ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an interdisciplinary approach to Victorian experiences of financial crime, which needs to inform any historical study of the phenomena. The strength of historian's interest in street crime, violence and protest did much to create intellectual space where the hidden affinities between respectability and criminality would remain obscured if not actually concealed in their representations of crime in society. The chapter which develops this latter proposition suggests that this legacy of Victorian responses is itself complex at best, and may actually be paradoxical, but that it may represent our best hope of understanding why the integration of financial crimes within Britain's legal and social cultures has been far from straightforward. It also argues the reality that financial crime has never fully become comfortably embedded within key institutional and normative frameworks underpinning reactions and responses to crime.
