ABSTRACT
Faced with incessant media reports attesting to ever-rising levels of street crime, it is easy to imagine that the scale of the problem we face today is so vast that British society has never seen or experienced anything like it before. Or has it? In this and the next chapter my aim will be to situate our current fears and anxieties about street crime within a historical context. This I will accomplish by looking at the historical record, and by so doing study the predecessors of the contemporary ‘mugger’ as this figure appears in different places at different times; and by considering the social response this archetypal folk devil has generated.
