Informers and Their Social Networks in Eighteenth-Century London: A Comparison of Two Communities

The informer’s particular contribution was to pollute the public well, to poison social life in general, to destroy the very possibility of a community; for the informer operates on the principle of betrayal and a community survives on the principle of trust. (Navasky 1981)

An intervention that rewards informers creates enormous stresses within the community that it targets, forcing each of its members to choose among three possible careers or alliances: solidarity with the larger community, collaboration with other informers, and membership in neither group (this last career is reserved for informers who work on their own). From one community three are created, and for the moment each is weaker than its parent. Because informers’ operations are predatory, they are secretive; and because informers are subject to attack once they are exposed, both they and any alliances that they might form are under constant risk.

These two criteria place societies of informers in a league with other secret societies, most notably, those compared and contrasted by Bonnie Erickson (1981). Within this structure, informers constitute a special and rarely studied group. They are recruited from the community on which they prey, only to be banished from it without being admitted into the society of their political masters. They are distinguished from their peers solely by the choices that they make, for when rewards are offered to betray individuals who are engaged in a newly proscribed activity, every member of the community must choose between solidarity and betrayal. Solidarity is a revocable choice, but betrayal is not. That is, once an individual becomes known as an informer, his or her reputation is beyond rehabilitation. Hence the creation of special prisons and prisons within prisons for informers, notorious sex offenders, and other inmates who must be segregated from the general prison population (Priestly 1980). Hence, too, the fate of an informer who “hang’d herself at St. Giles” in November of 1738, only to have “a Stake drove through her” upon being buried. Such, it was stated at the time, “is generally the Fate of such Wretches.” ¹

This study uses social network analysis in conjunction with qualitative analysis to compare and contrast two groups of informers in early Hanoverian London. The first operated in East London, in what was once Middlesex, and the second operated in Westminster. Both groups informed against individuals who sold gin and other distilled spirits without a license. They did so in order to collect a reward of �5 for each conviction under the so-called Gin Act of 1736. Our specific questions are these: To what extent did each group of informers enter into alliances among themselves? What form did these alliances take? What was the relationship between informers and local magistrates in the two communities?

It should be emphasized from the very start that our data are sparse and incomplete. By implication, our results and conclusions are at best tentative: they shed only a partial light on a group whose activities were by their very nature based on deception and shrouded in secrecy. In part, this gap can be filled by supplementing our analysis with archival and printed data; at the very least, combining the two methods—social network analysis and qualitative analysis—provides a preliminary model for studying social structures that are organized around the twin principles of deception and betrayal. In this particular instance, the two methods also allow us to see how the responses of local magistrates helped determine the extent to which informers were able to operate and organize in their communities.

Background

The Gin Act of 1736 relied on informers for its enforcement, and in doing so it brought three groups of people into contact with each other. The first consisted of people who retailed distilled spirits without a license, the second of people who informed...