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Recent decades have witnessed growing use of social network analysis (SNA) to study criminal activities, including that of co-offending. However, few studies have examined co-offending networks within a historical context. This paper focuses on group-based crime in a large English town during the Victorian period, employing SNA methods to examine the prevalence, structure and composition of co-offending relationships. Networks for property, violent and victimless crimes were partitioned to compare co-offending across crime categories. Results indicate that co-offending groups were typically segregated, although there was a loosely-organised community of property crime offenders connected by ‘brokers’ who collaborated with multiple groups. Evidence also suggests that co-offending was largely characterised by assortative mixing in regard to sex, age and marital status.

Prize-fighting culture in the Victorian period was a male-dominated arena. As such, women’s involvement in pugilism – save for their role as spectators – has been largely overlooked by historians. This article casts light on the neglected experiences of nineteenth-century female prize-fighters, drawing attention to the ways in which women engaged in pugilism as well as the methods used by reporters, police officers and magistrates to shape public perceptions of female violence. It is argued that female prize-fighters received an overwhelmingly hostile reception, their very involvement in the masculine fighting environment resonating with contemporary anxieties over public immorality, violent crime, and the emergent movement for women’s emancipation.