Place remembered vividly the London of his youth, and he was an indefatigable student of the literature which throws light on the manners of the earlier part of the century— largely of the Newgate Calendar type. As for the Report, the general agreement that crimes were " much less atrocious than formerly" speaks for itself. Townsend, the famous Bow Street runner, like Sir Nathaniel Conant, thought crimes were fewer. "I am astonished, considering the times. Now, for instance, what was expected [after the peace]? That there would be knocking down and this and that and t'other. With respect to cruelty in robbery, such desperate things as we had formerly, there is not a thing to be compared." Romilly exposed the often repeated fallacy that an increase in convictions meant an increase in crime.

The conclusion to be drawn from a careful analysis of the Report of 1816, together with the evidence of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, and much contemporary literature, is that there had been a change in manners and in the nature of crime comparable with, and closely related to, the changed attitude towards the penal code. How great this change had been is hard to realise in face of the opposition met with by Romilly and the other reformers who attempted to mitigate the barbarities of the laws.

In the early part of the century the forces of disorder and crime had the upper hand in London, subject to the extreme ferocity of the law on the comparatively rare occasions when a conviction was secured. The expenses and difficulties of prosecution, the uncertainties of the law resulted in a dreadful vindictiveness. In 1739 when two men were executed on Kennington Common for a so-called highway robbery-a trifling theft without violence-the prosecutor "rode at the tail of the cart, jeering them and insulting them all the way." 31 The brutality of the age and the sense of insecurity were reflected in demands for yet more sanguinary punishments. The writer of a pamphlet called Hanging not Punishment enough (1701) points out the increase of highwaymen and housebreakers, "though the Government has vigorously set itself against them by pardoning very few." He recommends torture as a deterrent, and also life servitude among the negroes in the Plantations, "first marking them in the face to distinguish them from honest men," as “a proposal

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lyable to as few exceptions as any other." This severity is the more surprising, as he adds, "we need not go far for the reasons of the great numbers and increase of these vermin, for though no times have been without them, yet we may now reasonably believe that after so many thousands of soldiers disbanded, and mariners discharged, many of them are driven upon necessity, and having been used to an idle way of living, care not to work, and many (I fear) cannot if they would."

" 32

By the end of the century we are in a different world. If we look back to it we are conscious of its brutalities, but if we attempt to look forward from the then immediate past, we see a revolution in opinion comparable with conversionwith that change of heart which is a phenomenon of individual experience. But the barbarous laws had hardly been modified to suit a more enlightened age which had discovered that they were fit only for a nation of savages.

It is significant of the new spirit which runs through society that there is a growing feeling against cruelty to animals. Of all Hogarth's moralising designs one feels that the Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) had the best chance of success. "The prints were engraved," he said, "with the hope of, in some degree, correcting that barbarous treatment of animals, the very sight of which renders the streets of our metropolis so distressing to every feeling mind. If they have had this effect, and checked the progress of cruelty, I am more proud of having been the author than I should be of having painted Raffaele's cartoons." " For ages throwing at cocks on Shrove Tuesday had been an accepted sport for which parents gave their children money. Both the Fieldings set themselves to suppress it," and local paving and improvement Acts made throwing at any "cock, fowl or bird" a punishable offence.

33

The supposed increase of crime then, was at least not proven, though changing standards had opened people's eyes to many brutalities which had diminished rather than increased. In 1816 it was not admitted by those whose opinion carries most weight-including Romilly and Place-and the student of eighteenth-century annals of crime can hardly fail to agree with Place that in proportion to the population crimes had diminished.

B

As for the other count in the indictment of the age, the discontent and spirit of revolution conspicuous between the end of the eighteenth century and the collapse of the Chartist movement in 1848 were doubtless largely due to industrial conditions, but not, in London, to a general worsening of those conditions. On the contrary, they are to be found precisely among those sections of the working classes whose position had improved.35 Place repeatedly says that the poorest and least skilled labourers in the early nineteenth century were then in the stage of social development of working-men as a whole forty or fifty years before. Mayhew in the eighteen-fifties found that "between the skilled operative of the West End and the unskilled labourer, the moral and intellectual development is so great that it seems as if we were in a new land and among another race." It is significant that he found the artisans "red-hot politicians (of a Chartist colour) while the labourers had "no political opinions whatever," though on the whole "in favour of the maintenance of things as they are." He found a marked contrast between the radical tailors and the coal-heavers, who were proud of having turned out to a man as special constables on the day of the great Chartist demonstration in 1848. In 1825 the nature of the change in the London artisan had dawned upon the Edinburgh Review: “People are aware of these combinations and hear of mischievous tracts widely disseminated, and they compare the careless, vacant, unenquiring clown of fifty years ago, with the busy, restless politician of the present day. They think the change is for the worse, and they impute this change to education."

Conditions in London, in the bad years which followed the peace of 1815, as in the eighteenth century, were exceptional. London to a great extent escaped both the torrent of pauperisation which deluged the greater part of agricultural England, and the catastrophic fall in wages which occurred in many places. The workhouse was used as a test of destitution and the more or less permanent organisation of paid officials and boards of Directors and Guardians of the poor showed its value. The transition from war to peace undoubtedly brought much misery and unemployment, it was a shrinkage from a period of commercial and industrial expansion under war conditions—a period of chequered and hectic prosperity."

36

But in spite of this, there is much evidence against a general set-back in social conditions in London. Place's evidence is comprehensive and convincing. Foreigners generally comment on the sturdy, well-dressed appearance of working people.38 Doctors testify to the improvement in health and cleanliness. There was much poverty, but it was being more comprehensively dealt with both by the poor laws and by charities than ever before. The death-rate for London as for the whole country continued to decline. Rickman, who was responsible for the early census returns, wrote to Southey in 1816 :

“One thing I wish to say as to an opinion which you seem to entertain as to the well-being, or rather ill-being of the poor, that their state has grown worse and worse of late. Now, if one listens to common assertion, everything in grumbling England grows worse and worse; but the fact in question is even a curiosity. Human comfort is to be estimated by human health, and that by the length of human life. . . . Since 1780 life has been prolonged as five to four, and the poor form too large a portion of society to be excluded from this general effect; rather they are the main cause of it; for the upper classes had food and cleanliness abundant before." 39

It is difficult to follow the social history of London in any detail without being impelled to the conclusion that bad as things were at the end of the Great War, they had still been progressively improving, and that people were learning to mitigate the evils of life in a great city; within the limits set by administrative possibilities and deep-seated prejudices something had been achieved. The facts that emerge from this conclusion are the depths of misery, the appalling brutalities of life in earlier periods, for which indeed there is much evidence. But it is not the people whose position is most abject who are most conscious of their miseries-at all events for the most part they suffer in silence. Hardships begin to be talked about when they are no longer taken for granted, and when therefore there is some prospect of relieving them. Irregularity of work and the combination of evils called sweating were of long standing, deeply rooted in the organisation of many London trades, yet so little is

heard of them till the nineteenth century that they pass as products of modern industrialism. The worst evils of childlabour had already begun to be mitigated when their existence first became generally realised, owing to the sufferings of apprentices in cotton-mills. Cellar dwellings again, often spoken of as a result of the industrial revolution, in London at least date from Tudor times, and were directly encouraged by Tudor and Stuart policy.

This book was begun as a survey of social conditions in London in the eighteenth century. In the process of research it became impossible to escape the conviction of a gradually improving state of things and the century seemed to emerge as a stage in a long, slow process by which life for the mass of the people of London was becoming less nasty, brutish and short, a process of course with many minor fluctuations. A pronounced set-back, for instance, between 1720 and 1750 was almost certainly due to an enormous consumption of very cheap, fiery and adulterated spirits, and there were repeated periods of distress owing to dislocating transitions from peace to war and war to peace, to trade crises and to times of dearth and epidemics. But the new spirit which (rightly or wrongly) regarded the miseries of man as due not to original sin or an inscrutable Providence, but to bad laws and a bad environment, was beginning to be concerned not only to relieve distress but to deal with its causes. As most of our modern social and industrial evils have a longer history than is often supposed, so has the process of improvement and reform. The advance in health, cleanliness, order, sobriety and education which has obviously been going on in London since 1850 can be traced since at least the middle of the eighteenth century.