Abstract
During the long nineteenth century new paradigms of organised and professional crime were framed through the changing prosecution of fraud and forgery, coining and other forms of financial crime. As previous chapters have argued, the records provide only fragmentary evidence of criminal networks and confederacies, suggesting that the existence of organised criminal gangs is far from clear-cut. However, from this period, in the records of the police, the press and the writings of social investigators, a language evolved that described gangs of swindlers, coiners and fraudsters through the rhetoric of criminal organisation, perpetuating an increasingly dramatic shadow world of professional criminals. From the later eighteenth century, financial crimes were seen as increasing in pace with the growth of commerce and banking in the metropolis. Thus, in 1796 Patrick Colquhoun lamented, ‘It is not to be wondered at in a country where commerce and manufactures have arrived at such a height, and where from the opulence of the people the interchange of property is so extensive, that forgeries and frauds should prevail in a certain degree.’2
The Times, 18 January 1905.
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Notes
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See B. Godfrey and J. Locker (2001), ‘The Nineteenth-Century Decline of Custom and its Impact on Theories of “Workplace Theft” and “White-Collar Crime”’, Northern History, 38, pp. 261–73.
G. Davies (2002), A History of Money from Ancient Times to the Present Day (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).
Robb, White-Collar Crime; for definitions see S. Wilson (2010), ‘Fraud and White-Collar Crime: 1850 to the Present’, in A. M. Kilday and D. Nash (eds.), Histories of Crime: Britain, 1600–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 141–59.
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See also, R. McGowen (2005), ‘The Bank of England and the Policing of Forgery 1797–1821’, Past and Present, 186, pp. 81–116.
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G. Dilnot (1928), The Trial of the Detectives (London: Geoffrey Bles). See also Shpayer Makov, Ascent, p. 38, passim.
See ‘The Detection of Crime’, The Times, 12 February 1884; R. M. Morris (2006), ‘“Crime Does Not Pay”: Thinking Again About Detectives in the First Century of the Metropolitan Police’, in C. Emsley and H. Shpayer-Makov, Police Detectives in History, 1750–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 79–102.
The fullest account of the robbery can be found in G. Dilnot (1930), The Trial of Jim the Penman (London: Geoffrey Bles). A more recent treatment can be found in Thomas, Victorian Underworld.
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This was related to the ‘Great Recoinage’ of the 1690s. A. Macfarlane (1981), The Justice and the Mare’s Ale: Law and Disorder in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell).
D. Philips (1977), Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country, 1835–1860 (London: Taylor & Francis), pp. 228–9.
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J. Grant (1838), Sketches in London (London: Ward Lock), pp. 401, 402; J. Garwood (1853), The Million-Peopled City (London: Wertheim and Macintosh), p. 46;
T. Archer (1865), The Pauper, the Thief and the Convict (London: Groombridge & Sons), p. 77.
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See W. M. Meier (2011), Property Crime in London, 1850 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 15, 16, 47; Shpayer Makov, Ascent, p. 293. See the debate about the extent of professional crime between the High Court Judge Alfred Wills and the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Robert Anderson in The Times, 12, 21 February, 22 April, 1901.
S. Petrow (1994), Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 57. See TNA: HO45/9442/66692, ‘State, Discipline and Organisation of the Detective Force of the Metropolitan Police. Report of the Departmental Commission and subsequent Rules’.
Political Examiner, 10 January 1857. The ‘barrister Saward’ was referred to at the trial of Pierce, Burgess and Tester (OBP, January 1857, William Pierce, James Burgess and William George Tester (t18570105–250)). Agar had sold him 500oz of the stolen gold. Saward was tried at the Old Bailey in March 1857, on a charge of forgery. OBP, March 1857, James Townshend Saward and James Anderson (t18570302–413). See the recent biography by his descendent J. Carnell (2011), James Townsend Saward, Criminal Barrister (Hastings: Sensation Press);
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OBP, May 1876, James Humphries, Henry Smith, Edward Houghton and Mary Robinson (t18760529–389). Pay was also involved in raiding and prosecuting disorderly houses, see TNA: HO45/9511/17216, Police Report, ‘C’ Division, by James Pay, Inspector (1863, not dated), cited in H. Cocks (2003), Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris), p. 206.
Levi, Phantom, p. 20, more generally pp. 19–28. R. Reushel (1895), The Knights of Industry (London).
OBP, March 1895, Stanilaus Reuschel (t18950325–304); see related trials, OBP, February 1895, Stein Semansky (t18950225–258); May 1895, Gustav Opitz (t18950520–469). P. Knepper (2009), The Invention of International Crime: A Global Issue in the Making, 1881–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan);
P. Knepper (2007), ‘British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire’, British Journal of Criminology, 47, pp. 61–79.
This group has been neglected in the expansion of middle-class historiography. P. Bailey (1999), ‘White Collars, Gray Lives?: The Lower Middle Class Revisited’, Journal of British Studies, 38, pp. 273–90; Crossick, Lower Middle Class.
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M. Heller (2008), ‘Work, Income and Stability: The Late Victorian and Edwardian London Male Clerk Revisited’, Business History, 50, 3, pp. 253–71.
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Dick Hobbs has explored some of these firms in a slightly later chronology, in D. Hobbs (2001), ‘The Firm: Organisational Logic and Criminal Culture on a Shifting Terrain’, British Journal of Criminology, 41, pp. 549–60.
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Shore, H. (2015). ‘A new species of swindling’: Coiners, Fraudsters, Swindlers and the ‘Long-Firm’, c. 1760–1913. In: London’s Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720–c. 1930. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313911_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313911_6
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