These parties are men from 20 years of age and upwards.
There is a class of women who go down the areas, under pretence of selling combs, stay-laces, boot-laces, and other trifling commodities. When they find a stealthy opportunity, many of them carry off articles from the kitchen, similar to those just described. These people are of all ages, some young, others tottering with old age. They generally belong to London, and go their regular rounds over the streets and squares. Many of them live in Westminster, St. Giles’s and Kent-street in the Borough.
There are other sneaks who enter the lobbies of houses, and commit robberies, chiefly in the West-end districts. These persons are of the same class, with the area sneak, but perhaps a step higher in the thievish profession. Their depredations are generally committed in the morning between 7 and 8, when servants are busily engaged dusting furniture and sweeping the hall and rooms. These thieves are then seen loitering about watching a favourable opportunity to steal.
The mode of stealing is the same in the passages of the houses of middle class people, and the entry halls of the elegant mansions of the gentry and aristocracy. Some of these thieves are men respectably dressed while others are in more shabby condition. They are young and middle aged. You may see them in those quiet localities, generally in dark clothing, having the appearance of respectable mechanics, or warehousemen. Others are like men who hang about the streets to run messages and assist men-servants.
They walk into the house, and pilfer any article they can find, such as articles of clothing, umbrellas, and walking-canes. Sometimes they take a coat off the knob and whip it under the breast of their coat, or put it on over their own. They frequently carry off a bundle of clothes, and sell them to some receiver of stolen property.
Such robberies are frequent in the neighbourhood of Brompton, Chelsea, Pimlico, Paddington, Stepney, Hackney, Bayswater, Camberwell, the Kent-road, and other similar districts.
The lobby sneaks are the same class of persons as those who enter the areas, and contrive to get a livelihood in this way. They live in various parts of London, such as the dirty slums, alleys, and by-streets of Covent-garden, Drury-lane, and St. Giles’s, Somers Town, Westminster, the Borough, Whitechapel, and Walworth Common, and other similar neighbourhoods.
Sometimes these men are seen in public-houses with large sums of money, no doubt got from the disposal of their plunder; and at other times lounge in low coffee-houses, without even the scanty means of paying for their bed, and are scarcely able to pay a penny for a cup of coffee. They often have to ask assistance from their companions, though a few days previous they may have been seen in possession of handfuls of cash.
They are usually unmarried, and live an uncomfortable, homeless life; often cohabiting with a low class of women, miserably clad, and generally wretched in appearance.
Middle aged and elderly women are occasionally engaged in sneaking depredations from the dwelling-houses of labouring men. An old woman may observe a child standing at her mother’s door, and ask if her mother is in. When the child answers, “No,” she will say, “I will mind the house, while you go and get a halfpenny worth of sweets,” giving the little girl a halfpenny. On the child’s return the woman has decamped carrying away with her money, or any other portable article she may have found in the house. This is the class of women we have noticed stealing from the shops of the butchers and cheesemongers.