Fear of burglars, and stories of houses being burgled, were a fixture of my 1980s childhood in suburban Birmingham. A two-week holiday away in August during the school summer holidays was understood to pose the biggest risk. Preventive measures included locks and burglar alarms but also neighbourly assistance such as someone to pick up the post from the mat in the hallway so the house did not look empty. Mitigating the risk of burglary was an integral part of holiday preparations, like buying sun cream and packing the car. Of course, people still secure their homes before they go away on holiday, but the cultural fear of burglary has lost some of its potency as it has become less frequent and as other crimes spark greater cultural anxiety. Between 1993 when I was still at school and 2009 when I was into my thirties, burglary in England and Wales declined by 67 per cent.Footnote 1
Before reading Eloise Moss’ fascinating Night Raiders, I did not know that until the Theft Act 1968, burglaries only happened at night. Breaking into and stealing from domestic properties during the day was housebreaking. The 1968 legislation brought the two offences together as both constituting burglary and the crime was no longer solely nocturnal. Moss uses this nocturnal crime as a lens to explore two features of modern urban life: pleasure and fear. While people anxiously setting their burglar alarms would no doubt be foxed by the idea of pleasure in burglary, Moss highlights heroes of folk and popular culture such as Charles Peace and Raffles, the gentleman burglar, to illustrate the pleasurable consumption of stories about criminals who outwitted the authorities (up to a point, in Peace's case). In the 1920s, narratives of pleasure in burglary had their real-life analogue in stories about cat burglars – skilled operators who traversed city roof tops and evaded the police.
As the risk of burglary solidified into a widely experienced fear, and one exploited to market insurance and security devices to middle-class households, the narrative of pleasure declined, although it did not disappear. Appearing on television screens the year that burglary ceased to be a crime that only took place at night, the Milk Tray Man deployed some of the skills of the cat burglar to deliver chocolates to beautiful ladies, and his black outfit was similarly evocative. A consummate smooth operator, the Milk Tray Man evoked another aspect of the heroic burglar – his sexual allure. The cultural association between burglary and sexual penetration is an enduring element of the narratives of pleasure and fear.
Burglars are not always men, but it would be fair to say the figure of the burglar in the cultural imaginary is male. Moss examines how women accused of burglary were presumed to be under the influence of men, which minimized their agency. This minimization preserved gender norms that constructed active, capable men and supportive, less-effective women.
The cunning and sexual potency of the burglar were significant attributes mobilized in the narrative of fear. Insurance companies emphasized that no home was ‘impregnable’ to burglars, meaning insurance was an essential purchase. The insurance industry expanded in the 1920s and 1930s and focused on recruiting customers from the middle classes. Burglary was frequently intra-class and always a crime experienced disproportionately by working-class households. However, these households were not as lucrative for companies seeking to profit from burglary. The need for responsible householders to buy insurance in order to replace any stolen possessions was advertised via emotional appeals to middle-class people's identities as homeowners. In particular, the (presumed) male head of the household must consider and mitigate the threat of burglary as part of fulfilling his role. As the middle class expanded, so too did the customer base for insurance companies.
While insurers sought to convince their customers that there was no such thing as an impregnable home, companies producing security devices such as locks, safes and alarms argued these were technologies for creating the burglar-proof home. Again, the importance of the responsible householder was central, as was the imperative to protect the home and any female inhabitants from violation. In these chapters, Moss’ work chimes with David Garland's explication of the late twentieth-century ‘culture of control’, which was underpinned by the criminology of the self and the criminology of the other.Footnote 2 The criminology of the self refers to the everyday crime-prevention measures responsible citizens should observe to protect themselves. The criminology of the other encapsulates the sensational media-driven creation of criminals as fear-inducing folk devils. The insurance and security industries channel both the criminology of the self and the criminology of the other. Unlike Garland, Moss demonstrates how gendered understandings of crime, risk and domesticity have been at the heart of these constructions. She is also attuned to how the narratives of pleasure and fear were largely shaped by middle-class sensibilities.
Night Raiders is a hugely rewarding cultural history, written in an accessible style that will appeal to historians, criminologists and other interested readers alike. Its focus is on metropolitan urban life although its insights are likely to be applicable to other British cities. Inevitably, a good book always leaves the reader wanting more and I would like to have known more about the interconnection between cultural imaginings of burglars, the commercialization of mitigating the risks of burglary and the growth of suburbia. The encroachment of urban others – working class and very possibly racialized – who do not belong on tree-lined streets is a component part of suburban fears of the burglar. Suburban life offers residents the opportunity to trade hubbub for tranquility and excitement for safety, while still requiring vigilance from householders.
What of the great burglary drop in the 1990s? Some criminologists have advanced the ‘security hypothesis’ as an explanation. This is the argument that devices such as deadlocks and lights on a timer indoors and a sensor outdoors have helped to dramatically cut rates of domestic burglary – for those that can afford them. Poorer households and those in less secure rented accommodation are at greater risk.Footnote 3 The differential class-based experience of burglary persists.
