Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London.

Smith, Greg T.

Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London, by Heather Shore. Royal Historical Studies in History Series. Woodbridge, Suffolk and London, Boydell and Brewer and the Royal Historical Society, 1999. xiii, 193 pp. $55.00 US (cloth), $29.95 US (paper).

Now that it has been republished in paperback, Heather Shore's illuminating study of juvenile crime and the debates about youthful delinquency in the early nineteenth century will be more easily available to scholars and particularly undergraduate students. Shore's book provides much useful background and context for studies of juvenile crime, and will now reach a fresh audience of students interested in the problems of crime, poverty, and youth culture in early- to mid-Victorian England. Students of nineteenth-century English literature and those interested in the Victorian underworld will also find much of interest here.

Shore's book has two main goals. The first is to present a synthetic overview of the criminal justice system in England as it related to young offenders in the first half of the nineteenth century. Shore argues that it was during that half century that notions of the juvenile delinquent became fixed in the public and, more importantly, penal firmament, and that crystallization of the notion of the juvenile offender emerged in concert with the codification of the law. As institutions of policing and summary trial developed in the same period, the young and poor became increasingly the target of strategies of control and repression. Shore demonstrates how these agencies sometimes had to work at cross-purposes, being expected both to protect and punish; but overall, the story of the young offender is a bleak one.

Though the early nineteenth century saw the beginnings of attempts to tailor punishments to suit the offences and offenders, this required some degree of classification and separation of convicts, which, in turn, required purpose-built facilities. But before the mid-nineteenth century, those facilities were largely non-existent at least when it came to juvenile offenders. Instead, the patchwork system of custodial and reformatory institutions that developed in good part out of private philanthropic initiatives in the late-eighteenth century continued to be used by the courts as a kind of surrogate penal system well into the nineteenth century. Thus institutions like the Philanthropic Society, the Children's Friend Society, the Refuge for the Destitute, and the Marine Society, among others, continued to take in young people who had been charged or convicted of some offence.

Shore's other goal is to put a human face on the young offenders who were drawn into the criminal justice system. Relying heavily on interviews with young offenders sentenced to the prison ship Euryalus, she offers vivid and often painful insight into the harsh experiences of juvenile custody.

Shore's study is based on a wide range of sources, from Home Office records to newspaper accounts, to trial accounts from the Old Bailey Sessions Paper, and other select court records. Especially heavy use is made of the reports of the parliamentary committees that fretted over the problems of crime and policing in the first half of the nineteenth century. Shore demonstrates how the debates about youth criminality were part of a larger discourse about crime, poverty, and penology generally in these decades, a period when the criminal law and its institutions were undergoing fundamental reform and restructuring. What Shore's book reveals is the considerable anxiety over the large and apparently growing numbers of juveniles who were being caught up in the ever expanding machinery of justice. This was especially the case in the growth of summary jurisdiction and the emergence of professional police forces. Shore calculates that by the mid nineteenth century, for example, more than 40 per cent of those convicted of criminal offences in the county of Middlesex, and in some sort of custody other than transportation, were under the age of twenty-five. This made for an "especially youthful" prison population and imparted no small degree of anxiety on the local and central authorities bent on overhauling the criminal justice system. Yet as Shore illustrates, though the nineteenth century saw a tough-on-crime mentality emerge, there were also competing voices calling for separate considerations for young offenders. Indeed the feeling that those under the age of about sixteen were still more susceptible to reformative impulses than their older compatriots meant that the range of piece-meal strategies that had evolved in the eighteenth century continued to hold sway well into the nineteenth.

Greg T. Smith

University of Manitoba