Anxiety, determination and businessmen as [criminal] policymakers

Victorian responses to financial crime show a society determined to respond to this particularly acute example of hidden affinities between respectability and criminality. The public character of financial misconduct termed by contemporaries high art or even actually financial crime was perhaps especially apparent when arising from the operations of banks and finance houses and on which clients, and particularly commercial pursuits would depend on continuing to be able to make payment. As the example of Joseph Windle Cole emphasises, Victorian determination to criminalise deviations from the ordinary transactions of trade so serious that they required enforcement as public wrongs even transcended contemporary concerns about how wide-spread ruin could emanate from regulating capitalism. In determining crimes properly so-called, matters deserving of criminal attention were distinguished from those which were not by identification of the presence/absence of fraudulent intent.