Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

Chapter 14
Sir Augustus Stephenson and the Prosecution of
Offences Act of 1884
Roger Chadwick
During the second half of the nineteenth century radical changes in the
demography of Britain were accompanied by equally notable changes in the
behaviour of its population. What had once been seen as a 'most turbulent and
ungovernable people' became a European model of anxious respectability - a
nation of shopkeepers.
The decline of violent crime and its progressive isolation, if not in a criminal
under-class as Tobias and others have suggested, 1 at least in the lowest
socio-economic strata, was matched by a growing ethical consensus among
the respectable majority. In the formation of this consensus government
played a reluctant but crucial role. While efforts to revise or even to codify
the substantive criminal law failed, changes in the administration of the law
brought a rising level of pressure to bear against those who persisted in the
traditional spirit of lawlessness. As V. A.C. Gatrell observed: 2
In so far as the machinery of law and order had positive effects on Victorian
criminality it was because those who broke the law were not well defended against
those who sought to bring them to justice. The agencies of the law were, in that
sense, appropriate to their task.
Foremost among these agencies were those of police and public prosecution
and their spasmodic evolution in Victorian England was sufficient to shift the
balance of the legal system significantly against the offender. What may be
true of crimes of violence is not, however, necessarily true of all crime and in
late Victorian England it was the emergence of new crimes and new criminals
which attracted much of what Gatrell called the 'prosecutorial energy' of that
society. 3 It was an impetus that had to meet continuing opposition from all
parts of the political spectrum fearing the extension of government power.
In the hands of a new generation of public servants the Department of
Public Prosecutions evolved as a response not to the threat of the 'criminal
classes' but of middle-class, white-collar crime. Moriarty not Fagin was the
1 J.J. Tobias, Crime and Industrial Society in the 19th Century (New York, 1967).
2 Crime and the Law, V.A.C. Gatrell et al., ed. (1980) 258.
3 Ibid., 251.