Behaving Badly: Social Panic and Moral Outrage--Victorian and Modern Parallels (review)

The fourteen chapters of this book address a range of issues of concern to the Victorians and still, or again, causes of concern today. These involve "the essentially fluid boundary between the criminal and the anti-social" (1). This volume foregrounds the complex interactions between popular and media understandings of the point at which offensive behaviour becomes (or ought to be designated) crime, and the official response through legislation or policing practice. The approach is strongly interdisciplinary: contributors include academics from a range of areas, and several are also lawyers or solicitors, or have been involved in other aspects of law and policing.

Initial chapters look at general issues of legal systems, perceptions of the law, and the role of policing. David Bentley, a former Queen's Counsel, judge, and legal historian, contrasts Victorian and modern trial systems. He argues that in spite of the lack of representation for poor prisoners, and of an effective appeal structure, confidence in the Victorian legal system was high, with a tacit assumption that there were never miscarriages of justice. Judith Rowbotham and Kim Stevenson's chapter on "Media and Legal Representations of Bad Behaviour" argues that Victorian media fostered trust in their political and legal institutions, whereas in the present day the media uses "personal 'exposures'. . . to undermine the individual professional" (33). They also find, however, significant similarities in "attention-grabbing sensationalism" and the media's ability to "make choate the incoherent fears existing more widely in society" (41). Kiron Reid, a lecturer in law, examines the enormous recent increase of criminal legislation and state intervention in the UK, independent of changes in the ruling party. The Victorians passed relatively few acts relating to criminal justice, but, he argues, this was less about liberalism than the presence of extensive powers enabling the police to deal with a range of bad behaviour. There is also continuing disjunction between the attitudes expressed through legislation by successive parliaments and the justice system's actual performance in the courts.

The rise of a professional police force was a major nineteenth-century innovation. In "Policing a Myth, Managing an Illusion," Tom Williamson, a former Deputy Chief Constable and forensic psychiatrist, considers crime recording and the production of statistics, particularly in the light of the vast explosion in the numbers of criminal offences defined by the law since 1901. Roger Hopkins Burke examines get-tough policing strategies, then and now, to remove undesirables—drunks, vagrants, beggars—from the public streets, a class particularly likely to grow in periods of economic upheaval and trade recession. He argues that proactive dealing with these "rougher elements" both in the Victorian era and today has commanded a good deal of support from the "respectable working class," who were the most likely to be affected by the gross behaviour, violence, and extortions of this excluded group.

Several chapters address particular forms of bad behaviour. Sara Wilson, a lecturer in company law and financial crime, considers white-collar crime. She suggests that financial crime in the modern sense was born in the nineteenth century, and only then did fraud come to be perceived as undermining social and economic stability. Blasphemy, the subject of historian David Nash's chapter, may conversely seem like an ancient form of bad behaviour. Nash argues that English jurisprudence in this area has, historically, generated significant paradoxes through its "strange mixture of authoritarian defence of morals and protection of individual opinion" (114). A similar point is made by Tom Lewis, a solicitor, who suggests that the "lack of certainty and clarity" (151) about the line between art and obscenity in Victorian England was rooted in a central paradox: preserving the right to privacy and maintaining the right of protection from pollution. Lewis also makes the point that increased anxieties over obscene representations were fuelled by the wider and cheaper dissemination of such materials enabled by technological developments, a theme picked up in...