Three «moral entrepreneurs» and the creation of a «criminal class» in England, c. 1790s-1840s

Abstract

In the first half of the nineteenth century, English society developed a strong concern about the problem of crime fuelled by rising criminal statistics and pressures for regular paid police forces. By the 1840s, the dominant view of crime was that it was a product, not of poverty, but of weakness of character in the criminals. The three men analysed in this article – Colquhoun, Miles and Chadwick – all of whom advocated a state-run police to cope with the problem, contributed substantially to the creation of that image of crime and criminals; many contemporaries accepted that image as fundamentally correct. Through a detailed analysis of their writings, this article argues that these three men deliberately exaggerated that image, with inflated emotive language, to serve their own campaigns for police reform.