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Policing Print: the Novel Before the Police

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Policing Print: the Novel Before the Police Policing Print: The novel before the police * Three Card Trick A Novel Jack Reynolds September 2016 A thesis submitted to the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. 1 Abstract: This thesis is presented in two sections; the first, ‘Policing Print: The novel and the practice of law enforcement 1720-1750,’ is a critical essay examining the interrelated development of the novel and the culture of policing in eighteenth-century London. ‘Policing Print’ investigates what D.A. Miller refers to as ‘the possibility of a radical entanglement between the nature of the novel and the practice of the police.’ While Miller’s book, The Novel and the Police, engages with post-1860 novels and policing practices, this thesis takes his subject back further and argues that the eighteenth-century novel was already engaged with the culture and practice of policing. The second, though primary, section is the historical novel, Three Card Trick, which is a fictionalised telling of the confrontation between the notorious housebreaker, Jack Sheppard, and the thief-taker, Jonathan Wild. Three Card Trick is an attempt to write a crime novel differently; to bend and stretch the genre in order to make it speak to the specificities of my historical characters and the milieu in which they are embedded. Three Card Trick therefore derives its narrative structures and strategies from the acts and institutions of crime and law enforcement which it describes; Wild is at once criminal and policeman, antagonist and ally, Sheppard both self-interested criminal and ascendant folk hero. These two parts of the thesis are significantly in dialogue with each other. ‘Policing Print’ argues that the novel and the culture of policing informed and were informed by one another. Attention to this movement between novelistic and policing practice produces new readings of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Henry Fielding’s The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great. In turn, these readings directly shape the creative methodology of my novel, Three Card Trick, by enabling it to engage creatively with the arguments made in my critical work. 2 Acknowledgements: I would like to thank: My incredible supervisory team, Rebecca Stott and Cath Sharrock, without whose attention and patience this thesis would have been impossible. Craig Warner, Tara Morris Philip Langeskov, Rebecca Tamas, Nathan Hamilton, Anna Metcalfe, Anna Jones, Tyona Campbell and all my colleagues on the PhD course, for their feedback, encouragement and companionship. 3 Contents: Policing Print: The novel before the police 6 Bibliography 65 Three Card Trick 77 4 Policing Print: the novel before the police Introduction: I - Police before police At the turn of the eighteenth century, there was no such institution as the police, and no such person as the policeman. For much of the century, there was barely the word police. In its modern sense, police was entirely non-existent as verb, noun, institution, and concept. No police, no policing, no policework.1 Where police did appear, it was as a borrowing from French, signifying variously ‘policy,’ ‘civilization,’ or, to those who associated it with continental statism, ‘absolutism.’2 The century would be more than halfway done before police took on something approaching its modern meaning and began to refer to practices and institutions of professional law enforcement and crime prevention.3 Even after the new meaning appeared, the older, broader meanings persisted, as theories of police in the sense of ‘policy’ became central to the workings of government, and police in the sense we understand it remained a rarity.4 So no police. In the absence of the word, the ideology, or the institution, the work we now call policing was shared between private citizens and a haphazard agglomeration of local institutions with 1 The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern sense of ‘the civil force of a state, responsible for the prevention and detection of crime and the maintenance of public order’ to the early nineteenth century. 2 For a detailed history of the changing meaning and use of police, see Leon Radzinowicz, A History Of English Criminal Law And Its Administration From 1750 (London: Stevens, 1948), III, 1-8; F. M. Dodsworth, ‘The Idea Of Police In Eighteenth-Century England: Discipline, Reformation, Superintendence, C. 1780–1800’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 69 (2008), 583-604; Elaine A Reynolds, Before The Bobbies (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 3 John B Bender, Imagining The Penitentiary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 1; Contradicting the OED, Bender identifies John Fielding (half-brother of Henry and co-founder of the Bow Street Runners) as the first Englishman to regularly use police in its modern sense, but provides no specific citation. Police in the sense of a body dedicated to the prevention and detection of crime is used unambiguously in the title and text of John Fielding’s 1758 pamphlet An Account of the Origin and Effects of a Police Set on Foot, which recounts the formation and operations of the Bow Street Runners. 4 Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries On The Laws Of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), II, 161; Blackstone defines what he refers to as ‘police and oeconomy’: ‘The due regulation and domestic order of the kingdom: whereby the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behaviour to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.’ Blackstone’s use contains a germ of Fielding’s new sense, but the infection is mild; although Blackstone specifies systems of ‘due regulation,’ the sense is of a governmental strategy rather than an institution or a class of action. 5 no central organizing force. London was divided into twenty-six wards, each of which was further divided into precincts of varying sizes. These divisions overlaid the older parish lines, creating a palimpsest of ancient and modern divisions and boundaries.5 In this fragmented political and geographical structure, even the localization of power was not straightforward, and the institutions and practices of law enforcement emerging from London’s diffuse civic organization were themselves fragmented and inconsistent, differing widely in both scale and strategy. Constables, for example, were recruited by the precinct, but their sphere of duty encompassed the whole ward.6 This meant that, since the number of precincts per ward was highly variable, the number of constables in each ward also varied wildly. According to recruitment figures provided by John Beattie, Bread Street ward had thirteen precincts and 331 households, which meant that in Bread Street ward there was one constable for every 25.5 households. By contrast, in the ward of Cripplegate Without, which was composed of four large precincts, and so could nominate only four constables, there were 486.5 households for every officer.7 Official practice varied from ward to ward and precinct to precinct, and responsibility for the prevention and detection of crime was distributed between a number of institutions and groups whose co-operation was limited.8 Beadles, constables, and watchmen made up the main body of the city’s official policers. These officers derived their powers separately from the city, ward, precinct and parish respectively, though a loose chain of supervision existed with beadles co-ordinating the activities of the constables in their wards, and constables directing the efforts of the watch within their precinct. However, this limited organization depended for its cohesion on the discretionary willingness to co- operate of individual officers, rather than on any central mandate.9 The duties of these officials comprised a fraction of those we associate with the modern police. Constables held the power of arrest, but had no duty to investigate crimes in which there was no readily available suspect, and they were expected to spend the majority of their hours of duty at home, so as to be available to victims, rather than in the active pursuit of criminals. As John Beattie writes, the constabular oath of office ‘makes it clear that there was no expectation that a constable would 5 John Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 6-17. Leon Radzinowicz, A History Of English Criminal Law And Its Administration From 1750 (London: Stevens, 1948), I, 32-60; Reynolds, 12-14 6 Beattie, 114. 7 Beattie, 116. 8 Reynolds, 18-24. 9 Peter King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740-1820 (Oxford: University Press, 2000), 62-70 6 investigate a crime, discover the perpetrator, formulate and bring the charges’.10 Watchmen did patrol, walking the streets between the hours of 9pm and 5am in winter and 10pm and 6am in summer, though they held no powers of arrest, and the long, unwieldy halberds which they carried as a mark of office until the second quarter of the century were more suitable for sentry duty than for active patrol in the narrow streets of the city, this indicating their largely deterrent function.11 So, with official efforts largely confined to prevention and deterrence, the detection and investigation of crimes and the discovery and apprehension of perpetrators was largely left to victims and their associates. This diffusion of policing powers created a zone of opportunity in which private interests could operate, and in the first three decades of the century a variety of unofficial policing endeavours emerged in response to the problem of crime.
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