ABSTRACT
(Arthur) Osborne Montgomery Jay was a Church of England clergyman and social commentator. From 1883 to 1886, he was in charge of a college mission in Stepney, London. In 1886, he accepted the living of Holy Trinity, on the boundary between Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, which possessed the highest poverty level in East London. In The Social Problem, Jay advised that the criminal elements of society – those living in the Old Nichol – could not be reformed, they were incurable. Such ‘moral maniacs’ should be forcibly removed to penal settlements to serve life sentences, and forbidden to procreate. Only then would the strain of criminality be wiped out from the population. The penal settlement “will exorcise that awful spectre of heredity which clogs so many lives.” Jay’s language was part-religious, part-Lombrosian, with overtones of the ‘born criminal,’ and he was clearly familiar with Havelock Ellis’s work on heredity.
