Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: the Shadow of Our Refinement (review)

This relatively short monograph (the six substantive chapters take up less than 130 pages), offers a thought-provoking mixture of theoretical abstraction and detailed empirical analysis, primarily of trial depositions. Theoretically, it leans heaviest on the works of Elias and Foucault, although there are also interesting borrowings from social geography, Thompsonian Marxism and to a lesser extent social anthropology. This is, in short, an ambitious study which aims to chart the interaction between 'civilising' and 'customary' mentalities of violence across the nineteenth century. Wood's approach is to focus on the narratives woven about inter-personal violence both in middle-class prescriptive discourse and in accounts, particularly witness accounts, of violent incidents brought to trial. According to Wood, the half-century between approximately 1820 and 1870 represented a decisive moment in the redefinition of 'violence' in English culture. During this period, he argues, 'self-identified civilizing forces undertook a determined offensive against alternative, customary attitudes towards violence' (9). Wood suggests that this involved middle-class groups, whose lives were generally remote from everyday violence, inventing public violence as a new social problem. In part this reflected anxieties about the need to impose order and control on new and apparently chaotic urban environments, but it also reflected processes of middle-class identity formation – 'violence in this way became a "shadow" of middle-class "refinement"' (21). Wood therefore posits a close match between mentalities and social class – with the 'civilizing' mentality mapping onto an 'assertive' middle class, whilst 'customary' mentalities are seen as increasingly the preserve of a pathologized working-class 'Other'. Wood acknowledges exceptions to this simple class-based model (e.g. 25), but they remain at the margins of his analysis of the 'civilizing process' and its battle with customary 'structures of violence mentalities' (22: not, it's true, a happy phrase). By the 1870s, working-class culture is represented as having been widely penetrated by the 'civilising' ethos, not least through the culture of 'respectability', so that only the 'rough' working class are left to uphold their version of the customary culture of violence.

As will become clear, I have many difficulties with the grand sweepof Wood's analysis, but it should first be stressed that there is alsomuch fine social and cultural history here. In particular, Wood makes fascinating use of trial depositions to reconstruct the elaborate rituals surrounding early nineteenth-century plebeian street fights. In doing so he brilliantly demonstrates how the conduct of such fights often closely mirrored the rituals of prize-fighting – including the appointing of seconds, the creation of a ring, the policing of fair and foul blows, and the recognition of 'rounds' (as in prize-fighting determined by a knock-down not the clock). The rules for determining victory also closely matched prize-fighting, including not just the knock-out and the admission of defeat, but also more technical rules such as failure to return to 'the scratch' within eight seconds of 'time', and being deemed incapable of self-defence. Wood suggests that ritualized male combat began to lose its hold over working-class street culture in the later nineteenth century as prize-fighting lost out to 'modern boxing' as defined by Queensbury Rules (the use of gloved rather than bare fists, timed bouts [and rounds] and the possibility of victory on points). However, Wood's evidence for this appears rather limited. We are told that during the 1860s and 1870s, court records include a growing number of cases where street fights degenerated into brutal melees in which the participants apparently displayed no recognition of the distinction between 'fair' and 'unfair' combat. Wood reinforces this argument with quotations from Clarence Rook's colourful turn-of-the-century account of juvenile delinquency Hooligan Nights (87-91). We are told that Alf, Rook's hooligan anti-hero, represented a fearsome opponent 'in a street row, where there are no rules to observe', but Wood...