Novels about the underworld in older times

Let's say before 1900.
Thieves, courtesans, vagrants.
I've heard the titles The Crimson Petal and the White, The Robbers, Memoirs of a Geisha, Lazarillo de Tormes.
I'm especially interested in people who were half-aristocrats, half-criminals. The Milady in Dumas. Non-fiction books would also be useful.
This is a certain motif, I believe, as in Dr Jekyll.
In David Copperfield, girls drawn into prostitution in London are mentioned.
Aretino's Dialogues are probably useful.
Personally, I don't like this current very much, but many people were in these trades in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagrancy
I can see that courtesans are a popular subject for novels nowadays.
The Scarlet Letter, Camille, Nana.

Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet & Fingersmith might be worth a try

This series is about a spy/courtesan in the Napoleontic era.
https://www.librarything.com/nseries/93505/Elza

>1 asurbanipal:

Non-fiction books would also be useful.

When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store, by Elaine S. Abelson
The Age of Consent: Victorian Prostitution and its Enemies, by Michael Pearson
Victorian Murderesses: a True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women accused of Unspeakable Crime, by Mary S. Hartman
Urban Crime in Victorian England, by J. J. Tobias

A good novel is Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, (published in the U.S. as The Trial of Elizabeth Cree), by Peter Ackroyd

In YA fiction, a lot of Leon Garfield's novels qualify. The Sally Lockhart series by Philip Pullman and These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly are also worth checking out.

Nonfiction titles include The Regency Underworld and Underworld London.

Oh! I thought you were referring to the physical underworld.

"Every woman is a bit of a rogue." I once read this quotation in a dictionary of quotations. Probably there are also psychiatric books explaining the phenomenon. Often this was done for the money.
Oliver Twist? Balzac's Vautrin and Hugo's Valjean. Villon.

Mary S. Hartman's Victorian Murderesses is SO good. Definitely second that rec!

Also, check out Judith Walkowitz's City of Dreadful Delight and her Prostitution in Victorian Society
Philip Sugden's The Complete History of Jack the Ripper -- more serious history than sensationalistic narrative
Hallie Rubenhold's The Five (on the victims of Jack the Ripper -- corrects much of Sugden & everyone before him)

>6 2wonderY: And I assumed it meant the mythological underworld, and I was all ready to suggest the relevant episodes in Odyssey and the Aeneid, or Gilgamesh, or the Mabinogion...

>7 asurbanipal: How is being a "rogue" a gendered characteristic? And surely most people involved in illegal activities are doing so at least partially as a source of income?

So criminal underworld, not political? So that would leave out Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Also, specifically Europe?

For nonfiction, it's hard to beat London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew et al.

Women of Karantina is an Egyptian mafia 100 years of solitude, more or less.
Dicken's friend Wilkie Collins gives a good line in victorian skeeve if you can bear the wordiness.
I loved The Victorian Underworld by Kellow Chesney - massmarket social history nonfic. It has loads of thieves' cant and how to crack an 1860 safe, that kind of thing