Criminal Children: Researching Juvenile Offenders, 1820–1920

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This book explores how ‘offending’ children were dealt with from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Over this 100-year period, ideas about how children should behave, and how they should be corrected when they misbehaved, changed dramatically. Indeed, it was the period in which ‘juvenile delinquency’ is said to have been ‘invented’, when the problems of youth crime and youth gangs developed, and society began to ask, for the first time, how do we stop criminal children from developing into criminal adults? There were various experiments in reformation, ranging from transporting child convicts to Australia, to the creation of separate juvenile prisons, and the establishment of reform schools. But did any of these things actually work? This book reveals the lives of some of the thousands of children who were transported, imprisoned or kept in reformatory or industrial schools for years, to see how their lives turned out in reality.

In October 1872 the Morpeth Herald reported that two boys had been apprehended for housebreaking. At Newcastle Crown Court Richard Clement Fisher and Henry Leonard Stephenson were charged with housebreaking and theft. Henry, whose picture appears on the cover of this book, was a 12-year-old dark-haired boy with hazel-coloured eyes. In the dock he pulled himself up to his full height of 4 foot 5 inches to hear the defence and prosecution speeches. During the previous six weeks, several unoccupied houses in the area had been broken into and their contents ransacked. Detective Anderson stated in his evidence that he had spied the two prisoners acting suspiciously and he marched them to their parents’ houses. Turning out the boys’ pockets revealed a bunch of keys. One opened a small wooden box which contained some money and jewellery that had been stolen from the houses. In front of his grandmother, who was his guardian, and the detective, Henry admitted that he and his mate were responsible for the break-ins.

In court, Richard Fisher’s parents said that all the stolen property had been restored and that Richard would be sent away to serve in the Navy. The parents asked for a merciful consideration of the case. They claimed that the boys had really broken into these houses, not so much for the purpose of stealing the property, as from an idea that they were doing heroic and manly acts, having perhaps been reading the wrong sort of books. Witnesses were called, who gave the boys good characters, and it was stated that Henry Stephenson would be sent to India if he was released from the court. The prosecutors stated that they did not wish to continue the case, but it was out of their hands as by then the court had completely taken charge of the proceedings. Richard Fisher was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment with hard labour, and Henry Stephenson to two months’ imprisonment. The court was probably convinced the boys would leave the country, and that is why the Judge did not send them to a reformatory where they would have stayed for a number of years.

The courts had many options when it came to sentencing children in this period. Many of the boys and girls mentioned in this book would have been confined to reformatories or industrial schools in order to give them a measure of punishment but also to train them in employment skills (and sometimes just to take them away from abusive or neglectful home lives); others were simply imprisoned, fined, or put on probation. A generation earlier, and the boys could have been sent to a foreign country for their punishment. We will examine the lives of children who were transported to Australia as convicts (a system which lasted from 1788 to 1868), and those who suffered other punishments. We will also explain how we know so much about the young people in this book, and how contemporary sources can be used to reconstruct the lives of boys and girls who got into trouble with the courts in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

But what happened to Henry? Piecing together information from Victorian newspapers, genealogical data and speculation on various websites, we know that Henry’s grandfather was a chemist who had been Superintendent of Factories for the East India Company in Bihar. His grandmother was a doctor’s daughter. Henry’s father, Henry Layton Stephenson, was a railway worker who had remarried after his wife (Henry’s mother) died when Henry was just 3 years old. When he remarried, he left Henry behind with his first wife’s parents when he emigrated to New Zealand in 1874. After serving his sentence, and after his grandmother’s death, Henry also emigrated to Ashburton in New Zealand to join his father and his step-sisters in 1878. The whole family prospered in New Zealand. Henry’s father rose to a high position at work and in the Freemasons, and Henry himself never committed another crime. His spell in prison seems to have been a salutary experience.

The concept of ‘juvenile delinquency’ was already established by the time Henry was convicted, and Chapter Two reveals the birth of this concept. It describes the origins of ‘youth crime’ in the early nineteenth century, and how children, particularly working-class children, were caught up in police campaigns against public disorder. As the century progressed, fears of juvenile gangs caught the public imagination, and the lives of real and imagined gang members were splashed over the pages of the newspapers. Press attention did not subside in the twentieth century, however, and this chapter discusses how moral panics have coloured our views about youth crime for decades.

Following conviction in the courts came punishment. Chapter Three describes the various types of punishment that were imposed on child offenders, from transportation to the Australian colonies and imprisonment, to care and control regimes in reformatories and industrial schools. We end the chapter with a look at the borstal system created in 1902 to deal with the worst of the young offenders.

The following chapter, Chapter Four, is critical. It explains how we can find out more about the lives of young offenders from contemporary archival and digital records, how that data can be put together to make sense of a young person’s troubled life, and what ethical considerations should be kept in mind when we research the lives of young people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Having discussed how we can use historical documents to reconstruct lives, we then look at a selection of children’s lives in Chapter Five. We examine their lives before they were caught up in the criminal justice system, their experiences under punishment, and how their lives unfolded after they were released. Whilst some ‘offending’ children went on to lead very normal and routine lives, others had dramatic and troubled histories, which are sad, fascinating and also illuminating.

The Conclusion which rounds off the book is followed by a selection of further reading for those who want to learn more about the history of young people, youth crime and the punishment of child offenders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CONCEPT OF ‘JUVENILE DELINQUENCY’

Today the peak age of offending is 18, the same as it was for men in the eighteenth century. For women, it is much lower today (15) than it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most offenders today fall into the category known by the criminal justice system as ‘youth offending’, where anyone under the age of 18 is dealt with in a juvenile court and anyone under 21 serves a custodial sentence in a young offenders’ institution rather than in an adult prison. However, despite the fact that most offenders tend to concentrate their offending in their late teens, society, politicians and the media all seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time focusing on young offenders between the ages of 10 (the age of criminal responsibility) and 16. Teenage offenders have long captured the public imagination. Indeed, we don’t have to look very hard to find reports of unruly, rude and criminal children in the Victorian newspapers. This report was printed in Lloyd’s Illustrated Newspaper on 13 April 1851:

‘A Juvenile Highway Robber’ – an impudent Jack Shepherd [Jack was a notorious burglar who escaped from prison on two occasions] belonging to a desperate gang of juvenile thieves infesting the borough . . . was charged with knocking down a lad and stealing sixpence and a basket in the public highway. A witness saw the 12-year-old perpetrator snatch the basket, knock the victim to the ground, give him a good kicking, and run away, and went to fetch a constable. The police officer from M Division in Southwark ‘having knowledge of the prisoner, found him in ‘‘Thieves Kitchen’’, in the Mint, where the gang of thieves to which the prisoner belonged, frequented’.

Newspaper reports did not only bring us news about notorious habitual offenders. The Sunday Times on 12 October 1856 reported:

John Clark, a smart-looking lad, 16 years of age, was charged with stealing some beef. When he was apprehended by the butcher, the prisoner said ‘Let me go, I won’t do it again’, but he was handed over to a police constable. The defendant refused to say where he was living so that his friends did not discover his plight. He appeared to be living rough, getting money where he could. The magistrate asked him what he had intended to do with the beef. ‘Why, eat it, to be sure.’ He was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment in Wandsworth House of Correction. ‘The prisoner was then led away by the gaoler, laughing’.

There were so many reports of teenage thieves such as those above that readers of newspapers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could be forgiven for thinking that committing theft and violence was a natural life-stage for working-class children. How and why did it become a common expectation that a considerable number of children would naturally resist authority, cause mischief and break the law? It wasn’t always that way.

The Legal Definition of Childhood

Legal doctrine in the eighteenth century determined that children aged 6 and younger were not capable of doing anything truly evil and could not, therefore, be held responsible for their actions in court (legally this was called doli incapacitas). Above the age of 7, children were granted the same status as adults: they could drink alcohol, gamble and be employed, and were therefore subject to the same level of legal responsibility as adults. However, this shifted over time. It was still the case that children aged under 7 could not be prosecuted, but in the nineteenth century children aged between 7 and 14 could be prosecuted only if the prosecutor could convince the judge and jury that the child in the dock knew they were committing a crime (doli capax) rather than just being ‘naughty’. This still meant that young children could end up in prison, or could be transported to the American or Australian colonies (as happened to William Gadsby, Letitia Padwick and Ellen Miles, see Chapter Five), or, in some cases, could be sent to the gallows for execution. We will explore the punishments meted out to children later (see Chapter Three), but how did society come to think that young children deserved to be prosecuted and punished?

Good and Bad Children

Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, respectable society became concerned about large numbers of decommissioned soldiers who were now unemployed and roaming around the country. Young men, physically tough and well-used to violence, were ‘tramping’ through towns and cities looking for work. They also fought with each other and with locals, got drunk, stole or damaged property, and slept out in the open. They were not popular. At about the same time as people were generally uneasy about lawlessness, ‘The Committee for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis’ produced its report (in 1816). It was one of the first times that the phrase ‘juvenile delinquency’ was used. The report found that:

Juvenile Delinquency existed in the metropolis to a very alarming extent; that a system was in action, by which these unfortunate Lads were organised into gangs; that they regularly conspired together in public houses, where they planned their enterprises, and afterwards divided the produce of their plunder.

This sounded more like muscular young ex-soldiers than anything else, so how did the term ‘juvenile delinquent’ come to be applied to kids hanging round on street corners? The first clue is in the word ‘delinquency’. From which ideal were these children delinquent, what were they not able to live up to?

Although children were treated as ‘small’ or ‘young’ adults in the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century society was beginning to consider a more refined concept of childhood. From the 1820s and 1830s onwards, children were increasingly removed from the workplace (especially by the Factory Acts which took young children out of the unhealthy and dangerous textile mills). They were increasingly required to undergo some form of elementary education, and were becoming the focus of commercial activity by the 1820s and 1830s. Shops sold toys, and children’s books were published in increasing numbers. These books romanticised the idea of childhood. For example, Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies was published in 1863 and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland two years later. When Peter Pan, the story of the boy who never grew up, was written by J.M. Barrie in 1902, it became a firm favourite with children and adults alike. All of these books helped to celebrate the idea of childhood (of a particular type). They were aimed at and made for children who deserved them: that is to say, they were meant for good, dutiful, polite and ‘sweet’ children. They were not meant for children whose parents could not afford to buy books or toys (which was the majority of working-class parents).

Children who could not live up to the ‘ideal’ concept of childhood were perceived to be delinquent, troublesome, rude and, in some cases, criminal. As Chapter Three explains, the Victorians put a great deal of effort into sorting out which children could be rehabilitated and which could not. Although children were thought to be more malleable and reformable than adults, there were still some children (boys usually) who were thought to be incapable of reform, as Chapter Three shows. And after 1837, society could begin to visualise these ‘criminal’ children thanks to the most famous author in the world at that time.

The painting ‘Bubbles’ by John Everett Millais (1886) was subsequently used as an advert for Pears soap in the 1890s. (Wikimedia Commons)

Charles Dickens, who himself was sympathetic to the plight of poor and working-class children, was nevertheless central to the creation of the concept of delinquency. Oliver Twist, published in 1837, featured a gang of young thieves controlled by their puppet-master Fagin. Their juvenile leader was the Artful Dodger, described here:

He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy . . . as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man. He was short for his age: with rather bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes . . . He wore a man’s coat, which reached nearly to his heels. He had turned the cuffs back, half-way up his arm, to get his hands out of the sleeves: apparently with the ultimate view of thrusting them into the pockets of his corduroy trousers; for there he kept them. He was, altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six.

The Artful Dodger. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Artful Dodger shared many characteristics with poor children, especially those who were orphans, had been deserted by their parents, or were just generally neglected. Street children grew up quickly, so not only had the ‘airs and manners