darwinism and the movement towards more psychologically-based explanations for delinquency in children and youths began to gain popularity. The impact of phrenology, and especially the work of Cesare Lombrose, L’Uomo Delinquente – &145;The Criminal Man&146; (1876) – mixed with notions of imperialism and a particular ideological expression of empire, came for a time to dominate thinking on crime and penal policy. However in the earlier part of the century more environmental explanations for delinquency were favoured.

Although contemporary reports commented on the &145;swarms of ragged children&146; infesting the metropolis, the investigations of social and penal reformers were heavily influenced by what might be called a &145;hard-core&146; of juvenile offenders. These were youths, overwhelmingly boys, who were found in London, at Newgate and Coldbath Fields prisons, in the houses of correction at Tothill Fields and Clerkenwell, in the courts of the Old Bailey and Westminster. Discussion of juvenile offenders in other parts of the country did occur – the factory increasingly became the focus as a site of disorder and delinquency, while the work of the Reverend John Clay with prisoners in Preston in the 1840s was referred to frequently. Significantly, however, the parliamentary debate was coloured by an understanding of metropolitan delinquency. Thus, in the early nineteenth century, juvenile crime in a London setting tended to dominate the construction of the young offender. This was further consolidated by prevalent stereotypes of London pickpockets and thieves. The Artful Dodger in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-39) is irrevocably a child of the capital, his familiarity with the underworld London as he leads Oliver through its streets confirms this:

Mayhew and Binny on juveniles

The most famous interviews with criminals in the nineteenth century are those conducted by John Binny in volume IV of Henry Mayhew’s, London Labour and the London Poor, published in 1861-62 and titled Those That Will Not Work, comprising Prostitutes, Thieves, Swindlers and Beggars, by several contributors. Binny had been influenced by Mayhew himself, who in 1850 had published in the Morning Chronicle an oral history of a young delinquent that was later used in London Labour. Mayhew’s skills as an interviewer of nineteenth-century street types were unparalleled, and are of value both in terms of social history and in revealing the ways in which the model of the juvenile criminal was constructed. Interviewing a fifteen-year-old pickpocket in a London lodging-house, Mayhew’s physical description of the boy’s tools of the trade is almost uncomfortably intimate:

The characteristics implicit in the work on delinquents by both Mayhew and Binny continued a tradition of describing the juvenile offender in a particular mode. He was male, often of small stature, and sharp-witted. Like the Dodger he often had the manner of a small adult, a boy-man, a combination of innocence and experience, of immaturity and mature masculinity which seems to have both disturbed and attracted reformers and investigators. One of these was William Augustus Miles, a confused and sometimes controversial figure, who interviewed delinquents in the 1830s as part of Edwin Chadwick’s investigations into the constabulary. For Miles and many of his contemporaries, the archetypal juvenile offender was a pickpocket, or an aspiring one.

Characterising the juvenile criminal

For much of the nineteenth century juvenile crime was slotted into a model of criminal progression. From scrumping apples from orchards, to shop-lifting from stalls and generalised petty thieving, a boy aspired to the more skilful occupation of picking-pockets. But why was this characterisation so important and central to the ways in which Victorian juvenile offenders have been mythologised? Firstly the pickpocket suggested a level of skill and thus training. For the social commentators of the early nineteenth century this opened a frightening vista of an organised sub-culture in which adult agents trained the children of the street into crime. Secondly, there was progression beyond picking pockets: the most skilful thieves became burglars. The most admired of these boy-men, pickpocket-burglars were described as being members of the Swell mob, a loose, and probably semi-mythological, group of prosperous thieves who dressed stylishly, lived in the best parts of town and cruised the streets of London with their girls on their arms, flaunting their success in the hierarchies of the criminal underworld. A police officer in Mayfair and Soho told Miles about a young man called William Nelson, who was mentioned by various juvenile offenders and social investigators alike in the 1830s:

Nelson certainly did exist, and indeed was sentenced to transportation at the Westminster sessions in December 1836, but his significance borne out by this description lies in this illustration of a particular stereotype of the juvenile criminal. Thus while commentators might have talked generally about ragged children and poor urchins, in the pamphlets and reports the emphasis was placed on a particular representation of the young offender that closely reflected fears about the criminal classes, the street and the underworld. It was a characterisation that was implicitly, and often explicitly, gendered. Although the proportion of female to male juvenile offenders was low, many girls were tried summarily or through other informal methods. The model of the juvenile criminal that appears in nineteenth- century texts was determinedly male; the female played a perhiperal role, and was remarked upon more often as being a source of sexual corruption.

The juvenile criminal experience

So what was the reality for juvenile offenders in the nineteenth century? Youths who fitted the popular caricatures of the Swell mob could certainly be found, but most children were drawn into crime through poverty and debilitating backgrounds. To some extent the activities engaged in by delinquent children were the actions of unruly teenagers influenced by peers and the need for adolescent excitement, and have been described on the streets of seventeenth-century Norwich and twentieth-century Glasgow, as much as nineteenth-century London. Whether there was more juvenile crime in the nineteenth century than before or since is a moot point and one which has less bearing than the question of how juvenile crime was perceived by contemporaries, and on which &145;facts’ and ‘stories’ they based their understandings.

The typical experience for juvenile offenders in this period was to spend some time, perhaps a year or more, committing fairly minor crime, petty theft and vagrancy, for which they would occasionally be brought in front of the magistrate, and if found guilty receive a fine, a whipping, or more likely a short spell in the house of correction, or in London, Bridewell. If this did not divert them, sooner or later they would be indicted for a felonious crime, larceny, pickpocketing or theft from a dwelling-house (often in their capacity as domestic servants), for which they would appear at a higher court: in London this would be Clerkenwell, the Old Bailey, or Westminster. From there, having already spent time in prison on remand, they would be acquitted, or if found guilty, sentenced to a spell in the house of correction, or to transportation, or to death.

Children under sixteen were still sentenced to death in the early nineteenth century. However, in almost all cases their sentence was reduced to transportation. One exception was John Any Bird Bell, a fourteen-year-old murderer from Kent who in 1831, after cutting the throat of another boy, was executed at Maidstone, crying out his last words, ‘All you people take heed by me!’ Those who were sentenced to transportation would be taken to the hulks at Chatham or Woolwich. Between 1825 and 1843 boys could be sent to a specially adapted juvenile hulk, the Euryalus at Chatham. Here they would await transportation to the colonies, to New South Wales, or from 1834, Point Puer, a penal colony for boys in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania).

Of course there were a number of other routes by which children could be incorporated into the criminal justice system. We have to remember the co-existence of the public justice system with its trials and model institutions – such as Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight, opened for boys in 1838 and much criticised by contemporary reformers such as Mary Carpenter – with the private initiatives that continued to take in both children who had actually committed crime, and those it was felt were in danger of becoming delinquent. These were the children that Mary Carpenter designated as the ‘perishing’ in her 1851 text, Reformatory Schools for the Children of the Perishing and Dangerous Classes, and for Juvenile Offenders.

Throughout the nineteenth century, through the auspices of such august institutions as the Philanthropic Society, the Refuge for the Destitute, the Children’s Friend Society, and later, Dr Barnardo’s schemes, thousands of children were sent abroad to Australia, South Africa and Canada. Of these, some had been accused of committing crimes, many had not: rather a collision of interests resulted in schemes in which the emphasis lay on separation and removal. Transportation and emigration served the purpose of removing Britain’s unwanted and delinquent children. It also satisfied an imperial ideology which saw these young, white Britons as new stock for the colonial lands. For the reformers transportation served the dual purpose of removing such children from the corruption which tainted them at home, while offering the opportunity for reform and renewal in the colonial lands. Yet in this medley of objectives the child was rarely seen as an individual, his opinions rarely sought. One fifteen-year-old boy who had been sent to South Africa (we do not know his crime) wrote to his mother in 1835:

A new juvenile justice system

By the late nineteenth century the new juvenile justice system was firmly in place. Various acts since 1850 had extended summary powers, and there were increasing calls for a separate juvenile court in which to process young delinquents. The first children’s court was set up in Birmingham in April 1905, strongly influenced by the model of the Illinois Juvenile Court which had been established by act in America in 1899. Transportation had ended by 1867, though emigration of delinquent children continued. A number of Reformatory and Industrial Schools developed from the acts of the 1850s, a process completed by the Education Act of 1876, which put into place industrial day schools and truant schools. As Leon Radzinowitz has pointed out, by the eve of the First World War, ‘there was a network of 208 schools: 43 reformatories, 132 industrial schools, 21 day industrial schools and 12 truant schools’.

The juvenile offender was not, then, an invention of the nineteenth century. However, it is clear that in this period a reconceptualisation of youth crime, and various developments in social policy, as well as the activities of certain individuals, resulted in a new language of youthful delinquency. By the late nineteenth century, through a combination of state legislation and institutional projects, voluntary initiatives, and cultural concepts culled from a particular response to, and understanding of, such crime, the juvenile offender had become a centtral figure, fully entrenched in the British justice system.