Thieves' Kitchen: The Regency Underworld

Alongside the cultural brilliance and high achievement of the Regency period, the world of Pride and Prejudice and the Nature poets, of Constable and Nash, there existed also a pulsating urban underworld where crime and vice of every kind flourished. A varied throng of pleasure-seekers and criminals -- among them gamblers, pickpockets, brothel-keepers and body snatchers -- crowded the streets of London. All indulged themselves with little restraint until the coming of the Metropolitan Police Act in 1829 curbed their more obvious activities. Thieves' Kitchen takes us into this often forgotten world, and draws on a wide range of contemporary sources, including unpublished notebooks, to provide a vivid picture of criminals at work. It was a world of sometimes startling contrasts in which aristocracy, even royalty, rubbed shoulders with all manner of crooks, vice-pedlars and "unfortunates." The exclusive clubs of St. James's where vast fortunes changed hands overnight, and the flash houses and rookeries in the ill-lit streets and alleyways of Whitechapel and St. Giles's where crimes were plotted and concealed; the high-spirited adventures of Tom and Jerry, and the macabre exploits of the resurrection-men; women of pleasure and grand-scale embezzlers -- all are part of Donald A. Low's colorful portrait of high life and low, of the criminal and the racy, which was the Regency underworld.