The 19th Century Underworld


Book Description

Underworld: n. 1. the part of society comprising those who live by organized crime and immorality. 2. the mythical abode of the dead under the earth. Take a walk on the dark side of the street in this unique exploration of the fears and desires at the heart of the British Empire, from the Regency dandy’s playground to the grim and gothic labyrinths of the Victorian city. Enter a world of gin spinners, sneaksmen and Covent Garden nuns, where bare-knuckled boxers slog it out for dozens of rounds, children are worth more dead than alive, and the Thames holds more bodies than the Ganges. This is the Modern Babylon, a place of brutal poverty, violent crime, strong drink, pornography and prostitution; of low neighborhoods and crooked houses with windows out like broken teeth, wraithlike urchins with haunted eyes, desperate, ruthless and vicious men, and the broken remnants of once fine girls: a grey, bleak, infernal place, where gaslights fail to pierce the pestilential fog, and coppers travel in pairs, if they venture there at all. Combining the accessibility of a popular history with original research, this book brings the denizens of this vanished world once more to life, along with the voices of those who sought to exploit, imprison or save them, or to simply report back from this alien landscape that both fascinated and appalled: the politicians, the reformers, the journalists and, above all, the storytellers, from literary novelists to purveyors of penny dreadfuls. Welcome to the 19th century underworld…




Tales from the German Underworld


Book Description

Through the means of four powerful and extraordinary narratives from the 19th-century German underworld, this book deftly explores an intriguing array of questions about criminality, punishment, and social exclusion in modern German history. Drawing on legal documents and police files, historian Richard Evans dramatizes the case histories of four alleged felons to shed light on German penal policy of the time. 25 illustrations.




The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York: The Autobiography of George Appo


Book Description

Through the colorful autobiography of pickpocket and con man George Appo, Timothy Gilfoyle brings to life the opium dens, organized criminals, and prisons that comprised the rapidly changing criminal underworld of late nineteenth-century America. The book's introduction and supporting documents, which include investigative reports and descriptions of Appo and his world, connect Appo's memoir to the larger story of urban New York and how and why crime changed during this period. It also explores factors of race and class that led some to a life of crime, the experience of criminal justice and incarceration, and the masculine codes of honor that marked the emergence of the nation's criminal subculture. Document headnotes, a chronology, questions for consideration, and a selected bibliography offer additional pedagogical support.




The 19th Century Underworld


Book Description

**Underworld** n. 1. the part of society comprising those who live by organised crime and immorality. 2. the mythical abode of the dead under the earth. Take a walk on the dark side of the street in this unique exploration of the fears and desires at the heart of the British Empire, from the Regency dandy's playground to the grim and gothic labyrinths of the Victorian city. Enter a world of gin spinners, sneaksmen and Covent Garden nuns, where bare-knuckled boxers slog it out for dozens of rounds, children are worth more dead than alive, and the Thames holds more bodies than the Ganges. This is the Modern Babylon, a place of brutal poverty, violent crime, strong drink, pornography and prostitution; of low neighbourhoods and crooked houses with windows out like broken teeth, wraithlike urchins with haunted eyes, desperate, ruthless and vicious men, and the broken remnants of once fine girls: a grey, bleak, infernal place, where gaslights fail to pierce the pestilential fog, and coppers travel in pairs, if they venture there at all. Combining the accessibility of a popular history with original research, this book brings the denizens of this vanished world once more to life, along with the voices of those who sought to exploit, imprison or save them, or to simply report back from this alien landscape that both fascinated and appalled: the politicians, the reformers, the journalists and, above all, the storytellers, from literary novelists to purveyors of penny dreadfuls. Welcome to the 19th century underworld...




The Victorian Underworld


Book Description

Through the eyes of its inhabitants, this work portrays the 19th-century underworld, a place of night houses and cigar divans, of street people like the running-patterer with his news of murder, and entertainers like the Fire-King. It looks at the criminals, growth of prostitution and prisons.




Manifest Destiny's Underworld


Book Description

This fascinating study sheds new light on antebellum America's notorious "filibusters--the freebooters and adventurers who organized or participated in armed invasions of nations with whom the United States was formally at peace. Offering the first full-scale analysis of the filibustering movement, Robert May relates the often-tragic stories of illegal expeditions into Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and other Latin American countries and details surprising numbers of aborted plots, as well. May investigates why thousands of men joined filibustering expeditions, how they were financed, and why the U.S. government had little success in curtailing them. Surveying antebellum popular media, he shows how the filibustering phenomenon infiltrated the American psyche in newspapers, theater, music, advertising, and literature. Condemned abroad as pirates, frequently in language strikingly similar to modern American denunciations of foreign terrorists, the filibusters were often celebrated at home as heroes who epitomized the spirit of Manifest Destiny. May concludes by exploring the national consequences of filibustering, arguing that the practice inflicted lasting damage on U.S. relations with foreign countries and contributed to the North-South division over slavery that culminated in the Civil War.




Vice, Crime, and Poverty


Book Description

Beggars, outcasts, urchins, waifs, prostitutes, criminals, convicts, madmen, fallen women, lunatics, degenerates—part reality, part fantasy, these are the grotesque faces that populate the underworld, the dark inverse of our everyday world. Lurking in the mirror that we hold up to our society, they are our counterparts and our doubles, repelling us and yet offering the tantalizing promise of escape. Although these images testify to undeniable social realities, the sordid lower depths make up a symbolic and social imaginary that reflects our fears and anxieties—as well as our desires. In Vice, Crime, and Poverty, Dominique Kalifa traces the untold history of the concept of the underworld and its representations in popular culture. He examines how the myth of the lower depths came into being in nineteenth-century Europe, as biblical figures and Christian traditions were adapted for a world turned upside-down by the era of industrialization, democratization, and mass culture. From the Parisian demimonde to Victorian squalor, from the slums of New York to the sewers of Buenos Aires, Kalifa deciphers the making of an image that has cast an enduring spell on its audience. While the social conditions that created that underworld have changed, Vice, Crime, and Poverty shows that, from social-scientific ideas of the underclass to contemporary cinema and steampunk culture, its shadows continue to haunt us.




The 19th Century Underworld


Book Description

Underworld: n. 1. the part of society comprising those who live by organized crime and immorality. 2. the mythical abode of the dead under the earth. Take a walk on the dark side of the street in this unique exploration of the fears and desires at the heart of the British Empire, from the Regency dandy’s playground to the grim and gothic labyrinths of the Victorian city. Enter a world of gin spinners, sneaksmen and Covent Garden nuns, where bare-knuckled boxers slog it out for dozens of rounds, children are worth more dead than alive, and the Thames holds more bodies than the Ganges. This is the Modern Babylon, a place of brutal poverty, violent crime, strong drink, pornography and prostitution; of low neighborhoods and crooked houses with windows out like broken teeth, wraithlike urchins with haunted eyes, desperate, ruthless and vicious men, and the broken remnants of once fine girls: a grey, bleak, infernal place, where gaslights fail to pierce the pestilential fog, and coppers travel in pairs, if they venture there at all. Combining the accessibility of a popular history with original research, this book brings the denizens of this vanished world once more to life, along with the voices of those who sought to exploit, imprison or save them, or to simply report back from this alien landscape that both fascinated and appalled: the politicians, the reformers, the journalists and, above all, the storytellers, from literary novelists to purveyors of penny dreadfuls. Welcome to the 19th century underworld…




A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York


Book Description

"A true story more incredible than fiction." —Kevin Baker, author of Striver's Row In George Appo's world, child pickpockets swarmed the crowded streets, addicts drifted in furtive opium dens, and expert swindlers worked the lucrative green-goods game. On a good night Appo made as much as a skilled laborer made in a year. Bad nights left him with more than a dozen scars and over a decade in prisons from the Tombs and Sing Sing to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he reunited with another inmate, his father. The child of Irish and Chinese immigrants, Appo grew up in the notorious Five Points and Chinatown neighborhoods. He rose as an exemplar of the "good fellow," a criminal who relied on wile, who followed a code of loyalty even in his world of deception. Here is the underworld of the New York that gave us Edith Wharton, Boss Tweed, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge.




London's Underworld


Book Description

London’s Underworld takes us on the nightmarish last journeys of condemned criminals to the gallows at Tyburn. We enter death-trap eighteenth century prisons, one of which the novelist Henry Fielding described as a ‘prototype of hell’. We walk the crowded streets of Victorian London with its swarms of prostitutes and follow the ingenious villains who carried out the first great train robbery in 1854. We see the rise and fall of the interwar racecourse gangs and the bloody battle for control of the Wes End. This fascinating book illustrates how crime in the capital has evolved from the extreme violence of the early eighteenth century to the vastly more complex and lucrative, but no less brutal, gangland of today.