New Hibernia Review

New Hibernia Review 5.3 (2001) 66-86

Homicide in Late-Victorian Ireland and Scotland

Carolyn A. Conley

[Tables]

One of the peculiarities of Victorian Britain was the marked difference in perceived behavior and attitudes in the two largest Celtic nations. Despite their common roots, by the late nineteenth century the images and experiences of Scotland and Ireland were strikingly different. The Irish were regularly portrayed in the British press, in Scotland as well as England, as violent semibarbarians, incapable of showing gratitude for the blessings of British rule. The Scots, on the other hand, were seen as progressive, well-mannered, and orderly. While these perceptions are certainly open to clarification, the judicial record indicates that Scots were less violent than the Irish; or at least, the Scots were less likely to kill each other.

This study compares the records from homicide trials in Scotland and Ireland between 1867 and 1892 in order to examine the differences in the frequency of, responses to, and perceptions of criminal homicide. Almost any cross-cultural comparison of homicides is problematic, as the number of reported homicides always depends on who is counting and why. Accidents, suicides, and deaths from natural causes might be counted or not, depending on the official involved. Irish crimes were reported both as crimes and as "outrages" with no clear distinction between the two. Further, whether a particular homicide was reported as an outrage was at the discretion of the local police and some, but not all, of the homicides in the city of Dublin were excluded. In Scotland the procurator fiscal--roughly the equivalent of the state prosecutor--had sole discretion as to whether to treat a death as a homicide.

The Irish and Scottish records do not easily lend themselves to comparison. At the National Archives of Scotland there are registries listing every person tried before the High Court of Judiciary, the highest criminal court in the Scottish legal system. Every person arrested and formally charged with homicide appeared there. At the Irish National Archives there is a registry kept by the chief secretary which lists all the outrages reported in Ireland each year, including homicides. The problem is that while the Scottish records list the persons charged with homicide, the Irish report homicide victims. However, because the Irish records include information about the outcome of cases, it is possible to distinguish the Irish cases for which someone was arrested and tried. Therefore, [End Page 66] it is possible to compare homicide trials in Scotland and Ireland. Clearly, the number of homicide trials is not equivalent to the number of homicides. It does not include murder-suicides, unsolved crimes, or homicides in which there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.

Comparing raw figures is further complicated by the fact that while the population of Scotland grew during the period, Ireland's population declined. In 1871, there were more than two million more people living in Ireland than in Scotland; by 1891 the difference had dwindled to 679,000. After taking into account all these caveats, the data studied here counted 566 homicide trials recorded in Scottish records and 1,616 in Irish records. The average number of persons tried for homicide per 100,000 population per year between 1867 and 1892 was 0.6 for Scotland and 1.2 for Ireland. The Irish rate of homicide trials was therefore twice that of Scotland. ¹

In both countries the perception of the criminal justice system was colored by historical experience as well as by national pride. Scottish national identity in the nineteenth century is a complex issue, lately further complicated by the reappearance of a Scottish Parliament. ² As part of the United Kingdom since 1707, Scotland had experienced economic prosperity, had seen its citizens play a disproportionate role in the growth of the British Empire, and despite occasional tensions, had generally enjoyed a sense of partnership with its southern neighbor without the taint of colonialism. Scotland had maintained its own ecclesiastical and legal system, but Victorian Scots were often content to view themselves as North Britons. In the Glasgow...