Low, Donald A. The Regency Underworld . Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1999. xxxvii + 194. $34.95.

Reviewed by George Justice, English Department, Marquette University.

Donald A. Low's The Regency Underworld was first published in 1982. This revised edition is an attractive book that will be of interest to Jane Austen enthusiasts and others interested in the literature of Regency England. At one point in his study, Low quotes a historian who suggests that there was greater separation of social classes in Regency England than at at other time, before or after. Yet what emerges from his survey of aspects of the "underworld" is the dependency of Regency civilization upon unpleasant or illegal social practices. For all practical purposes, Low argues, London was the site and source of many of the nefarious scams and liaisons he engagingly describes. London itself is the main character of the story, as it was in the Cruikshanks' and Pierce Egan's Life in London Or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in Their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, to which Low devotes a full chapter.

In general, Low focuses on examples rather than systems. The "underworld" never emerges from his study as a coherent geographic or social entity, despite the emphasis on life in London. Rather, discrete scams accumulate, providing a picture less of "evil" than of a teeming mass of souls impudently seizing some small (or grand) pleasure and profit from an unforgiving and fearful world. The closest Low comes to integrating his analysis is an energetic long Foreword, "Sights and Sounds of Regency London," which he concludes with the young De Quincey's encounter with a prostitute named "Ann." (Low admits that it's impossible to determine whether Ann was a person or a "figment of [De Quincey's] imagination.") After a long quotation, Low writes, "Here, perhaps, the anonymous underworld finds a human identity and voice" (xxiv).

The chapters in Low's study seem determined to overthrow any expectation of "anonymity" created by the Foreword. The only statistical analyses included in the book are those of contemporary social reformers like Patrick Colquhoun; instead Low focuses on spectacular crimes and scams of the time, those which achieved publicity, as if the perpetrators were desperately attempting avoid the anonymity of De Quincey's suffering Ann. Chapter 1, "Of Rookeries and Thief-Takers," presents contemporary accounts of the problem of crime. Chapter 2, "The Last of the Charleys," and Chapter 3, "Nurseries of Crime," detail London's response in terms of enforcement and punishment. The cultural fear of common crime and admiration for daring misdeed begin to emerge here in the incompetence of traditional law enforcement and the draconian nature of envisaged police forces and efficient prisons. Chapter 4, "The Medical Underworld," was to me the most fascinating: Low follows the tolerated but illegal activities of the body snatchers, whose grave robbing served a growing demand for anatomical subjects for medical studies in London and in Edinburgh. The body snatchers led a rough and tumble life of drinking by day and digging up corpses at night. The ingenuity of their organization is surprising and eye-opening, especially considering the dissolute alcoholism through which most of them apparently lived. Low highlights the particularly gruesome (and public) case of William Burke and William Hare, who murdered people for their bodies. Low presents this as a lamentable but predictable result of the incompetence of the English to make a law providing for a legal supply of an adequate number of bodies to feed medical schools.

After the fifth chapter summarizing the exploits of Tom and Jerry, Low moves in Chapter 6 to a study of gambling. If body snatching represents the low end of paralegal activity, gambling represents the high end. The "underworld" figures Low describes here are none other than Beau Brummel and Byron's friend Scrope Davies, who prospered and suffered from success and failure at the tables. The genius of the chapter is William Crockford, who opened a club on St. James's street that catered to the richest of the well-connected rich and profited from their addiction to gaming. No underworld here, unless Crockford himself, of working class background, counts. For those looking for Austen connections, The Regency Underworld contextualizes the behavior of Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. The final chapter in the volume covers "Some Regency Rogues and Characters," including James Hatfield, "The Famous Seducer," whose exploits will not be unfamiliar to those acquainted with the peculiar manner of courtship of George Wickham, Esq. Low's retelling of Hatfield's story in the context of the rest of the volume brings together the attractively seductive elements of Wickham's character and the London "underworld" into which he had taken Georgianna Darcy and then the disastrously oblivious Lydia Bennet. The Bennets' shock and horror stems not from injured propriety alone, but from the material circumstances of a world not far enough removed from Longbourn.

The book does not always follow through on important topics that it raises, particularly in discussing women's roles in the underworld. For example, prostitution has a lurking presence throughout the volume but is only addressed specifically in a brief case study of Harriette Wilson and her infamous Memoirs in the final chapter. Colquhun's "Estimates of Persons who are Supposed to Support themselves in and near the Metropolis by pursuits either Criminal--Illegal--or Immoral--" totals 115,000, of whom 50,000 were "Unfortunate Females of all descriptions, who support themselves chiefly or wholly by prostitution." Low's attention well-documented and culturally prominent examples seems like a weakness here. It is not his fault that there is no Regency Moll Flanders, but The Regency Underworld cannot capture the concrete common particularity evoked so fully in Defoe's novel.
The Regency Underworld does capture aspects of the world brilliantly through its inclusion of many illustrations, mostly taken from the Mary Evans Picture Library and the Museum of London. These are well chosen and will be useful in the classroom. I was particularly struck by an engraving of "the treadmill at Brixton prison." "It was common practice for people visiting a new prison such as Brixton--opened in 1821--to watch the prisoners taking the forty-eight or fifty laborious steps a minute required to turn the wheel. Occasionally, the treadwheel was used productively, to grind corn or raise water, but far more often it merely beat the air, in many prisons for as much as ten hours a day, with prisoners stepping on and off it every twenty minutes" (52-3).

A sensibly ordered Book List substitutes for a full bibliography but provides a number of primary and secondary sources in concise fashion. The book does not pretend to be a contribution to original scholarship--it is "under-theorized," to use academic jargon, with nary a mention of Foucault even in its explanation of Bentham's Panopticon, and it relies mostly on common secondary sources and reprinted primary sources. This is The Regency Underworld's strength (as well as a weakness for some audiences). Low brings a literary perspective to a field of social history that should be better known by scholars and teachers of English literature. I learned a lot from reading The Regency Underworld, and I will use its handsomely reproduced illustrations when next teaching the literature of early nineteenth-century Britain.