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This book offers an original and exciting analysis of the concept of the criminal underworld. Print culture, policing and law enforcement, criminal networks, space and territory are explored here through a series of case studies taken from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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1. Introduction 2. ´Now we have the informing Dogs!´: Crime Networks and Informing Cultures in the 1720s and 1730s 3. ´A Noted Virago´: Moll Harvey and her ´Dangerous Crew´, 1727 - 1738 4. ´The pickpockets and hustlers had yesterday what is called a Grand Day´: Changing Street Theft, c. 1800 - 1850 5. ´There goes Bill Sheen, the murderer´: Crime, Kinship and Community in East London, 1827 - 1852 6. ´A new species of swindling´: Coiners, Fraudsters, Swindlers and the ´Long-Firm´, c. 1760 - 1913 7. ´A London Plague that must be swept away´: Hooligans and Street Fighting Gangs, c. 1882 - 1912 8. ´The Terror of the People´: Organised Crime in Interwar London 9. Conclusion

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Heather Shore is a Reader in History at Leeds Beckett University, UK. She is the author of Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth Century London (1999) and has co-edited two books, with Pamela Cox, Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650-1950 (2002) and with Tim Hitchcock, The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Exhibition (2003).

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