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Informers and Their Social Networks in Eighteenth-Century London

A Comparison of Two Communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Jessica Warner  and
Frank Ivis
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Extract

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 whowork on their own).

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , winter 2001 , pp. 563 - 587
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2001 

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