This book examines London’s transformation from the mid-Victorian “miracle” of low and diminishing crime to its status as a high-crime society at the outset of the twenty-first century. It treats six different types of misdeed—burglary, shopbreaking, shoplifting, confidence schemes, robbery, and drug smuggling—as representative of distinct phases in the evolution of criminal activity and the criminal-justice system in modern Britain.

This is the first book to offer an expansive analysis of twentieth-century thieves and to challenge the notion that they operated in a self-contained underworld. It argues that to understand the growth of lawbreaking we must connect sensational and mundane offenses alike to their social and economic contexts, with a particular focus on how these contexts, including experience within the penal system, shaped criminal decision-making and expanded opportunities for transgression.

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