Bibliographical Essay

Like so much cultural and social history, the history of criminal violence tends to be written from national perspectives. Moreover, while the subject is increasingly popular, much of the work remains in the language of the country dealt with.

For England criminal violence and culture are explored extensively in James Sharpe, A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England (London: Random House, 2016). For the shorter period of this volume see Clive Emsley, Hard Men: The English and Violence since 1750 (London: Hambledon, 2005) and John Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: The Shadow of Our Refinement (London: Routledge, 2004). Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) focuses particularly on male violence towards women and the sometimes contrasting attitudes of the courts and at least some of the populace. While it seems probable that the Victorians moved increasingly towards a critical view of violence, they also celebrated violent anti-heroes such as Mr Punch and Sweeney Todd, an area vividly explored in Rosalind Crone, Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).

British gangs have been well covered by Andrew Davies, The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers, Britain's First Youth Cult (Preston: Milo Books, 2008) and City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013), but the best work on the French apaches remains largely in French, notably Michelle Perrot ‘Dans le Paris de la Belle Epoque, les “Apaches”, premieres bandes de jeunes', in her collection Les ombres de l'histoire: crime et chdtiment au XIXe siecle (Paris: Flammarion, 2001). The violent criminal and semi-criminal groups of southern Europe are better served with significant English-language volumes such as Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and John Dickie, Blood Brotherhood: Camorra, Mafia, ‘Ndrangheta: The Rise of the Honoured Societies (London: Sceptre, 2011).