Authors: Sarah Wise
Children under the age of seven were not criminally liable, since they were not deemed to be capable of crime. Yet London’s prisons had plenty of slightly older children serving sentences for begging. In 1827, according to the 1828
Police Select Committee Report,
seventeen boys and twenty-seven girls under the age of twelve served sentences in the Bridewell prison. (Newgate Prison even had a schoolmaster to teach the inmates under fourteen.) And Elizabeth Butler, imprisoned in a small jail in Westminster on a charge of vagrancy in January 1828, was, in fact, seven years old, as the Select Committee’s own tables showed.
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Several factors contributed to the heightened vulnerability of young people in British cities, and one of the biggest of these was the strain placed on the traditional family. While divorce would not be available to anyone outside the aristocracy until 1857, common-law marriages increased in number from the end of the eighteenth century, with stepparents becoming more notable in descriptions of the makeup of urban families. Abandoned wives figure large in any data, descriptive or numerical, on the urban poor of these times, and while many women were widowed by the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) or saw their husbands rendered unfit for work through injury, some men had found conscription a handy exit from family life. Other men decamped for the cities to find work and never called for their wives and children to join them. Absconding fathers could be arrested and jailed for failing to maintain their dependents, and advertisements about them often appeared in the London publication
Hue and Cry
(renamed the
Police Gazette
in 1828), a twice-weekly compendium of recent court hearings and notices of stolen property, escaped prisoners, deserting soldiers, wanted criminals, and, from time to time, missing children.
Another destabilizing factor for young people was the end of “living-in” apprenticeships. Traditionally, young males who were apprenticed to learn a trade moved in with the “master’s” family and received board and lodging as well as training. A formal apprenticeship lasted seven years—the years of adolescence and early manhood. The master took over the role of paterfamilias as long as the apprenticeship lasted, and many contracts stipulated that the apprentice was to abstain from drink and fornication. The signings of these “indentures” were witnessed by a senior figure in the parish, or even by a magistrate. (Their importance in a young man’s life is indicated by the fact that John Bishop’s own signed indenture had his birth caul attached to it.) In 1814, the Statute of Apprentices was repealed by Parliament in a move to free up the labor market and enlarge the pool of semiskilled workers who could take jobs without needing highly specialized training. The practice of shorter “out-apprenticeships” began, removing the board, lodging, and moral-supervision elements; when the day’s training was over, young men had more time on their hands, unsupervised by either family or master. Some police officers and magistrates claimed this rise in the amount of leisure hours brought greater opportunities for youths to be led into “juvenile depravity,” as it was coming to be termed. Only about one in eight cases heard at the Old Bailey involved any kind of violence (although this figure is unlikely to reflect the true level of violence—particularly in the home), and, in fact, London was a safer place for the person (though not for property) in the early decades of the nineteenth century than it had been in the eighteenth. But it didn’t seem so. Though the highwaymen and “footpads” (muggers) of the Hanoverian age had been largely eradicated, vaguer, less easily located anxieties about urban evil remained. There began to be voiced, from the early 1820s, a suspicion that an organized, systematic layer, or web, of criminality existed that was becoming harder and harder for the authorities to penetrate. Such matters did not appear to be measurable, quantifiable, governable; and the aspects of city life that were evading the tables and lists began to prey on official minds precisely because of their unknowability.
London’s rapidly swelling population further exacerbated the already precarious situation of the poor. Some thirty thousand babies were born in London each year in the first decades of the nineteenth century; yet the rising ranks of Londoners were not merely the result of the city’s birth rate but reflected the phenomenon of urbanization. In 1801, the year of the first English census, just over one-third of the population lived in rural areas; by 1831, this proportion had dropped to just below one-quarter. In 1801, London’s population had passed the one million mark; in 1831, it had risen to 1,646,288, representing almost one-eighth of the population of England and Wales. But people were coming to towns and cities from the country not so much to seek their fortune as to subsist. Internal migration had swelled from a steady stream to a torrent after 1815—an increase that was, arguably (and many historians have argued about it), accelerated by the process of “enclosure.” Some 740,000 acres of farmland were amalgamated into large agricultural estates by 1815, while five million acres of common had also been enclosed, depriving of a livelihood those who made a humble living from grazing on commons and “waste” land. (These livings were a long-held custom, not a legal right.) The flight to the cities was the only reasonable prospect for the landless, propertyless, and unskilled; but it coincided with an economic collapse following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which had demobilized half a million men home to a contracted employment market and a land where food prices fluctuated wildly and bread prices were kept artificially high to protect the incomes of landowners and owners of large farms.
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Then, in 1825, came another, sudden economic depression.
Edward Pelham Brenton, a retired naval captain and philanthropist, noticed the saddest results of the mass migration on the streets of London every day. In addition to setting up refuges for the destitute, Brenton urged the wealthy, in a series of open letters, to remember their traditional, paternalistic duties to the poor in this rapacious new age of industrial and agrarian capitalism: “There are in the streets of this great Metropolis about 15,000 poor boys who gain their bread by lying, cheating, thieving, sweeping the streets and holding gentlemen’s horses, and they are all perishing for want of our care.… We found them in the streets without food and clothes, or house, or friend, the objects of persecution and punishment, alternately the inmates of workhouses, of prisons, of dark cells, of tread mills, pursuing an uninterrupted course through all the gradations of misery and infamy, to the hulks and the gibbet.”
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But destitution, like crime, was proving hard to catalog. London’s transient population fell outside the scope of the census, and London’s 153 parish vestries were under no obligation to collect such information.
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The various charities, the police, and a number of Parliamentary Select Committees attempted head counts that were heavily reliant on anecdotal evidence. The London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity reported that over 40,000 people had come to its office in 1828; Edward Pelham Brenton, as noted, put the figure for vagrant boys in London at 15,000; the Society for Relieving the Houseless Poor admitted more than 6,500 different individuals to its three London refuges in the bitter winter of 1830–31 (providing bread, water, and clean straw to sleep on), with a total of 55,000 visits recorded. Police and judicial statistics are difficult to interpret, since magistrates habitually—either through carelessness or for reasons of humanity—failed to supply the sessions courts with details of convictions for vagrancy, as they were legally obliged to do.
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One glimpse of such humanitarian feeling is caught in a report in the
Morning Post
in which Bow Street magistrate Thomas Halls lamented having to jail twelve vagrant men who had been found asleep in a prison van that was stored at nighttime in the vaults under the Adelphi Terrace, between the Strand and the Thames. Halls handed out one-month sentences to the reoffenders among the group and seven-day sentences to the first-time offenders, saying that he disliked having to imprison men “without their committing any other crime than that of having no place to go.”
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* * *
Removing, or at least hiding,
the poor was becoming an increasingly urgent task. The Vagrancy Act had become law in 1824: properly entitled An Act for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Persons, and Rogues and Vagabonds, in That Part of Great Britain Called England, the legislation was intended to tighten up outmoded, unworkable statutes and to form the bedrock of policing the public activities of the poor; instead, it was a ramshackle collection of prohibitions of various open-air “misdeeds.” In its strictest application, anyone who looked out of place and failed to give a plausible account of him- or herself could be imprisoned. The following were deemed to be criminal and subject to one month’s hard labor if the 1824 act was followed to the letter: anyone who could work but willfully refused or neglected to do so and applied for parish relief, anyone applying for relief in a parish where he or she had no settlement, any unlicensed itinerant peddler, and any prostitute wandering in the public streets behaving in an indecent manner. Moreover, “every person wandering abroad … in any public Place, Street, Highway, Court or Passage, to beg or gather alms, or causing or procuring or encouraging any Child or Children so to do, shall be deemed an idle and disorderly person within the true intent and meaning of this act.”
Three months’ hard labor was the punishment for anyone found sleeping in the open air with no visible means of subsistence and unable to give a good account of him- or herself, anyone asking for charity under false pretenses or showing wounds or deformities to gain alms, itinerant fortune-tellers and palmists, anyone betting or gambling in a public place, anyone selling or exposing to view an obscene picture or exhibition, any man found indecently exposing himself “with the intent to insult any female,” any man who deserted his wife and/or family, leaving them dependent on parish relief, anyone carrying implements that could be used for burglary, and “every suspected person or reputed thief, frequenting any River, Canal, or navigable Stream, Dock or Basin, or any Quay, Wharf or Warehouse near to or adjoining thereto, or any Street, Highway or Avenue … with intent to commit Felony.”
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Demobbed soldiers and sailors and discharged prisoners were entitled to permits to gather alms on their journey back to their home parishes, as were certain seasonal workers, such as harvesters. Aside from these exceptions, the act, far from settling once and for all the definition of “beggar,” or of “loiterer with intent,” or of “suspicious character,” left vast leeway for police and magistrates to decide who was, and who was not, legally entitled to occupy public space. It conflated the concepts of idle and of disorderly, eliding unemployment with criminality; and it had the potential to circumscribe the activities of street entertainers and the sort of peripatetic sellers who provided a useful, less expensive alternative to fixed-location retailers. When the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Police of the Metropolis gathered its evidence in 1828, Joseph Sadler Thomas admitted to being unsure whether simply sleeping out in the open constituted an offense under the act.
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(It did, and was punishable by three months’ hard labor.)
But stints of jail and hard labor could hardly solve the problem. The question of what should be done with the vagrant poor, especially children, preoccupied numerous organizations. Parliamentary Select Committees convened to discuss the destitute in 1816, 1821, and 1828. There was a lively pamphlet debate about the best way to rescue street children and train them for “useful” lives. A variety of philanthropic societies—some harshly disciplinarian, others humane in intention—sprang up, supported by contributions from the wealthy. The London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (colloquially known among the poor as the Dicity) was founded in 1818; the Children’s Friend Society and the Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy were founded in 1830; and the Nightly Shelter for the Houseless opened in 1822, with asylums in Playhouse Yard, off Golden Lane, and in London Wall. There were specialist charities too, such as the Society for Foreigners in Distress, the Marine Society for destitute former sailors, and the National Guardian Society for those who had formerly been employed as servants. Other bodies named themselves after the specific kind of help given, and in the East End, the Soup Society, the Blanket Association, even a City of London Truss Society attempted to alleviate the suffering of the very poor.
This piecemeal, haphazard charitable giving had two motives: humanity and the need to head off the threat of revolution. What had happened in Paris in 1789 informed much of the activity and behavior of the powerful and the wealthy. The year 1831 saw the formation of the National Union of the Working Classes, a coalition of London workingmen, mainly artisans in the furniture-making and weaving trades, who sought universal male suffrage, the reform of the House of Commons, and the passage of laws to protect the British workingman from exploitation. A number of independent political unions were springing up all over Britain in manufacturing towns and cities. With the shocking news in October 1831 that the House of Lords had thrown out the second attempt to pass the Reform Bill, there was nationwide civil unrest, with three days of rioting in Bristol (the town hall and bishop’s palace were torched) and severe disturbances in Nottingham (the castle was razed), while in the capital the houses of prominent anti–Reform Bill figures were stoned. The newspapers of Monday, 7 November 1831, carried two major domestic stories: the discovery of a possible Burke and Hare case in Bethnal Green; and the suppression of a meeting of a body calling itself the Eastern Division of the Political Union of the Working Classes of the Metropolis—described by the
Times
as “The Mob.” This rally, which the union itself billed as a “Monster Meeting,” had caused so much alarm that the New Police posted public notices declaring it illegal—many of which were flamboyantly torn down by Londoners supportive of the Radical, pro-Reform cause; however, the union leaders called off the rally late in the day, their obedience confounding those who painted them as irrational, bloodthirsty Jacobins.