Analyse how the writer uses language and tone to give the impression that londoners werent safe in the passage.
leaving aside drunkenness, theft was rampant. while children might pickpocket and steal from barrows on the streets, women might engage in shoplifting, and, as for london's sly con men, cheats, "magsmen" or "sharpers," they were notorious. so were the housebreakers working in teams, and slipping into homes and shops and warehouses. mugging, with its associated violence, was rife. a hanky dipped in chloroform might be used to subdue someone before robbing him, or a man's hat might be tipped over his face to facilitate the crime (this was called "bonneting"). another ruse was to lure men down to the riverside by using prostitutes as decoys. the dupes would then be beaten up and robbed out of sight of passers-by. violence could, of course, easily extend to murder. prostitutes themselves ran huge risks. no one knows how many of them were strangled or stabbed or butchered (jack the ripper was far from the only villain, and dickens's nancy must be mourned for many a pitiful "lost woman"). no respectable woman would have ventured forth after dark at all, if she had any choice in the matter. even if a policeman appeared on the crime scene, he might be driven off by having nitric acid thrown in his face. the were at special risk. well-turned-out children might be waylaid, dragged down an alley, and stripped of their finery, or pet dogs kidnapped for ransom or simply filched for their skins. around mid-century, and again in 1862, "garrotting" or half-strangling unwary pedestrians from behind while accomplices stripped them of their valuables, caused great waves of panic. there were big-time criminals as well as gangs of street hooligans. in a new version of highway robbery, for instance, bankers' consignments might be snatched in transit. there was also a surge in gun crime in the 1880s, and hardened burglars "increasingly went armed."
which areas were most affected?
probably the riskiest places for theft and pickpocketing were in the open markets of the east end (whitechapel, the haunt of jack the ripper in 1888, often crops up in this context too), the insalubrious areas of south london, and crowded railway stations. but it was risky to be anywhere where many people gathered or, alternatively, where there was no one else around. lee jackson's dictionary of victorian london includes a letter to the times from 1850, recording a mugging by regent's park. the assailants were two fashionably-dressed young men who started by chatting to their victim quite innocuously about the weather, and later eluded a policemen who thought them to be "gents" larking around after a night on the town . liza picard in victorian london gives the case of an mp "walking along pall mall in broad daylight one day in 1862, when two men attacked and 'garrotted' him, one beating him while the other stole his watch"; picard quotes a french visitor who wrote in 1866: "crime is developing itself into a mania london has ceased to be a city which one can traverse at night with mind at rest and the hands in the pockets" . home wasn't much of a refuge either, with large rises in housebreaking recorded towards the end of the century. there was general panic in the capital on more than one occasion, the worst being on "bloody sunday" in november 1887 when hordes of east enders, the dreaded "king mob," were denied access to trafalgar square for a socialist demonstration. "[o]ne feels as if one might meet violence any where," wrote the social reformer octavia hill in 1886 .