The British Ballarat? Crime in Middlesbrough, c. 1840–70

Abstract

As Britain became increasingly an urban and industrial society, fears of social disorder became more prominent in the educated discourses of the Regency and early Victorian period. Crime became both a symptom and a barometer of wider problems in a society that was experiencing an unprecedented change in values and patterns of behaviour. The reporting of crimes, especially serious crimes against property and person, heightened anxieties particularly in the difficult years following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and again in the strife-torn years of the 1840s. Contemporary fears were fuelled further by the publication of annual crime statistics that showed a dramatic increase in recorded crime and confirmed the fear that there was a real and growing threat to respectable society posed by a growing criminal class. Later historians, rightly, have drawn attention to the fact that these figures do not simply measure changes in criminal behaviour but also reflect important changes in the behaviour of prosecutors.¹ But others have gone further and challenged the notion that property and the person were under increasing threat. Philips’ influential study portrays the Black Country as not ‘a notably violent society’, nor one in which ‘very large amounts or… very important articles’ were stolen. Furthermore, by the 1850s there was a sense of safety, because crime had been controlled, or at least contained, at acceptable levels.²