The incidence of shoplifting was so extensive that it was crippling London's retail trade. This was the unequivocal message that the capital's traders intended to convey to Parliament in the late 1690s as the country's lawmakers debated the need for dedicated legislation. Petitioning Parliament, they related a litany of ills. Shoplifting was the daily experience of all London shopkeepers, they declared, ‘against which their strictest diligence cannot secure them’. They bewailed that due to the shoplifter's cunning and the inadequacy of sentencing under the law, those actually prosecuted were but a fraction of the shoplifters plying the crime: ‘Experience shews, that burning and whipping increases their number, and ripens their invention; so that few offenders are taken; when taken, not one in ten prosecuted.’ But how accurate were their accusations: was shoplifting indeed as frequent, pervasive and under-prosecuted as they asserted? In this chapter we interrogate that view, examining the extent of the crime.

We begin by projecting the true prevalence of the crime, calculating its scale from prosecution, retailer and offender evidence. An examination of the many factors impeding the stopping and prosecuting of perpetrators lends credence to the traders’ claims. The chapter then explores the geography and topography of the crime, identifying the location of incidents over time and the significance of their spatial patterning. It shows how retail specialisation and the casual nature of most offending, imparted in the last chapter, was formative to its spread. The exercise reveals that the shopkeepers most at risk were not those that previous historiography may lead us to expect. Perhaps surprisingly, shoplifting had a greater impact on local neighbourhood shops than the elite stores that were most emblematic of England's consumer renaissance.

Assessing the prevalence of the crime

In attempting to accurately quantify shoplifting we must grapple with a problem that has long frustrated historians. Only a proportion of actual thefts will ever be detected and prosecuted. The remainder, termed the ‘dark figure’ of unreported crime, can be as elusive today as in the eighteenth century. British self-report surveys in the last fifty years have suggested that only between one in forty and one in 250 shoplifting incidents result in a conviction or caution.