Methodological and Theoretical Implications of the Study of Law and Crime

The praise given by scholarly reviewers to David Philips' Crime and Authority in Victorian England1 greatly puzzled me. At least two of these reviewers pointed to serious weaknesses in the book, and it is hard to see how they could have reconciled their praise with their criticisms. Even allowing for a 'protective' style of reviewing, perhaps peculiar to historians,2 the contradictions seemed glaringly obvious. In the Times Literary Supplement of 19 April 1978 (p. 557) David Jones wrote in his opening paragraph, 'This is an important work, one of the very few pioneering studies on Victorian society that have appeared in recent years. Both the scholarship and technical expertise in this book reveal David Philips as a historian of exceptional talent'. Later, the same reviewer said that Philips' 'conclusions are by any standards significant and provocative'. Yet Jones suggested that Philips was not aware of the significance of his failure to deal with offences other than indictable ones, that he ignored the importance of the political setting of the period and lacked depth in his treatment of industrial society and of the 'normalisation' of crime, and that he failed to include an adequate discussion of the magistracy on the grounds that he had already published an article on that topic. Similarly, Barbara Weinberger began her review in the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History (No. 36, 1978, p. 61) by reference to 'this very lucid and useful study', which, she later asserted, 'will undoubtedly become the standard reference for research in this field'. Yet she also criticised the failure to deal adequately with the magistracy, and?after praising the section on industrial theft?said

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