What has happened to criminal skill? How is it that the pavements of Victorian London seethed with pickpockets and conmen, variously feigning fits and forging wills, whereas now we have only beggars and muggers to contend with?
Is there a capable cat burglar anywhere in the country? Or a cracksman, able to finger his way through Mr Chubb’s most subtle defences? And when was the last time anyone came across a dredgerman trawling his net through the Thames in search of a valuable corpse; or a coiner melting spoons for his private mint; or a cardsharp with his fingertips skinned to decipher the pinpricks on the back of his pack?
The answer, I think, is revealing not only of the character of crime but also of the character of the poverty which lies behind it, and it points to a profound difference between the Victorian underworld which Donald Thomas describes and the contemporary underworld of the “socially excluded” who have become the object of such great political anxiety.
Thomas’ world – which he describes with vivid colour and great relish – is a place created and formed by extreme material hardship, a place where a man might reasonably conclude that his best chance of surviving is, for example, to learn the skills of a “tosher”, to wade waist-deep through offal and excrement in the sewers beneath the streets, searching for treasure without succumbing to poisonous gasses and sudden floods. The skill is born of desperation.
More than that, the skill is shared, passed from one hand to another in the fetid intimacy of the rookery slums, embellished as each new obstacle devised by the opposition inspires a new technique. (Thomas reproduces a late Victorian diagram of a safe-breaker’s kit, a state-of the-art collection of precision drills, cleavers, jemmies and prisers.)
The contemporary poor, on the other hand, suffer a different kind of hardship. Its origins are certainly material – hugely increased by the unemployment and welfare cuts of the 1980s – but the hardship is not so deep and the character of their despair is different.
Theirs is a world formed by a conspiracy of circumstance: by addiction to crack cocaine and heroin and speed; by the blackmarket in drugs, which is the most important economic fact of their lives and which offers far more treasure than any tosher’s sewer and far more dangers; by images of wealth pumped into televisions in every broken home; by the release of the mentally ill into their midst; by guns and gangs. The damage here is not merely material, but emotional and social and spiritual, too. Those who survive do so, not with subtlety and skill, but with ruthless selfishness.
They live in communities which have been shattered, first by slum clearance and then by the sale of council houses. The outcome is a generation who have no role models – lawful or criminal – and no-one from whom to learn the old skills of the street. But more than that, this is a generation which is depressed and alienated and bitter, not merely relying on violence instead of skill, but relishing it.
This is not to romanticise their Victorian forbears, who were certainly ruthless – just think of Kate Webster who not only murdered her mistress for the sake of her jewels, but dismembered her corpse, boiled and boned the flesh, and then sold the body fats for dripping – but it is to recognise that whereas the material hardship of the last century might be tackled by the welfare state, begun by the Liberals in 1906, contemporary poverty is a far more complex and difficult enemy.
Nick Davies is the author of Dark Heart: the shocking truth about hidden Britain, published by Chatto and Windus, £16.99.
