"PUTTING ON THE POSH" RETAIL, CRIME, GENDER, CLASS, AND THE FORTY ELEPHANTS IN 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY LONDON

Abstract

For over 100 years, the Forty Elephants, an all-female working-class shoplifting gang, terrorized the streets and shops of nineteenth-and twentieth-century London. Their operation included over 75 members, who participated in criminal activities that ranged from blackmail schemes to organized shoplifting in department stores from London?s West End to the city of Derby. Using a wide-range of sources such as court records, habitual criminal registers, prison calendars, police memoirs, and newspaper articles, this thesis explores the success of the gang from the 1870s to 1926 by examining their changing criminal methods under the gang?s three leaders: Mary Carr, Alice Diamond, and Maggie Hughes. While most academic studies of crime tend to relegate women in criminal gangs as victims or pawns to the men around them, this thesis argues that the women were successful criminals with their own independence and agency that actively chose to pursue a life of crime. By mimicking the mannerisms of female middle-class shoppers, the Forty Elephants defied class and gender boundaries, and used the department store and the modernizing city of London to establish a respected position in the criminal underworld. In the end, this thesis examines the origins, evolution, and expansion of the Forty Elephants from blackmailers to professional shoplifters and argues that professional female shoplifting gangs were serious criminal agents, who were just as violent and successful as their male counterparts.