IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB112455571

‘Flash houses’: Public houses and geographies of moral contagion in 19th-century London (2022)

Eleanor Bland (Author)

History of the Human Sciences
Volume: 35
Issue: 1
Pages: 32-55
Publication date: 2022
Language: English

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951211024561

DOI: 10.1177/09526951211024561

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

‘Flash houses’, a distinctive type of public house associated with criminal activity, are a shadowy and little-studied aspect of early 19th-century London. This article situates flash houses within a wide perspective, arguing that the discourses on flash houses were part of concerns about the threat of the urban environment to the moral character of its inhabitants. The article draws on an original synthesis of a range of sources that refer to flash houses, including contemporary literature, newspapers, court documents, and government papers. It demonstrates that flash houses were part of both popular intrigue about the perceived ‘criminal underworld’ and official concerns about the collusion between police officers and suspected offenders, since police officers allegedly frequented flash houses to gather criminal information. A detailed examination of this term reveals anxieties about the state of the metropolis, poverty, and criminality that were central to the early 19th-century consciousness. However, the discussion of flash houses in this context also demonstrates a powerful connection in contemporary minds between the physical spaces of the city and the risks that they posed to inhabitants' morals. While associations between the physical environment and morality have been drawn throughout history, flash houses represent a paradigmatic moment in this dialogue. This is because different moral concerns coalesced around the discourse on flash houses: anxieties about the criminal underworld, the potential for moral degradation of young people who frequented these spaces, and the corruption of police officers through contact with known or suspected offenders.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB112455571

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Catherine Cox; Hilary Marland; (2018)
Broken Minds and Beaten Bodies: Cultures of Harm and the Management of Mental Illness in Mid- to Late Nineteenth-century English and Irish Prisons (/p/isis/citation/CBB458369956/)

Chapter Milburn, Colin; (2008)
Wissenschaft aus der Hölle: Jack the Ripper und die viktorianische Vivisektion (/p/isis/citation/CBB001024352/)

Book Samson W. Lim; (2016)
Siam's new detectives: Visualizing crime and conspiracy in modern Thailand (/p/isis/citation/CBB055737159/)

Book Jinee Lokaneeta; (2020)
The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India (/p/isis/citation/CBB848872389/)

Book Neu, John; (2009)
Show Me the Way to Go Home (/p/isis/citation/CBB001090050/)

Article Rebecca Lemov; (2018)
An Episode in the History of PreCrime (/p/isis/citation/CBB532997986/)

Article Jennifer Wallis; (2018)
A Home or a Gaol? Scandal, Secrecy, and the St James’s Inebriate Home for Women (/p/isis/citation/CBB355616622/)

Article Amy Helen Bell; (2017)
Abortion Crime Scene Photography in Metropolitan London 1950–1968 (/p/isis/citation/CBB513811401/)

Article Matthew Perkins-McVey; (2022)
Kant, intoxicated: the aesthetics of drunkenness, between moral duty and “active play” (/p/isis/citation/CBB800355901/)

Article Michael Ruse; (2022)
Evolution and ethics viewed from within two metaphors: machine and organism (/p/isis/citation/CBB267078190/)

Chapter Cornelia Lambert; (2020)
Barefoot children in a ‘fine room’: Robert Owen, Adam Smith, and social regeneration in Scotland (/p/isis/citation/CBB480269477/)

Article Geoffrey Cantor; (2021)
Thompson, Biographer (/p/isis/citation/CBB000247262/)

Article David Ceccarelli; (2021)
Theistic evolution and evolutionary ethics: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Huxley’s legacy (/p/isis/citation/CBB339183866/)

Article Maurizio Meloni; (2017)
Disentangling life: Darwin, selectionism, and the postgenomic return of the environment (/p/isis/citation/CBB291217176/)

Article Harro Maas; (2020)
Monitoring the self: François-Marc-Louis Naville and his moral tables (/p/isis/citation/CBB489750642/)

Article Birgit Braun; (2020)
Person and ethics of a psychiatrist during National Socialism: Friedrich Meggendorfer (1880–1953) (/p/isis/citation/CBB172692386/)

Article Wendy Sims-Schouten; (2022)
‘A troublesome girl is pushed through’: Morality, biological determinism, resistance, resilience, and the Canadian child migration schemes, 1883–1939 (/p/isis/citation/CBB503354077/)

Article Magne Brekke Rabben; Øyvind Thomassen; (2019)
Humane treatment versus means of control: coercive measures in Norwegian high-security psychiatry, 1895–1978 (/p/isis/citation/CBB458667420/)

Thesis Elisabeth M. Yang; (2022)
Constructing Moral Babies: The Medical and Scientific Enterprise of Infancy in America, 1850s–1920s (/p/isis/citation/CBB171852329/)

Book Saumitra Basu; (2021)
The History of Forensic Science in India (/p/isis/citation/CBB589250648/)