The Victorian Underworld

Defined by night houses and cigar divans, populated by street people and entertainers, the Victorian underworld was an insular yet diffuse community, united by its deep hatred of the police. Its gin shops and taverns were teeming with thieves, beggars, cheats, forgers and pickpockets, preying on rich and poor alike. Career criminals sometimes showed a craftsmanship that would put their descendants to shame: it took true professionals to remove a vast fortune from the Bank of England, and in one case conspirators even recruited officers from Scotland Yard. Those who failed in such enterprises found themselves in the convict hulks, where the mortality rate might reach 40 per cent, or in the new prisons, their faces masked and identified only by numbers. Donald Thomas's novels and biographies have been steeped in the "other England" of Victoria's reign - a place of Hogarthian realism untouched by middle-class propriety. In this book he depicts that underworld through the eyes of its inhabitants.