The fourth book in my Secrets and Scandals series, To Love a Thief, features a former constable who’s just inherited a title and consequently gave up his profession. He’s definitely a case of you can take the viscount out of the magistrate’s office, but you can’t take the magistrate’s office out of the viscount.
Those of you familiar with the Regency are likely aware London had no formal police force until 1829. Before that, they had a variety of law enforcement entities, but nothing centralized. Perhaps the most well-known is Bow Street, founded in 1740 by Sir Thomas De Veil, a justice who set up this office with the purpose of investigating and pursuing crime. Sir Henry Fielding took over as magistrate in 1748. He and his brother established the “runners” or principal officers who patrolled the streets similar to modern-day police officers.
Bow Street was successful enough that the Middlesex Justices Act was passed in 1792, which established seven magistrate offices throughout London. Each office had three paid magistrates and up to six constables. The hero of To Love a Thief is based on one of these constables. In addition to these offices, a river police was founded in 1798 at Wapping, but there was still nothing centralized.
Corruption had been a problem during the eighteenth century with thief-takers, which were a sort of private police force. A thief-taker was a private individual hired by a crime victim to catch the criminal, typically a thief. However, many thief-takers were corrupt and would extort protection money from the very criminals they were hired to capture. Or they had their own gangs of thieves, some of whom they’d turn over in order to collect the fee from their victim client. Bow Street was not immune to this sort of corruption. In 1816, a member of the Bow Street Horse Patrol, George Vaughan was convicted of setting up five men for a burglary. He served five years’ hard labor.
Punishment for crime during the Regency depended on the offense, of course, but their sentences were much harsher than today, and weren’t delivered with the purpose of rehabilitation. London had several prisons, but the English preferred to ship their convicts overseas. However, transportation became more difficult after 1775 when the American Revolution began. Often, ships loaded with convicts would sit in the Thames for months with nowhere to go. This sort of imprisonment stuck and by the early nineteenth century, the “hulks” were born. Converting ships that were no longer seaworthy was less expensive than building new prisons, and so convicts were sentenced to several years’ hard labor aboard the hulks, doing things such as cleaning the river and raising sand, soil, and gravel.
The hulks were horrendous. Convicts began their incarceration on the lowest decks and—if they survived—gradually moved up to the top of the ship over the course of their sentence. Recidivism wasn’t a component of crime prevention at this time, but those who served in the hulks rarely escaped a life of crime once they were released. Their time in the hulks was so demoralizing and damaging that they spent their incarceration planning for their return to crime, and in some cases became more violent criminals than they ever would have been.
Probably the most affected by London’s ineffectual legal system were disadvantaged children, or what we might today call “at risk youth.” In many cases, a child’s mother (often they didn’t know their father) would be sent out in the morning to obtain money or objects of value however they might. In other cases, children had no parents and were on their own, some living in “flash houses” with other children.
Flash houses were places where people gathered to drink (sort of like a tavern) and where crime often bred. Many flash house proprietors were fences for stolen goods. One of the characters in To Love a Thief, Odette, is a fence who operates a flash house, and who served as an informant to the hero when he was a constable. Some flash houses contained dormitories where kids from age 10 or sometimes younger to age 14 or so lived, drank, and gambled. Young boys lived with young girls, much like a married couple, and the girls would even look after things for the boys if they were incarcerated for a time. These children had almost no hope for a productive life as honest citizens.
