Introduction

Crime and Criminality in the Nineteenth Century

Two European-wide processes shaped the development of legislative principles, strategies of punishment, regimes of law enforcement, and theories of crime and criminal behaviour in the nineteenth century. The first encompassed the rationalisation of criminal codes, the replacement (or at least reduction in use) of the blunt and barbaric instruments of capital and corporal punishment, and a vision of man as a freely-willing, self-directing, rational being. The second was in part a reaction against the principles of uniformity and rationality embodied in the first. The individuals driving this second process stressed the sociological, and particularly the biological pressures moulding human behaviour; they emphasised the uniqueness of individual offenders, and they highlighted the necessity of tailoring punishment regimes to take account of these factors. Establishing the timing, relationship, relative influence, and ‘meaning’ of these two processes is the most important set of problems occupying modern historians of crime.

The first process gathered momentum in the second half of the eighteenth century, and its full force began to be felt in the early 1800s. It was a reaction against the arbitrary, brutal, secretive, and authoritarian legal regimes of the age. Its most famous spokesman was the Italian aristocrat Cesare Beccaria (1738 -1794), whose Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), or On Crime and Punishments, was the manifesto for a generation of legal reformers. They wanted to place criminal law on a rational basis, establish its independent and supreme authority in a written code, make it open and comprehensible to all, ensure it operated uniformly over the nation as a whole, and reduce all to the same level before it. Punishments were to be uniform, proportionate, prompt, and certain. The potential offender must expect to be punished, so deterring him from calculated criminal activity. Each punishment involved the infliction of a precise quantum of pain, both in deserved retribution and as a deterrent to further criminality. Imprisonment proved the method of punishment most amenable to precise manipulation, and its restriction on individual freedom meshed well with these classical reformers’ vision of man as an autonomous, rational being, motivated by pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding. The deprivation of freedom is the most natural punishment for the abuse of freedom.

In England the most compelling spokesman of this reform movement was Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), whose influence was felt for more than a century. His plans for an ideal prison, a Panopticon, outlined in 1787, perhaps represent the acme of this rationalist approach to crime. In the Panopticon every prisoner would live in his or her own cell, and would be subject to unpredictable and secret observation by prison guards. Imprisonment thus amounted to supervision by an ever-vigilant external conscience. Bentham’s Panopticon was never built, but his several attempts to rationalise the criminal law in England found considerable support. His emphasis on imprisonment as the punishment of choice was shared by religiously-inspired social reformers such as John Howard (1726 -1790) and Elizabeth Fry (1780 -1845), who worked to alleviate prison brutality and disorder. Others, such as Samuel Romilly (1757 -1818), campaigned tirelessly against capital punishment. Existing prisons were gradually brought under state supervision (in the Prison Acts of 1839 and 1840), and new model prisons were built, notably Pentonville in 1842.

Half sequentially, half in parallel with this reform movement, a new understanding of criminality and of the purposes of criminal policy emerged. The immediate source of this second process was perhaps the work of the charismatic Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835 -1909), particularly his L’Uomo delinquente (1876). Lombroso attracted a number of talented young researchers (notably Raffaele Garofalo (1852 -1934), and Enrico Ferri (1856-1929)) to the University of Turin where he taught, and helped to form what has become known as the Italian School of positivist criminology. The members of the Italian school were much influenced by the determinist implications of the work of the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796 -1874), by Auguste Comte’s (1798 -1857) anti-metaphysical sociology, by Darwin’s (1809 -1882) On the Origin of Species (1859), and by the work of the French psychiatrist Benedict Augustin Morel (1809 -1873), particularly Traite des degenerescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espece humaine (1857). Lombroso’s key belief, one shared by many of his Italian colleagues, was that human behaviour was determined above all else by the physiological makeup of the human body. Men and women were not rational, autonomous beings, acting according to will and intention. They were pushed and pulled by instincts and tendencies, some positive, many negative, inherited from their parents and inherent in their physical being.

This determinist view had momentous consequences for criminal legislation and punishment. It had not been uncommon during the nineteenth century for one or other writer to assert that there existed a class of uniquely dangerous criminals. Lombroso’s work went much further, locating dangerousness in the very body of the offender. Since the body and mind were unalterable, the idea of reforming criminals, of returning them to society, came to seem radically mistaken. Instead of exacting the proper amount of retribution from criminals and deterring further offending, positivist criminology was thus designed to identify the born criminal, the incorrigibly dangerous perpetrator, and ensure that this morbid deviation from the normal type of humanity was segregated from respectable society. If classical theorists were motivated by a desire to prevent the abuse of state power, positivist criminologists sought instead to defend the social body, including the state, from the threat of the alien within.

Positivist criminology was in part a reaction against classical conceptions of crime and criminality, and in part a continuation of classical penology’s attempt to free itself from moralising platitudes and a religious conception of crime as sin. So much is clear. What is not quite so clear is how much of an impact Lombrosian criminal anthropology had in Europe generally, or in Britain specifically. That it had an impact, few historians would today deny. But did it replace classical penology entirely, or did it simply modify classicism? In France, for example, many criminologists, led by Alexandre Lacassagne (1844 -1921), rejected Lombroso’s biological approach. In Britain it is possible to trace lines of influence from L’Uomo delinquente to the work of psychiatrists such as Henry Maudsley (1835 -1918) and Thomas Clouston (1840-1915), eugenicists such as Francis Galton (1822-1911) and Karl Pearson (1857 -1936), novelists such as Bram Stoker (1847-1912) and H. G. Wells (1866-1946), and sexologists such as Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939). Positivist criminology also seems to fit in with the fin de siecle sense of gloom and foreboding, and the prevailing pessimism about social reform. But Lombroso’s work was not translated into English until 1911, and there was no British criminal anthropologist of his stature or influence promoting positivist criminology. Loud and weighty critical voices were also raised against Lombroso, including those of Charles Mercier (1852 -1919) and Charles Goring (1870 -1919). There is much evidence to suggest that classical notions of individual free will and rational decision-making continued to exercise an important, perhaps dominant influence in British cultural life. (See: Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, The Emergence of Penal Policy in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford,1986)).

The discussion about the relative influence of classical and of positivist ideas in British cultural life is part of a wider debate about the impact of ‘science’, particularly Darwin’s theory of evolution and psycho-physiological conceptions of human identity and behaviour, on religious understandings of man and society. To what extent did evolutionary or social Darwinist or materialist ideas influence late-Victorian and Edwardian writers and readers? The answers to these questions depend to a large extent on which social groups are scrutinised. Psychiatrists seemed to be relatively more open to evolutionary and positivist thinking than members of the clergy, say, or many prison administrators. But it is rash to generalise on this topic.

The French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, in Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975), sparked intense debate about how historians should treat changes in the conceptualisation of criminal behaviour and in legislative attempts to deal with that behaviour. Were these changes prompted by the humanity, benevolence, and philanthropy of reformers such as Bentham, Howard, and Fry? Do they add up to legal and criminological ‘progress’? Or, alternatively, do these changes represent a half-conscious but wholly cynical attempt on the part of the middle-class to extend surveillance and control over those they perceive to be a threat to their social position? Were the emphasis on imprisonment rather than corporal punishment, and the accompanying push to generate detailed scientific knowledge about the denizens of the reformed institutions, part of a wider attempt to refine the techniques of power, to create more effective forms of social control? Or, finally, were penal institutions and criminological theories simply the unintended material and intellectual by-products of the struggle of new professional groups - e.g. psychiatrists and prison administrators - to map out fulfilling career-paths, to win both public respect and public indulgence? These remain open questions.

The modern legislative-penal complex is founded in nineteenth-century developments, and many of the issues that preoccupied nineteenth-century criminologists - are criminals born rather than made? what is the proper method of punishment? - today continue to be matters of intense debate. The history of crime and criminality has never been more relevant.

Further Reading

1. Primary source readers

P. Keating (ed.), Into Unknown England, 1866-1913: Selections from the Social Explorers (London, 1976)

Vieda Skultans (ed.), Madness and Morals: Ideas on Insanity in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1975).

2. Secondary works

Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 (Harlow, 1989 [1987]).

Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975), Alan Sheridan (trans.), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London, Penguin edition, 1991 [1977]).

David Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot, 1987 [1985]).

Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London, 1978).

Michael Ignatieff, ‘State, Civil Society and Total Institution: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment’, in D. Sugarman (ed.), Legality, Ideology and the State (London, 1983).

S. H. Mannheim, Pioneers in Criminology (2 nd edition, Montclair, N. J., 1972 [1960]).

Daniel Pick, Faces of degeneration: A European disorder, c.1848-c.1918 (CUP, 1996 [1989]).

Leon Radzinowicz and Roger Hood, The Emergence of Penal Policy in Victorian and Edwardian England: Volume 5 of A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750 (Oxford, 1990 [1986]).

Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven and London, 1974).

Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the criminal: Culture, law, and policy in England, 1830-1914 (CUP, 1990).

3. Websites

For Beccaria’s work see www.constitution.org/cb/crim_pun.htm

For Bentham’s Panopticon see www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/index.htm .

For Jack the Ripper see www.casebook.org

For an extensive bibliography see www.crimetheory.com