Abstract
The police are noticeably absent from the criminography of the 1820s and early 1830s. A conspicuous constabulary they certainly were in terms of their physical presence on the streets of London; but in the contemporary literature they were conspicuous rather by their absence, existing at best as marginal figures. This can in part be explained by the fact that a police force in the modern sense did not come into being until 1829, when the New Metropolitan Police Force was inaugurated. There had been representatives of policing before this time, most notably the Bow Street Runners, who were equally under-represented in literature. Where policing of any kind appeared in periodicals and books it was invariably denigrated, despised or dismissed. Yet, by 1850, not only the preventive police, but also the relatively new detective police force, were being written about and positively celebrated in fact and fiction by, among others, an author as well-known and respected as Charles Dickens. I intend here to analyse this reversal in public opinion from opprobrium to approbation of the police with reference to the popular literature of the time.
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Notes
Henry Goddard, Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner, ed. and intro. by Patrick Pringle (London: Museum Press Ltd, 1956), Introduction, p. ix.
John Wight, ‘Advertisement to the First Edition’, Mornings at Bow Street: A Selection of the Most Entertaining Reports Which Have Appeared in the Morning Herald (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1875 [1824]), p. iv.
Clive Emsley, The English Police: A Social and Political History (London: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1996), p. 20.
Beiton Cobb, The First Detectives and the Early Career of Richard Mayne (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), p. 40.
Peter Drexler, Literatur, Recht, Kriminalität: Untersuchungen zur Vorgeschichte des englsischen Detektivromans 1830–1890 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 109.
Drexler is citing Christopher Pulling, Mr. Punch and the Police (London: Butterworth, 1964).
Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, etc., 7th edition (London, 1806 [1796]), p. 10.
Cited in Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750–1900 (London: Longman, 1996 [1978]), p. 56.
Patrick Colquhoun, ‘Preface’, Treatise on the Commerce and Police of the River Thames (London, 1806 [1800]), n.p.
Rowan and Mayne, General Instruction Book (1829), p. 1. A copy of this book, with detailed instructions for the activities of the different ranks of policemen, was issued to each recruit on joining the force. It was in print by September 1829, but required amendment and was reissued with corrections in October 1829. See David Ascoli, The Queen’s Peace: The Origin and Development of the Metropolitan Police 1829–1979 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979), p. 85, n. 1.
David Robinson, ‘The Local Government of the Metropolis, and Other Populous Places’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 29:175 (January 1831), pp. 82–104. Originally published anonymously, this article has been ascribed to David Robinson by the Wellesley Index to Periodicals 1824–1900.
Edwin Chadwick, ‘Preventive Police’, London Review 1:1 (30 January 1829), pp. 252–308, p. 290.
Duane DeVries, Dickens’s Apprentice Years: The Making of a Novelist (New York: Harvester Press, 1976), p. 18.
Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Evety-Day People (London: Oxford University Press, 1957 [1836–1837]), p. 47.
Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1965 [1962]), p. 2.
Stephen Inwood, ‘Policing London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829–1850’, London Journal 15:2 (1990), pp. 129–146, p. 144.
Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Law and its Administration from 1750 Vol. TV: Grappling for Control (London: Stevens and Sons, 1956), pp. 191–192.
R. F. Stewart, … And Always a Detective: Chapters on the History of Detective Fiction (London: David and Charles, 1980), p. 126.
Martin Kayman, From Bow Street to Baker Street: Mystery, Detection, and Narrative (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 119.
Ian Ousby, The Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 70.
Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man, 1830–1850 (Harmondsworth: Penguin University Books, 1974 [1963]), p. 17.
Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998 [1957]), p. 347.
See Philip Collins, ‘Dickens’s Reading’, Dickensian 60 (1964), pp. 136–151.
Charles Dickens, ‘A “Detective” Police Party’, reprinted in Hunted Down: The Detective Stories of Charles Dickens, ed. by Peter Haining (London: Peter Owen, 1996), pp. 71–90, p. 73. The original was published in Household Words 1:18 (27 July 1850). As the articles are reprinted in Haining’s text without alteration, for convenience all references will be to that edition. Dates of the originals are given parenthetically in the text.
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© 2005 Heather Worthington
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Worthington, H. (2005). A Conspicuous Constabulary: or, Why Policemen Wear Tall Helmets. In: The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230506282_4
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