The Police and the Periodical: Policing and Detection in Victorian Journalism and the Rise of Detective Fiction, c. 1840-1900 Samuel Joseph Saunders A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Liverpool John Moores University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2018 Acknowledgements My overwhelming thanks go to Dr. Jonathan Cranfield for his support, guidance, advice and, above all, his seemingly endless supply of patience, which never wavers no matter how much I have tried it. I’d also like to thank Professor Glenda Norquay for her supervision and wonderfully directed advice. My gratitude also to the School of English at Liverpool John Moores University for providing funding, support and teaching opportunities, and to all of the staff at the Museum of Policing in Cheshire, the National Library of Scotland and the Parliamentary Archive in Westminster for all of their help to a student who often didn’t know quite what he was doing. Thank you also to my entire family for their continued support and resolute optimism, and I am indebted to my in-laws who continue to put a roof over me. For all of the above, and for everything else, I thank Emma, without whom I would never have got started. 1 Abstract This thesis explores the connections between the nineteenth century periodical press and the development of detective fiction, between approximately 1840 and 1900. It argues that these two Victorian developments were closely interrelated, and that each had significant impacts on the other which has hitherto gone underexplored in academic scholarship. The thesis argues that the relationship between the police and the periodical press solidified in the mid-Victorian era, thanks to the simultaneous development of a nationwide system of policing as a result of the passage of the 1856 County and Borough Police Act and the abolition of the punitive ‘taxes on knowledge’ throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. This established a connection between the police and the periodical, and the police were critically examined in the periodical press for the remainder of the nineteenth century from various perspectives. This, the thesis argues, had a corresponding effect on various kinds of fiction, which began to utilise police officers in new ways – notably including as literary guides and protectors for authors wishing to explore growing urban centres in mid-Victorian cities which had been deemed ‘criminal’. ‘Detective fiction’ in the mid-Victorian era, therefore, was characterised by trust in the police officer to protect middle-class social and economic values. Towards the end of the nineteenth century however, everything changed. The thesis explores how journalistic reporting of a corruption scandal in 1877, as well as the Fenian bombings and Whitechapel murders of the 1880s, contributed to significant changes in the detective genre. This was the construction of the image of the ‘bumbling bobby’, and the corresponding rise of the private or amateur detective, which ultimately led to the appearance of the character who epitomised the relationship between the police and the periodical – Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. 2 Contents Introduction – Policing and Periodicals: Summary, Rationale and Context 6 1. Thesis Summary 6 2. Context, and Theoretical and Methodological Frameworks 12 3. Historical Context I: The Repeal of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ 24 4. Historical Context II: The Development of British Policing 32 Chapter 1 – Periodical Discourses on Policing and Detection: 1860-1890 43 1.1: Introduction: The Universal Concept of Uniformed Policing 43 1.2: Chapter 1 – A Methodological Note 46 1.3: ‘[...] a baton in his hand and a blue coat upon his back’: Police, Detectives and the Law in Conservative Periodical Discourse, c. 1850-1875 50 1.4: ‘[...] the vigilance of the police is notoriously inferior’: Police, Detectives and the Law in Liberal Periodical Discourse, c. 1850-1875 62 1.5: Scrutiny of the Police in Non-Partisan Periodicals: 1860-1890 70 1.6: The Police and the mid-Victorian Periodical Press: Chapter 1 Conclusions 77 Chapter 2 –‘A Condemned Cell with a View’: Crime Journalism c. 1750-1875 80 2.1: Introduction: From Execution Broadsides to Crime ‘Round-Ups’ 80 2.2: Mid-Victorian Crime Reporting and the Police Officer 84 2.3: Crime Journalism and the Criminal Space 99 2.4: Looking Ahead to ‘Detective Literature’: Chapter 2 Conclusions 109 Chapter 3 – ‘“Detective” literature, if it may be so called’: The Police Officer and the Police Memoir 111 3.1: Introduction: The Merging of ‘Non-Fiction Police Criticism’ and ‘Crime Round-Up’ Journalism 111 3.2: Early Nineteenth Century ‘Social Exploration Journalism’ 112 3.3: ‘In company with detectives, he has visited beershops [...]’: Social Exploration Journalism in the Mid-Victorian Era 120 3.4: ‘“Detective” literature, if it may be so called’: The Police-Memoir as ‘Detective Fiction’ 132 3.5: The Police Memoir: c. 1830-1875 139 3.6: The Memoirs of a Detective: Chapter 3 Conclusions 155 Chapter 4 – ‘The Romance of the Detective’: Sensation Fiction and Police Memoir Fiction 157 3 4.1: Introduction: From Memoirs to Sensations 157 4.2: Sensation Fiction and Detective Fiction in Scholarship 159 4.3: Contemporary Periodical Connections: Sensation and Police Memoir Fiction 164 4.4: Secrets of the Home Revealed: Shifting Perspectives onto Domesticity 171 4.5: ‘Time and place cannot bind Mr Bucket’: Police Officers, Sensation Fiction and the Police Memoir 176 4.6: ‘Sensation Recollections’: Chapter 4 Conclusions 194 Chapter 5 – ‘...people are naturally distrustful of its future working’: The 1877 Detective Scandal in the Victorian Mass Media 198 5.1: Introduction: The 1877 Detective Scandal 198 5.2: ‘Surely [...] every policeman ought to be a detective’: Periodical Perceptions of Detectives , 1842-1877 203 5.3: Reporting the 1877 Crisis 209 5.4: ‘Officers of the Committee of Criminal Investigation’: Reflections on the Police and Detectives 222 5.5: ‘[...] little, if at all better’: Chapter 5 Conclusions 231 Chapter 6 – From ‘Handsaw’ to Sherlock Holmes: Police Officers and Detectives in Late-Victorian Journalism 233 6.1: Introduction: Turf-Frauds, Torsos and Tit-Bits 233 6.2: Perceptions of the Police in 1880s Periodical Journalism 235 6.3: The Bumbling Bobby and the Private Detective: 1880s Periodical Detective Fiction 250 6.4: From Tit-Bits to the Strand Magazine : George Newnes, Periodical Publishing and the Short Story 261 6.5: Perceptions of the Police in the Strand Magazine , 1891-1900 270 6.6: ‘I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies’: The Strand Magazine and Sherlock Holmes, c. 1891-1900 278 6.7: Looking Ahead to the ‘Golden Age’: Chapter 6 Conclusions 287 Conclusion 291 Bibliography 294 Appendix A: Published Article: ‘To Pry Unnecessarily into Other Men’s Secrets’: Crime Writing, Private Spaces and the Mid-Victorian Police Memoir 322 4 List of Illustrations 1. ‘Sellers in the Streets’, Leisure Hour , 4 July 1861, p. 425. 44 2. ‘A London Police Court’, London Society , October 1866, p. 321. 44 3. ‘Ground Plan of HM Prison Cold Bath Fields, National Archives <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/a-victorian-prison-source- 1.jpg > [accessed 19 February 2016] (1884). 60 4. ‘The City Police’ Punch, or, the London Charivari , 11 April 1863, p. 151. 75 5. 'The Idiot Detective, or, the Track! The Trial!! and the Triumph!!!', Fun , 2 January 1869, p. 13. 76 6. 'Criminal Record’, Leader , 7 August 1858, p. 767. 88 7. George Cruikshank, ‘Symptoms of the finish of Some Sorts of “Life in London”. Tom, Jerry and Logic, in the Press Yard, at Newgate”, British Library <https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/tom-and-jerry-life-in-london >, [accessed 22 September 2017] (1821). 113 8. George Cruikshank, ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell’, The Adventures of Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress , Victorian Web <http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/cruikshank/ot24.html > [accessed July 2 2018], scanned and uploaded by Philip V. Allingham (1839, uploaded 2014). 118 9. ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), ‘The Night’, Victorian Web <http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/phiz/bleakhouse/36.html > [accessed Feb 28 2018], scanned and uploaded by George P. Landow (1853, uploaded 2007). 181 10. ‘Apprehension of Good for the Barbarous Murder of Jane Jones’, British Library <https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/broadside-apprehension-of-good-for-the-barbarous- murder-of-jane-jones > [accessed 1 January 2018] (c. 1842). 204 11. Anonymous, Autobiography of Jack Ketch (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835). 204 12. ‘The Idiot Detective, or, the Track! the Trial!! and the Triumph!!!’, Fun , January 1869, p. 13. 208 13. ‘The Charge Against Detectives’, John Bull , 24 November 1877, p. 748. 218 14. ‘The Great Detective Case’, Illustrated Police News , 3 November 1877. 221 15. ‘Violet’s Valentine, or, the Undetected Detective’, Fun , 11 February 1885, p. 60. 248 16. ‘Adventures of our Own Private Detective’, Fun , 24 October 1888, p. 181. 249 17. ‘Animal Actualities, IX: Sauce for a Goose, Sauce for a Gander’, Strand Magazine , March 1899, p. 304. 274 18. ‘Animal Actualities, IX: Sauce for a Goose, Sauce for a Gander’, Strand Magazine , March 1899, p. 304. 275 5 Introduction Policing and Periodicals: Summary, Rationale and Context 1. Thesis Summary This thesis explores the relationship between the evolution of detective fiction and the periodical and magazine presses across the mid-to-late nineteenth century, between c. 1840 and 1900. There are two distinct gaps in scholarship which it rectifies by approaching the genre from this perspective. Firstly, broad studies of generic development (especially those which look at such a loosely-defined genre as ‘detective fiction’)1 mistakenly tend to be insular, and explore sporadically-published texts which are often insecurely connected through their shared aspects in order to present a viable literary chronology.