Eloise Moss On A Modern History Of Burglary

Eloise Moss On A Modern History Of Burglary | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"[On the late 19th/early 20th century] What's really distinctive about the history of crime in this period, but specifically the history of burglary is that the law itself has a very, very specific set of criteria for what actually counts as a burglary.

So, today, if someone breaks into your home at any time of day or even any kind of property in any sense, it can be classified as a burglary. Now before 1968, which was when the Theft Act made that the case, before that point, burglary by law was defined as breaking into an exclusively domestic environment, so, an inhabited residential space between what are legally defined as the nighttime hours of 9pm and 6am.

And for that reason, burglary has a kind of really sinister aspect to it because essentially, when the burglar is nearby, you are going to be in bed, asleep, vulnerable. Potentially undressed, even, around the presence of that intruder, so it carries a life sentence, because it's entwined with ideas of vulnerability. It's entwined with ideas of rape, and it's even imagined as a kind of a rape of your home, that penetrating into the sanctity of your own personal space in a period where privacy is really a marker of particularly being a middle and upper class person. Privacy is is sacrosanct. So the idea of what's usually characterized as some working class person breaking into that space is horror, you know, and then purloining your valuables...

"‘There's a romance about burglary in this period that is associated with so many people experiencing economic deprivation. And the idea that certain burglars have kind of taken more initiative than others to clamber up and over into people's properties and therefore avoid the police altogether because they're not operating at street level, they're clambering over and above the the level of the streets. Is actually viewed as sort of slightly inspirational.

There's a historian called Gillian Spraggs, who suggests that we have a cult of the robber In England dating from the medieval period with characters like Robin Hood through the 18th century with real life highwaymen like Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard, who have been idolized in songs and ballads and in stories for as long as we can remember’...

‘You mentioned that there is almost an erotic connotation to it as well. You did touch on it when you were talking about the invasion of the boudoir’...

‘The idea of a very handsome young man dressed in black and he's very athletic, clambering up into your bedroom by night is not viewed as necessarily a bad thing by everyone and there's a lot of quite trashy semi erotica written around that possibility in stories of the period’...

‘There were women burglars, there are women burglars, but in the period that of this book 1860-1968, as far as the government was concerned, and as far as the judicial system was concerned, no there weren’t... women was viewed as so integral to domesticity, to home life, to maintaining the stability of homes and relationships in this era, the idea that a woman would kind of ignore all that ideology to break into a house to threaten a family, to threaten their prosperity and their sense of safety and stability and to threaten the relationships at the core of that family by their presence, by making the home less safe, was really something that contemporaries fought against...

They were given either much lighter sentences, and often the ones having been captured for burglary that charge would then be changed into being an accomplice of a man. So a lot of women burglars actually become quite canny about this and say, oh, no, it wasn't me, it was my boyfriend or my husband who had lured me into doing this, or who gave me these things and then it turned out they were stolen, who knew? You know, poor me. And they say this in court.

And they are believed because people want to believe that a woman will not have been able to commit this crime, both on moral grounds and actually in terms of skills as well, because as much as the burger is seen as the aristocrat of crime, they're associated with being particularly clever and particularly skilled. And again, this is a period in which largely women are thought to be far less intelligent than men"


Patriarchy!