ABSTRACT
This chapter actively engages with the lexicon of financial crime in beginning its search for its historical foundations. It first explains the apparent importance of popular perceptions for directing legal responses, and then explores how strongly ambivalences concerning financial crime appear to gravitate around perceptions of conventional forms of crime and delinquency. Sutherlands seminal linking of the rhetoric of respectability, business and white-collar crime is the starting point for exploring nineteenth-century consciousness of the lexicon of financial crime. Dr Charles Goring's study was very much one of developing and explaining different typologies of crime and criminal. This and its purported influence on enforcement policy suggest it could be an extremely important reference point in the search for the lexicon of financial crime in nineteenth-century societal consciousness. It forms part of a lengthy tradition in Britain of exploring the apparent characteristics and peculiarities of financial crimes by reference to benchmarks of ordinary or traditional criminality.
