In the 1990s, Pickering & Chatto (now part of Routledge) entered the academic publishing world marketing multivolume editions of primary-source materials to those university libraries that could afford to buy such high-end items. Some of these projects, notably those concerning Romantic era writers, were extremely valuable, drawing together substantially unpublished manuscript materials from a variety of archival sources. Others were less useful, compilations of printed materials that were already widely available on microfilm (and now in digital databases), with a critical introduction (sometimes all too brief and underdeveloped). Given the ever more relentless pressure of expectations for academic publishing, however, especially those sanctioned by governments in Britain and Australia, the number of these multivolume projects quickly proliferated.
The new four-volume Nineteenth-Century Crime and Punishment edited by Victor Bailey ranks among the very best examples of this sort of work. Bailey is outstandingly well qualified to select and comment upon the materials. The Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kansas, he has previously published a pioneering account of juvenile delinquency in early twentieth-century Britain; a superb study of suicide in Victorian Kingston-upon-Hull; a compact and vivid account of policing in East End London during the late nineteenth century; and, most recently, a massive and important analysis of imprisonment in twentieth-century Britain. He has also found time to produce a variety of substantial and outstanding articles on crime, policing, and penal policy in modern Britain.
These four volumes are particularly distinguished by the generously proportioned secondary text that Bailey has provided in explaining the substance of the nearly two hundred excerpts from manuscripts, parliamentary papers, and print sources through which he presents a portrait of “change in penal policy and practice across the long nineteenth century” (1:15). The first volume contains a twenty-page account of the aims and substance of the project overall, while each individual volume contains an additional twenty pages explaining the relationship of the documents both to one another and to the larger narrative they illustrate. A person new to the field of criminal justice will learn just about everything they need to know about crime and punishment from 1776 through 1914 simply by reading Bailey's one hundred or so explanatory pages. Students preparing for comprehensive exams, and young scholars starting out as teachers, will be grateful for how much Bailey has done to ease their introduction to a large and still steadily expanding field.
In some ways, the compilation also retraces the arc of Bailey's distinguished career. This is perhaps especially true of the first volume, which evokes changing perceptions of the nature and scale of criminality in England. In past work, Bailey has provided important analyses of the appearance and subsequent development of the concept of a criminal class across the nineteenth century. Here, in addition to reminding us of that centrally important phenomenon, he also provides examples of Victorian anxieties about criminality amongst women, juveniles, and such scapegoated working-class immigrant groups as the Irish and the Jews. On the other hand, volume four, which examines developments in English prisons between a mid-Victorian crisis triggered by the end of transportation to Australia and anxiety over a seeming resurgence in urban street violence and the advent of more nominally humane notions of criminality and confinement that emerged at century's end, can be read as a prelude to Bailey's more recent work, which carries that subject forward through to the end of the Welfare State and the great so-called liberal moment.
Equally valuable, though, are the two volumes that focus on issues that other scholars have investigated. The second volume provides useful summaries and examples of the issues provoked by a “Bloody Code” (2:1) of capital statutes that was going increasingly unenforced by the end of the eighteenth century; the debates that this provoked among public commentators and in Parliament; the nature of the decisions that sent capital convicts either to the gallows or to some other, nonlethal punishment; and how the death penalty was effectively reduced (with surprising swiftness) to apply only to murder by the early Victorian era. The third volume treats those secondary punishments to which convicted criminals were increasingly subjected from the 1770s onward: transportation, confinement on board prison hulks (which often, in practice, entirely took the place of transportation), and confinement in local jails. The third volume is particularly useful because both perceptions of transportation during the early nineteenth century, and the path by which imprisonment gradually became primary among the secondary punishments by the 1830s and 1840s, remain some of the most substantially understudied topics in this area and an especially fruitful path for future researchers.
Finally, Bailey's publisher should be delighted by how effective his editing and commentary has been in producing four volumes that can each stand alone. Scholars of the area will want to have all four in their university and personal libraries alike. But many will also value the option of buying the individual volumes that treat the subjects of particular interest to them. The four volumes of Nineteenth-Century Crime and Punishment stand as both an impressive survey of a field of recurrent interest among historians and a pointer toward work still to be done. They are yet another feather in the cap of a scholar who, with Martin Wiener, stands preeminent amongst historians of crime, society, and punishment in modern England.
