Reprinted as 'The Ruffian' in collected editions of the series.

Matthew Arnold uses the word 'rough' in the euphemistic, softening sense Dickens objects to, throughout Ch. 2 ('Doing as One Likes') of Culture and Anarchy (1869), where he argues that 'the difference between an Irish Fenian and an English rough is ...immense', and that 'the Hyde Park rough' 'has not yet quite found his groove and settled down to his work, and so he is just asserting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes'.

As the present paper belongs to neither of the previous 'Series' of 'Uncommercial Traveller' papers, and awkwardly pre-empts the return of the column which Dickens planned to coincide with the commencement of a complete New Series of AYR on 5 December 1868, it is clear that Dickens felt provoked into publishing it by reading of particular offences. On 3 September 1868, a 'Police Report' in The Times noted that the cases had been heard at Southwark magistrate's court 'of desperate highway robbery committed within the past few weeks by an organised gang known as the Waterloo highwaymen'; four members of the 'gang' had been captured, though not all were detained (p. 9, col. f). Several other Times reports later in the month illustrate further offences of which Dickens complains here. But the general, penological question of the treatment of habitual criminals was one in which Dickens shows an abiding interest. The Habitual Criminals Bill, prepared by Lord Kimberley, was on the Commons agenda for 1868, and became law the following year. On 3 April 1869, an article called 'Injured Innocents' appeared in AYR, containing the following passage which complements Dickens's views in the present Item:

It may be the case (we do not say it is) that the efficiency of the force is not what it was; but how that can affect the question of making professional crime as difficult and dangerous a pursuit as it can be made, or what argument can be found in it against a measure eminently preventive and not detective, is more than we can understand. Habitual criminals exist and carry on their trade... for no other reason than because the police have no preventive power whatever over them, unless detected in some offence. It is illogical in the last degree to punish severely detected crime, so long as, undetected, it is thus tacitly encouraged (N.S. Vol. I, p. 418).

The 'Society for the protection of remonstrant Ruffians' mentioned below seems to be Dickens's satirical version of the 'Discharged Prisoners Society' which shared with the Police responsibility for monitoring prisoners released on tickets-of-leave.

The prosecution of a teenage girl, apparently a prostitute, narrated in the second part of the paper, is an episode also recalled by Dickens in the HW article 'Stores for the First of April', in which he attacks a mixed range of contemporary abuses, including Police toleration of thieves' gatherings, and the use of foul language in places of public resort:

The writer has himself obtained a conviction by a police magistrate ...for this shameful and demoralising offence—which is as common as the mud in the streets. He obtained it with difficulty, the charge not being within the experience of anyone concerned; but, he insisted on the law, and it was clear (wonderful to relate!) and it was enforced.... (Vol. XV, 7 Mar 1857).

In bringing this action, Dickens appears to have made use of the clause in the Act for Further Improving the Police in and near the Metropolis (2 and 3 Vict., cap. 47) which states that '[e]very person who shall use any threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour with intent to provoke a breach of the peace, or whereby a breach of the peace shall be occasioned' should be liable to 'a penalty of not more than 40 shillings' (54.13). Assuming the internal evidence of the present item to be reliable, K. J. Fielding has argued that the episode Dickens describes 'certainly took place some twenty-five years before he wrote the [present] article' in AYR, when the 'newest Police Act' (1839) was still relatively new, and Dickens and his young family were living at 1 Devonshire Terrace, near Regent's Park ('Charles Dickens and 'The Ruffian'', English, Vol. X [1954], pp. 88-92). This conclusion is employed to counter the tendency of critics and biographers to confuse the date of the episode with the date of the article, and thus to read it as evidence of Dickens's increasingly authoritarian attitudes in later years. With greater justice, Philip Collins has called attention to the aggression apparent in Dickens's call for assaults on women to be punished by flogging (Dickens and Crime, 1963, p. 17-18). This too, however, should be set in context of an overall hardening of attitudes in public debates on penology in 1868. During the reading of the Bill to carry out 'Capital Punishment within Prisons' in the Commons, for example, the celebrated humanitarian J. S. Mill had, in supporting the continuation of the death penalty, spoken in defence of whipping as 'a most objectionable punishment in ordinary cases, but a particularly appropriate one for crimes of brutality, especially against women' (Hansard, 3rd Series, 21 April 1868, Vol. CXCI, p. 1054).

Literary allusions:

• 'hewing wood and drawing water': Joshua 9:27;
• 'Mr Carlyle, some time since, awakened a little pleasantry by writing of his own experience of the Ruffian of the streets': Carlyle's essay 'Model Prisons' (Latter Day Pamphlets, 1850, No. II), with its insistence that 'scoundrel is scoundrel' and attack on ''universal Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Societies'' contains many passages similar in style and substance to 'The Ruffian', and was heavily criticised in the edition of Punch for 16 March 1850 (Vol. 18, p. 107);
• 'Red Riding Hood... the Wolf': the popular Fairy Tale;
• 'all his evils deeds upon his head': version of Shylock's 'My deeds upon my head! I crave the law' in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1600), Act IV, Sc. 1.

Author: John Drew; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859-1870, 2000.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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