Godfrey Barry

What was life like in the Victorian underworld - who were the criminals, what crimes did they commit, how did they come to a criminal career, and what happened to them after they were released from prison? Victorian Convicts, by telling the stories of a hundred criminal men and women, gives the reader an insight into their families and social background, the conditions in which they lived, their relationships and working lives, and their offences. They reveal how these individuals were treated by the justice and penal system of 150 years ago, and how they were regarded by the wider world around them. Such a rare and authentic insight into life in and out of prison will be fascinating reading for anyone who is interested in the history of crime and criminals, in legal and prison history and in British society in the nineteenth century.

This book is about the emergence in the late Victorian period of discourses about on the character of the urban poor of 'the rough', and how this label came to assume definitional power during the mid to late Victorian period. It described the imaginary space between the two concepts of 'the respectable poor' and the 'criminal class', and seeks to develop a more sophisticated understanding of those on the margins of the criminal underworld at the turn of the twentieth century. This book is therefore concerned not with the notorious criminal, nor even the habitual criminal, but those who inhabited the world between the 'respectable poor' and the 'criminal class' - those who were infrequent robbers, but frequently drunk and disorderly; those who were not violent robbers, but who were often involved in street-fighting. It looks to the unruly, the disreputable, the stand-up drunk, fighting working class dwellers of many towns and cities throughout Victorian England. In other words, it is concerned with those who occupied the hinterland rather than the heartland of criminality in the public imagination. The theories developed in this book will connect and interact with several wider debates, including conceptions of violence in late modernity; the demise or growth of civility; social memory and the mythologies of the pre-first world period, and on cultural attitudes towards violence in the western world.