This book offers an original and exciting analysis of the concept of the criminal underworld. Print culture, policing and law enforcement, criminal networks, space and territory are explored here through a series of case studies taken from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

An examination of the circumstances of youthful delinquency in London in the early nineteenth century, and the legislative measures put in place to contain and control offenders. A well-researched and well-argued monograph contributing significantly to our understanding of juvenile delinquency. CRIME, HISTOIRE ET SOCIETESA fine book... based on a wide range of well-marshalled primary evidence that emphasizes the voice of young offenders - highly readable. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEWThe early nineteenth century witnessed an increasing concern about the incidence of juvenile crime. Youthful delinquency was not new, but it was notuntil then that the foundations were laid for a juvenile justice system which would serve, with amendments, for the next century and more. Separate trial, separate penal provision, and an emphasis on reform rather than punishmentwere all enshrined in the new legislation.Heather Shore explores the processes and context of these legislative strategies, in which consideration of juvenile crime in London - with its close streets and alleys and conspicuous juxtaposition of poverty and wealth - played a major part, influencing elite perceptions of offending by children and young people. At the heart of this study is a critical consideration of the lives of young offenders. Dr Shore examines the process of offending, from the initial foray into crime, through apprehension and passage through the judicial system, to punishment and experience of penal and reform measures: prison, houses of correction, transportation and colonial emigration. HEATHER SHORE is Lecturer in Social and Cultural History, University of Portsmouth.

Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, difficult and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile reformatory system. The book breaks new ground in crime research, speaking to pressing present-day concerns around child poverty and youth justice, and resonating with a powerful public fascination for family history. Using innovative digital methods to unlock the Victorian life course, the authors have reconstructed the lives, families and neighbourhoods of 500 children living within, or at the margins of, the early English juvenile reformatory system. Four hundred of them were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north west of England from courts around the UK over a fifty-year period from the 1860s onwards. Young Criminal Lives is based on one of the most comprehensive sets of official and personal data ever assembled for a historical study of this kind. For the first time, these children can be followed on their journey in and out of reform and then though their adulthood and old age. The book centres on institutions celebrated in this period for their pioneering new approaches to child welfare and others that were investigated for cruelty and scandal. Both were typical of the new kind of state-certified provision offered, from the 1850s on, to children who had committed criminal acts, or who were considered 'vulnerable' to predation, poverty and the 'inheritance' of criminal dispositions. The notion that interventions can and must be evaluated in order to determine 'what works' now dominates public policy. But how did Victorian and Edwardian policy-makers and practitioners deal with this question? By what criteria, and on the basis of what kinds of evidence, did they judge their own successes and failures? Young Criminal Lives ends with a critical review of the historical rise of evidence-based policy-making within criminal justice. It will appeal to scholars and students of crime and penal policy, criminologists, sociologists, and social policy researchers and practitioners in youth justice and child protection.