Ubiquitous Theft: The Consumption of London in Mayhew’s Underworld

Scholl, Lesa

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_5

Lesa Scholl⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

John Binny’s "Thieves and Swindlers" in Henry Mayhew’s groundbreaking London Labour and the London Poor (1851) uses the motif of the river to chart London’s streets and architecture through categories of theft. From the petty theft of pickpockets to the institutionalized corruption of the commercial centre of Britain’s empire, layers and degrees of stealing physically and ideologically define the city. In this chapter, the environmental decay of the city, figured through the polluted Thames, speaks to the decay across the strata of London society. Criminality is not only as ubiquitous across class, but entrenched in the city’s foundations and flooding the nation beyond London’s boundaries.

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Notes

1.
John Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” in vol. 4 of London Labour and the London Poor: The Classical Study of the Culture of Poverty and the Criminal Classes in the 19th-Century, ed. Henry Mayhew, 273–392 (New York: Dover, [1861–62] 1968), 273.
2.
John Scanlon, “In Deadly Time: The Lasting on of Waste in Mayhew’s London,” Time Society 16 (2007): 197, 199.
3.
Christopher Herbert , “Rat Worship and Taboo in Mayhew’s London,” Representations 23 (1988): 1.
4.
Roger Swift , “Heroes or Villains? The Irish, Crime, and Disorder in Victorian England,” Albion 29 (1997): 408.
5.
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 128.
6.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 273.
7.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 273.
8.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 274.
9.
Karl Marx , Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Harmondsworth, [1867] 1976), 926.
10.
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee , Crime and Empire: The Colony in Nineteenth-Century Fictions of Crime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2.
11.
Henry Mayhew, ed., London Labour and the London Poor: The Classical Study of the Culture of Poverty and the Criminal Classes in the 19th-Century, vol. 4 (New York: Dover, [1861–62] 1968), xv.
12.
Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4: xvi.
13.
Patrick Brantlinger and Donald Ulin , “Policing Nomads: Discourse and Social Control in Early Victorian Britain,” Cultural Critique 25 (1993): 34.
14.
Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4: 4 (emphasis added).
15.
Scanlon, “In Deadly Time,” 190.
16.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 276.
17.
Brantlinger and Ulin , “Policing Nomads,” 59.
18.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 308.
19.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 295.
20.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 294.
21.
Catherine Gallagher , “The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” Representations 14 (1986): 90.
22.
Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 3: 397.
23.
Scanlon, “In Deadly Time,” 197.
24.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, “Introduction,” in London Labour and the London Poor: A Selected Edition, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, xiii–xliii (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xix.
25.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 295.
26.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 295.
27.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 295.
28.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 295.
29.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 274.
30.
Binny, “Thieves and Swindlers,” 307.
31.
Troy Boone , Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3.
32.
Heather Shore , Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early 19th-Century London (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), 24.
33.
Shore , Artful Dodgers, 24.
34.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 298.
35.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 274.
36.
Seth Koven , Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1, 14.
37.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 303.
38.
Richard F. Wetzell , Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 26.
39.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 360.
40.
Brantlinger and Ulin , “Policing Nomads,” 56–57.
41.
Wetzell , Inventing the Criminal, 3.
42.
Brantlinger and Ulin , “Policing Nomads,” 57–58.
43.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 326.
44.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 326.
45.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 307.
46.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 303–04.
47.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 277.
48.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 309.
49.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 297.
50.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 298. Unlike Mayhew’s own contributions to London Labour, the inclusion of statistics is light in Binny’s account. In this way, he draws on sensation and the rhetoric of excess in his portrayal of London as being overrun and overwhelmed by thieves and prostitutes.
51.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 356.
52.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 360.
53.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 356.
54.
Binny , “Thieves and Swindlers,” 308.
55.
Brantlinger and Ulin , “Policing Nomads,” 36.
56.
Scanlon, “In Deadly Time,” 190.

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University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Lesa Scholl

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Lesa Scholl
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University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Grace Moore
Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Michelle J. Smith

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Scholl, L. (2018). Ubiquitous Theft: The Consumption of London in Mayhew’s Underworld. In: Moore, G., Smith, M. (eds) Victorian Environments. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_5
Published: 08 March 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57336-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57337-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

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