The Police and the Public from the 1870s to 1914

Abstract

Late-Victorian and Edwardian England was a policed society in a way that set it apart from Regency and early-Victorian England and that had more in common with the twentieth-century experience, at least until the 1970s. This did not mean that the police were universally liked. The Times painted an over-rosy picture of working-class attitudes with its reference to the ‘handyman of the streets’ but the very fact of a policed society was evidence of the ability of the police to win support and defuse or disperse opposition to such an extent that much of their work was unquestioned and many of their men went about that work unchallenged.¹ Despite the importance of this development, policing late-Victorian and Edwardian England has not attracted the same degree of detailed attention from historians. The broad outlines have been established and offer a relatively comforting image of society that contrasts with the experience of the late twentieth century.² However, there is a danger not only of losing the subtlety that comes from an appreciation of the variety of local experience, but also of underestimating the problems that still faced the police in the second and third generations, and thus of overstating the stability of that policed society so praised by The Times in the early twentieth century.