The incidence of shoplifting was so extensive that it was crippling London's retail trade. This was the unequivocal message that the capital's traders intended to convey to Parliament in the late 1690s as the country's lawmakers debated the need for dedicated legislation. Petitioning Parliament, they related a litany of ills. Shoplifting was the daily experience of all London shopkeepers, they declared, ‘against which their strictest diligence cannot secure them’. They bewailed that due to the shoplifter's cunning and the inadequacy of sentencing under the law, those actually prosecuted were but a fraction of the shoplifters plying the crime: ‘Experience shews, that burning and whipping increases their number, and ripens their invention; so that few offenders are taken; when taken, not one in ten prosecuted.’ But how accurate were their accusations: was shoplifting indeed as frequent, pervasive and under-prosecuted as they asserted? In this chapter we interrogate that view, examining the extent of the crime.

We begin by projecting the true prevalence of the crime, calculating its scale from prosecution, retailer and offender evidence. An examination of the many factors impeding the stopping and prosecuting of perpetrators lends credence to the traders’ claims. The chapter then explores the geography and topography of the crime, identifying the location of incidents over time and the significance of their spatial patterning. It shows how retail specialisation and the casual nature of most offending, imparted in the last chapter, was formative to its spread. The exercise reveals that the shopkeepers most at risk were not those that previous historiography may lead us to expect. Perhaps surprisingly, shoplifting had a greater impact on local neighbourhood shops than the elite stores that were most emblematic of England's consumer renaissance.

Assessing the prevalence of the crime

In attempting to accurately quantify shoplifting we must grapple with a problem that has long frustrated historians. Only a proportion of actual thefts will ever be detected and prosecuted. The remainder, termed the ‘dark figure’ of unreported crime, can be as elusive today as in the eighteenth century. British self-report surveys in the last fifty years have suggested that only between one in forty and one in 250 shoplifting incidents result in a conviction or caution.

This account of the trial of Ann Ward and Sarah Bream in 1735 only served to fuel contemporary suspicion that shoplifting was a form of organised crime. Pleading some years earlier for harsher laws, London retailers had complained bitterly that shoplifters ‘personate all degrees of buyers, in all their respective qualifications, having their several societies and walks, their cabals, receivers, solicitors and even their bullies to rescue them if taken’. While we may question the sincerity of their conviction, shopkeepers sought to convey a message that professional thieves, masquerading as customers, were plundering their businesses. By design or through ignorance they promoted a false understanding of a crime that, from the evidence of this study, was principally an intermittent form of makeshift for the poor. As this chapter discloses, those brought to court were more often amateur than professional, occasional than full-time, and opportunist than conspiring. This book begins by examining who within society became a shoplifter and why they stole. While offending behaviour formed a spectrum that stretched from recurrent through intermittent offending to the occasional bravado act, it was predominantly an economic resource for those struggling to make a living. So, let us review the evidence.

From fabrics to flat irons, shoplifters systematically sought items they valued. But did they privilege the same items that appealed to their middling and elite peers? Their choice can be of particular interest to historians who continue to debate what has been termed one of the conundrums of eighteenth-century consumption: how far down the social scale did the new goods and expanded consumption opportunities extend. By examining what items shoplifters stole we can observe whether their ‘alternative’ mode of consumption played a part in distributing novel and fashionable goods more widely throughout the eighteenth-century population. If, as some economic historians have suggested, the working incomes of the poor remained at too low a level for them to meaningfully participate in the century's reputed consumer boom, did shoplifting serve an enabling function?

However, suggesting that the crime brought unaffordable goods within financial reach begs a further and perhaps more interesting question: how actively did the poor avail themselves of this opportunity to acquire stylish attire and home embellishments? Historians have speculated that over the course of the century an appetite for consumer goods animated all levels of society. Jan de Vries has proposed that the desire for new home comforts was strong enough to encourage a greater industriousness in working households. Beverly Lemire has also been prominent in affirming the importance of fashion to such communities, albeit in a more democratised and popular guise. She contends that demand for this was widely met by the second-hand trade, supplied in part by shop theft, and asserts that ‘legal records abound with vivid depictions of the selectivity of … shoplifters, who in turn reflect the preferences of the wider market for stylish clothes’. But how sound is this conclusion? In its specific targeting of retail outlets, shoplifting was intriguingly different from other property theft. While burglars, housebreakers and pickpockets can rarely anticipate the exact content of their haul, this was a type of thieving in which perpetrators could very deliberately take their pick from the same range of new manufactured and imported goods on display to better-off shoppers.

In the summer of 1719 William Marvell entered a shop in the City of London and ‘cheapened’ the price of some silk handkerchiefs with the owner. Cheapening or bargaining for goods was standard practice in an age before fixed pricing. He then took the handkerchiefs to the door to show a female companion. Again, this desire to see goods in daylight was not unusual: early-eighteenth-century shop interiors were invariably dim or poorly candlelit. Marvell declined to purchase at the offered price of 12 shillings, but no sooner had he left than the handkerchiefs were found to be missing. Only then, too late, did the shopkeeper realise that his customer was a shoplifter. Sending his daughter fruitlessly after the thief, she returned shortly with the information that he had been seen by a neighbour who had recognised him as London's former hangman. There was to be no escape from justice for such an infamous figure. Six weeks later Marvell was captured in farmland on London's outskirts and taken to a local alehouse where he was identified by the shopkeeper's wife and daughter. His initial offer of recompense and claim he had been drunk at the time rejected, Marvell was swiftly charged with shoplifting and committed to appear at the next session of the Old Bailey. Within a fortnight he was found guilty and facing a sentence of death. Only witnesses to his character as ‘an honest and industrious man’ narrowly earned him the reprieve of transportation.

Marvell's celebrity appearance in the dock focused public attention on this newly capital crime, but it also highlighted many of its paradoxes. Was his theft driven by need? It was common knowledge that he had lost his executioner post two years earlier through debt. Or could it be the compulsion of greed? This period was witnessing a relaxing of older moral constraints on consumption, and social commentators were swift to predict the criminal implications of the poor coveting luxury. The silk handkerchief, worn as a neck adornment, had become the quintessential fashion accessory for working Londoners.

Daniel Defoe, writing his early-eighteenth-century trade manual, had no doubt that shoplifting was a battle of wits between shopkeeper and thief. In this chapter we draw on the wealth of information found in contemporary court transcripts to anatomise the tactics that shoplifters employed in order to steal, and the measures store owners took to resist their incursions. To better understand their respective stratagems and the dynamics of these encounters we turn to an explanatory framework developed in modern criminology. Routine activity theory seeks to define criminal behaviour in terms of the routines of the participants. It specifies that for a crime to occur there needs to be an offender, a target and the absence of an effective guardian against the crime. The target will be an object of high value to the thief: visible, accessible and portable. The crime will occur in a place which has a manager: for a shop, this will be the shopkeeper. Guardians, in the case of shoplifting, may be shop staff, police or very commonly other shoppers and the general public. This theory provides a useful model for illuminating the tactical manoeuvrings of eighteenth-century shoplifters and shopkeepers in their competing struggle for advantage. Repeatedly we find the evidence from the London and Northern sample cases endorses its validity for explaining patterns of customer theft behaviour in this earlier period. So, first, how did offenders identify the personal value and accessibility of their target object?

Planning the crime

While some thefts may have been on impulse, witness evidence suggests that thieves commonly took great care to size up the risks and potential rewards offered by individual shops. Birkhead Hitchcock noticed Thomas Smith ‘pass and repass the shop two or three times’, before stealing cloth from his open shop window, while Alexander White was spotted observing his chosen hosier's shop for an hour and a half.

On Saturday, 24 April 1784, William Mawhood, a London woollen draper with a shop in West Smithfield, recorded an eventful day in his diary:

This is the only surviving example we have of an eighteenth-century shopkeeper's unmediated, contemporaneous reaction to a shoplifting incident which was subsequently tried at the Old Bailey. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no dwelling on the items stolen, or their value – later declared in court to be £5. The episode is portrayed as a minor neighbourhood drama; Mawhood's diary entry implies some regret that his son was persuaded to charge the perpetrators, some concern to keep on terms with a local business associate, and even some sympathy for a fellow parent. In financial terms, he is clearly more exercised by his earlier visit to the bank and the uncertainty of the forthcoming dividend.

William Mawhood may have been among London's wealthier traders. Joseph Collyer in 1761 estimated start-up costs for woollen drapers to be £1,000 to £5,000, the highest for any London retail trade.