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.

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).