[Henry Wilkinson Holland], ‘Thieves and Thieving’, Cornhill Magazine (1860), Excerpts

Inspectors, moral reformers, goal chaplains, literary men, legislators, and novelists, all these have had something to say about thieves. The author wrote a subsequent piece (‘Professional Thieves’) which appeared in Cornhill Magazine in 1862. He initially shows recognition that many criminals become so through ‘the force of circumstances’ but then goes on to demonstrate the automatic assumption that crime is committed by the poor due to ‘temptation, laziness, vice, necessity and depraved will’. He gives a sense of criminals (and thieves in particular) as a self-perpetuating community (identifying a ‘thieves’ quarter’ where they live, for example) but this is curiously at odds with his concurrent depiction of the criminal class as vagrant, rootless and ever-shifting. While crime is thus still associated with the poor, and with particular types of behaviours, the author’s focus on the bodily appearance of criminals, and on the transmission of criminality across generations, prefigures tropes which would become increasingly obvious in later decades.