Understanding the Criminal: Record-Keeping, Statistics, and the Early History of Criminology in England, 1780-1860

This article seeks to understand why detailed personal information about accused criminals and convicts was collected from the late eighteenth century in England, and why some of this information was converted into statistics from the 1820s, such that by 1860 extensive information about criminals’ physical characteristics and backgrounds was regularly collected. Record-keeping was mostly driven by local initiatives and imperatives, revealing the development of a grass-roots information-gathering culture, with limited government direction. Similarly, the government was a slow and reluctant participant in the collection of statistics, often yielding to external pressures. Ultimately, the substantial amount of information recorded reveals a strong and widely-held desire to understand the criminal, long before the self-conscious enterprise of ‘criminology’ was invented.