Victorian street-sellers in Covent Garden.
(C.1822 SOMERBY, LINCS) – LOCAL PRISONER
Those who led the most precarious economic lives were those most vulnerable to arrest. They were, however, also those least likely to consistently appear in the official record. Without well-ingrained support networks and stable residential arrangements, those working in informal, temporary or insecure employments could all too easily find themselves at the mercy of the streets. There they slipped from the grasp of many social records. Accounts of the crimes and trials of such individuals are sometimes the only insight we get into their largely undocumented lives.
Jane was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, between 1818 and 1825. More than a decade before mandatory national registrations, we cannot be precisely sure of the date, and it appears, neither was Jane, who variously reported her age to suggest that her date of birth was 1820, 1818, 1823, 1824 and 1826. Jane was born in South Lincolnshire, but moved further north to Sleaford searching for work. She was already married and 30 years old when our period begun, having married James Foster in 1843.
James, like Jane, had few marketable skills, and struggled to find secure well-paying employment. The pair began working as hawkers. James was licensed to do so, Jane was not. The living afforded them was enough to survive, but not to find anywhere permanent to live, or to establish a stable life. The pair began living increasingly precariously, sometimes lodging, but often sleeping rough as they moved from place to place around Lincoln and the surrounding towns. Despite their irregular mode of life, Jane seems to have avoided being convicted for any offences for more than a decade.
Victorian street-sellers in Covent Garden.
However, by the time she did appear in court in 1860, charged with being drunk and incapable, she was obviously already known to the police, and it was noted at her trial that she ‘was said to be connected to a gang of thieves’. Street-sellers, like beggars and prostitutes, spent long hours waiting in public spaces with little to do. On days of slow trade, and in cold inclement weather, alcohol provided a cheap and easy source of entertainment. Unfortunately, the public nature of their lives meant that even relatively harmless acts of drunkenness or rowdy socialising (the likes of which occurred in pubs throughout Britain) could quickly be classified as a breach of public order.
Things worsened for Jane and James after the birth of their son, John, in 1868. Their financial strain was only intensified by the needs of a child. While they did not relinquish custody of John, they did sporadically place him in the workhouse when Jane was in prison, or safe accommodation was lacking. It is not clear whether during these times Jane and James always stayed together, or went to different parts of the country to try and raise funds. Jane was certainly known locally as a vagrant, and although she always gave her marital status as married, she always appeared alone in court, and used the aliases of Robinson and Kendal. By 1881 Jane, James and John were living together again in a cramped court dwelling along with twenty-seven other people.
Not all of Jane’s apprehensions led to convictions. As a vagrant or ‘tramp’ when she was picked up by the police for drunkenness, Jane might only be confined in the police station or local lock-up for a night, giving her a chance to sober up before she was released and encouraged to move on. Often it was more useful for local police to move a vagrant on than it was to prosecute them and begin a cycle of reconviction which kept troubled individuals in the local area. Jane’s custodial sentences were primarily a result of her petty thefts. In the 1880s, as Jane entered her sixties, the thefts she may already have been carrying out for the majority of her life became clumsier and easier to detect.
Between 1880 and 1890 Jane had more than thirteen convictions for theft, earning her between one week and three months’ hard labour. Jane started out by stealing large items of clothing like coats and gowns, but changed tactics to steal items that could less conspicuously be sold on the street – items such as hairbrushes, cigarette cases, spectacles and books. She also stole consumable items like food which once sold and eaten left no trace of a crime.
At the end of April 1891 Jane was arrested for taking a basket belonging to a neighbour, Mrs Jones. The basket had been lent to Jane several times before by Jones for work, and always returned. However, on this occasion Jane had taken the basket without asking. Whether she genuinely intended to steal the basket or not was uncertain, though her record of previous convictions spoke against her. Jane had been in prison on remand for ten weeks awaiting the trial, and was sentenced to a further two months of imprisonment. Life was becoming harder, and selling anything on the street without attracting police attention more impossible.
In June 1894 Jane was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for theft, with a term of two years’ police supervision attached. She was released in December that year, and managed to avoid reconviction for almost a year, until September 1895, when she received another month. As she was under police supervision, it is likely that Jane refrained from offending in the first three-quarters of 1895. However, with stealing constituting a vital part of her income, Jane was plunged into considerable poverty by attempting to stay on the right side of the law. On discharge at the end of 1894, having spent six months on the Wakefield Prison diet, Jane’s build was described as ‘proportional’ and her face ‘round’, By September 1895, having struggled to subsist, her build had altered to ‘slender’, her face drawn and ‘long’.
In 1897, when she was sentenced to seven days of hard labour for being drunk and disorderly, the Lincolnshire Free Press reported that ‘she has already spent twenty years of her life in prison, seven days hard labour is but a modest addition to such a record’. Jane had never been given a sentence longer than a few months of imprisonment, most of her sentences were just a few days in length. To have accumulated twenty years in custody illustrates just how frequently Jane found herself picked up from streets and prosecuted.
Given the hardships of Jane’s life, her frequent homelessness, more than twenty years spent undertaking the harsh regime of local prisons and the scarce availability of food and medical care, it is quite remarkable that, after her last release from prison, Jane survived another ten years, and died at the age of nearly 90 in 1907.