1. See Simon Rae's biography W G Grace (London: Faber, 1998) pp 103–104 for the ‘amateur’ Grace's earnings from the game.

2. See Francis Thompson in the celebrated poem ‘At Lord's’ recalling a match in 1878. It ends, famously:

‘For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host,

As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,

To and fro;

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!’

See Ross, A (ed)The Penguin Cricketer's Companion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) at 459 Google Scholar.

3. Orwell, G ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’ in Orwell, S and Angus, I (eds)The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968) at 212 Google Scholar.

4. In fact the third volume of stories relates back to the earliest days of Raffles and Bunny, Raffles having been killed at the end of the second. There are many different editions of the Raffles stories. I give here page references for the single volume edition The Collected Raffles (London: Dent, 1985), but in all cases I will also give the name of the story and the date will indicate the individual volume in which it is included. In this way the reader should be able to find the references no matter which edition is at hand.

5. The Amateur Cracksman was dedicated ‘To ACD This Form of Flattery’. See J. Lewis in The Collected Raffles, above n 4, at xvi.

6. There is debate as to the origin of the name. See P Rowland Raffles and His Creator: The Life and Works of E W Hornung (n.p: Nekta, 1999) p 132. I think the resonance with the historical character Sir Stamford Raffles, a biography of whom, by D C Boulger, had been published in 1897, is important and would only add a couple of observations. First, the question of the timing of the transition of the meaning of the term ‘raffish’ from ‘disreputable’ to ‘rakish’, and whether it be a cause, an effect or neither of the character's name is suggestive, but is unknown to me. Second, and more important to the argument advanced here, if there is a connection, the stereotyped cockney burglar of Felix Dale's 1867 farce He's a Lunatic is called ‘Ruggles’. The soubriquet ‘Bunny’ is, I think, simply taken from the term ‘rabbit’ as applied to a poor batsman. It was a term used by Hornung in this sense. See the 1923 story ‘Chrystal's century’ in Ross, above n 2, at 41.

7. It is difficult to posit with confidence a precise demographic of the readership, though the production of cheaper editions is suggestive. See Rowland, above n 6, p 126, for the publishing history.

8. Although at least in Britain we can, I think, discount the overwhelming significance of the Lombrosian ‘lightning flash’ which still continues to blind many contemporary writers on the history of criminology. Despite careful new appraisal (see Rafter, N ‘Cesare Lombroso and the origins of criminology: rethinking criminological tradition’ in Henry, S and Lanier, M (eds)The Essential Criminology Reader (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006)Google Scholar), which gives a more considered perspective, it is still too easy to overstate Lombroso's influence in Britain, and to consider the important British empirical innovators like Dr G Wilson, J Bruce Thomson and D. Nicolson as ‘proto-Lombrosian’ (presumably in the way that horses are ‘proto-carts’). For these last mentioned writers, see, eg, Radzinowicz, L and Hood, R The Emergence of Penal Policy in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)Google Scholar ch 1, or, differently considered, in Davie, N Tracing the Criminal: The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860–1916 (Oxford: Bardwell Press, 2005)Google Scholar chs 1 and 2.

9. It may be objected here that there is nothing new in this process in the nineteenth century, for ‘vagabonds’ collectively were a cause for concern in the sixteenth century, just as ‘unruly apprentices’ were in the eighteenth. But the collectivity invoked there is, I suggest less precise and hard-edged; it invokes the characteristics of and dangers of a style of living rather than the precision of the criminal conviction. These were people who committed crime rather than being defined by it. In any event, this type of collective aggregation is much less common and much less the subject of detailed ‘scientific’ analysis than that of the nineteenth century. In this respect I believe that the continuity of concern brilliantly analysed in Geoffrey Pearson's classic study Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan, 1983) should not be read as indicating that nothing changes in the nineteenth century, an argument for stasis which he himself broadly denies (p 207). Other collectivities where the descriptor also defines the offence (as ‘Catholic’ or ‘Protestant’ at different times in the sixteenth century) raise, I think, rather different issues.

10. See, eg, the recent critical analysis of the current state of the discipline in Young, J The Criminological Imagination (Cambridge: Polity, 2011)Google Scholar.

11. For good discussions of the development of statistics, see Radzinowicz and Hood, above n 8, ch 4; Rafter, N (ed)The Origins of Criminology: A Reader, (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2009)Google Scholar part IX; and Godfrey, B, Lawrence, P and Williams, C History and Crime (London: Sage, 2008)Google Scholar ch 2.

12. Radzinowicz and Hood, above n 8, p 98.

13. See Rafter, above n 11, chs 17 and 27.

14. Ireland, R W ‘A Want of Order and Good Discipline’: Rules, Discretion and the Victorian Prison (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007) pp 145–147 Google Scholar.

15. See Radzinowicz and Hood, above n 8, pp 107 et seq.; and Pearson, above n 9, pp 215–216.

16. Ireland, above n 14, pp 1–44.

17. Eg,'the Panopticon was also a laboratory, it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals' (p 203), ‘a positive knowledge of the delinquents and their species, very different from the juridical definition of offences and their circumstances, is gradually established…. The task of this new knowledge is to define the act “scientifically” qua offence and above all the individual qua delinquent. Criminology is thus made possible’ (p 254), both in M Foucault Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, translated by Sheridan, A asDiscipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979)Google Scholar. It is neither necessary nor possible here to explain how my own understanding of the process of penal transformation more generally differs from that of Foucault (on which, see Ireland, above n 14, pp 10–12). Perhaps, however, it may be legitimate to point out as meriting further study what I see as an increasingly divergent view of the values of Foucault's study as expressed by the social theorists whose work he inspires and the prison historians working in proximity to the subject matter which gives rise to it.

18. See Wrightson, K ‘Two concepts of order: justices, constables and jurymen in seventeenth-century England’ in Brewer, J and Styles, J (eds)An Ungovernable People: The English and their Laws in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries (London: Hutchinson, 1979)Google Scholar at 24: ‘The maintenance of order meant less the enforcement of impersonal regulations than the restraint of conflict among known individuals in a specific local context.’

19. For the argument underlying these paragraphs, the reader is referred to Ireland, above n 14, Introduction. The only point at which my argument would be altered within the context of this paper would be to give rather more emphasis to the role of the increase of the reporting of crime within the increasingly important newspaper and periodical press in the nineteenth century, which could and did introduce readers in, say, rural Wales to criminality within the metropolis and, if the case was sufficiently striking, vice versa. See, eg, Ireland, R W ‘Sanctity, Superstition and the Death of Sarah Jacob’ in Musson, A and Stebbings, C (eds)Making Legal History: Approaches and Methodology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) p 284 Google Scholar.

20. It may be argued that the sense of anonymity and community breakdown is overstated here, that stable working-class groupings existed within the urban sprawl. But even if this is so it does not invalidate an argument that such matters were perceived to be real and worrying contemporary problems. See Crone, R “from Sawney Beane to Sweeney Todd: murder machines in the mid-nineteenth century metropolis' (2010) 7 Cultural and Social History 59 CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 71 et seq.

21. See, eg, the methodology as described by Wines, F W Punishment and Reformation (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895) p 254 Google Scholar: ‘No observations, however numerous, are of any scientific value (except as material for science) until they are reduced to order by classification and comparison. Observations of the abnormal are of no value without comparison with the normal.’ Note also Wines' sensible reflection on criminological typology: ‘There is always a danger in speaking of groups or classes of men, without reservations, such as that a particular observation is meant to apply not to all individuals of the group, but to the majority; or that it is intended as a generalization expressive of an average condition or tendency; or that it is true of all members of the group who fall within certain defined limits, and that the exceptions are outside those limits’ (p 229).

22. Orwell, above n 3, p.214, and note the words of the character himself: ‘Society is in rings like a target, and we never were in the bull's-eye’ (‘To Catch a Thief’ (1901) p 203).

23. But note, and this is important, Bunny's concession that once revealed as criminals he and Raffles are no longer ‘amateurs’ in crime. This concentration on the fact of conviction (or in Raffles's case, flight) as the entrée into the world of the ‘professional’ criminal is a telling acknowledgment of the implications of using particular facts as the basis of categorisation.

24. ‘A Costume Piece’ (1899) p 24.

25. It should be noted that the paradigm of criminality in the nineteenth century is increasingly an urban one, following a population shift which sees for the first time the statistical dominance of urban lives over rural ones in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such demographic changes have, I have argued, had profound repercussions for the understanding of criminal justice (see Ireland, above n 14, Introduction). A reading of Pearson's Hooligan (see above n 9) with a heightened awareness of its essentially urban lens is interesting. Such changes are also, of course, constitutive of modern life, and their results have located modern criminology as, I suspect unnoticed or at least largely unchallenged by its practitioners, a predominantly urban discipline, the gang culture, night-time economy, knife-crime and the like which it studies perhaps less universal phenomena than it assumes.

26. It should be noted that the noun ‘unemployment’ was coined in 1888. All persons therefore, notwithstanding their engagement within the economy, were theoretically therefore possessed of a job description, even ‘pauper’– a term not legitimately available to the able-bodied, whose status would be given as ‘rogue’, ‘vagrant’ etc; positive formulations rather than the negative one of the modern term. My own experience of criminal, vagrancy and casual poor relief records in West Wales suggests that there, at any rate, the description ‘not employed’ is used overwhelmingly in respect of married women. ‘Professional criminal’ answers a similar descriptive purpose. Beyond this the term could found, or be influenced by, theories which sought not simply to label but also explain that condition. See, eg, Henry Lettsom Elliot: ‘They were led into crime from precisely the same motives that have kept those who now hear me from such a career. The examples of those older than themselves, the influence of associates, the love of standing well in the estimation of others …these …determine the career of every man' (H L Elliot “What are the principal causes of crime, considered from a social point of view?’Transactions NAPSS 1868, quoted in Radzinowicz and Hood, above n 8, pp 75–76.

27. As, for example, in the important Habitual Offenders Act of 1869. Michael Lobban's helpful nudge ensured that I explicitly addressed both descriptions.

28. I have in mind here the countervailing conceptions of ‘rational choice’ theorists and what Young (above n 10, eg pp 64–65) characterises as ‘liberal othering’– the construction of deviance as and through perceived deficiency.

29. On which see, eg, Wiener, M Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar esp ch 6.

30. See Ireland, above note 14, ch 4, esp 170–175.

31. See Young, above n 10, p 137: ‘Much of the best modern ethnography looks at the urban poor-in this it in direct descent from Booth and Mayhew and, like the Victorians viewing the street Arabs, there is a gulf between the ethnographer and their [sic] subjects which mirrors that of quantitative researchers.’ Yet elsewhere in the text these same early writers are hailed as precursors of the sort of ‘imaginative’ criminology favoured by the author (see pp 181, 222). The confusion is not helped by the conflation of two Mayhews (Henry and Pat) in the index to the volume.

32. H Mayhew and G Cruikshank 1851 or The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and Family, who came up to London to Enjoy themselves and to See the Great Exhibition (London: Bogue, n.d.) pp 44–45.

33. Mayhew, H London Labour and the London Poor, Volume IV (London: Griffin, Bone, 1862)Google Scholar. For more on Mayhew, see further D England in L Knafla (ed) Crime, Gender and Sexuality in Criminal Prosecutions (Westport, CT, Greenwood, 2002); Y Levin and A Lindesmith in P Rock (ed) History of Criminology (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994) ch 15; Bennett, J Oral History and Delinquency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar ch 1; and Radzinowicz and Hood, above note 8, pp 79–83 (where Mayhew's work is described as bringing a ‘fresh and lasting insight’, p 83).

34. There is another interesting issue relating to class in this story as the Scotland Yard detective, Mackenzie, joins the guests after (though not at) dinner at Milchester Abbey. His attendance recalls the observations of ‘Alfred Aylmer’ (Arthur Griffiths) in the Windsor Magazine for 1895 where the presence of detectives at society gatherings is noted. Aylmer reports that he could ‘safely assert that these “professionals” were certainly not the least gentlemanlike in manners or costumes of the guests assembled’ (quoted in Shpayer-Makon, H ‘from menace to celebrity: the English police detective and the press, c. 1842–1914’ (2010) 83 Historical Research 672 Google Scholar at 688).

35. Published in 1875. The links between financial speculation and the more traditionally ‘rakish’ fault of gambling are apparent throughout the novel. See also, eg, Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault's Foul Play of 1866 for a more traditionally pecuniary offence. Reade is interesting on crime and class. In The Autobiography of a Thief of 1858, Reade ironically points to the difference between ‘respectable’ fraudsters and the ‘cracksman or swell mobsman’ ((my edition is London: Chatto & Windus, 1890, pp 7–8). This condemnation of prevailing commercial morality sometimes finds itself being discussed by ‘criminologists’ (see, eg, Horsley, J W How Criminals are Made and Prevented: A Retrospect of Forty Years (London: Fisher Unwin, 1913)Google Scholar ch 3). Rowland, above n 6, makes much in his linking of Raffles and Oscar Wilde of the interesting choice of pseudonym, Maturin, used by Raffles in exile. Maturin was the name of Wilde's relative who had written the classic Gothic tale Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820, and Wilde had used the name ‘Melmoth’ during his own exile after his prison sentence. Trollope's villain's name also invokes this earlier dangerous outsider. The cover of The Illustrated Police News of 20 April 1895 (reproduced in Ashley, M Taking Liberties: The Struggle for Britain's Freedoms and Rights (London: British Library, 2008) p 93 Google Scholar) leads with two ‘properly’ high status cases – that of Oscar Wilde and Jabez Spencer Balfour. Wilde's case is well-known. Balfour was an MP and fraudster, whose My Prison Life (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907) is an important memoir of penal servitude. The link with Wilde is suggestive in ways which will not be pursued here. Narrowly it raises questions about the nature of the relationship between Raffles and Bunny (this is no overwrought post-Freudian reading, for the stories are explicit on the complexity of Bunny's emotions in relation to Raffles). More broadly the stories may be seen against a background of a fin de siècle crisis of masculinity, which involves the undermining of the role of the ‘gentleman’, of the kind argued for in A Smith Victorian Demons: Medicine Masculinity and the Gothic at the fin de siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

36. E Bulwer Lytton Paul Clifford (London: Penguin, 2010 [1830]) p 488. Lytton's taste for physiognogmy in description of his criminals, here and particularly in Eugene Aram, first published in 1831, is notable.

37. See the Morning Post, 23 March 1899. The Silver King by H A Jones and H Newman (London: French, 1907) was first performed on 16 November 1882. The origins of the villain's military title are not explained. Interestingly, he shares his soubriquet with the affluent but fraudulent financier in W P Frith's series of paintings The Race for Wealth of 1880 (on which, see Ireland, R W ‘ “the Policeman and the Rail”: crime and punishment in the paintings of W P Frith’ (1997) 2 Art, Antiquity and Law 381 Google Scholar at 383).

38. A Dillwyn A Burglary or ‘Unconscious Influence’ (Dinas Powys: Honno, 2009 [1883]) p 141. His name is William Sylvester, who is provided with a conveniently troubled past history.

39. See Ireland, R W ‘The phantom at the limits of criminology’ in Bell, I A and Daldry, G (eds)Watching the Detectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990) p 68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. In Whose Body?, published in 1923. As for novels written to exemplify rather than disparage contemporary criminological doctrine, the most celebrated is Émile Zola's Lombrosian La Bête Humaine of 1890.

41. ‘ “The Criminologists, my dear Bunny, are too few for a local habitation, and too select to tell their name in Gath. They are merely so many solemn students of contemporary crime, who meet and dine periodically at each other's clubs or houses…. They have got it into their heads,” said he, “that the gladiatorial element is the curse of modern sport. They tremble especially for the professional gladiator. And they want to know whether my experience tallies with their theory” ’ (‘The Criminologists’ Club' (1905) p 324).

42. For his fictional successors, see Binyon, T Murder Will Out: The Detective in Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp 129–131 Google Scholar.

43. See Sandiford, K A P Cricket and the Victorians (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1994)Google Scholar ch 5.

44. Ranjitsinhji, K S The Jubilee Book of Cricket (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1898) pp 455–456 Google Scholar.

45. See also Lewis, above n 5, p xii.

46. ‘Gentlemen and Players’ (1899) pp 41–42.

47. The Times, 8 June 1886. For details of the case, see Rae, above n 1, pp 301–304. Gilbert in fact subsequently went to Canada (ibid.). He is pictured in the 1877 Gloucestershire side in Sandiford, above n 43, plate 2.

48. Griffiths, A Secrets of the Prison House, Volume 2 (London; Chapman & Hall, 1894) pp 76 and 84 Google Scholar.

49. Balfour, above n 35, pp 358, 365 and 369.

50. ‘ W B N’ Penal Servitude (London: Heinemann, 1903) p 305. Nevill's authorship of the text may be traced from details of his offence (on which, see, eg, the Leader which followed his conviction, The Times, 16 February 1898).

51. On which see Orwell, above n 3, p 214. Britain's perceived poor performance in the Boer War was of course of some criminological significance in itself, sparking an investigation into degeneracy in the British population: the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904) (on which, see Pick, D Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) pp 185–186 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

52. Penny Illustrated Paper, 13 October 1906. Interestingly, in view of Henry's observations infra, the reference is to a ‘fashionable fad’ in America.

53. O Henry ‘Makes the whole world kin’ (1911) in The Complete Works of O Henry (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1927) p 660. For Henry's criminal background (as W S Porter), see Franklin, H B The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) pp 150–151 Google Scholar.

54. ‘Sold for a penny, and placed in the hands of poor little gutter-snipes, the adventures of the renowned cricketer, A.J. Raffles, turned cracksman, might not be altogether edifying’ (Country Life Illustrated, 29 April 1899).

55. H L Adam The Story of Crime: From the Cradle to the Grave (London: Collins?, n.d.) pp 218 and 219.

56. Raffles in Real Life: The Confessions of George Smithson alias ‘Gentleman George’ (London: Hutchinson, n.d.).

57. The National Archives HO144/11473. Smithson's assorted petitions within this file are as entertaining as his book.

58. Smithson, above n 57, pp 13 and 15.

59. For the links between Lupin (who appeared in 1905), Raffles and Sherlock Holmes, see Drake, D ‘Crime fiction at the date of the Exhibition: the Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin’ (2009) 2 Synergies Royaume-Uni et Irlande at 105 Google Scholar.

60. S Scott The Human Side of Crook and Convict Life (London: Hurst & Blackett, n.d.) p 197. Scott likes the idea of the criminal as sportsman. For example: ‘The more intelligent crook is generally a sportsman and recognises and appreciates this quality even in his natural enemy’ (p 103).

61. Parq, G Du Secrets of the French Police (London: Jarrolds, 1934) pp 204 Google Scholar et seq. ‘I interviewed the young lady who had been forced to sup with Raffles, and she became almost lyrical when I asked her to give me some details of his behaviour. It appeared that he was young and charming’ (p 205).

62. See, eg, Williams, K Textbook on Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 6th edn, 2008) pp 56 Google Scholar et seq. Though note also the earlier observations of Horsley, above n 35.

63. Matza, D and Sykes, G S ‘Juvenile delinquency and subterranean values’ (1961) 26 American Sociological Review 712 CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 718–719. Note also the language above n 61.

64. See Binyon, above n 43, pp 6–7; and Cox, M Victorian Detective Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p xx Google Scholar.

65. See the critical reception revealed in Rowlands (above n 6, ch 10), although by no means all contemporary reviewers found any cause for alarm in the stories.