Publisher's Synopsis
The pieces in this collection range from an account of the Skeleton Army riots against the Salvation Army in the early 1880s to the unsuccessful campaign to abolish the death penalty in the aftermath of the Second World War. They include essays on how the Home Office and Metropolitan Police responded to the unemployed riots in the West End of London in 1886, contest over the right to assemble in Trafalgar Square in 1887; the complex relationship between the Salvation Army's social scheme and the early labour movement; the changing meanings inscribed within the term "dangerous and criminal classes"; and English penal culture from the Gladstone Committee's Report on Prisons (1895) to the Labour Research Department's Prison System Enquiry Committee's report, English Prisons Today (1922).
