Police

Abstract

Jonathan Wild and Moll Flanders both announce ‘a new scene’. Moll inflects the criminal career, substituting an individualized providential plot of social mobility and respectability for a conventional criminal fate. Moll’s new scene was to be the scene of ‘Reform’: those novel strategies which rewrote the political and economic codes of the nation (the franchise and the tariff) and regulated the culture of the poor during the period from the 1770s to the mid-nineteenth century. And Wild the ‘Thief-Taker’, in his role within an ambiguous condensation of crime and the new business regime, points towards one of its main contributions: the ‘police’. The most important moment of Moll’s life occurs in Newgate when, inspired by a visiting minister whose ‘way of treating me unlocked all the sluices of my passions’, she is persuaded to repent, in effect rewriting her picaresque life as a moral tale. What then is this appeal that can so transform a sinner into a penitent? Alas, ‘I am not able to repeat the excellent discourses of this extraordinary man’.¹ Given her expressed concern to provide an example, this absence is most telling. Moll is a scene of reform without, as yet, a reforming discourse.

‘Mrs. Pardiggle … pulled out a good book, as if it were a constable’s staff, and took the whole family into custody. I mean into religious custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were an inexorable moral Policeman carrying them all off to a station-house.’

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853), ch. VIII.