ABSTRACT
Criminologists and scholars of criminal law have both identified the strong orientation of contemporary response to crime and deviance as directed towards the lower classes as a mechanism for distancing the respectable classes ideologically from the social menace of crime. The relationship between financial misconduct in commercial dealings and what became termed overtrading was a particularly important touchstone for Victorian determinations of criminal liability in the commercial sphere. Historians have noted how overtrading manifested in any fast trading making haste to be rich would come to be regarded during the middle years of the nineteenth century as being even more egregious than deliberate fraud. Responding to crime and aligning law with capitalism were themselves two heavy-weight agendas in Victorian law-making, reflecting how contemporaries clearly appreciated living through times of rapid and far-reaching change. In times of enormous change, responses to financial crime would in many ways capture the nature of this change and its very considerable reach.
