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‘Bustling, crowding, and pushing’: pickpockets and the nineteenth-century street crowd

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2013

PETER K. ANDERSSON
PETER K. ANDERSSON*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Lund, Sweden
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Abstract

The history of walking in the city has long been neglected, and the existing scholarship is largely concerned with rioting, flânerie or urban geography. This article aims to detect the behavioural patterns of pedestrian traffic in the late nineteenth century through a close study of the methods of pickpockets in London streets, with information gleaned from trial reports and writings on pickpockets. By analysing the most common ways in which pickpockets operated, as described in numerous accounts, we can see how they adapted to nineteenth-century pedestrian norms, and through this method acquire a rough outline of what pedestrian traffic looked like, and thus how urban dwellers living in a critical historical period adapted and reacted to urban conditions on an everyday level. The evidence shows that pedestrian traffic through the century remained highly interactive, and that the modern aspects of cities identified in theories of civilizing or impoverishment of the public realm had a very limited impact at this time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 291 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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22 t18770917–701.

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24 t18841020–999.

25 t18861025–1102; t18840623–727.

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27 t18790805–746.

28 t18831015–917.

29 t18830910–811.

30 t18720408–347.

31 We find several other cases where the pickpockets place themselves in a crowd and surround their victim in this manner: t18701212–69; t18720819–600; t18721028–733; t18740608–383; t18750503–349; t18760918–400; t18801213–130.

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48 Films include London Street Scenes, 1903, and Blackfriars Bridge, 1896, both available through the British Film Institute.

49 I am doing this to a larger extent in my doctoral thesis, ‘Streetlife in late Victorian London: the constable and the crowd’, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan (Basingstoke). These concluding remarks are to some extent based on my observations there.

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