ABSTRACT
Poverty was omnipresent in the eighteenth century, and England offered little of material comfort and less of hope to the majority of its people. There were some exceptions, but what most convicts had in common was their poverty; their crimes varied, their poverty was universal. Indeed much of their crime was a product of their poverty. The workhouses, obviously, could cope only with a minority of the poor of England, outdoor relief with another minority, so that many of the poor simply took to begging and vagrancy, with occasional petty crime and occasional violence. Engels's view that crime was the result of the industrial revolution and that in pre-industrial England the absence of crime had been the normal state. There was certainly an increase of crime after 1770, which, in combination with American independence, produced an intolerable strain on the existing facilities of incarceration.
