San Antonio College Library

The author exposes "the teeming underbelly of a world more often associated with gentility and high culture. ... In its gin shops and taverns, hard by the fashionable West End, thrived thieves and beggars, cheats, forgers, and pickpockets, preying on rich and poor alike."--Jacket.

This work offers an original and exciting analysis of the concept of the criminal underworld. Print culture, policing and law enforcement, criminal networks, space and territory are explored here through a series of case studies taken from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Anna, a midwife at a North London hospital, finds the diary of a Russian teenager who dies giving birth to a baby, and resolves to find the young girls' relatives in the hopes of providing the orphaned child with a loving family. As Anna follows the clues the diary provides, she finds evidence of a local Russian mob's criminal activities, and meets Nikolai, a formidable mob enforcer. Anna and Nikolai find themselves growing close as the Russian mobsters...

"As London became the first major city of the nineteenth century, new models of representation emerged in the journalism, poetry, fiction, and social commentary of the period. Simon Joyce argues that such writing reflected a persistent worry about the problem of crime but was never able to contain it. Commentators such as Wordsworth, Dickens, Mayhew, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Booth, and Wilde all struggled with the same questions about how to represent...