Things were still almost as bad four centuries later, in the time of Dr Johnson; gangs of robbers attacked houses in the country at night and sometimes burned them down. Bands of footpads armed with knives attacked parties of prosperous-looking people in London’s Covent Garden, and Horace Walpole was shot by a highwayman in Hyde Park. ‘The farmers’ fields were constantly plundered of their crops, fruit and vegetables were carried off, even the ears of wheat were cut from their stalks in the open day. The thieves boldly took their plunder to the millers to be ground, and the millers, although aware that fields and barns had been recently robbed, did not dare to object, lest their mills should be burnt down over their heads.’ This is described by Major Arthur Griffiths in his Mysteries of the Police and Crime (Vol. 1, p. 66). In Queen Victoria’s London, according to works such as Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and The Victorian Underworld by Kellow Chesney, footpads could operate by day, sometimes in upper-class residential districts: Even children were not safe; ‘child strippers’, mostly women, would lure children into doorways and steal their clothes.
What is so hard for us to grasp is that the whole of society, from top to bottom, operated upon principles that would seem ferociously cruel to a modern citizen of the western world. Our present concern for children and animals would have struck an early Victorian as ludicrous, while Dr Johnson would simply have condemned it as dangerous sentimentality. Boswell tells in his Life of Johnson (Everyman edition, Vol. 2, p. 447) that when, in the 1780s, there was talk of doing away with Tyburn, where executions were turned into public holidays and children were often hanged for stealing, Johnson said indignantly that ‘executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose…’ Writing about this period, an English historian of crime and punishment says:
Children were starved by drunken parents and parish nurses, they were sent out to pick pockets, they were forced to become prostitutes and many not more than twelve years old were ‘half eaten up with the foul distemper’ of venereal disease, they were made to beg and sometimes scarred or crippled so they might be more successful in exciting pity. They seldom did excite it. Pity was still a strange and valuable emotion. Unwanted babies were left in the streets to die or were thrown into dung heaps or open drains; the torture of animals was a popular sport. Cat-dropping, bear-baiting and bull-baiting were… universally enjoyed.
Christopher Hibbert: The Roots of Evil, p. 44.
And it was not only animals who were at risk. England had no love of foreigners, and they were likely to be jeered at and pelted with mud as they walked through the streets of London. One Portuguese visitor who got into a fight with an English sailor had his ear nailed to the wall, and when he broke away he was battered and stabbed by the mob until he died. Offenders who were sentenced to be exposed in the stocks were often stoned to death. But such brutality was not confined to the lower classes.
The Mohocks, a society whose members were dedicated to the ambition of ‘doing all possible hurt to their fellow creatures’ were mostly gentlemen. They employed their ample leisure in forcing prostitutes and old women to stand on their heads in tar barrels so that they could prick their legs with their swords; or in making them jump up and down to avoid the swinging blades; in disfiguring their victims by boring out their eyes or flattening their noses; in waylaying servants and, as in the case of Lady Winchelsea’s maid, beating them and slashing their faces. To work themselves up to the necessary pitch of enthusiasm for their ferocious games, they first drank so much that they were quite ‘beyond the possibility of attending to any notions of reason or humanity’. Some of the Mohocks also seem to have been members of the Bold Bucks who, apparently, had formally to deny the existence of God and eat every Sunday a dish known as Holy Ghost Pie. The ravages of the Bold Bucks were more specifically sexual than those of the Mohocks and consequently, as it was practically impossible to obtain a conviction for rape and as the age of consent was twelve, they were more openly conducted.
The Roots of Evil, p. 45
In the anonymous Victorian autobiography My Secret Life, the writer describes how he picked up a middle-aged bawd and a ten-year-old-girl at Vauxhall Gardens and possessed the girl several times. ‘Oh, he ain’t going to do it like that other man – you said no one should again.’ ‘Be quiet you little fool, it won’t hurt you. Open your legs.’ And the writer admits cheerfully (Vol. 2, chapter 9): ‘I longed to hurt her, to make her cry out with the pain my tool caused her, to make her bleed if I could.’
In judging the author of My Secret Life we should bear in mind that, had the girl been two years older, she could have legally consented to her own seduction; it was not until 1875 that the age of consent was raised to thirteen. Fifty years earlier, as Arthur Koestler and C. H. Rolph relate in Hanged by the Neck (1961), children were still being hanged or transported to the colonies in ‘hulks’. (There was even a special prison ship for children, which was in use until 1844.) In 1801 a boy had been hanged for stealing a spoon; in 1808, two sisters, aged eight and twelve, were hanged at Lynn; in 1831, a boy of thirteen was hanged at Chelmsford for setting fire to a house; in 1833, a boy of nine was sentenced to death – but reprieved – for pushing a stick through a cracked shop window and stealing two pennyworth of printer’s colours. Homeless children walked the streets and could be charged with vagrancy and sent to prisons which had a part set aside for their accommodation. In Nineteenth Century Crime J. J. Tobias mentions a Report by the Inspector of Prisons for 1836 which describes the children’s section of Newgate and mentions that, out of twenty-four, ‘seven had been committed for robbing their masters, one for purloining from his father, and another from his aunt’ (p. 152).
By the mid-nineteenth century, the public conscience had begun to wake up, largely as the result of the work of humanitarian novelists such as Dickens and Victor Hugo. It is interesting that all that was needed to bring about the change was to touch people’s imagination. On the page before he quotes Dr Johnson on the abolition of public executions, Boswell says ‘Such was his sensibility, and so much was he affected by pathetick poetry, that when he was reading Dr Beattie’s “Hermit” in my presence, it brought tears into his eyes.’ A ‘pathetick poem’ about public executions would probably have changed Johnson’s mind about Tyburn.
By the 1850s, people all over the civilised world were shedding tears over the fate of little Nell and the hunchback Quasimodo who died for love. When, in 1862, Sioux Indians went on the rampage in Minnesota – because they felt they had been cheated out of their land – accounts of the rising emphasised the suffering of children.
The hero of the day was an eleven-year-old boy named Mertin Eastlick, who carried his fifteen-month-old brother Johny on his back for fifty miles, but died shortly afterwards from exposure, over-exertion and lack of nourishment. Mr Eastlick had been killed, and Mrs Eastlick was lying helpless on the ground from a bullet wound. Her two little boys, named Freddie and Frank, were with her. Two squaws saw them, and catching the children they beat them to death before the helpless mother’s eyes. Many other children were only beaten, until they became helpless, and then left to die from hunger and exposure to the storm.
History of the Indian Outbreaks by Judge Buck, quoted in Thomas Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America, p. 388.
The resulting storm of outrage convinced Americans that the Indians deserved to be deprived of their land and herded into reservations. The feeling is understandable; but we can now see that it was the Indians who were being victimised by history. They were simply behaving as they had for centuries; their cruelty was part of the warrior tradition, as the historian Francis Parkman recognised:
An inexorable severity towards enemies was a very essential element in their conception of the character of the warrior. Pity was a cowardly weakness, at which their pride revolted. This, joined to their thirst for applause and their dread of ridicule, made them smother every movement of compassion, and conspired with their native fierceness to give a character of unrelenting cruelty rarely equalled.
From Half a Century of Conflict, quoted by John Andrew Doyle in Essays on Various Subjects, 1911, p. 75.
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