¹ East London Observer, 23 September 1882.

² See Ross, Ellen, “Survival Networks: Women's Neighbourhood Sharing in London before World War I,” History Workshop Journal 15, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 4–27, at 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shani D'Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (DeKalb, 1998), 51–62.

³ V. A. C. Gatrell, “The Decline of Theft and Violence in Victorian and Edwardian England,” in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, ed. V. A. C. Gatrell, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker (London, 1980), 238–370, at 288–89. For criticism of the use of these statistics, see Sindall, R. S., “The Criminal Statistics of Nineteenth-Century Cities: A New Approach,” Urban History Yearbook 13 (May 1986): 28–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Howard, “Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics since the 1850s,” Economic History Review 51, no. 3 (August 1998): 569–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Malcolm Feeley and Deborah Little argue that this decline began in the eighteenth century and continued until the end of the nineteenth. Feeley, Malcolm M. and Little, Deborah L., “The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process, 1687–1912,” Law and Society Review 25, no. 4 (December 1991): 719–57, at 722CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Conley identifies a decline in the second half of the nineteenth century. Carolyn A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (Oxford, 1991), 70. See also, V. A. C. Gatrell and T. B. Hadden, “Criminal Statistics and their Interpretation,” in Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data, ed. E. A. Wrigley (Cambridge, 1972), 336–96, at 374.

⁵ Judicial Statistics, 1857, Parliamentary Papers (1857–58), vol. 57, 15; Judicial Statistics, 1885, Parliamentary Papers (1886), vol. 72, 24.

⁶ Barry Godfrey, Prosecutions for Violent Offences in Selected English, Australian and New Zealand Petty Sessions' Courts, 1880–1914 [computer file]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive [distributor], July 2002. SN: 4483. The original data creators, depositors or copyright holders, the funders of the Data Collections (if different) and the UK Data Archive bear no responsibility for the analysis and interpretation in this work.

⁷ Martin Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge, 2004), 27; Clive Emsley, Hard Men: The English and Violence since 1750 (London, 2005), 12, 178–89.

⁸ John Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: The Shadow of Our Refinement (London, 2004), 5, 9, 14.

⁹ Emsley, Hard Men, 46; Wiener, Men of Blood, 6, 289.

¹⁰ John Archer, “‘Men Behaving Badly’? Masculinity and the Uses of Violence, 1850–1900,” in Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850–1950, ed. Shani D'Cruze (Harlow, 2000), 41–54, at 46; John Carter Wood, “Drinking, Fighting and Working-Class Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Susanne Schmid and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp (London, 2014), 71–80, at 73, 79.

¹¹ Schippers, Mimi, “Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity and Gender Hegemony,” Theory and Society 36, no. 1 (March 2007): 85–102, at 100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Godfrey, Barry, Farrall, Stephen, and Karstedt, Susanne, “Explaining Gendered Sentencing Patterns for Violent Men and Women in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian Period,” British Journal of Criminology 45, no. 5 (September 2005): 696–720, at 715, 717CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Wiener, Men of Blood, 289.

¹⁴ Emsley, Hard Men, 59, 35.

¹⁵ Wood, Violence and Crime, 39–40, 61.

¹⁶ Wiener, Men of Blood, 132.

¹⁷ Godfrey, Farrall, and Karstedt, “Explaining Gendered Sentencing,” 718, 716.

¹⁸ Ibid., 715. The authors note, “we cannot rule out that all of these factors … might reduce the clear gender bias.”

¹⁹ Andrew Davies argues that magistrates expressed significant concern about the participation of young women in Manchester gang violence in this period; despite this, they punished men more severely. This may reflect the youth of these female offenders, some of whom were bound over in their parents' recognizance rather than imprisoned. Davies, Andrew, “‘These Viragoes Are No Less Cruel Than the Lads’: Young Women, Gangs and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford,” British Journal of Criminology 39, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 12–89, at 86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ David Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750–1914 (New York, 1998), 18; Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900, 4th ed. (Harlow, 2010), 214–17.

²¹ Thomas William Saunders, Metropolitan Police Court Jottings by a Magistrate (London, 1882), 10. There were formally thirteen police court jurisdictions in London, but Hammersmith and Wandsworth shared magistrates, as did Greenwich and Woolwich, leading Saunders to enumerate eleven police courts. On the range of uses made of these courts by poor Londoners, see Davis, Jennifer, “A Poor Man's System of Justice: The London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Historical Journal 27, no. 2 (June 1984): 309–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Edward Carpenter, Prisons, Police and Punishment: An Inquiry into the Causes and Treatment of Crime and Criminals (London, 1905), 69–70.

²³ “T. W. Saunders, Esq.,” Law Times (8 March 1890), 335.

²⁴ “Sir Franklin Lushington,” Law Times (16 November 1901), 69.

²⁵ Saunders, Metropolitan Police Court Jottings, 81.

²⁶ Carolyn Steedman, An Everyday Life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2013), 15–16.

²⁷ Godfrey, Farrell, and Karstedt, “Explaining Gendered Sentencing,” 701.

²⁸ See Davis, “A Poor Man's System of Justice,” 332; Steedman, An Everyday Life, 154; Alexander J. Auerbach, “‘In the Courts and Alleys’: The Enforcement of the Laws on Children's Education and Labor in London, 1870–1914” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2001), 133.

²⁹ Michelle Abraham, “The Summary Courts and the Prosecution of Assault in Northampton and Nottingham, 1886–1931” (PhD diss., University of Leicester, 2011), 45.

³⁰ Davis, “A Poor Man's System of Justice,” 319.

³¹ Just over 7 percent of cases were described as involving “cutting” or “wounding” in some combination.

³² East London Observer, 26 December 1885; Thames Police Court Notebooks, December 1885. London Metropolitan Archives, PS/TH/A/01/006. Because of the violence, this case is included in the data set.

³³ Emsley, Hard Men, 6–7.

³⁴ Davis described lawbreaking as “endemic in working-class life.” Jennifer Davis, “Law Breaking and Law Enforcement: The Creation of a Criminal Class in Mid-Victorian London” (PhD diss., Boston College, 1984), 70.

³⁵ Preliminary examination of other months in the Thames Police Court records and the East London Observer indicate that these months were typical in this regard.

³⁶ East London Observer, 29 November 1884.

³⁷ John Archer and Jo Jones, “Headlines from History: Violence in the Press, 1850–1914,” in The Meanings of Violence, ed. Elizabeth A. Stanko (London, 2003), 17–31; Catherine Lee, Policing Prostitution, 1856–1886: Deviance, Surveillance and Morality (London, 2013), 60–61; Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, 2004), 4; Barry Godfrey, “Rough Girls, 1880–1930: The ‘Recent’ History of Violent Young Women,” in Girls' Violence: Myths and Realities, ed. Christine Alder and Anne Worrall (Albany, 2004), 21–39, at 26; A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992), 42; L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Jack the Ripper and the London Press (New Haven, 2001), 48, 56, 65.

³⁸ Shani D'Cruze, Barry S. Godfrey, and David J. Cox, “‘The Most Troublesome Woman in Crewe’: Investigating Gender, Sentencing and the Late Victorian English Lower Courts,” in Problems of Crime and Violence in Europe, 1780–2000: Essays in Criminal Justice, ed. Efi Avdela, Shani D'Cruze, and Judith Rowbotham (Lewiston, 2010), 237–77, at 240.

³⁹ Ross, “Survival Networks,” 15; Jennifer S. Davis, “Prosecutions and Their Context: The Use of the Criminal Law in Later Nineteenth-Century London,” in Policing and Prosecution in Britain 1750–1850, ed. Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder (Oxford, 1989), 397–426, at 417.

⁴⁰ D'Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, 51, 61.

⁴¹ Abraham, “Summary Courts,” 136.

⁴² Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, between the Wars (London, 1986), 96; see also August, Andrew, “A Culture of Consolation? Rethinking Politics in Working-Class London, 1870–1914,” Historical Research 74, no. 184 (May 2001): 193–219, at 200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Ross, Ellen, “‘Fierce Questions and Taunts’: Married Life in Working-Class London, 1870–1914,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 575–602CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D'Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, esp. ch. 4.

⁴⁴ Emsley, Crime and Society, 45.

⁴⁵ This is quite different from the findings of Michelle Abraham in her study of Northampton and Nottingham, where she found few women charged with assaulting men. Abraham, “Summary Courts,” 120–21.

⁴⁶ The proportion is somewhat lower in cases with only female assailants. In these cases, 28 percent of victims were the police.

⁴⁷ This contrasts with Keven Felstead's findings for Staffordshire. See Kevin Felstead, “Interpersonal Violence in late Victorian and Edwardian England: Staffordshire 1880–1910” (PhD diss., Keele University, 2001), 203–4.

⁴⁸ Joanne Turner, “Offending Women in Stafford, 1880–1905: Punishment, Reform and Re-Integration” (PhD diss., Keele University, 2009), 71; Godfrey, “Rough Girls,” 27.

⁴⁹ Injuries were categorized as mild if the report mentioned them, but neither commented on their severity nor mentioned medical treatment. Cases with moderate injuries mentioned medical treatment and release without a hospital stay. Reports of significant injuries described those injuries as serious, or mention broken bones or a hospital stay. 65 percent injured by men suffered mild or moderate injuries, while 74 percent injured by women suffered mild or moderate injuries.

⁵⁰ Davis, “Law Breaking,” 212.

⁵¹ Wood, Violence and Crime, 110.

⁵² East London Observer, 22 January 1881.

⁵³ Godfrey has suggested that police were less likely to “bring in” disorderly or violent women than they were to arrest dangerous men. Godfrey, “Rough Girls,” 32.

⁵⁴ Lucia Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford, 1991), 297; Conley, Unwritten Law, 72; eadem, “No Pedestals: Women and Violence in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” Journal of Social History 28, no. 4 (Summer 1995): 801–18, at 801CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rowbotham, Judith, “Gendering Protest: Delineating the Boundaries of Acceptable Everyday Violence in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” European Review of History—Revue Européenne d'Histoire 20, no. 6 (December 2013): 946–66, at 955CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Women's Suffrage Journal, 1 March 1878, 39. See also Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, 53.

⁵⁶ Godfrey, Farrall, and Karstedt, “Explaining Gendered Sentencing Patterns,” 711, 717; Davies, “‘These Viragoes,’” 87. Abraham, “Summary Courts,” i, 15; Rowbotham, “Gendering Protest,” 955.

⁵⁷ Streib, Victor L., “Death Penalty for Female Offenders,” University of Cincinnati Law Review 58, no. 3 (1990): 845–80, at 877Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Ballinger, Anette, “Masculinity in the Dock: Legal Responses to Male Violence and Female Retaliation in England and Wales, 1900–1965,” Social and Legal Studies 16, no. 4 (December 2007): 459–81, at 461CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Deirdre Palk, Gender, Crime and Judicial Discretion 1780–1830 (Woodbridge, 2006), 51–52, 157, 168–69.

⁵⁹ D'Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, 148.

⁶⁰ Davies, “‘These Viragoes,’” 79.

⁶¹ Catherine Hall, “The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology,” in White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, ed. Catherine Hall (New York, 1992), 75–93, at 85–86; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987), 191; Peterson, M. Jeanne, “No Angels in the House: The Victorian Myth and the Paget Women,” American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (June 1984): 677–708, at 677CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶² Lydia Murdoch, Daily Life of Victorian Women (Santa Barbara, 2013), xxvi.

⁶³ By the 1880s, some middle-class women began to challenge these restrictions, venturing into previously off-limits public spaces. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 46.

⁶⁴ Marjorie Levine-Clark, Beyond the Reproductive Body: The Politics of Women's Health and Work in Early Victorian England (Columbus, 2004), 22.

⁶⁵ Susie Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 2012), 133, 135.

⁶⁶ Ellen Ross, “‘Not the Sort that Would Sit on the Doorstep’: Respectability in Pre-World War I London Neighborhoods,” International Labor and Working Class History 27 (March 1985): 39–59, at 48, 49; eadem, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford, 1993), 27, 29, 109–10.

⁶⁷ Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914 (London, 1996), 72.

⁶⁸ Andrew August, Poor Women's Lives: Gender, Work and Poverty in Late-Victorian London (Cranbury, 1999), 118.

⁶⁹ Levine-Clark, Beyond the Reproductive Body, 75–76.

⁷⁰ Ross, “Fierce Questions and Taunts,” 592.

⁷¹ D'Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, 58–59; D'Cruze, Godfrey, and Cox, “‘The Most Troublesome Woman in Crewe,’” 250; Lynn MacKay, Respectability and the London Poor, 1780–1870: The Value of Virtue (London, 2013), 31–33.

⁷² Ross, “Fierce Questions and Taunts,” 576.

⁷³ Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham, 1992), 65.

⁷⁴ Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody, 297.

⁷⁵ See Godfrey, Farrall, and Karstedt, “Explaining Gendered Sentencing,” 706.

⁷⁶ Wood mentions kicking as one aspect of male violence that attracted particular attention and condemnation in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Wood, Violence and Crime, 90.

⁷⁷ According to Zedner, repeat offenders among women were viewed as the least promising subjects for reform efforts. Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody, 112, 143. See also Davis, “Law Breaking,” 169.

⁷⁸ East London Observer, 17 June 1882 and 28 June 1884.

⁷⁹ Ballinger, “Masculinity in the Dock,” 463; Martin J. Wiener, “The Victorian Criminalization of Men,” in Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus, 1998), 197–212, at 206; Archer, “Men Behaving Badly,” 51–52; Godfrey, “Rough Girls,” 33; Godfrey, Farrall, and Karstedt, “Explaining Gendered Sentencing,” 715; Wiener, Men of Blood, 28, 62.

⁸⁰ Conley, Unwritten Law, 67.

⁸¹ Frost, Ginger, “‘She is but a Woman’: Kitty Byron and the English Edwardian Criminal Justice System,” Gender and History 16, no. 3 (November 2004): 538–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D'Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, ch. 7.

⁸² D'Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, 155.

⁸³ East London Observer, 11 March 1882. Sullivan was sentenced to fourteen days with hard labor.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 17 June 1882.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 28 July 1883. Though the magistrate commented on how bad Regan's behavior was, she was sentenced to only seven days with hard labor.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 20 September 1884. Gale was sentenced to the maximum of six months with labor.

⁸⁷ Conley notes the general skepticism toward working-class women's ability to be truly women. Conley, Unwritten Law, 71. George Robb discusses similar depictions of women as masculine in appearance. See Robb, George, “Circe in Crinoline: Domestic Poisonings in Victorian England,” Journal of Family History 22, no. 2 (April 1997): 176–90, at 178CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. See also Rowbotham, “Gendering Protest,” 959.

⁸⁸ Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, 1998), 51.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 57–58.

⁹⁰ Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 61–62; Koven, Slumming, 205–15.

⁹¹ East London Observer, 20 May 1882. Gilbert was ordered to find a surety of £20 for six months of good behavior. Headings on East London Observer reports of police court cases appeared in all capital letters. This formatting has been retained here.

⁹² Ibid., 3 June 1882. McCarthy was fined 10s plus 10s costs, with a threat of fourteen days in prison in default.

⁹³ Ibid., 28 July 1883.

⁹⁴ Andrew Davies cites the use of “exotic” language to describe female gangsters. Davies, “‘These Viragoes,’” 85. See also Susan E. Grace, “Female Criminality in York and Hull 1830–1870” (PhD diss., University of York, 1998), 33; Mahood, Linda and Littlewood, Barbara, “The ‘Vicious’ Girl and the ‘Street-Corner’ Boy: Sexuality and the Gendered Delinquent in the Scottish Child-Saving Movement, 1850–1940,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 4 (April 1994): 549–78, at 552Google Scholar.

⁹⁵ Koven, Slumming, 183, 188–89.

⁹⁶ East London Observer, 19 June 1880.

⁹⁷ Ibid., 5 August 1882.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 14 June 1884.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 26 August 1882.

¹⁰⁰ D'Cruze, Crimes of Outrage, 194.

¹⁰¹ East London Observer, 21 October 1882.

¹⁰² On ambivalent attitudes toward cohabitation in late Victorian courts, see Ginger Frost, Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England (Manchester, 2008), 32.

¹⁰³ East London Observer, 30 August 1884 and 6 September 1884.

¹⁰⁴ Frost, “‘She is but a Woman,’” 543, 546–47; Levine-Clark, Beyond the Reproductive Body, 22; Ballinger, “Masculinity in the Dock,” 468.

¹⁰⁵ Zedner argues that a biological/medical view of female criminality spread at the end of the nineteenth century, though she focuses on the description of women as “feeble minded.” Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody, 50, 78–83, 274–75.

¹⁰⁶ Ballinger, “Masculinity in the Dock,” 477.

¹⁰⁷ East London Observer, 23 August 1884. For an analysis of a similar case, see Frost, “‘She is but a Woman.’”

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 30 August 1884.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 4 October 1884.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 31 May 1884.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 4 December 1880.

¹¹² Curtis, Jack the Ripper and the London Press, 93.

¹¹³ Conley notes that authorities who used this term were “apparently blinded” to the irony. Conley, Unwritten Law, 167.

¹¹⁴ East London Observer, 5 November 1881.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 14 May 1881.

¹¹⁶ Ibid., 21 February 1880 and 13 March 1880; Standard, 10 March 1880.

¹¹⁷ March 1880, trial of Sarah Beckett (29), Old Bailey Proceedings Online, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, accessed on 13 April 2015, t18800322–320.

¹¹⁸ By way of comparison, a similar case with a male defendant a couple of weeks earlier at the Old Bailey resulted in the same sentence. Joseph Wheeler, convicted of wounding his wife with a knife and hammer, received eighteen months imprisonment. Old Bailey Proceedings, t18800301–275.

¹¹⁹ Davis, “A Poor Man's System of Justice.”

¹²⁰ Bailey, Peter, “‘Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?’ Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability,” Journal of Social History 12, no. 3 (Spring 1979): 336–53, at 347CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacKay, Respectability and the London Poor, 9.

¹²¹ Lee, Policing Prostitution, 60, 63.