History

Why does violence seem to haunt modern civilization? Can violence “speak,” and if so, what can it tell us? Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: The Shadow of Our Refinement examines these questions by considering a critical period in the evolution of attitudes toward violence. Using the English experience to explore questions about the process of civilization, it mixes detailed research with a broad survey of current theoretical approaches.

Nineteenth century social upheaval coexisted with changes in attitudes toward class, gender, suffering, public space and state power.  In combination, these trends led to new understandings of violence.  Adherents of emerging “civilized” views confronted a “customary” mentality with different views of violent behavior. That encounter saw the “invention” of violence as a social problem. Standards of behavior were redefined, and “savagery” was seen to threaten a nascent culture of refinement. This process is examined critically, and the customary mentality of violence, which provided rules for legitimate violence, is given particularly close attention. The complex and dynamic interactions between civilization and custom are revealed through topics such as streetfighting, policing, sports, community discipline and domestic violence. Although customary notions eventually faded, the nineteenth century set the stage for enduring patterns in views of violence.

The late 1920s saw a dramatic upsurge in popular concern about the abuse of police powers in Britain, the end result of a longer-term trend. Various aspects of policing were seen as worrying, but the most important concerned illegitimate forms of questioning. The phrase ‘the third degree’—imported from America—came to encapsulate this unease. Before the First World War, the terminology began to be used in British coverage of American crimes and their investigation, typically accompanied by disparaging commentary on American methods as well as the confident assertion of the superiority of British policing. The war-time growth in police powers and broader state regulation caused some to see an erosion in the ‘liberty of the subject’, and a series of scandals seemed to reveal serious problems with police procedure. The popularity of crime dramas featuring ‘third degree’ interrogations also shaped public images of the police. Scandals in 1928 generated enough outcry to force the calling of the Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure (1928-29). Even though few concrete procedural changes were undertaken, it appears to have successfully calmed worries about the police. Concerns about the police receded, not to reach a similar level until the late 1950s.

This article considers reader responses to newspaper coverage of a British murder case in 1928. Accused of the arsenic murder of her husband, Beatrice Pace became a fixture on the front pages of the British press. More than two hundred letters sent to her after her acquittal have survived in papers kept by her solicitor. Although far from a perfect source for gauging public opinion, the letters provide a rare and valuable glimpse into the range of reactions that media stories inspired in the past. Although it is clear that press coverage crucially influenced public attitudes, reactions to Pace were also highly individual and affected by readers’ personalities and previous experiences. On the other hand, there are obvious patterns in the responses, most notably related to gender. From their letters, it is apparent that many female readers identified with Pace, whether as women, as mothers or as fellow victims of domestic violence. Men’s reactions were motivated by respect, desire (sometimes in the form of marriage proposals) or business opportunities. Other themes apparent in the letters were shared across gender lines: most notably religion (including an emphasis on divine vengeance), spiritualism and the desire to make contact with a famous figure.

"‘Justice’ is a historical phenomenon: legal institutions and cultural attitudes (along with their various languages) vary across geography and time. At the same time, enduring elements of human psychology and recurring patterns in social structures provide continuities which allow the past to speak to contemporary issues. To understand the ‘experience of justice’, the historical tension between continuity and change and the many factors influencing the perceived boundaries of acceptable behaviour must be addressed. One approach involves examining specific experiences of victimisation, which is particularly important in the case of those who have traditionally been socially, legally and politically disadvantaged, such as women.

However, while it is primarily an admission of powerlessness, ‘victimhood’ – the active claiming of victim status – can also be a source of social power. Only ‘victims’, after all, are in the position to claim some form of justice, whether retributive or restorative. However, one of the main problems with gaining a historical perspective on female victims of domestic violence is that their voices have relatively rarely survived in the public record.

A valuable exception is the case of Beatrice Annie Pace. The wife of a Gloucestershire quarryman and sheep farmer, she was tried and acquitted for murdering her husband with arsenic in 1928. Extensive pre-trial hearings had revealed the horrifying extent of the dead man’s physical and psychological brutality throughout eighteen-years of marriage. The dramatic twists and unexpected developments in the case were eagerly picked up by the voracious newspaper media, making the trial a sensation. ‘Mrs. Pace’, as she was known, achieved celebrity status; no longer simply an individual, she also became a popular and sympathetic media persona.

This chapter explores the issue of justice by looking at the languages surrounding the Pace case. While legal issues raised in the trial (such as the accused’s treatment by the police and coroner’s jury) even led to questions being asked in Parliament, Pace was not only talked about but also received the rare opportunity to present her own version of events to the public which had so eagerly supported her. Following her acquittal, she sold her story to a tabloid, and the married ‘martyrdom’ which she revealed in a serialised memoir riveted newspaper readers across Britain. In this context, she had a great deal to say about her experience of abuse, the nature of married life and her treatment by the British legal system. The result is an invaluable resource for examining not only how one woman came to grips with her experience but also to compare her own views with those of other observers of the case. For some, Pace’s suffering was evidence of serious shortcomings in British society and law. Pace’s own commentary is both more personal and, ultimately, more ambiguous about the meaning of her victimisation and ultimate vindication. Thus, this case allows a unique, historically aware consideration of the complicated nature of the ways in which one woman created justice and resisted injustice through one of the only vehicles available to her: language.
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Despite lively debates in many related fields about whether biological and evolutionary approaches can contribute to social and cultural investigations of human behaviour, historians have rarely confronted this issue directly. The historiography of violence is a partial exception, but there has been relatively little interdisciplinary exchange on topics central to both historical and natural-science analyses. Nevertheless, historians of violence have relied upon two concepts—‘social roles’ and ‘social construction’—that have been subject to constructive critique and revision from Darwinian perspectives. This article concludes by arguing that greater incorporation of evolutionary psychological perspectives and approaches into social and cultural analyses of violence (whether historical or contemporary) has much to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of physical aggression.

Late 1920s Britain saw dramatic press and political debates resulting from a series of police scandals involving questionable arrests, illegitimate interrogation methods and corruption. Although historians have downplayed the impact of politics on inter-war criminal justice, they played an important role in these debates: the Labour Party and the left-wing press pushed for in-depth inquires into and legal reforms of police powers while conservatives tended to defend the police and resist substantial changes. Despite the debates’ sensational nature (which shed light on significant cultural trends in the 1920s) they had little impact on police procedure.

"Much of J. G. Ballard’s writing involves variations on a recurrent theme: the interaction between twentieth-century society and enduring human psychological drives. Impulsivity, self-control and aggression are central topics for him. Thus, it is curious that his fiction has yet to be examined in light of a theory with similar interests that has greatly influenced the historical and social analysis of violence: Norbert Elias’s ‘civilising process’. This paper examines how Ballard dramatises crises and tensions within the ‘civilising’ factors Elias identified.

Elias saw the long-term growth of self-control as a central feature of increasingly complex societies, driven by economic and social interdependence, centralised monopolisation of legitimate force and increasing social pressure to restrain sexual and aggressive impulses. Historians of violence have used this theory in explaining the centuries-long decline in everyday interpersonal violence in Western Europe; however, it is far from a naïve notion of historical progress.

Indeed, the novels High-Rise and Super-Cannes highlight two factors Elias recognised about the civilising process: its potential fragility and tendency toward creating psychological dissatisfaction. High-Rise stages a ‘de-civilising process’: internal and external interdependencies are disrupted, the monopoly of force breaks down and psychological self-restraint is relaxed. The sprawling business park in Super-Cannes allows Ballard to explore a more chronic and subtle civilisational tension. As Elias noted, the ‘quest for excitement in unexciting societies’ leads to the ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ in contexts such as sport, an analysis I extend to the violent ‘games’ and ‘controlled and supervised madness’ featured in the novel."

This book offers the first in-depth study of one of the most gripping trials of inter-war Britain, that of farmer’s wife Beatrice Pace for the arsenic murder of her husband. A riveting tale from the golden age of press sensationalism, the book offers insights into the era’s justice system, gender debates, and celebrity culture. Based on extensive research, it locates the Pace saga in the vibrant world of 1920s press reporting and illuminates a forgotten chapter in the history of civil liberties by considering the debates the case raised about police powers and the legal system. Spanning settings from the Paces’ lonely cottage in the Forest of Dean to the House of Commons and using sources ranging from meticulous detectives’ reports to heartfelt admirers’ letters, The Most Remarkable Woman in England combines serious scholarship with vivid storytelling to bring to life the extraordinary lives of ordinary people between the wars.

In the early hours of 6 July 1928, a young woman who gave her name as Helene Adele was arrested in north London on a disorder charge. This otherwise unremarkable event quickly developed into a press sensation, one of several involving accusations of police corruption and abuse of power in the late 1920s. The scandal of the case emerged when Adele was brought before a magistrate. There, she claimed that the officers had invented the disorder charge to cover up an attempted sexual assault by one of them after they had found her asleep in a taxi parked in an Islington garage. (Adele was at this point without a fixed address and periodically slept in the cabs with the permission of the garage’s supervisor.)

Given the background of concerns about police treatment of women in mid-1928 – at this time one parliamentary committee was in the midst of examining problematic ‘street offences’ cases (mainly involving prostitution), another was about to report on allegations that Scotland Yard detectives had used ‘third degree’ questioning methods against a woman during an investigation into police perjury and a third was due to begin in the autumn to examine more general claims of police misconduct – these accusations raised press interest. Somewhat more remarkably, they also led to the prosecution and conviction of the two constables involved, who were both sentenced to prison and discharged from the force.

Adele, who at the time of her arrest was to some extent homeless and involved in relationships with various men, was briefly catapulted onto the front pages of Britain’s sensationalist press, and the serialized memoir of the ‘Garage Girl’ appeared in two newspapers. However, given the context of widespread concerns about police powers, the Adele case was more than just a tabloid spectacle.

In this paper, I explain various aspects of the Adele case and consider what they tell us about police procedure, the political debate about policing and the press’s presentation of gender. How was the Adele case linked to other concerns about police powers in that year? To what extent did these connections contribute to a situation in which a magistrate took the word of a homeless woman of questionable respectability over that of two married police constables with good service records? How did Adele’s memoir series present her own life story, particularly in the context of the 1920s cultural obsession with young women’s lifestyles and sexuality?

Although Oswald Spengler’s ideas fascinated some British intellectuals in the inter-war period, there have been suggestions that his approach remained on the margins of British thinking about history and about the fate of ‘the West’ (or of ‘Europe’). So far, however, there has been no attempt to systematically consider how Spengler was popularly discussed in Britain in the two decades after his magnum opus, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) in 1918 and 1922. As signalled in my title, I focus here on press sources. These consist of the Conservative- leaning papers The Times, the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, the Observer and the Scotsman, and the ‘liberal’ leaning Manchester Guardian and Economist. A range of provincial papers have also been consulted via the British Newspapers Online project. The intellectual/cultural press – the Times Literary Supplement (TLS)and the weekly BBC magazine The Listener (which began in 1929 and reprinted many radio talks) – have likewise been consulted in their digitised forms, as have three British fascist newspapers, Action, The Fascist Week and The Blackshirt. The Nation and the Fabian New Statesman offer an intellectual and left-wing perspective. While not comprehensive these sources do offer a reasonably representative cross section of commentary about Spengler’s ideas.

Even prior to the translation of the first volume of Untergang des Abendlandes into English (1926), both its title and the name Spengler were well known in Britain; reviewers were impressed with the boldness of Spengler’s approach, even if remaining convinced by its specifics. An emphasis was put on the gloomy, even pessimistic, qualities of what was already being called ‘Spenglerism’. However, broader engagement in Britain with Spengler first got going in 1926. The overall pattern was one of respect for Spengler’s ingenuity combined with scepticism about his ‘morphology’ of history. By the time the translation of volume two appeared in English in late 1928 opinions seem to have subtly hardened against key elements of Spengler’s argument: the organic analogy of ‘Cultures’, the insistence on their separateness and the claim that their destinies could be predicted.

However, there were other factors and associations that shaped British responses to Spengler’s thought that went beyond specifically methodological doubts. These can be discussed under the headings of ‘erudition’, ‘pessimism’, ‘Germanness’ and ‘politics’. Taken together, these elements help to explain the relatively minor inroads Spenglerian thought made in Britain in the inter-war period, even if there were individual commentators who found themselves impressed – or even enthusiastic – about it. For example, Germanness as such would not have been a hindrance to Spengler’s popularity; however, Spengler’s philosophy (and perhaps even more his politics) ran against the grain of those aspects of Weimar Germany – ‘modernity’, youthfulness, innovation and experimentation – that appealed to British intellectuals and academics in this period.

Thus hindered, Spengler’s ideas were hobbled in the face of stiff competition from other thinkers who were also presenting broad, universal histories and considering the future of Western (or European) civilisation, particularly H. G. Wells and Arnold J. Toynbee. There was, in addition, a relative lack of political resonance for Spengler’s ideas – his advocacy of ‘Prussianism’, German nationalism and ‘Caesarism’ – in 1920s and 1930s Britain. In Britain, Spengler thus became a figure whose name was known by most, whose work was cited by many but whose analysis was actually advocated (and possibly even read) by a relative few.

Social and economic dislocation, the rise of totalitarianism and the fears (and then reality) of a new global war generated many explanations for the crisis of modern life in the 1930s and 1940s. Intriguing responses to what Richard Overy has called this ‘morbid age’ were offered by a British Christian intellectual network based within the Anglican Church and the international ecumenical movement. Events such as the 1937 Oxford ecumenical conference on ‘Church, Community and State’ or the books and articles published by members of a high-powered discussion circle known as ‘The Moot’ (participants included T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, J. H. Oldham and Karl Mannheim) both reflected and significantly influenced Christian thinking about modernity in a time of crisis.

This paper will explore both the diagnoses of and cures for the modern crisis offered by these theologians, philosophers, sociologists, civil servants, churchmen and writers insofar as they related to modern forms of media. Though diverse, their views shared a critique of ‘mass’ society – and particularly the ‘mass media’ – for undermining humane values and forms of traditional community. In response, these Christian intellectuals not only sought ways of using existing media outlets but also created new ones to promote their ideas for renewing British and European life.

The inter-war period is emerging as an active area of research on British crime, particularly with regard to the interactions among crime, justice and media. This paper will address these topics via a case study of the 1928 trial of Beatrice Pace for the alleged arsenic murder of her husband. It focuses on the role that the case played in contemporary debates around the topics of police powers and the fairness (or otherwise) of the criminal justice system. During the investigation into the case, detectives were accused of using ‘third degree’ interrogation methods. This proved to be the first of a series of scandals that year involving the treatment of women in police custody. The procedure at the coroner’s inquest into Pace’s husband’s death was also criticised in press and parliament. Finally, as an impoverished woman on trial for her life, Beatrice Pace faced the problem of mounting an adequate defence. The public’s generous contributions to a legal defence fund set up by her MP ensured that the woman dubbed the ‘tragic widow’ in the press was capably represented; nonetheless, her very need to rely on public charity raised questions in some quarters about the fairness of the justice system.

While many questions remain about the precise balance of causes that lead to specific incidents of violence in particular places – and while definitively predicting individual behaviour remains elusive – there is no reason to see violence, in general, as a random, senseless or mysterious phenomenon. All human societies have been (and remain) well acquainted with interpersonal aggression; its prevalence certainly varies widely over space and time, but researchers are repeatedly confronted with evidence that the basic motivations for, and contexts of, the infliction of non-consensual interpersonal harm are universal. It is, in a manner of speaking, very much a part of what we are.

It is thus becoming increasingly clear that any effort to explain convincingly this mixture of change and continuity (or similarity and difference) will have to consider violence from an interdisciplinary perspective that involves ‘biology’ (i.e., the physiological bases of behaviour and the presence in all normal brains of emotional and cognitive capacities that encourage or restrain the use of interpersonal aggression), ‘society’ (the different constellations of interpersonal relationships that encourage or discourage violent predispositions) and ‘culture’ (the sets of meanings, codes and expectations related to violence that are passed on by non-biological means from one generation to another). In all three cases, making sense of violence means understanding history.

While most historians have tended to focus narrowly on particular times and places, some recent work in violence history has begun to consider much longer periods of time and to cross national borders. This expansion of the aims of violence history brings it increasingly into contact with sociological and psychological theories about the causes of violence. This paper will consider the consequences of this encounter, arguing that a combination of cultural, psychological and biological interpretations is required in order to ‘make sense’ of interpersonal aggression.

Whether in urban or rural environments, drinking establishments were a central venue of social life for working-class Britons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There, social connections were forged, gossip exchanged and entertainment enjoyed. Conviviality, however, was twinned with conflict: insults were traded, challenges to status were offered (and responded to) and disputes were begun, carried on and settled. As a result, fighting was a common accompaniment to drinking for working-class men in the nineteenth century.

For middle-class observers—whose assumptions and attitudes were becoming more distant from the customary popular culture that had previously been shared across classes—drinking and fighting were seen as the scourges of a ‘savage’ and barbaric lower-class existence. Influenced partly by a self-conscious devotion to ‘civilising’ behaviour, they emphasised drink as a source of conflict and suffering. In part, that view was correct; however, this paper will examine the relationships between nineteenth-century drinking and fighting to suggest the complexity of the connections between ‘savage’ violence and alcohol.

That drink often fuelled conflict is unquestionable; however, the fights that resulted often remained controlled and to some extent rule-bound. An examination of these conflicts suggests that it was not so much drink but rather the culture of drinking that was important. In nineteenth-century England, the drinking culture was accompanied by a tradition of fighting that ritualised male conflict. Elements of what one finds in the nineteenth century have also been emphasised in work on modern-day pub fights: e.g., the important role of bystanders and the ways that crowds sometimes engage in a kind of ‘self-policing’ that—even among very drunk people—can act as a restraining force. In sum, this analysis of drinking and violence provides insight into important aspects of a working-class ‘public sphere’ that was quite distinct from that being forged by their social betters.

The criminal justice system took centre stage in debates about civil liberties and the powers of the state in Britain in the 1920s and 30s. Although a general consensus regarding the superiority of Britain’s justice system and police forces remained intact, changing social relationships and the expansion of state power during the Great War raised concerns about the ‘liberty of the subject’. Observers from across the political spectrum claimed that traditional (and for some, specifically British) freedoms were being seriously eroded. Some of the key anxieties focused on an extension of social and moral regulation, the policing of political activities, court procedure and the access of poor people to legal representation.

Concentrating mainly on the second half of the 1920s – when many of these issues became particularly controversial – this paper will analyse how such ‘political’ concerns were reflected and discussed in the popular press. To a large extent, press interest in – and political debate about – civil liberties was driven by media-friendly scandals involving allegations about abuses of institutional power. The most sensational stories were those in which the ‘victims’ were either prominent and respectable or, alternatively, from a selection of ‘vulnerable’ groups defined by age, gender or social class. Many of the resulting press narratives were thus very personal: rather than addressing abstract ‘public policy’, the press discussed the criminal justice system and civil liberties within a frame of individual experience. Particularly those commentators who sought to critique aspects of the criminal justice system used (often highly dramatised) stories of personal suffering to make their case.

The debate about civil liberties was far from one-sided in this period: while some argued that the public wanted nothing more than ‘heroic doses of being left alone’, there were also those who defended the state’s handling of the justice system based either on a commitment to a traditional status quo or an awareness that the state must adapt to a changing and increasingly complex society. However, the patterns in agreement and dissention among Labour, Liberal and Conservative opinion were sometimes surprising, and there were instances where they – at least temporarily – found common libertarian ground on particular issues. Fundamentally, however, the liberty of the subject debate remained a party-political one. 

In this paper, I will attend to the above issues through particular attention to three topics: the debate about the over-regulation of everyday life through moralistic legislation, concerns about police procedure with regard to interrogation, and the expressed anxiety about the fairness of the courts. While focusing on press debate, political and parliamentary contexts, I will also consider the cultural significance of the ‘liberty of the subject’ debates (especially their reliance on a notion of ‘British liberty’ that other societies lacked) and the limited extent to which public opinion could influence state policy in this period.