As coronavirus took over Britain, the public became increasingly interested in statistics regarding detected cases, deaths and data comparison with other countries. Our ancestors also took a great interest in statistics. However, looking at the evidence, can we trust the criminal data completed by the Victorians?

Romance in a cricketing field
In early June 1870 a local girl Emma Bishop and her suitor Henry Wells were caught and charged with committing an immoral act in the cricketing field in Bromley, Kent. The case was reported in The Maidstone and Kentish Journal: Henry was discharged, but Emma was committed for one month’s hard labour. In another case dating back to 29 July 1853, a Bromley clerk updating local Board of Guardians minutes books duly noted a complaint of three women against a local doctor. Among them was Mrs Bragier, a pauper widow with three children, who complained that ‘Mr Fowler poked me twice with his whip in an indecent manner’. Confronted with the accusations, Dr Fowler denied the assaults and his (gentleman’s) word was taken as evidence. In result, Mrs Bragier’s testimony was dismissed, and the case closed without it ever being reported to the police. In both cases nobody questioned the outcome. Victorian police, judges and the public often believed that no man should lose his respectability and his freedom by seducing girls or pauper women. Looking at such examples, modern readers can see that in Victorian society females were treated inadequately, so can we trust criminal statistics from that period?

The government takes charge
In 1810 the British government begun to publish a regular set of criminal statistics (known as Criminal Returns), which were collected by local clerks, and showed details about defendants put on trials and their resulting sentences.

The data also included their date of birth, age, sex, occupation, hair colour, literacy and previous convictions. From around 1816, clerks and prison chaplains added columns for details such as special marks, marital status, dependent children, legitimacy, religion and the character of the criminal. One of them was John Clay, a chaplain to the Preston House of Correction, who in 1839 designed a set of registers for recording information about those committed to the jail (Clay’s template, pictured).

The data collected by people like Clay paved a way to generating statistics, eventually used by the Home Office to monitor the British population. Among them was the Home Secretary Robert Peel, who in response to rising crime in rapidly growing cities, used those figures to justify the official formation of the Metropolitan Police, which consisted of 3,000 uniformed policeman (twice the number of patrols in Paris at that time). The task for the new police force was to catch criminals, but the officers were also obliged to collect detailed and systematic information about the offenders and their crimes.

The pressure for the Home Office to improve the reliability of criminal statistics continued to grow from various concerned communities. In 1853 the International Congress of Statisticians and in 1856 the British Association for the Advancement of Science both recommended a centrally directed and uniform system of criminal record-keeping. The result was the introduction in 1857 of the Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, which brought together the existing Criminal and Prison Returns with a new set of Police Returns. The innovative system allowed Parliament to collect statistical information about each police force, running costs of prisons as well as persons charged, bailed, committed or discharged. The new method continued to improve with each decade, and it marked a significant development towards much more reliable record-keeping in Victorian England.

The suspicious Victorians
The statistics presented society with a clearer summary of criminal activity, but even the Victorians had doubts about their reliability. One of the examples of criminal data lacking credibility comes from the British Medical Journal, which on 29 December 1877 published an article called ‘Coroner’s Inquests in Kent’. The paper was deeply concerned that despite a large number of 22 coroners in the county and despite 2,103 deaths, only 2.1 per cent were investigated, while in some regions such as Sevenoaks and Tunbridge the proportion of inquests was as low as 1 per cent. The concerned paper called the system ‘dangerously lax’, adding that ‘similar defects exist in other parts of England and Wales’ although not ‘to so glaring at extent’. As an example the journal quoted a 27-year old labourer who died from ‘exhaustion from loss of blood’ despite no information ‘whether the loss of blood was due to natural or to violent causes’. In another example the journal reported on the death of a 10-year-old illegitimate child in Hollingbourne near Maidstone, with the cause of death as ‘unknown’. This article demonstrates the scale of the problem with statistical accuracy and it shows that the problem was already recognised by Victorian practitioners.

The difficulties are also clear in another historical document called ‘Instructions for guidance of officers preparing the monthly process return’ (available in MEPO 4/38 at The National Archives). The leaflet advises policemen to write the correct age of an offender, yet adds that if this cannot be determined, the officers are required to ‘give the apparent age to the best of their ability’. Historians Godfrey and Lawrence quote two cases of deceased persons found in Kent in 1859, in which the first body was a foreigner ‘hence not worth the taxpayer’s expense of an investigation’, while the second was ‘recorded as suicide despite having a stab wound on its back (see Crime and justice since 1750, Routledge). Neither of those murders was recorded in official records, therefore those homicide police statistics cannot be accepted as historical evidence without deeper historical examination.

Invisible children
The crime statistics regarding children are even more complicated. Murders of newborn babies by mothers were punishable by hanging. These, if proven, would be included in official homicide statistics. However, juries were often sympathetic to desperate women and were reluctant to bring in guilty verdicts. Instead, it became common to record verdicts for the crime of ‘concealment of birth’ which did not carry a capital sentence. It shows that infanticide was especially difficult to investigate and record.

Older children were no less protected by the law. On 28 June 1859 The Maidstone and Kentish Journal reported a case of an arrested a man, whose 10-month-old daughter starved to death. The father explained to the court that he had been drinking since his wife’s death. As he was not used to and capable of childcare, the father had been excused and his case dismissed. In another sad case from Canterbury prison records, a man called Charles Kinsley Gasson indecently insulted three-year-old Lottie from Dover. Gasson, who had already been twice convicted of indecent assaults, did not became a prison statistic or a registered offender. After paying £50 and promising ‘to keep the peace’ he was free to go (images 2.0 and 2.1). Such examples highlight the problems associated with the classification of what was considered a crime in Victorian society and how far compassion, social rules and gender mattered in what was considered a criminal act.

Can neither read nor write
Victorian data is far from reliable. Statistics were often flawed, incomplete, lost, not recorded, biased towards rich and powerful men, consciously manipulated or inconsistent. Yet the data remains important.

Victorian statistics can tell us a lot about 19th-century cultural trends such as the approach of Victorian society towards offenders, the justice system, state legalisations and public opinion.

The statistical process was not static but became more detailed, organised and under growing control by the state. A growing sophistication of surveillance techniques (such as fingerprinting, telegraphy and photography) also allowed better identification of offenders and social problems.

Primary sources show that some statistics are likely to be accurate and can add valuable information for the historians of crime. In 1879 The Kent and Sussex Courier examined judicial statistics of prisoners in Kent, and reported that ‘1,012 males and 357 females could neither read or write, 1,948 males and 634 females could read imperfectly, 53 males and 6 females could read and write well, while seven males had had superior instructions.’ Those statistics are an important in analysis of elements such as the levels literacy of convicted in prisoners.

Other newspaper editors looked into the connection between reoffending rates of pauper children in relation to their treatment when jailed.

The Kentish Gazette reported that the proportion of juvenile prisoners in Kent was 9.3 per cent, while the average for England and Wales was only 1.1 per cent. The newspaper blamed ‘our wicked treatment of those poor children’, questioning how oakum-picking in prisons could possibly have a positive impact on young offenders to ‘grow up to be gentlemen’.

The journalists used statistics to conclude that only long training and schooling could keep youngsters away from ‘picking and stealing’. The above articles demonstrate that crime statistics have been used, and still are, to study social problems and reoffending.

Some of the most important pieces of information coming out of historical statistics are details on how new legalisations changed the penal system over the time, with some punishment methods disappearing altogether. The Anatomy Act, which became law in August 1832, ended the practice of stealing dead bodies for medical schools, a crime previously committed by resurrectionists commonly known as ‘body snatchers’. The national ban on convict transportation in 1853 also resulted in drastic changes in penal system: the rise of prisons as a principal form of punishment. The statistics show in detail how the process took place; in 1850, out of over 20,000 convicts 17,002 were sentenced to transportation, while a year later 2,880 were transported, while 18,418 were imprisoned (Kentish Gazette, 14 September 1852).

Lessons from our ancestors
Criminal statistics are not faultless, and so they have to be read with caution over their reliability and accuracy. Yet viewed with this in mind, statistics can still add great value to the history of crime and are an essential part of a historian’s toolkit.

Analysed in terms of patterns, methods of punishment and changing levels of criminality, statistics can be used to establish national patterns and provide useful information in individual or local case studies. They reveal Victorian information-gathering culture, which resulted in the fundamental transformation in the fields of policing and the judicial system. Before the introduction of the systematic harvesting of criminal data, there was little understanding in the field of criminology such as the effect of environmental factors like poverty and lack of education on crime. Victorian obsession with crime statistics helped to build the foundations on which our modern understanding of criminality is based.