Try to do some background reading for my dissertation and want to get a basic understanding of the scholarship available.
Kellow Chesney wrote a superb book on the Victorian Underworld many years ago in the 1970's. Most of it is focussed on London. J.M Beatie's book The First English Detectives is a superb scholarly work. Charles Dickens did some great stuff in Household Words and the SOLON project generated a lot of original and excellent work on this subject. I have done a lot of research in this area so please feel free to contact me.
Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914 by Martin Wiener. And Henry Mahew's London Labour and the London Poor as a primary source.
Clive Emsley, who is a police historian covers the 19th century view of crime quite well in The Great British Bobby: A History of British Policing From 18th Century to the Present. Judith Flanders wrote a great book called The Invention of Murder about how the Victorians invented modern crime. Another great source is Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in 19th Century Discourse by Marie-Christine Leps. Clive Bloom's Violent London: 2000 years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts covers political crime and Jerry White's London in the 19th Century has large sections on crime in the capitol.
Henry Mayhew wrote a contemporary (1851) account of the London poor and in 1861 added a fourth volume entitled 'London labour and the London poor; a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work" which looked at prostitutes, beggars and thieves amongst others
https://archive.org/details/cu31924092592793
Go to the source. The proceedings of Old Bailey are online.
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
Philip Collins's Dickens and Crime (Macmillan, 1995) provides very useful contextual information on the multifarious facets of Victorian crime. The book as a whole relates the various incarnations of crime to the vividly portrayed social realism of Dickens's fiction.
You may check the databases and statistics bureaus referred to in this paper:
Hausken, K. and Moxnes, J.F. (2005), “The Dynamics of Crime and Punishment,” International Journal of Modern Physics C, 16, 11, 1701-1732.
Article The Dynamics of Crime and Punishment
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