ABSTRACT
Lord North's anonymous informant, who thought the Gordon rioters were made up mostly of house-breakers, pickpockets and the like, clearly considered London to have a substantial criminal population. 1 That was a widely held view. Although at times, for example in the early 1720s, around 1750 and in the last decade of the century, crime levels became a matter of special concern, throughout the eighteenth century perceptions of a problem of crime and anxiety over its presumed increasing incidence were widely held, especially in the capital. This is hardly surprising, for crime is usually the most obvious and widespread threat posed by the unpropertied to the propertied. Oliver Goldsmith anticipated modern sociology in his interactive view of the relationships of crime, property and the criminal law.
