Crime and the Criminal Classes in Ireland, 1870–1920 by Brian Griffin, and Nether World Crime and the Police Courts in Victorian London by Drew D. Gray reviewed by William Meier
Published in Victorian Studies, 2025.
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Abstract

, Nether World: Crime and the Police Courts in Victorian London, by Drew D. Gray; pp. 318. Reaktion Books, 2024, £16.99., Don’t let the titles mislead you: these two surveys of crime and justice in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom do not portray the antics of picaresque rogues in a self-contained underworld or “criminal class.” Rather, both Brian Griffin and Drew D. Gray view crime as quite ordinary, free of romantic, sensational, nationalist, or ideological readings. Both authors succeed in painting bird’s-eye views of everyday practices on the streets and in the courts., Griffin’s Crime and the Criminal Classes in Ireland, 1870–1920 places agrarian crime in the context of all Irish criminal activity in the period. This is a useful shift in the angle from which scholars view agrarian crime, which has its own extensive literature in the historiographies of Irish nationalism and British colonialism. Contemporary counting and reporting practices normalized the sensation value of agrarian crimes by classifying them as outrages, but in the opening chapter, which examines crests of rural agitation during the Land War of the 1880s and the Ranch War of the 1900s, Griffin persuasively shows that most so-called outrages involved disputes between tenants, rather than between tenants and landlords. He also confirms the view that secret society involvement in agrarian criminality was minimal, though he concedes that the revolutionary period after 1916 witnessed stronger links between Irish republicanism and land seizures. In this view, such everyday conflicts as competition for farms, trespassing, revenge, and family disputes were more likely to cause agrarian crimes than was a secret society’s enforcement of an unwritten agrarian code. Further complicating the official statistical record, Griffin also discusses the phenomenon of bogus outrages that farmers manufactured in order to claim compensation., The second and third chapters of this short book turn to ordinary crimes: drunkenness, illicit distillation of poteen, prostitution, tramping, and theft. Griffin shows that emigration, decline in public drunkenness, and heavy policing by the Royal Irish Constabulary made Ireland a statistically less violent place in the early twentieth century than it had been at the beginning of his period. But there is little new information in these chapters, which reveal familiar points about poverty as the main driver of crime, the overrepresentation of women in records of public intoxication, and the underreporting of sexual and domestic violence. Despite the book’s title, Griffin doesn’t probe the idea of the “criminal class” other than to use it as shorthand for repeat offenders., Overall, Griffin concludes that Irish crime resembled British patterns, particularly for urban crime. In other words, Ireland was not unique, and there was nothing [End Page 56] specifically Irish about Irish criminality. Here Griffin implicitly rejects the contemporary prejudice that the Irish were an innately violent people. He also implicitly challenges attempts to read political and ideological motives into criminal acts, finding them just ordinary; this is a different view of nineteenth-century Ireland, albeit one that mostly ignores the colonial context., Crime and the Criminal Classes in Ireland presents useful statistical tables and illustrative examples, but is more overview than monograph. Griffin synthesizes other scholars’ work and the book’s main contribution is to shift the vantage point on Irish crime rather than to explore new sources and topics. Accordingly, readers of this journal ought to consult Griffin’s book as a reference work, especially the extensive footnotes and bibliography., Readers looking for an accessible and engaging introduction to crime and policing should look to Gray’s Nether World: Crime and the Police Courts in Victorian London, which presumes no foreknowledge of the territory. The introduction, in particular, would be a welcome addition to any syllabus on Victorian crime due to its lucid description of the structure, personnel, and powers of police courts and their ancillary institutions, the police and police court missionaries., Gray argues that historians ought to pay more attention to police courts, where the Victorian state handled the majority of its criminal business, especially after mid-century when the magistracy assumed a primary role in dispensing summary justice. He demonstrates that police courts dealt not only with theft and violence, but also public order...