They Did the Police in Different Voices: Representations of the Detective on the Victorian Stage

Isabel Stowell-Kaplan

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies University of Toronto

Isabel Stowell-Kaplan Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies University of Toronto

2018

ABSTRACT

In the spring of 1863, Detective Jack Hawkshaw strolled carelessly onto the stage of the Olympic

Theatre. The first British stage detective of any significance, Hawkshaw ushered in the beginning of a detective era on the London stage. Established quickly as a significant part of the nineteenth-century theatrical scene, the stage detective was swiftly codified into a theatrical

“line.” Always happy to adopt a fictional persona or throw off a disguise, to play with performance conventions or manifestly observe his theatrical counterparts, the stage detective spoke the language of nineteenth-century theatre. More than this, he became an integral part of contemporary dramatic structure and style, both facilitating melodramatic resolution and looking forward to the dandiacal style of Wilde’s society comedies. The plays which form the focus of this work are a mixture of the canonical and those unknown to modern scholarship: from Tom

Taylor’s well-known 1863 play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, to Clement Scott’s long-forgotten The

Detective (1875), from Wilkie Collins’s stage adaptation of The Moonstone to two adaptations of

Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. To build a clear picture of English attitudes to the new detective and his appearance on the London stage I draw from contemporaneous newspaper articles and accounts, critical reviews and essays dedicated to theories of performance, as well as acting manuals and official police orders. Understanding the detective’s dramatic purpose and theatrical positioning sheds light on nineteenth-century theatrical conventions – from the complex iii interplay between representation and authenticity to the ways in which the melodramatic universe was conceived – as laid out by scholars such as Lynn Voskuil, Martin Meisel, Peter

Brooks and Elaine Hadley. It also better illuminates the epistemological frameworks of the period – from questions of deception and fraud to concerns about omniscience and earned authority – as explored by Audrey Jaffe, Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison and others. Despite his significance, the figure of the stage detective has received scant scholarly attention. By pursuing original archival research as well as revisiting the stage detective’s appearance in the more canonical work of the period, I aim to reinstate the detective in the theatre history of the period.

Acknowledgements

This research has been generously supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Fellowship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a number of fellowships awarded at the University of Toronto – the John Macrory Fellowship, the Arthur Lindsay Fernie Research Fellowship and the Lise-Lone Marker Award.

This work would not have been possible without the continuing existence and support of both national and specialist archives and collections. I would like to thank the British National Archives, the British Library and the V&A Theatre and Performance Archives, where I received the generous support of their archivists and, though the research did not find its way directly into this dissertation, I should also like to thank those at the Metropolitan Police Heritage Centre for giving their time and assistance.

I want to extend my deepest thanks to my advisors and members of my committee – Stephen Johnson, Lawrence Switzky and David Taylor – for their guidance, critique and unwavering support over the years. I would also like to thank my external examiner, Jim Davis, for his thoughtful and generous comments.

I would like to thank Rebecca Biason and Samiha Chowdhury at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, for their friendly and generous support, as well as the members of my kind and encouraging cohort. I would also like to thank my wonderful friends in Toronto – Catie Thompson, Johanna Lawrie, Alex Logue, Allison Graham, Allison Leadley, Matt Jones, Jenn Cole, Nikki Cesare Schotzko and Didier Morelli – as well as my union, CUPE 3902, and the good friends I made there – Emily Clare, Pamela Arancibia, Evan Miller and Ryan Culpepper among many others.

Last but not least, I want to extend my sincerest thanks to my sisters, to my parents and to my husband, Will Fysh. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Contents

Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of figures vi

Introduction 1

1 “Enter Hawkshaw”: 29 Performance, Style and Authority in Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man

2 Line of Duty: Developing the Detective 83

3 Mediating Melodrama and Playing the Dandy: 148 Staging Sergeant Cuff

Conclusion 207 Works Cited 216

Figures

1 “Startling arrest of a Thief at the Great Exhibition by a Detective 60 Disguised as a Statue.”

Introduction

On the evening of September 29, 1829, the first English police force was officially established in

London, introducing to the streets a legion of “bobbies” and “peelers” – so-called after their chief instigator, Robert Peel. Thirteen years later, in the summer of 1842, the Commissioners of the

Metropolitan Police submitted a memo, asking to officially establish the position of the

“detective” within the force. Centralized policing was thus officially established in the capital.

This was not only a procedural development but also a cultural one, for just as the method was established so was the man. In each case – that of the “bobby” and that of the “detective” – a character quickly established itself, an archetype grounded in and responsive to both the realities and the aspirations of the force at the time. Like a theatrical “line,” these archetypes were performatively conceived and understood. The developing archetype of the “bobby” helped to mitigate the shortcomings of the actual constables on the street, offering an idealized type to which recruits might aspire and in which the public could believe. From the very beginning this new force was conceptually intertwined with performative ideas and bound up within theatrical frameworks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the figures of the “bobby” and the “detective” were soon found on the stage itself, where such dramatic principles and performative inflection became more explicit. The “bobby” quickly became a figure of pantomime and burlesque while the detective featured in more “serious,” though nevertheless popular, theatre. The rich history of the stage bobby is deserving of its own dramatic history, attentive to the complex relationship between performance and police. In this dissertation, however, I will be focusing on the stage detective, who, despite his theatrical significance, has been surprisingly neglected in the field of theatre history. Though the genre of detective fiction has attracted notable scholarly attention –

1 2 including that of D.A. Miller (The Novel and the Police 1988) and Ian Ousby (Bloodhounds of

Heaven 1976) – and the figure of Sherlock Holmes, the most famous of private detectives, has seen a renewal in popular attention, there is almost no scholarship on the figure of the professional stage detective. Aside from some work by David Mayer on the stage detective’s most well-known example, Hawkshaw of Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man (“‘The Ticket- of-Leave Man’ in Context” 1987), and some attention from Frank Rahill (World of Melodrama

1967) and Martin Meisel (Realizations 1983), the figure of the Victorian stage detective has almost entirely escaped scholarly notice. By pursuing original archival research as well as revisiting the stage detective’s appearance in the more canonical work of the period, I aim to reinstate the detective in the theatre history of the period.

The detective character and function in drama is complex and multifaceted, often even contradictory. It can signal a drive to investigate and authenticate, to authorize and regulate – contributing to the smooth running of the civic justice system and the stability of the moral universe. It can also prefigure disruption and deceit, challenging the status quo and threatening to upset the very moral and civic order that the stage detective is also, at times, so keen to protect.

This kind of behaviour is not new in theatre, but taps into a long history of authoritative figures adept at manipulating character and plot, contributing significantly to the functioning of the plot and in some cases even facilitating dramatic justice. Duke Vincentio of Measure for Measure – who abdicates his ducal responsibility to disguise himself as a friar in order that he may watch over the misdeeds of his citizens, before ultimately returning to restore civic and moral order – is, as Katharine Eisaman Maus explains, seen by some “as a version of God” (812). More than that, he is “a prince disguised as a friar [thus] bridg[ing], however unsteadily, the gap between knowledge and power” (Maus 813). Like the stage detective, who comes after, the Duke 3 represents an uneasy combination of information dubiously-gotten, with an authoritative position. Similarly, Mirabell, the handsome protagonist of William Congreve’s Way of the

World, allows the other characters to tie themselves in knots before eventually revealing that he has in fact forestalled the greed of the ill-intended Fainall, having laid the groundwork sometime prior and allowing for wit to triumph and the rightful marriages to prevail. In both cases, much like their theatrical colleague yet to come, each man is a quasi-authorial figure, observing and manipulating the others through disguise and deception, in order to facilitate the desired social outcomes. In addition, the disruptive and transgressive tendencies of the detective recall the

Harlequin figure of Commedia dell’arte, who winks at the social codes of others while playfully working toward his own goal. Despite these historical forebears, however, the English stage detective is undoubtedly new. The combination of his playful, deceptive, transgressive and yet authoritative, ordered and professional character along with his range of dramatic functions is both original and particular. The figure of the Victorian stage detective speaks meaningfully to the performative aspects of policing and its imbrication in a theatrical world as well as to wider issues of the period, including questions of omniscience, authenticity, authority and fraud.

In order to build a clear picture of English attitudes to the new detective and his appearance on the London stage along with contemporary thoughts on theatrical trends and tastes, I draw from contemporaneous newspaper articles and accounts, critical reviews and essays dedicated to theories of performance, as well as acting manuals and official police orders.

The plays which form the focus of this work are a mixture of the canonical and those entirely unknown to modern scholarship, from Tom Taylor’s well-known 1863 play, The Ticket-of-Leave

Man to Clement Scott’s The Detective (1875) – an extensively reviewed, moderately successful play by a foremost critic of the period but one which has been entirely omitted from the 4 scholarship of theatre history. In addition, I cover Wilkie Collins’s stage adaptation of his wildly popular novel, The Moonstone, and two adaptations of Dickens’s Bleak House – one by J.P.

Burnett and the other by George Lander – in order to explore the ways in which these famous detectives of fiction, based on detectives in fact, were theatricalized. Keeping these plays at the centre of my inquiries I aim to determine the style, form and function of these early stage detectives and their position in theatrical history. To do so effectively, I incorporate contemporary theories on both theatre and policing, in order to think more deeply about how both were formulated and to consider how each might influence the other.

My work is grounded in archival material, something which then allows me to make meaningful interventions in the field of nineteenth-century theatre history. To get to the heart of questions about how performance was presented and understood I first examine contemporary acting manuals by Henry Garside Neville and essays by G. H. Lewes on the famous actors of the day, before turning to the work of scholars such as Lynn Voskuil and Martin Meisel on the complex interplay between representation and authenticity in the period. To understand the ways in which melodrama was conceived and to explore the detective’s place in a melodramatic universe, I begin with the critical and theoretical responses of the period. I then place this in conversation with the foundational texts on melodrama by Peter Brooks and Michael Booth as well as more recent interventions in the field by Elaine Hadley and Carolyn Williams. To assess the ways in which the police detective was managed as well as received I look at official police orders alongside newspaper articles and contemporary cartoons. To best assess and effectively contextualize the manner and style of the stage detective I look at Charles Baudelaire’s contemporary musings on the dandy along with more recent scholarship on the status of masculinity by scholars such as John Tosh. Finally, by engaging with the work of Audrey Jaffe, 5

Frank Rahill, and Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, among others, I seek to establish the position of the stage detective as regards epistemological questions of omniscience, fallibility, authority and objectivity in the period. The stage detective – swiftly codified into a recognizable theatrical “line” – spoke the language of the nineteenth-century theatre. More than this, I argue, he intervened significantly in the dramatic structure and style of the pieces in which he appeared.

Heretofore a neglected figure in theatre history, I argue that a better understanding of his dramatic purpose and theatrical positioning will better illuminate not only the theatrical conventions, as laid out by Voskuil and Meisel, Brooks and Hadley, along with the detective’s position within them, but the epistemological frameworks of the period as explored by Jaffe,

Daston, Galison and others. In order to best situate the stage detective in the performative history of the early New Police I will turn now to the prior introduction of his more junior colleague, the

“bobby,” before returning to the figure of the detective.

The Invention of the “Bobby”

On the evening of September 29, 1829, with the spectacular introduction of a thousand newly minted “bobbies” onto the streets of the capital, Robert Peel’s New Police force was officially established in London. Over the next thirty years or so, Parliament passed a series of acts which,

David Taylor suggests, “effectively brought into being the ‘new police’” (12). The first histories of the police regarded Peel’s new force as part of the inevitable march of history and its twin, the progress of society, something noted by Clive Emsley in The English Police (4). Such histories cast Robert Peel and his supporters as far-sighted reformers who had found the answer to society’s problems in this new force. Though Peel’s new force had strong advocates then as now, 6 such arguments tend to obscure the precarious and fiercely contested position of this new force.

There had in fact been serious and significant debate on the nature of crime, disorder and the appropriate response to these issues in the capital, particularly over the prior fifty or even one hundred years.1 Though, by the early nineteenth century, some were in favour of introducing a more comprehensive police system, others were still vehemently opposed. Even in the face of the brutal Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, the Earl of Dudley might still comment that “they have an admirable police at Paris, but they pay for it dear enough. I had rather half a dozen people’s throats should be cut in Ratcliffe Highway every three or four years than be subject to domiciliary visits, spies, and all the rest of Fouché’s contrivances” (qtd. in Emsley, English

Police 22).

Despite the sort of opposition expressed by the Earl of Dudley, the following year, 1812, marked the beginning of a period of parliamentary activity on the subject, with a series of select committees called (1812, 1816-1818 and 1828) “to consider the issues of police arrangements, crime, the courts, and related matters” (Thurmond Smith 21). By the time Peel’s Police

Improvement Bill was finally passed in 1829 it was an issue which had been discussed passionately not only in Parliament but also in the media. The Times, for instance, noted on April

23, 1829 that “we have received many letters on the subject of Mr Peel’s Police Bill, but they are so voluminous, and some of them so intemperate, that insertion cannot be given to them” (April

23 1829). Peel and his supporters leaned heavily on the idea that his reforms were absolutely necessary in order for persons and property to be sufficiently protected in the capital – the old

1 Following the Gordon Riots in 1780, “a few individuals suggested that some kind of co-ordinated police system was needed for London” and “fears about rising crime” five years later “prompted the government of the Younger Pitt to propose the establishment of a centrally controlled police for the entire metropolis” (Emsley, English Police 20). Ultimately this bill failed in the face of vociferous criticism about the possibility of a “French police” which “if passed into law […] would destroy the liberty of the subject” (Daily Universal Register qtd. in Taylor 19). Taylor suggests that “by the middle of the next century such arguments no longer carried the same widespread support. Nonetheless, it would be foolish to underestimate such attitudes” (19). 7 patchwork system of local watches, organized in a haphazard manner, was simply not up to the task. To what extent Peel and others exaggerated the inefficiencies and corruption of the apparently bumbling beadles and rapacious Bow Street runners is hard to know. More recent police histories have tended to be kinder to the old system than advocates of the New Police ever were (Harris; Emsley; Taylor). As David Taylor argues, it was, in essence, a conversation about competing notions of liberty and order – conversations which continue to this day.2 Ultimately,

Peel succeeded, his bill passed and the “bobbies” appeared on the streets in September of that year. What is important to note, however, was that it was neither inevitable nor assured. When the first officers of the New Police stepped onto the streets of London in 1829 they were certainly welcomed by some but were also met with suspicion, fear and even outright hostility.

The main source of this anxiety seemed to stem from a continuing fear of the situation in

France. Jealous of a patriotic idea of liberty, many Englishmen looked warily across the channel to the police “contrivances” that the Earl of Dudley had invoked almost twenty years earlier. As a self-confessed “foreigner” writing to the Times in August of 1829 noted:

On the mention of the simple word “police”, every Englishman who has been upon the

continent, and who is jealous of the liberty of his country, feels himself at liberty to

manifest his distrust, and to express his fears of the slightest exercise by the English

Government of that monstrous state inquisition, of which the means are corruption,

espionnage, treachery, and degradation, – of which the end is tyranny, and of which the

results every where practically are the propagation of public and private vices, the

2 As the comment piece by Henry Porter, “Police get the tools they want, Britain loses the liberties it holds dear”, published a few years ago in the Guardian (24 January 2014) demonstrates, Britons continue to debate the extent of police power and its relationship to individual and societal liberty. 8

humiliation and disorder of one part of the social body, and the melancholy fruits of

discord.

(“Letter to the editor”, signed “A Foreign Sexegenary” 20 August 1829)

Given such strong resistance to a surreptitious system of continental-style surveillance it is not surprising that the objective of this new police force was laid out with such apparent clarity and precision.

“It should be understood, at the outset, that the principal object to be attained is the

Prevention of Crime” (MEPO 8/1 1). So ran the notice on the very first page of the Instructions to the Force, issued in 1829. This may seem rather self-evident but just as their introduction was not inevitable (nor indeed their continuing existence), neither was their particular purpose or range of duties. In fact, the way in which Peel’s police force was understood at the time is absolutely fundamental to the way in which it was created. The objective outlined above, for instance, that “prevention of crime” be the mark and measure of the force, was an objective understood not only by the men of the force but by the general public too. That is because not only were these instructions given to each man upon his induction into the force but they were published widely in the local newspapers – the Morning Chronicle and the Standard, for example, published them on September 24, 1829, succeeded by the Morning Post and the Times the following day.3 There seems little question that such transparency in the objectives and ideals of this fledgling force was designed to preempt concerns about the muddy nature of their authority and the purpose of this brand new and costly force. Moreover, the existence of a kind of consensual policing, far removed from the state surveillance apparently seen in France, is hard

3 To give a sense of the importance of these Instructions it should be noted that the Times, for instance, dedicated over four columns to printing them in full – more than a sixth of its spread. 9 to maintain if the public does not know why or how they are being policed. There was, in other words, a certain visibility written into this early force.

And just as the instructions were visible to the (newspaper-reading) public at large so too were the men. Once outfitted in the uniform of the New Police – “a suit of blue cloth,” with “a tall chimney-pot hat” (Clarkson and Richardson 65) and a “leather stock worn high inside the collar to guard the officer against strangulation” (Dell 4) – an officer was required to wear it at all times, whether on duty or off. The particularities of this uniform were no accident, with great care seemingly taken over their semiotic significance. As Clive Emsley suggests, “recognizing the English antipathy to a standing army quartered at home, efforts were made to ensure that the new police did not look like soldiers: they were given top hats, uniforms of blue, swallow-tail coats with the minimum of decoration, in contrast to the short scarlet tunics with coloured facings and piping of the British infantry” (English Police 26). Once again, an acute awareness of the latent hostility from some to the very existence of this force seems to have been forefront in the minds of Robert Peel and his commissioners. Avoiding the flashy scarlet of the military uniforms, which were designed to be spectacular, these initial police uniforms appear staid, serious and relatively inconspicuous. If scarlet is designed to draw your eye, a dark blue, I would suggest, is designed to do the very opposite.4 In this sense, the creation of these early uniforms, in a fundamental way, matches the first directives to the officers. If their primary mandate, to prevent crime, is characterized predominantly by a kind of inaction, whether it be theirs or the criminals whom they (should not have to) pursue, their uniform is a kind of visible incarnation of

4 In a 1955 essay outlining what makes a healthy and effective costume, Roland Barthes makes an observation that is particularly resonant with the outfitting of these police constables. “The costume, too,” he concludes, “must find that kind of rare equilibrium which permits it to help us read the theatrical act without encumbering it by any parasitical value: it must renounce every egotism, every excess of good intentions; it must pass unnoticed in itself yet it must also exist: the actors cannot, in every case, appear on stage naked. It must be both material and transparent: we must see it but not look at it” (49-50). The uniforms of Peel’s officers, I suggest, operate in precisely the way in which Barthes’ “healthy” costumes do; seen without ever quite being looked at. 10 this policy. Designed to be conspicuous mainly in its inconspicuousness, the costume of their policing performance was one of performed unobtrusiveness, a paradoxical unspectacular spectacle. Indeed, as the Instructions continue, “all the other objects of a Police Establishment, will thus be better effected, than by the detection and punishment of the offender, after he has succeeded in committing the crime … The absence of crime will be considered the best proof of the complete efficiency of the Police” (MEPO 8/1 1-2). Another paradox of the force’s peculiar visibility – the effectiveness of each man’s “performance” is marked by an absence.

The public was granted permission (encouraged, even) to watch the watchers but with the understanding that there should not, in fact, be much to watch. The potentially problematic nature of such an approach is perhaps best encapsulated by the skeptical comments of one

Birmingham town councilor in 1842: “What the town wanted was an effective thief-taking police, and not merely what could be considered little better than lads parading up and down the streets” (qtd. in Emsley, English Police 59). Though Peel’s police force was characterized by a consciously unobtrusive style it was also never the intention to have “lads parading” pointlessly through the streets of the capital. There were duties the men were expected to perform and to perform well. In a Police Order, dated January 7, 1830 – just about three months after their inception – the senior officers were instructed to ensure their men were sufficiently active and effective in their work:

The Superintendants, Inspectors and Sarjeants are directed to be more particular in

teaching the men to be more alert and intelligent in the performance of their duty and to

make a greater use of their eyes than they appear to do at present. If a man thinks he is 11

doing the duty of a Police Officer by loitering along the street without looking to the right

or to the left, he is much mistaken and cannot expect to remain long in the service.

(“P.O. January 7, 1830” MEPO 7/1 47)

Clearly there was particular behaviour these officers were expected to engage in, however, even in the case of this explicit reprimand, the direction is not so much about duties the policemen are supposed to carry out as it is ways of behaving. In this case, it is the style of their walking, their mode of observing and their general way of performing which is being critiqued. The specific critique of “loitering” is not only a critique of an action uncompleted – that is, a failure to look about – but a critique of an attitude unadopted – that is, a failure to look professional. It is a criticism of the men’s unimpressive performance as much as it is of their ineffective action, which, it is becoming evident, may in fact be one and the same thing. A man’s position, it seems, did not depend so much upon duties undertaken as upon an insistently visible performance in which to be seen to be a policeman was to be a policeman.

The fact that an officer was required to wear his uniform at all times suggests, in addition, that the uniform did more than simply denote his position and facilitate his time on the job.

Instead, it implies that a man could never be truly off duty; that being a policeman was an identity as much as a job. And, moreover, it was an identity at times even mandated by the very uniform which denoted this. In other words, the uniform itself helped to mould the bodies of the officers who wore it. As Clarkson and Richardson maintain, “the unfortunate policeman’s head was held as tightly as in a vice, making it impossible to look round without turning the whole body” (66). The uniform was complicit in mandating the very posture and gait of these first constables; a much bigger project of the first Commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard 12

Mayne. A police officer was expected to appear stiff, upstanding, inexorable – both literally and metaphorically, physically and temperamentally. The uniform, as in the case above, could be expected to play an important part in mandating this. Moreover, the uniform could be an important factor in solving any deviations from the ideal stance; so it is that when the commissioners observe the men disrupting this upright posture (and posturing) it is to the uniform that they turn:

P.O. Oct 5, 1829

Steps are taken to enable the Men to provide themselves with Gloves at a very moderate

price after which no Man will be permitted to walk with his hands in his Pockets or in

any other Slovenly Manner and the Inspectors and Sargeants will note down and Report

any Man they see disobeying the order. (MEPO 7/1 9)

By ensuring each man is able to purchase gloves and so modify his uniform in a minor way, it is hoped that this “slovenly manner” of posture and gait shall be eradicated. Ten days later the men are again cautioned about this particular behaviour, as it appears, the glove solution has perhaps been less than successful:

P.O. Oct 15, 1829

[The men] are likewise once more cautioned that if they are seen lounging about with

their hands in their great coat pockets, the pockets will be taken away. (MEPO 7/1 19)

The commissioners once again turn to the uniform to solve the problems of manner and style. If adding gloves won’t do the trick then simply take the pockets away. No pockets, no “lounging” – this seems to be the mentality of Rowan and Mayne. Why, though, this obsession with

“lounging”? The increasingly irate police orders about coats, pockets and “lounging about” are almost comical in nature. To answer this question it is important to understand the complex interrelations between posture, manner and temperament and, moreover, to understand their relationship to contemporary understandings of middle-class power and masculinity. That is because the uniformed “bobby” on the beat was performing a kind of self-mastery and self- control indicative of a particular version of middle-class masculinity.5

James Eli Adams places self-discipline at the centre of a new and developing nineteenth- century version of masculinity, noting that “by the 1830s […] self-discipline is increasingly claimed as the special province and distinguishing attribute of middle-class men” (7). Thus, this requisite “command of […] temper” (“P.O. June 3, 1830” MEPO 7/1 119 – 120) is not only a practical and pragmatic requirement for the new recruits but is part of a new understanding of the ideal male temper. It is not just the performance of policing but the performance of contemporary masculinity. As Adams argues, masculinity in the nineteenth century was no longer measured by a sword-wielding, gun-toting inclination to violence but rather by a mastery of the self. This self-discipline then is not to be confused with a womanly “passionlessness” but rather with

5 It should be noted that the performance of middle-class masculinity by these officers was a performance twice over. It was, in other words, a performance of masculinity but also of the middle-class for these men were quite decidedly not middle-class themselves. Philip Thurmond-Smith suggests that “in spite of [Edwin] Chadwick’s recommendation that the majority of the constables be middle-class, most were in fact agricultural labourers” (45). Whether they were “agricultural labourers” or simply “labourers” more generally has been debated but they were most certainly, as Shpayer-Makov explains, “‘young working class lads’”, those “from the social classes traditionally willing or forced to do manual labour” (Making of a Policeman 25, 28). Thus, the policemen were posturing not only as masculine but assuming a particular kind of middle-class masculinity. 14 contemporary middle-class masculinity. The New Police thus perfectly reflect this contemporary understanding of masculine strength and authority.

This construction of middle-class masculinity, however, was not invulnerable and

Emelyne Godfrey lays out the paranoia facing the middle-classes in the shape of the “mid-

Victorian moral panic of garroting” (19). “A large number of attacks featured in The Times” she notes “depict men sprawled on the ground, dispossessed of their middle-class accoutrements, namely their watches, money and hats”. “The Times”, she goes on to observe, “is profusely embellished with sensational images of middle-class masculinity defeated” (37). In this way, the threat of the dreaded garrotters (and, indeed, criminals more generally) is imaged, quite literally, as a destruction of middle-class stability and self-control. That each New Police constable could keep control of his uniformed body and possessions was thus a particularly important demonstration of his masculine authority and power. For, as Godfrey’s analysis implies, control of the body and its bearing was wholly entwined with contemporary ideas of masculinity and temperament. Indeed, bearing Godfrey’s argument in mind, the Police Order of 15 October,

1829, which warns “that if they are seen lounging about with their hands in their great coat pockets, the pockets will be taken away” (MEPO 7/1 19) at once makes a particular kind of sense. For “lounging about”, I suggest, is not only indicative of laziness or slovenliness but specifically challenges a notion of masculine power which was based on an upright bearing of stiff self-control. “Lounging” leans, perhaps, a little too close to the arguably effeminate posing of the dandies.6 The detective still yet to come, would stand in a different relation to the codes of masculinity. Not required to wear a uniform or walk a beat, his masculinity was understood in

6 See also Commissioners Rowan and Mayne’s explicit prohibition of sitting or leaning on the beat – “they are not allowed to sit down or even to lean against anything, or have any kind of rest whatever; they are expected to patrol their beat the whole time” (“Report from the Select Committee” 28 – q 47). 15 relation to the masculine pursuit of professional investigation, secured by his domestic life and fraternal bonds. And without the uniform or the police edicts issued from on high, the stage detective finds himself increasingly prone, looking and lounging more like a dandy than a bobby.

Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne had high standards for their new recruits, something evidenced by the high number of dismissals and frequent official reprimands. And yet, as also evidenced by the high number of dismissals and rate of official reprimand, their recruits regularly failed to meet these standards. There were, as a result, discrepancies between what was desired, mandated, created, believed and actually lived. Indeed, I suggest that it was these very discrepancies – between the reality of the recruits and the ideal to which the commissioners aspired – that helped to bring the theatrical and performative creation of the “bobby” into being.

The commissioners helped to create a stage type to operate in real life – an archetypal idealized figure that sands down the rough edges of reality and makes it palatable to the general public. If the men you have recruited are in reality a varied and inconstant bunch, dismissed more often than not for drunkenness, it becomes all the more important to create a consistent ideal (if imaginary) constable; the one man apparently represented by the same uniform, body type, body posture, temperament and so on. And yet, of course, the quotidian performances of the men you do have are the inconstant and unreliable actors in this charade as the creation and performance of each officer becomes an unreliable part of the puzzle of cultural creation. In this way, any helpful distinction between an ideal “bobby” and a real policeman becomes blurry with a constant and slippery readjustment between what is “real” and what is aspirational, what is

“true” and what is performed. Designed to stand as a singular man, in part to minimize the discrepancies and differences between the changing (and oftentimes inadequate men), the character of the “policeman” simultaneously co-opted the embodied performances of the 16 individual men in order to achieve this. The complicit relationship between this archetypal image of the “bobby” and the real men is something later echoed in the relationship between the stage detective and his real-life counterparts. The stage detective was likewise cast sometimes in a similar role; tasked with attending to the tarnished reputation and supposedly maligned name of the detective at large.

Staging the Detective

The hyper-visible duty assigned to the “bobby” meant that performance was written into the earliest history of the English police constable. What then do we make of his later counterpart?

No longer a man in uniform walking the beat, the detective lacked the obvious markers of police performance. And yet despite this lack of more obvious theatricality – the costume, the mandated posture and the prescribed location – the detective was no less performatively inflected.

Similarly shaped by the tenets of performance, the detective, I will argue, was a highly theatrical figure. By examining a number of early stage detectives – from Jack Hawkshaw in Tom Taylor’s runaway success The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) to Inspector Walker of Clement Scott’s The

Detective (1875), from Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s adaptation of his own novel, The

Moonstone: A Play (1877) to a couple of Inspector Buckets from two adaptations of Charles

Dickens’s Bleak House in the 1870s – I will unravel the interwoven and interdependent relationship between performance and detection. Placing the performance of the stage detective alongside contemporary handbooks on acting style as well as essays critiquing the famed actors of the day, I demonstrate how detective performance could and should be understood in relation to a range of contemporary performance styles, including that of melodrama and naturalism; 17 understood, in other words, theatrically. Nor was the significance of detective performance restricted to a man’s actorly inclination or dramatic flair. Rather, the performance of detection became just that – performance in the service of detection. In other words, the well-documented penchant for curious or outlandish disguise that many of these early stage detectives exhibit allows their performative zeal to serve the dual function of detection and entertainment. Walker’s skilful disguise and Hawkshaw’s dramatic reveal entertain the audience and hoodwink their nemeses at once.

The figure of the stage detective was fast becoming its own stage type: one recognizable by a number of common characteristics and performative tics. He was cool, calm and collected; astute and eagle-eyed; fallible, certainly, but morally upright; and more often than not had a flair for the dramatic. In a remarkably swift theatrical codification, by the mid-1870s contemporary critics were spotting these common characteristics of the stage detective and by 1889 “The

Detective” had already made its way into Jerome K. Jerome’s Stage-Land. And yet Horace

Wigan had only appeared as Jack Hawkshaw – the first English stage detective of note – in 1863.

Hawkshaw, though, was not the only detective Wigan was to play. Just twelve years following his successful appearance in Taylor’s play, Wigan can be found again treading the boards as a police detective – this time in Clement Scott’s aptly titled, The Detective. How then was such a figure formed and on what basis might he be judged? Horace Wigan himself made quite a substantial contribution to the line, solidifying his status as stage detective-in-chief by appearing not only as Jack Hawkshaw but also as Inspector Walker. The fact that Clement Scott, a renowned critic and all-around man of the theatre, thought it might be worth his time to pen such a piece suggests that by 1875 the figure of the detective was rapidly crystallizing into a theatrical line, one in which men like Horace Wigan might specialize and one to which Scott had 18 something to contribute. Keen to defend the police, oft-maligned by the press and public, Scott set out to define his detective by his upright character and steady professionalism. The defensiveness of Scott’s mission adds the question of rehabilitation to the agenda, as he gives the stage detective one particular duty – to aid in rehabilitating the reputation of his real-life colleague. This particular mission of Scott’s reveals the tight connection between the detective of the stage and that of the street. The two figures were entangled in an ongoing process of cultural creation that saw the detective bounce from column to column and genre to genre as the line between fact and fiction grew thin.

The extent to which the stage detective reflected or refracted reactions to the real-life detective and responded to contemporary social concerns forms another important part of this work. Clement Scott’s Inspector Walker was intended (whether successfully or not) to offer reassurance that the detective police were in fact hard-working men of honest integrity. Though this is one of the more direct ways in which the stage detective might interact with the reality of policing in the mid-late nineteenth century it is not the only way in which the stage detective was influenced by the social concerns of the day. For one, the very performative quality of the stage detective – that which made him so well suited to the stage – has, in fact, its roots in the same contemporary anxiety about the status of a secret French-style of police which so influenced the implementation of the force with its highly visible “bobbies.” If his detection was highly performative, visible even in its invisibility, then he might not pose such a threat. It was, in short, a theatrical answer to a societal concern. With his performative visibility helping thus to quiet such concerns about his insidious potential, he might go about reassuring those anxious about the level of fraud and criminality in the world. The plays in which these stage detectives appear are preoccupied by the idea of inauthenticity and deceit – a spoon may be silver or it may just be 19 plated (The Ticket-of-Leave Man), a cousin may be friend or foe (Moonstone: A Play) and a wealthy lady may, in fact, be disguising her dubious origins (Jo and Poor Jo). In a world suffused with fraud, the detective might offer a reassuring eye; an expert able to see through the inauthentic and sort the wheat from the chaff. The style and status of his expertise, however, is fraught and contingent. Is he a new and objective scientist carefully measuring and weighing the evidence he finds? Is he a physiognomist or old-world savant, offering the reassuring certainty found in nostalgia? Or is he an infallible figure with omniscient vision able always to see the truth? Moreover, does his own inclination to put on a disguise or effect deceit challenge his position as expert authenticator? These detective plays grapple with such epistemological challenges, positioning the new detective among contemporary concerns about expertise, authority and the question of authenticity. Such concerns prove particularly germane in the realm of theatre where the question of authenticity and deception is always at stake. In this way, the stage detective finds himself centre stage – at the heart of questions about morality and theatricality and who has the right to deceive.

Finally, this dissertation explores the ways in which the detective’s role is intertwined with contemporary dramatic practice and developing theatrical trends. In particular, I examine the ways in which theatrical impulses might influence the drive of detection and how, in turn, theatre practice might be disrupted by the figure of the detective. The question of justice becomes significant as I look at the inquiries the stage detective conducts and the expectations by which his investigations are moderated. At times the stage detective seems to be conducting an official search for criminal guilt but at others he seems intent on rooting out evil and vindicating innocence. In other words, his mission is at times moderated by the idea of an extratheatrical criminal justice system, but at others seems directed by the moral tenets of a melodramatic 20 universe. The detective is a key player in the dramatic and social structures, allowing for dramatic and criminal justice at once. The entanglement of these two epistemological approaches

– one moderated by melodramatic expectations and one by criminological ones – thus complicates the kind of justice he seeks. Dramatic expectations and social norms are called into question by the stage detective whose theatrical duty challenges the audience to consider by what terms such justice is understood and upon what basis it is sought, both within and without the theatrical world. Though the detective seems well versed in the rules and rationale that govern the contemporary theatre he is not averse to challenging them. The style and manner adopted by the developing line of detectives seems, for example, to resist any clear division between naturalist and non-naturalist acting techniques. Practicing a studied normalcy, he seems at once to look back to the stylized techniques of melodrama and to cast forward to more naturalist styles. In addition, though Sergeant Cuff and the two Inspector Buckets help to facilitate a conventional theatrical justice, they do so in a more modern style, one indicative of changing theatrical tastes. The increasingly suave and leisured manner of these detectives – one which sees them whistling an air or seated themselves on a sofa – anticipates the indolent Wildean dandies yet to take over the London stage in the society plays of the 1890s. In this way, the role of the stage detective contributes both to the success of an older style of melodramatic justice whilst indicating an affinity with this more modern style of manner. The figure of the stage detective is one both indebted to and affective of dramatic trends, reflecting and refracting theatrical tastes and influencing the development of theatre in the nineteenth century.

Chapter Breakdown

I begin, in Chapter 1, by focusing my investigations on Jack Hawkshaw, the lead detective in

Tom Taylor’s play The Ticket-of-Leave Man. Opening at the Olympic in 1863, Taylor’s play was a runaway success. Starring Henry Neville in the leading role of Bob Brierly and Horace Wigan as Detective Jack Hawkshaw, the play ran to over 400 performances. Though Neville took the titular role, it was Wigan as Hawkshaw who made dramatic history. Arguably the most important stage detective of the period, Hawkshaw laid the groundwork for this dramatic and cultural type.

Hawkshaw proves a predecessor of great significance, as I will argue in Chapter 2, providing a model against which other staged detectives are compared and by which they are judged. It is, nevertheless, important, as David Mayer argues in “‘The Ticket-of-Leave Man’ in Context,” to resist any temptation to excise Hawkshaw from the cultural concerns and social anxieties of the period in an effort to find a clear and simple progenitor for the detective figures we know today.

For Hawkshaw is a man very much of his time and of his place and, as I will show, it is by better understanding the aesthetic and epistemological concerns of the period that we can come to a clearer understanding of just how the early stage detective was formed.

I begin by establishing the particularities of Hawkshaw’s distinct and deliberate style before considering just what to make of such a self-consciously ordinary manner. How might we understand such a deliberately underwhelming performance on the stage? Quite distinct from some of the more conspicuously presentational styles Michael Booth identifies in English

Melodrama (31-3), it is nevertheless hyper-visible and theatrically legible. It is seemingly both highly theatrical and anti-theatrical at once. In this way, the combination of ordinariness and evident theatricality challenges the distinction often maintained between Naturalism and “natural 22 acting” on the one hand, and expressive theatrically-coded performances on the other. The detective’s attitude of studied nonchalance thus places him at the centre of these shifting theatrical trends – casting at once back to the highly coded form of melodramatic performance and forward toward a theatre interested in performing the “natural.” Though such an attitude of self-conscious disinterest is central to Hawkshaw’s quotidian manner, it is not the only kind of performance in which he engages. Quite the showman, Hawkshaw proves himself an adept actor, willing and able to take on (and throw off) disguises at will. The showy and enthusiastic way in which he dons these disguises bespeaks a somewhat different style of acting, a style identified by

G. H. Lewes in an essay on Charles Kean in On Actors and the Art of Acting as a specifically melodramatic kind of acting. In other words, Horace Wigan may be performing Hawkshaw but

Hawkshaw is also always performing. In this way, both Hawkshaw’s under and overplayed performances can be better understood via a thorough understanding of contemporary acting styles and trends. Hawkshaw, the stage detective, is thus quite clearly a performer performed.

Hawkshaw’s propensity to disguise himself has prompted David Mayer to suggest that he has something in common with characters like the insidious Fouché - the French Minister of

Police in Taylor’s earlier play Plot and Passion. An irredeemable villain with a keenness for disguise and deception, Fouché like Hawkshaw employs disguise in the pursuit of his ends. I will argue, however, that while Hawkshaw shares with Fouché a fondness for disguising himself, the style and manner of his costume and performance marks the difference rather than similarity between the two men. Where Fouché is stealthy and covert, Hawkshaw is playful and open. The contemporary English fear of an insidious network of French-style spies is well documented and

I will argue that the highly visible and “melodramatic” style of acting (as defined by G. H.

Lewes) that Hawkshaw employs, is designed to quiet just such a fear. In addition, as I will 23 demonstrate, such visible policing and a propensity to winking disguise was not the domain of stage detectives alone but crossed to the streets themselves with contemporary accounts noting the highly visible performance of apparent invisibility employed by detective officers.

The performative inclinations of these detective officers thus helped to reassure those anxious about the introduction of any kind of covert surveillance but this was not its only effect.

The process of disguise also had a more immediate use value for the officer. Hawkshaw disguises himself not ostensibly for fun (though he certainly seems to enjoy his performance) but for work. His disguise as a drunken navvy, Ginger Bill, allows him to deceive his criminal counterparts and so overhear their nefarious plans. Police work is thus intertwined with performative work as the execution of a successful performance results in the execution of a successful operation. Moreover, just as Hawkshaw enjoys a good disguise so he enjoys a good

“reveal” – throwing off his disguise to reveal his true identity and thus his performative skill.

Such moments punctuate the action, shocking those on stage and creating a tableau or

“situation.” Hawkshaw’s proclivity to arrest both people and scenes embeds him within a dramatic culture that, as Katherine Newey suggests, “relied greatly on the creation of ‘telling’ scenes and ‘speaking pictures’ in its creation of arresting and interesting situations” (3). In this way, Hawkshaw’s work intertwines policing with performance using each in the service of the other. I conclude the chapter by examining Hawkshaw’s status as authenticator and expert, exploring the sources of his authority and the type of expertise he demonstrates. Hawkshaw’s

“eye” and his ability to see well are noted throughout the play. What (or more accurately, who) is he looking at and what is it that might he be seeing so well? At one point in the play Hawkshaw designates himself a physiognomist; at another, he seems to disavow such an approach. How then is he evaluating that which he sees? What is the audience to make of his expertise? Lorraine 24

Daston and Peter Galison suggest that through the nineteenth century scientific endeavour changed in mode from something they call “truth-to-nature” to the now more familiar concept of objectivity. Seeking to place Hawkshaw within this changing landscape of epistemic inquiry, I examine his particular brand of investigation.

In the second chapter I focus on the stage detective as a developing theatrical line.

Turning my attention to Clement Scott’s long-forgotten play of 1875 – The Detective – I unearth an important figure in the generation of this stage type. Inspector Walker is the titular detective of the piece and the focus of Scott’s play. As the title suggests, The Detective is not a play with an incidental police presence but a play predicated upon the detective figure. Of particular significance in this initial production at The Mirror in Holborn is the casting, for Inspector

Walker is played by none other than Horace Wigan, the actor who played Detective Hawkshaw of Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man. As such, I explore the ways in which Wigan’s own style and manner may have contributed to this developing line. I also look at the critical response more generally, examining the ways in which the contemporary critics identified this emergent stage type. Scott though was not satisfied with simply replaying, even developing this new figure, but was intent upon rehabilitating him. What though were the terms of this rehabilitation?

Perhaps surprisingly, Scott’s play revolves not so much around reliability and police infallibility as it does questions of character and professionalism. I begin by exploring the particularities of such character-based rehabilitation, looking at how it interacted with contemporary ideas of domesticity and masculinity. Like the “bobby,” Walker’s own characterization is bound up with contemporary understandings of masculinity but with a somewhat different emphasis. Walker’s masculinity is not one of stiff and dispassionate self-control so much as it is one understood via his fraternal relationship and satisfactory domestic situation. 25

Walker’s professional position is stressed throughout The Detective and, so that the audience may better assess his professional status he is regularly and directly compared with

Lawrence Lindon, an enthusiastic amateur seeking justice for himself and his murdered mother.

Walker consistently comes out on top, proving to be the experienced and skilled detective that

Lawrence is clearly not. In this chapter, I interrogate the reasons that Clement Scott might attach such importance to his detective’s professionalism and ask what the effects of such an emphasis might be. In addition, I ask how such professionalism might be granted or assured, particularly in the fictitious and playful theatrical setting. How does Walker’s theatricality influence his professionalism and vice versa? Are there ways in which the continuing theatrical codification of the stage detective might work in tandem with Scott’s efforts to assure his professional codification? I conclude this section by exploring the ways in which the two might work to reinforce one another in a mutually beneficial way, as they both seek a kind of confirmation in codification. In other words, the question of Walker’s professional position and the status of his theatrical standing both gesture toward the notion of sanction or official endorsement. To further explore this question of position and propriety I turn to the issue of curiosity, asking how

Walker’s tendency to pry into the lives of others and ask impertinent questions might challenge the official sanction he seeks. The concept of curiosity was a tricky one, alternately aligned with masculine exploration and inquiry, and feminine meddling and snooping. Does Walker’s professional position insulate him from accusations of feminine prying or might his inclination to pry challenge the professional sanction he insists upon? Might, in fact, the theatrical codification so entangled in his professional position threaten to colour his inquiries with the same kind of purposeless so often ascribed to “useless” feminine inquiry? For the very theatrical frame, so 26 evident in this highly metatheatrical play, complicates the question of professional purpose and deliberate inquiry.

I conclude this chapter by focusing in on the status of deception and authenticity in the play, asking how the theatrical framework contributes to and/or compromises Walker’s detective authority. The relationship between the competing concepts of deception and authentication is always at stake in theatre practice and performance. This is particularly so in the world of nineteenth-century drama. As Jacky Bratton suggests, “theatres attracted interest by the topicality and relevance of a play’s title and supposed subject-matter, perhaps explicitly claiming to deal with authentic information” even as “the tale told was endowed with meaning by formal principles not determined by the events it supposedly reflected or reported” (Introduction 4).

And Frederick Burwick observes that “in the broad array of crimes represented in the melodrama that thrilled the spectators, fact was preferred to fiction” (141). The ambiguous status of these authenticated fictions is stressed in The Detective with Walker, the stage detective, caught up in the compromising world of theatrical “facts.” I conclude this chapter by examining Walker’s position in such a landscape of confusing fraudulence and confused authenticity. Walker is dependent on the theatrical world for his professional and theatrical codification and yet the authority and authenticity of these official positions are always vulnerable, always at risk of being overwhelmed by the expansive fraudulence of this selfsame theatrical landscape.

In the final chapter, I turn to Wilkie Collins’s stage adaptation of his wildly successful novel, The Moonstone, along with two adaptations of Dickens’s Bleak House, Jo by J.P. Burnett and Poor Jo by George Lander, all of which hit the London stage in the later 1870s. Each adaptation features a detective – Inspector Bucket and Sergeant Cuff, of Bleak House and The

Moonstone respectively – in a prominent position. Looking specifically at the ways in which 27

Cuff and the two Buckets were staged, I reveal the essential theatricality of each stage detective.

Beginning with their relationship to stage space and their manipulation of theatrical convention, I examine the ways in which Sergeant Cuff’s unusual management of theatrical space threatens both the theatrical and domestic orders. Finding his way into the Verinder home not through the front door but rather through the back garden and doing so improbably quickly, Cuff challenges the sanctity of the domestic space and hints at the socially transgressive powers the others fear he may possess. Cuff’s apparent flouting of the neo-classical unities imposed by Collins upon his stage adaptation seems to set him apart from the others. Not a simple figure of order and authority, Cuff is a disquieting figure who discomfits those around him in his quest for truth. The question of just whom or what Cuff serves becomes significant as he threatens to disorder the world according to his own principles of justice. The Inspector Bucket of J.P. Burnett’s Jo similarly upsets the status quo when he uses his detective’s eye to notice the bruise on the face of a brick-maker’s wife. Like Cuff, this Bucket seems prepared to upend social norms and niceties to get at what he seeks.

I then move on to the role and positioning of these stage detectives within the generic conventions and expectations of contemporary melodrama. The very willingness to disrupt conventional social mores that Burnett’s Bucket displays, combined nevertheless with a certain hesitation in the face of societal expectation, illustrates well the detective’s affinity with the complex genre of melodrama. Following Carolyn Williams’ suggestion that even domestic melodrama – often considered the more conservative descendant of nautical or gothic melodrama

– could maintain its radical potential through a certain “intertwining of progressive and conservative elements” I examine the potential of Inspector Bucket to serve as proxy for the equivocations of the genre (202). I then turn to Sergeant Cuff whose demeanour – described by 28 one reviewer as “calmly quiet and appropriately self-contained” (Illustrated Sporting and

Dramatic News 22 September 1877) – might seem to exclude him from the melodramatic world of intense emotion and high passion described by Michael Booth in English Melodrama. I will contend that in fact Cuff occupies a pivotal role in the landscape of melodrama. In his foundational text, The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks suggests that melodrama is “not only a moralistic drama but the drama of morality,” striving, “to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to ‘prove’ the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, mashed by villainy and perversion of judgment, does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among men” (20). Cuff’s unrelenting search for justice and for truth validates this moral framework, ensuring moral clarity for the characters and the audience members. Sergeant Cuff’s drive to discover moral truth is thus both “stage” and “detective,” following a theatrical impulse as well as a societal one.

Despite Cuff’s perhaps surprising allegiance to the melodramatic world order his style and his tone, as I noted above, remain distinct. I conclude this chapter by examining this style in detail, considering what its reference points are and asking what it might signify. For the style and manner of Cuff and both staged Inspector Buckets is a world away from the stiff and dispassionate and quite literally upright demeanour demanded of their uniformed counterparts.

Instead, they seem to anticipate the lounging dandies of society theatre yet to come. Even as their melodramatic function keeps them grounded in a melodramatic world, their style casts forward to the popular society drama of the 1890s. In this way, the stage detective is further intertwined with the developing dramatic world, itself already entwined with the changing fashions and contemporary concerns of mid-late nineteenth-century society. 1

“Enter Hawkshaw”:

Performance, Style and Authority in Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man

In the summer of 1842, the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police submitted a memo to Sir

James Graham, asking to officially establish the position of the “detective” within the force.

Officers were already being pulled from their routine duties in order to carry out what essentially amounted to detective work and, in a move designed to recognize, codify and perhaps expand current practice, the detective branch was established:

The employment of the men [as detectives], however useful and necessary for the

purpose, interferes with the regular routine of duty assigned to each individual in the

Police …// The Commissioners submit that it would facilitate the carrying on this branch

of the Police operations, if they had a certain number of men specially applicable to the

duty of following up cases, whenever it became desirable that steps should be taken

which cannot be so effectively performed by those of the Police who have other duties to

attend to.

(“Memorandum relative to detective powers of Police”

from the Commissioners to Sir James Graham, 14 June

1842, in the Public Record Office, 45/292, qtd. in R. F.

Stewart 127)

29 30 Perhaps not quite the grand and imposing introduction we might have imagined. Nevertheless, in

August of the same year an official Police Order announced the employment of two inspectors and six sergeants “as a Detective Body” (Memo 14 August 1842, qtd. in Moss and Skinner 16).

This new detective branch slipped into being almost unnoticed, garnering so little press attention from a “sizeable press normally hostile to the police” as to even suggest, R. F. Stewart speculates, some kind of conspiracy of silence (125). Certainly the modest size of this new

“Detective Body” – eight men out of a force of approximately 4,000 – might reflect a hesitance to expand a body established in the face of much resistance.1 But the reality is likely less exciting than R.F. Stewart supposes. This underwhelming introduction suggests not the collusion of the government and the “normally hostile” press so much as the tacit understanding that there was little to report. The process of detection was already underway – the Police Order merely formalized this. To put it another way, detection was already being undertaken; what was established in August of 1842 were “detectives.” Much like the initial establishment of the New

Police itself with its “bobbies” and “peelers,” this moment is all the more significant for its lack of transformative institutional effect. What is significant is not that detection was somehow created on August 8, 1842 but that detectives were; a process became a person. The character of the detective was established as his function was culturally codified.

Just over twenty years later, marking a leap from street to stage, the actor Horace Wigan

“stroll[ed] carelessly” onto the stage as Detective Jack Hawkshaw, starring in Tom Taylor’s best- known play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) (166; Act 1).2 The title role went to Henry Neville

1 The number “eight” also recalls the number of Bow Street Runners – a group of professional but quasi- independent thief-catchers who had operated in the area and around the country for decades and who were disbanded only three years earlier in 1839. For more on the Bow Street Runners and their relationship to early detection see J. M. Beattie’s The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840. 2 I refer throughout to Martin Banham’s edition of The Ticket-of-Leave Man. I have chosen this version because it includes text from the original Licensing copy rather than simply reproducing Lacy’s text (vol. LIX). The original copy, he argues “is more coherent and in many respects richer” and Banham’s edition is the most comprehensive version (Banham 17). I note in a couple of places, sequences or comments that do not seem to appear in Lacy’s. 31 as Bob Brierly, but as Martin Banham notes, the play “creates two substantial characters, that of the Ticket-of-Leave man himself […] and the detective Hawkshaw” (12; emphasis added). Bob

Brierly may have been the main part and that given to the charming and likeable Henry Neville, but it is Hawkshaw who made dramatic history. Michael Booth observes that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, “the detective became an important stage figure” and it was Hawkshaw who was there at the start, the first English stage detective of real significance (145). Arguably the most important stage detective of the period, Wigan’s portrayal of Hawkshaw laid the groundwork for a dramatic and cultural type that has only grown in significance and influence.

As Banham suggests, “Horace Wigan as Hawkshaw set a pattern together with the playwright, for the stage detective who was so to fascinate audiences throughout the rest of the nineteenth century and indeed to the present day” (12-13).

Taylor’s play, opening in May of 1863, was an instant success. The original production ran to 407 performances and was later revived in the West End in 1873, 1875, 1879 and 1888

3 (Brown vi-ix) . Like so many of the most successful British plays of the period, The Ticket-of-

Leave Man was in fact an adaptation from the French. Based upon Le Retour de Melun, by

Brisebarre and Nus – “published in 1860 […] and performed as Leonard in Paris in 1862” –

Taylor, nevertheless, suggests John Russell Brown, “imagined everything afresh and recreated it in contemporary and local terms” (Brown vi).4 The play tells the story of Bob Brierly, a poor country boy who falls in with the wrong crowd upon his arrival in the dangerous and sinful metropolis that is London. Having succumbed to the usual temptations of gambling and drink he

3 The various versions of The Ticket-of-Leave Man held in the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection (such as C.H. Hazelwood’s A Detective; or a Ticket of Leave or the anonymous The Return of A Ticket of Leave) as well as the later touring versions of Taylor’s own play speak further to its evident success. 4 Unfortunately, I am unable here to undertake a complete comparison of Taylor’s A Ticket-of-Leave Man and Brisebarre and Nus’s Léonard, which can be found in a version published in 1863, citing a first performance date in December of 1862. The genesis of the French play is itself a little muddy as the preface to the 1863 publication notes that the play appeared in Les drames de la Vie in April of 1860, also under the title Le Retour de Melun (3). In any case a more fulsome comparative analysis between Léonard and The Ticket-of-Leave Man would certainly be warranted as there are some interesting similarities as well as important and telling differences where the detectives are concerned. I do, nonetheless, refer to a number of interesting divergences here. 32 unwittingly becomes a pawn in the game of two career criminals. Hawkshaw, the famed London detective, catches Brierly mistakenly passing off fraudulent bills in the first act, as his criminal counterparts, Moss and Dalton, make off. The rest of the play follows Brierly’s life after his release from prison. Now a “ticket-of-leave” man – a parolee out on license5 – Brierly attempts to find work, along with his sweet and unassuming new wife. Try as he might to find respectable employment, Brierly’s past continually catches up with him as his old criminal associates make it their mission to inform any and all who will listen that he is an ex-convict and not to be trusted in their employ. Ultimately Brierly, together with Hawkshaw, is given the opportunity to foil a plot of the criminal pair; the guilty are arrested, vengeance is served and order restored.

Recognizing Hawkshaw’s theatrical significance, David Mayer nevertheless cautions against what he sees as the tendency of scholars like Michael Booth and Martin Banham to read backwards, to find too easily in Hawkshaw a wellspring of stage and cinema detectives and, in so doing, to assume a characterization that we later come to recognize (“‘The Ticket-of-Leave Man’ in Context”). Eager to recontextualize Hawkshaw within Taylor’s play and the politics of policing in 1863 London, he suggests that Hawkshaw may not in fact be the “respected instrument of public justice” that Banham and others might assume (Mayer 32). “Taylor,” Mayer argues, “is not introducing Hawkshaw to celebrate the Detective Police, and it would be a mistake for today’s critics to interpret his play as a Victorian counterpart to modern detective fiction, film, television play, and drama that makes heroes of policemen and detectives” (34).

Since Mayer penned his article in 1987 much has changed and I suspect that audiences today would not assume that cultural representations of police always bend toward the morally upright

5 In accordance with the 1853 Penal Servitude Act, “felons due for transportation after penal servitude were permitted to remain in Britain and to live at large among society on a ‘ticket-of-leave.’ The ticket was a card that the parolee was required to carry at all times and to present to the police for inspection at intervals specified by law” (Mayer 35). The “garrotting scare” of 1862-3 caused many in parliament to link these parolees with the recent spate of garrottings and so the question of this scheme and the position of these parolees in society was one very much under discussion at the time of the play’s production (Mayer 34). 33 and unquestionably just.6 In any case, Mayer is right to resituate Hawkshaw in the cultural concerns and social anxieties of the period. For it is not just that Hawkshaw was shaped by the aesthetic and epistemological concerns of the period but that these, in turn, were influenced by the emerging figure of the stage detective.

I begin this chapter by examining the ways in which Hawkshaw’s quotidian style is theatrically inflected. Despite his plain-clothes and understated attitude, he retains something of the theatrical. In the opening scenes, his self-conscious performance of the everyday seems to render his performance both visible and invisible at once. His obviously mannered and theatrical performance of the ordinary is designed to reflect the gaze of the other characters whilst simultaneously drawing the eye of the audience. In conversation with contemporary questions of theatrical style and dramatic legibility, Hawkshaw’s performance is implicated in the changing theatrical landscape of the period. Moving beyond the stage, I consider just how such theatrical style could signify on the streets as well as in the theatres. Hawkshaw’s insistent visibility spoke not only to theatrical trends but also to a societal anxiety about the status of these new detectives.

Given the “accumulated anxieties over the ‘French system’ of plainclothes ‘police spies’,” this studied performance of apparently unseen detection could provide reassurance in the form of theatrical legibility (Mayer 34) – a performative answer to a societal concern, relevant on the street as on the stage.

I then move on to look more specifically at Hawkshaw’s propensity to disguise himself as well as his equally important commitment to a kind of theatrical “reveal,” both of which align him with G.H. Lewes’s contemporary explications on “melodramatic” actors and tie him closely with performance and aesthetic cultures which valued theatrical talent and visible skill. His more theatrical flourishes made a performance of detection and detection of performance. It is not just

6 There are many, more recent representations of police officers rooted in equivocation with, for instance, the incredibly successful BBC police procedural, Line of Duty (2012-2017), premised on police corruption and culpability. 34 that he manipulates the opportunities afforded by detection to enact a dazzling performance of disguise and “reveal” but that he uses these very tools of performance in the trade of detection.

Manipulating both the aesthetic and pragmatic frameworks at once, he serves art and the police, simultaneously arresting suspects and images. For though there was a fear, then as now, of covert surveillance the characters of The Ticket-of-Leave Man also show a desire for this kind of order and authority. This may go some way to explaining the focus we find on Hawkshaw’s “eye” – the seer seen, as Hawkshaw strives to authenticate and order the world with the physiognomically-informed vision he seems to possess. In a world overrun with worries about fraud and inauthenticity the detective’s intertwined dramatic and detective abilities may offer a reassuring order to a society nostalgic for dramatic and societal certainty. Despite his skills, however, Hawkshaw does falter and mistake. Might his occasional missteps and blunders challenge his position as civic and moral arbiter? I conclude this chapter by addressing the ways in which his fallibility may, in fact, offer its own reassurance; reassurance that the detective is not an omniscient kind of deity but, in the end, only human.

To Be a Detective: Style, Manner and Form

The original constables of the New Police were nothing if not visible. Marked by their dark blue uniforms, tall hats and standard-issue rattles, they were intended to patrol the streets of the capital in an ordered and predictable manner. Conspicuous by design, the function of Peel’s

“bobbies” hinged on their very visibility. Despite complaints in the local press that you could never find an officer when you really needed him, the reality was that they were present on the

London streets in numbers that would have made them impossible to truly avoid. The early detective, by contrast, seems so much harder to know. Is there, then, something we might recognize? Is there something we might call detective style, and, how might Hawkshaw, Taylor’s 35 early stage detective, be a part of this? In direct contradistinction to his junior counterpart and earlier antecedent the detective wore no uniform and followed no set pattern. George Dilnot, in his rather laudatory 1915 book, Scotland Yard: The Methods and Organisation of the

Metropolitan Police, suggests the following:

The real detective is a common-place man – common-place in the sense that you would

not pick him out of a crowd for what he is. He assiduously avoids mannerisms. You will

find him genial rather than mysterious. He does not wear policeman’s boots, and he is not

always weaving a subtle network of deductions. He is a plain business man of shrewd

common-sense who has been carefully trained to take the quickest and most accurate way

to a desired end. (43)

The detective of Dilnot’s description is simply an ordinary, albeit skilled and assiduous, man.

Eschewing the traits of what seems to be an assumed fictional detective – that “mysterious” one weaving those subtle networks of deduction – Dilnot lands squarely on the apparently real and straightforward man of business. Given the ordinariness with which he is described, the detective may seem an uninteresting figure with no defining qualities, a figure certainly unsuited to the dramatic stage. And yet, even in his clear attempt to untangle the dashing fictional detective from the apparently stolid reality of the man, Dilnot inadvertently gestures to what I would term the resting manner of Taylor’s fictional Hawkshaw: that is, his resolute inconspicuousness, his propensity to a studied nonchalance. Despite Dilnot’s clear attempts to draw a line between the theatrics of the imagined detectives and the reality of the true officers of the law, his own description seems rooted in the style of Taylor’s early stage detective. The very normalcy which is supposed to be particular to real detectives and distinct from their fictionalized counterparts is itself performed by Hawkshaw. Hyper or exaggerated normalcy therefore becomes theatrical. 36 Hawkshaw’s self-consciously natural style seems at once to cast forward to the Naturalists’ obsession with staging the quotidian and simultaneously to resist it – too deliberate and mannered, too obviously theatrical, to really qualify.

Strolling on to the stage in Act One Hawkshaw is marked immediately as conspicuously casual:

(Enter HAWKSHAW. He strolls carelessly to the DETECTIVES’ table, then in an

undertone and without looking at them -)

HAWKSHAW. Report.

1st DETECTIVE. (In same tone and without looking at HAWKSHAW) All right.

HAWKSHAW. (Same tone) Here’s old Moss. Keep an eye on him. (Strolls off.) (166;

Act 1)

Far from announced, Hawkshaw’s first appearance is decidedly underplayed; he “strolls carelessly,” avoids the eye of his fellow detective and then speaks in what Taylor marks a clear undertone. The deliberately casual nature of Hawkshaw’s behaviour, as designated by Taylor, is clearly no accident. By comparison, within the same few lines, Melter Moss merely “enter[s]” and Maltby simply “exit[s]” (166; Act 1). It is Hawkshaw alone who is given such a consciously nonchalant mode. Clearly at work, issuing instructions to his inferiors to “Report” and “Keep an eye,” Hawkshaw is from his first entrance engaged in a surreptitious kind of performance. Taylor does not in fact identify Hawkshaw as a detective (nor as Hawkshaw, in particular) at this early moment in the play, and it would be a fair question to ask whether the audience in fact even noticed his performed nonchalance. The directions issued to his fellow officers, however, ensure that the audience turn their attention his way and would most likely identify this casual character 37 as a detective of the police. When Hawkshaw returns just a short while later in the act, his affected casualness persists, accompanied this time by an even more obviously watchful quality:

HAWKSHAW. (Sitting down coolly at the table and unfolding the paper) Papers very

dull lately, don’t you think so, sir?

DALTON. (Assuming a country dialect) I never trouble ’em much, sir, except for the

Smithfield Market List, in the way of business.

HAWKSHAW. Ah, much my own case. They put a fellow up to the dodges of the town,

though; for instance, these cases of bad notes offered at the bank lately. (Watching

him close.) (170; Act 1)

Here again Hawkshaw sits “coolly,” unfolding the paper – a gesture of self-occupied leisure.

Only then does he try to unnerve his criminal target as though by accident, watching him closely for any “tell.” Detection, it would seem, is best performed through the distraction of self- conscious disinterest. Hawkshaw’s apparent leisure is in fact performance, a cover for his watchful efforts and focused labour. His style of detection is so dedicatedly normal as to become mannered and obvious; something quite different from the more conspicuously presentational style of the lamenting old man or pathetic child (Booth 31-3). Nevertheless, Hawkshaw’s ordinariness becomes stagey as well as staged – the commonplace becomes studied, rendering the apparently invisible detective quite visible. The detective it seems is suited to the stage.

But is the inadvertent visibility of Hawkshaw merely a theatrical necessity, a dramatic adaptation designed to force the ordinarily imperceptible detective branch into the limelight? An article published in Macmillan’s Magazine in February of 1882, titled “The French Detective

Police,” suggests not:

38 I was having my shoes cleaned outside the Charing Cross Station, when I noticed two

well-built, well-set-up, active-looking men standing near me. They were in plain clothes,

and yet their dress was so much alike that they might almost be said to be in uniform. I

remarked to a friend who was with me that they looked like soldiers of the guards in

mufti. Upon this the youngster … who was brushing away at my feet, looked up at me,

winked, and said – ‘No, sir, them beant soldiers; they’s detectives, they is.’ ‘How do you

know?’ says I. ‘Oh, sir,’ was the answer, ‘we knows all them plain-clothes officers. They

try to look like other folks; but it’s no good. We can tell them as well as if they wore

helmets and blue coats.’ (“The French Detective Police”, Macmillan’s Magazine

February 1882, qtd. in R. F. Stewart 148)

Here the focus is on build, stance and, primarily, clothing, but the insistent visibility of the plainclothes officers is clear. Despite their evident efforts to the contrary the “youngster” of the piece identifies them with a wink. The English anxiety over a system of French police spies may go some way to explaining this trait. In a piece entitled “A French Detective Story,” published in

November, 1877, in All the Year Round the author goes to great lengths to distinguish the French detective from the English on the basis of the former’s ability to be truly unknown. In what may in fact be an earlier iteration of the tale from Macmillan’s quoted above, the French master of disguise argues that the English “‘secret police’” are entirely incapable of being truly secret.

They “are no more secret,” he insists, “than your police in uniform. Everybody knows them, and they even dress so exactly alike that they might as well wear the blue tunic with the number on the collar’” (“A French Detective Story” 369). The insistent visibility of the English police detective may be laughable to our French antagonist, but it may yet speak well for him in an

English context. In a nation still anxious about the potential for covert surveillance carried out by an unknown and unseen network of spies, the detective’s visible invisibility was not a sign of his 39 incompetence but reassuring reminder of his connection to the hyper-visible bobby. There are, in short, reasons beyond dramatic necessity that would render these detectives stolidly visible and performatively legible. The theatrical idiom in which they moved and spoke, and through which they could be understood, helped salve social concerns as much as dramatic ones.

The question of just what might be legible and how it could be aesthetically read is one which Meisel takes up in Realizations. Meisel observes what he sees as a tension between conventionalized gesture and the expression of individual and particularized feeling: “The aesthetic problem for the age was to incorporate such individuation, for which it had an enormous appetite and which it perceived as the real, with the glamor and readable moral and intellectual coherence of the faceless ideal” (8). This tension between the real and the ideal created aesthetic challenges in an age when legibility and moral coherence were key, challenges with which contemporary artists had to grapple:

The nineteenth-century artist, especially the Victorian artist, working for a

comprehensive audience, had a double injunction laid upon him. He found himself

between an appetite for reality and a requirement for signification. Specification,

individuation, autonomy of detail, and the look and feel of the thing itself pulled one

way; while placement in a larger meaningful pattern, appealing to the moral sense and the

understanding, pulled another. A story rightly told satisfied both requirements. (Meisel

12)

The question of the detective’s visibility and legibility in a system of meaningful signs places him at the centre of this aesthetic and epistemological knot. 40 Numerous handbooks were published for actors in the latter half of the nineteenth century concerned with the appropriate signification of these external signs.7 Henry Neville, The Ticket- of-Leave Man’s leading man, himself published a section on “Gesture” in Voice, Speech and

Gesture: A Practical Handbook to the Elocutionary Art some time after his success as Bob

Brierly. Noting the importance an actor must give to appropriate gesture in performance, he writes:

In order to gain a just idea of suitable action and expression it is necessary to remember

that every passion, emotion, and sentiment has a particular attitude of the body, and

physiognomical expression, which should be carefully studied and practiced with force

and frequency in order that we may wear ourselves into the habit of assuming them with

perfect ease. (110)

His guide details just what an actor might be expected to learn in order to do this. He dedicates a full nine pages, for instance, to the practise of walking on the stage, expressing his opinions not only on the particular style appropriate to specific types of persons – “young people,” “old people and invalids” – or particular tempers – “nervous,” “bilious,” “phlegmatic,” or

“lymphatic” – but also simply that suited to the “ordinary walk of a person of sanguine temperament” (116, 112); a walk that requires “a stride of about sixteen inches,” with “shoulders well down, head erect, chest forward” (113, 114). In other words, even the ordinary walk of the most ordinary man must be learnt, practiced and perfected for the stage. An “ordinary” walk on

7 Joel H. Kaplan lists a number of such manuals in his chapter, “Exhuming Lady Audley: period melodrama for the 1990s”: “To fine tune the process we used a number of nineteenth-century acting manuals, from Leman Rede’s The Road to the Stage; or, the Performer’s Preceptor (London: Smith, 1827) to Gustave Garcia’s The Actor’s Art: A Practical Treatise on Stage Declamation, Public Speaking, and Deportment (London: Simpkin, 1888) and Hugh Campbell’s Voice, Speech and Gesture: A Practical Handbook to the Elocutionary Art (London: Deacon, 2nd ed., 1895)” (152-3). 41 the stage is no ordinary feat; to act normally on the stage was its own skill. Unlike the Naturalists who were to follow, Neville believed that the gestures of the theatre were attitudes to be learnt and perfected – acting “ordinary” was one of these. Hawkshaw’s deliberately ordinary attitude thus has something in common with the stage actor of the period. His self-aware and self- conscious attitude of the ordinary is similarly practiced and deliberate.

The combination of Hawkshaw’s deliberate visibility with a performance of the ordinary also makes plain the paradox inherent in the concept of acting naturally. The combination of ordinariness and evident theatricality particular to the characterization of Hawkshaw challenges the problematic distinction often maintained between Naturalism and “natural acting” on the one hand, and expressive theatrically coded performances on the other. In this way, he seems to cast forward and back at once. His insistent ordinariness – quite different from the wild villains or emotional heroines of contemporary melodrama – anticipates the interest in performing the natural. However, the insistently visible and theatrical style of this ordinariness retains the overt theatricality and “excess of energy” that Michael Booth identifies as central to melodramatic acting (194). Carving out a space for this “detective style,” Hawkshaw’s stylized and obvious performance of something that looks something like but isn’t quite “normal” tests the contemporary understanding of theatre and performance style.

The play received a generally warm reception with much praise lavished on its actors who were presumably well practised in the correct gestural signification. Though most of the attention went to Henry Neville in the title role, Horace Wigan nonetheless garnered some attention as Hawkshaw. Focusing predominantly on his propensity to disguise himself

(something to which I will return shortly for it is something a little different) a number of reviewers do also comment on his generally self-conscious and casual demeanour. The critic for 42 the Times, for instance, refers to him as “a cool detective officer” (29 May 1863).8 The reviewer for the Era refers to the “vigilant Hawkshaw” and, in an unrelated but, as it turns out, apposite introductory paragraph discussing Wigan’s appearance in Bulwer-Lytton’s Lady of Lyons, describes his performance as rendered in his “usual conscientious style” (31 May 1863) – a signal perhaps that Wigan’s own approach was typified by a kind of understated workman-like quality that resonated well with Hawkshaw’s quotidian style. The idea that Horace Wigan’s own

“quiet conscientious style,” may have suited him well to the self-consciously sanguine detective is particularly interesting to note when one recalls that his brother, Alfred Wigan, had appeared just eight years earlier as John Mildmay in Taylor’s Still Waters Run Deep (1855). Though not a detective in name, John Mildmay is the quiet, cool and underestimated husband who foils the plot of the philandering adventurer, Hawksley, with his understated English detection. Described by one who does not underestimate him, as one of “thim north-country boys” who are “as cute

[that is, acute] as Dublin car dhrivers,” Mildmay, it would appear, is as “cute” as Hawkshaw, described in The Ticket-of-Leave Man as “the ’cutest detective in the force” (Still Waters 43, Act

2, Sc 2; Ticket-of-Leave 167, Act 1). The Wigan brothers seem suited to a performance line of understated English detection, whether undertaken through happenstance or by profession.

The critic for the Daily News makes explicit what the Era critic’s serendipitous juxtapositions allow for but do not necessarily endorse. Speaking in praise of the performance, the reviewer for the Daily News observes that “Mr. Horace Wigan, as usual, did excellent service to the author by his quiet telling style as a detective” (28 May 1863; emphasis added). In so doing he expresses a somewhat confused confluence of style, hovering somewhere between the style of the actor, Wigan, and that of the character, Hawkshaw, for it is not entirely clear to

8 Indeed, such comments are not restricted to Horace Wigan’s performance but can be found in the remarks about other Hawkshaw performers in later productions. The reviewer for The Manchester Courier, and Lancashire General Advertiser refers to the performance of Mr G. F. Sinclair as “the very type of a shrewd, sagacious, cool and clear-headed detective” in, it should be noted, the production which featured a young Henry Irving as Dalton. 43 whom this “style” applies. He may be praising Wigan’s own style which seems to fit so naturally with the detective whom he has to personate; he may alternately be praising Wigan’s performance of that detective style, aided perhaps by Wigan’s own preternatural disposition; or, he may in fact be praising Hawkshaw’s style which is distinct from Wigan’s performance of

Hawkshaw and unique to the detective character himself. This uncertainty in attribution illustrates the confusion and commingling at the heart of the early detective where the question of style could be at once theatrical and quotidian and where the actor, his performance and the assumed traits of the character he played might merge and reinforce one another.

Hawkshaw then has a decided style, a recognizable detective mode identified by reviewers in 1863. He is resolutely ordinary, visibly invisible and self-consciously inconspicuous: traits that align him well with the theatre of the day in which actors prided themselves on their effective attitudes of performance (from the proud and horrified to the sanguine and content) and situate him within a changing landscape of theatrical style. The figure of the detective is at home on the boards of the Olympic. Despite the clear theatricality of this detective mode, however, its precise origins and location remain muddy – part of a self- supporting tangle of actorly style, performance style and a burgeoning character type which is itself indebted to a real-life figure with his own network of meaning. Not only does the style of the stage detective bounce around between actor and character in productive ways, it is also in conversation with the detective of the streets as a casual theatricality flowed between the stage and the street. In his writings on “Gesture,” Henry Neville himself acknowledges that some skill in effective gesture might be necessary in public speaking. While maintaining a clear distance between theatrical gesture and that suited to the public sphere, he nonetheless suggests that an accomplished barrister, lecturer or clergyman will have need of “‘discriminating’ gestures”

(156). Neville’s emphasis may be on those who are engaged in public speaking of some sort and yet the “detective” feels a natural addition to his list of law and (moral) order professionals. A 44 well-crafted, self-conscious performance is the rightful domain of both the stage and street detective.

Dramatic Detection – Disguise and Reveal in the Performance of Policing

The mode of casual nonchalance so well developed in Hawkshaw’s first appearance is not the limit of his propensity to perform or to play. In fact, his actorly inclinations develop throughout the play, moving from this performance of casual disinterest via a brief spell as a pseudo office clerk to his full-blown disguise as a drunken navigator in “rough cap, wig and whiskers” (219;

Act 4, Sc 1). As observed already, many of the critics noted this propensity of the character, commenting favourably on Horace Wigan’s ability to act with such flexibility and range. The reviewer for the Evening Star observes that “Mr. Horace Wigan is wonderful in the disguises of person and manner by which Hawkshaw does his duty to the State and to his murdered colleague” (28 May 1863). The Era’s reviewer similarly notes that Wigan “is entitled to high praise for the dexterity with which he appeared under all sorts of forms, and destroyed his own identity to add to the general illusion of the scene” (31 May 1863). Where, though, might this propensity come from and what can it tell us about the character of Hawkshaw and the developing figure of the stage detective?

Some time before Tom Taylor’s Hawkshaw took to the stage, Eugène François Vidocq, the notorious real-life French police spy, had already been dramatized. Making his way from the

French stages to the English, Vidocq proved a successful stage character in London from the late

1820s into the 1860s. Drawing from Vidocq’s “own self-congratulatory autobiography” published in 1828, were two early dramatizations – Douglas William Jerrold’s Vidocq! the

French Police Spy (Surrey, January 6 1829), and John Baldwin Buckstone’s “slightly altered version,” Vidocq, the French Police Spy (Coburg, July 6 1829) (Burwick 172). In both the 45 Surrey and the Coburg productions, “Vidocq was presented as a master of disguise” (Burwick

172). In 1860, another Vidocq play appeared, The Thieftaker of Paris, or, Vidocq, the French

Jonathan Wild this time by Frederick Marchant (Britannia, Hoxton, November 1860) before returning in May of 1863 – the very same year as The Ticket-of-Leave Man – at the Pavilion.9

The Vidocq of Marchant’s play is an adept master of disguise, appearing as a German soldier and a monk, amongst other disguises. He is effective and entertaining and works primarily for the societal and moral good (albeit one often inflected with his own personal drive to revenge).

He is, however, a somewhat ambiguous figure who “strikes [the] hands [of Simon, a sworn enemy] until he releases his hold and falls into the River beneath” as he shouts “Revenge!” – hardly the actions of a professional member of the official constabulary (20).10 In this context,

David Mayer’s assertion that “the police spy was feared as an agent provocateur whose slippery dealings could incriminate or entrap innocent working people as well as criminals” certainly makes sense (36).

Mayer suggests that we must remember characters like Vidocq before we rush to designate Hawkshaw The Ticket-of-Leave Man’s playful detective. Vidocq’s slippery position somewhere been criminal and thief-catcher means that he cannot be an unambiguous force for good and, Mayer notes, “twice, in his Act I and Act II appearances, Hawkshaw’s presence in disguise threatens Brierly as much as it does the play’s true criminals” (35). Hawkshaw’s propensity to disguise himself may then draw him closer to a figure like Vidocq than earlier

9 Frederick Burwick notes that the first performance of this play did take place at the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton in 1860 but also suggests it was later produced at the Pavilion in May of 1863 (Burwick 172). 10 Something deserving of more attention than I am able to give it here is Hawkshaw’s own position vis-à-vis revenge drama. Hawkshaw’s self-stated mission to capture Dalton is one he admits comes, at least, in part from a personal offence: that is, the attack on his partner, Joe Skirrit. When he arrests Dalton in the final act, he declares, “Now Jem Dalton, remember poor Joe Skirrit – I promised him I’d do it. I’ve done it at last” (222; Act 4, Sc 3). In some respects, this aligns The Ticket-of-Leave Man with Marchant’s Vidocq as a kind of personal revenge drama. However, the specifics of Joe Skirrit’s relationship to Hawkshaw – he is a colleague, “I shall never work with such another” (202, Act 3), as well as friend – complicates this designation. This distinction is given further significance by Taylor’s clear authorial intent, as he shifted the source of his detective’s revenge from the murder of his father (“Il a tué mon père” [70; Act 4, Sc 6]) to the murder of his colleague; a small but important difference as it shifts the focus from familial revenge to one personal but also professional. 46 critics have allowed. And of course The Ticket-of-Leave Man is itself an adaptation from a

French drama, Le Retour de Melun or Léonard, by Brisebarre and Nus. Perhaps Taylor’s play simply retains this aspect of the original, these traits of its original police spy. Here, though, I have to disagree with David Mayer because although it is important to contextualize Hawkshaw in a society ambivalent about the detective police officer and its French antecedents, Hawkshaw simply does not seem to be a particularly disturbing or morally ambiguous figure. Mayer argues that contemporary audiences “looked on Hawkshaw with some misgivings,” before citing a review from The Illustrated London News. However, this reviewer seems mostly uninterested in

Hawkshaw, noting primarily that “it is not the detective (whose part is undertaken by Mr. Horace

Wigan) who denounces [Bob Brierly, in Act III], but, as we have suggested, his early acquaintances who had originally betrayed him into error” (27 June 1863).11 Perhaps Mayer regards this acknowledgement that Hawkshaw did not out Brierly as an ex-convict to his employer as a misgiving because Hawkshaw chooses not to share information about Brierly’s criminal past with Mr Gibson, information that Brierly himself has clearly not shared. However, this hardly seems adequate criteria upon which to view Hawkshaw as suspicious or disingenuous

– it is in fact the very opposite of Mayer’s description of these French agent provocateurs who might “incriminate or entrap innocent working people” (36). In fact, because the audience knows that Brierly was mistakenly arrested in the first place, Hawkshaw’s decision not to pursue the point with Gibson seems a dramaturgical attempt to right this initial wrong. Though Hawkshaw is ignorant of his prior error, his inclination to be kind to Brierly and avoid punishing him twice

(“he’s paid his debt at Portland”) aligns him with the righteous and the just – something to which

I will return later in this chapter. In addition, of significance here is a departure Taylor makes

11 I should note that it is not entirely clear to which review David Mayer is referring. He references an Illustrated London News review from June 17, 1863, however, the paper was not published on that date. I have assumed that it is merely a minor typo and he meant to reference the review from June 27, 1863 as this is a date upon which the paper was published and indeed, the date upon which a Ticket-of-Leave Man review was published. 47 from Brisebarre and Nus’s Léonard. Taylor chooses to nix a scene in which Marcol, the detective of Léonard, essentially offers to pay Léonard (the Brierly of the piece) for information:

“tu vivras riche,” he says (38; Act 2, Sc). Hawkshaw makes no such deals.

In addition, as Mayer further notes, Taylor actually had experience writing of these

French secret police in his play, Plot and Passion, produced at the Olympic ten years earlier:12

A decade before writing The Ticket-of-Leave Man Tom Taylor had himself expressed this

fear [of a “French system” of secret police taking hold in Britain] in his Plot and Passion,

written for the Olympic. The villain of this melodrama, set in the France of Vidocq, is

Desmarets, scheming and amoral, who is prepared to use the full repertoire of the Secret

Department of Police (betrayal, political murder, blackmail, bribery, disguise) to further

his unwholesome private ends. (36-37)

I would characterize Fouché, the Minister of Police, as the real villain of the piece but he works alongside Desmarets, described by Fouché as “the most unmitigated rascal and most invaluable head of a secret department in Europe” (4; Act 1). Together they scheme and plot their way through the play doing, as Mayer describes, whatever they need “to further [their] unwholesome private ends.” There is no real subtlety in this play as Fouché delights in his role as most powerful of villains who threatens and blackmails anyone in his power. He may, like Hawkshaw after him, use disguise as one of his strategies. However, the very way in which he does so only draws him further from our genial (if imperfect) detective: it marks the difference rather than the similarity between the two characters.

12 The particulars of authorship as regards Plot and Passion remain a little fuzzy with a piece in The Athenaeum suggesting that Taylor did not in fact write this single-handedly as Taylor maintained (suggesting, in fact, that Taylor wrote very little single-handedly). It was, this writer argues, in fact co-written with John Lang (“Mr Tom Taylor’s Plays”). 48 Fouché of Plot and Passion lives an elaborate lie of perpetual disguise. Cloaked as an abbé he pretends constantly to an identity and position that are not his own:

FOUCHÉ. You were summoned here in the name of the Police. You did not expect to be

received by one in this costume: You know the cowl does not always make the

monk! I am Fouché.

MARQUIS DE CEVENNES. (Stammering) I am charmed to have the honor of making

such an acquaintance. (8; Act 1)

Rather like the Frenchman in All the Year Round’s “A French Detective Story” (November

1877) who prides himself on his utter anonymity, Fouché lives a life of total deception and secrecy. Hawkshaw, by contrast, happily puts on disguises and rather excitedly throws them off.

They are insistently visible to his audience who are invited in on the trick early in the game and encouraged along with a number of the other characters to marvel at Hawkshaw’s dextrous performance rather than be overawed by his hidden reach. Keeping clear water between himself and any disguise employed, Hawkshaw invites the audience to enjoy his performances from a knowing, and thus safe perspective.

Hawkshaw’s penchant for this kind of conspicuous and stagey performance comes to a head in the final act of the play when he dons the costume and adopts the attitude of a drunken navigator, or navvy:

([…] Enter HAWKSHAW, disguised as a navvy. He appears flustered with drink – goes

to one of the tables, and assuming a country dialect, calls swaggeringly.)

HAWKSHAW. Gallon o’beer, measter. 49 MATLBY. A gallon?

HAWKSHAW. Aye, and another when that’s done – I’m in brass tonight, and I stand

treat […] (208; Act 4, Sc 1)

Performing as a swaggering navvy, Ginger Bill, Hawkshaw implicates himself in the final action of Dalton, Moss and Brierly. As compared to his earlier performances or disguises broadly understood this final moment is significant, demonstrating his theatrical prowess and dramatic abilities. It is a comprehensive performance involving a newly acquired country accent, a wig and pair of fake whiskers (as referenced explicitly later in the act) and an ongoing pretence of sustained intoxication throughout: “flustered with drink,” “pretending to be very drunk,” “as if dead drunk” and so on (208, 215, 218; Act 4, Sc 1). Hawkshaw’s performance is bold and unsubtle and it seems likely an audience would quickly identify the disguised detective. In case the audience is not so perceptive, Taylor makes sure to alert them to Hawkshaw’s game. Just a few minutes after his disguised entrance Hawkshaw announces his intentions in an aside, remarking: “Yes – it’s Jim Dalton – or the Devil! Whichever it is he shall find Jack Hawkshaw a match for him. I’ve marked him down here! Now – I’ll stalk him like his shadow. (Exit, staggering like a drunken man after DALTON)” (209; Act 4, Sc 1). The audience is invited into his game of dramatic irony, knowing from this point on (if not before) that Ginger Bill is

Hawkshaw’s latest theatrical endeavour. Unlike Fouché, whose disguising seems to be a necessary part of his clandestine life, Hawkshaw’s final disguise is a notable performance, the culmination of his dramatic tendencies and a necessary part of the play’s climax. The shared use of disguise may at first glance seem to draw these two Taylorian detectives together but upon further examination it becomes clear that their very way of using this technique keeps them poles apart. I would even suggest that the insistent visibility and grand performativity of Hawkshaw’s disguise is something of an answer to the anxieties prompted by the very kind of furtive disguise 50 in which Fouché engages. In this way, Hawkshaw’s disguise of showmanship and performance is one to be marveled at not fearful of.

The audience, so apprised, is in a position to appreciate not only Wigan’s performance but Hawkshaw’s. The reviewers of the play complimented Wigan on his successful flexibility - but the performance to be appreciated is not Wigan’s alone but Hawkshaw’s. For if Wigan is required to perform a myriad of personations so too is Hawkshaw. As the reviewer for the Daily

News reported, “Another character who has much to do with the plot – who turns up in almost every scene in as many disguises as an ‘entertainer’ behind a table, is a detective of the romantic type, played by Mr. Horace Wigan,” or that for the Daily Telegraph who notes, “The detective, who also has as many characters to personate as if he had to contribute to the amusement instead of the safety of society, found in Mr. Horace Wigan the most complete master of disguise” (29

May 1863) – a particularly interesting comment to which I will return. And in this final act

Wigan is Hawkshaw is Ginger Bill; and Hawkshaw, it would seem, is a successful and winning actor. More specifically, he is a melodramatic actor well-suited to his stage.

In a contemporary series of essays on notable actors of the period, George Henry Lewes delineates his own thoughts on the stage and performance. Observing with frankness Charles

Kean’s apparent skills as well as shortcomings, Lewes explains that Kean was a skilled actor; only of a very specific type – he was, Lewes concludes, a decent melodramatic actor but a man never intended for tragedy. In so explaining Kean’s talents, Lewes recounts the skills he believes are needed for success:

A melodramatic actor is required to be impressive, to paint in broad, coarse outlines, to

give relief to an exaggerated situation; he is not required to be poetic, subtle, true to

human emotion. (“Charles Kean” 24-25)

51 Hawkshaw’s drunken swaggering and pretended stupor, his adopted “country dialect,” and his assumed wig and whiskers form the basis of just such a performance. Painting in bold, broad strokes he successfully performs in this melodramatic mode. Hawkshaw, it would seem, is a different kind of actor from the actor who portrays him. The audience may be in on the trick but the characters onstage remain oblivious as Hawkshaw successfully deceives those around him:

(The tables have before this been cleared of all the NAVVIES except HAWKSHAW,

who lies with his head on the table as if dead drunk.)

(Enter MALTBY from bar.)

MALTBY. (Shaking HAWKSHAW by the shoulder) Now, my man, we’re shutting up

the bar.

HAWKSHAW. Shut up. I’m shut up. Good night. (Lets his head fall.)

MALTBY. It’s no use – he won’t go, and I’m wanted in the concert room. (Exit

MALTBY, calling.) Bar closed.

MOSS. (To DALTON, suspiciously pointing to HAWKSHAW) There’s a party –

DALTON. Eh? (shaking HAWKSHAW) Holloa, wake up. (HAWKSHAW grunts.)

MOSS. He’s in a deplorable state of intoxication.

DALTON. Yes, he’s got his cargo – no danger in him – now for business […] (218; Act

4, Sc 1)

Hawkshaw’s investigative strategy requires a kind of theatrical performance and just as Wigan is an actor on the stage of the Olympic so is Hawkshaw an actor in the bar of the apparent

Bridgewater Arms. So convinced by Hawkshaw’s performance of utter intoxication are Moss and Dalton that they openly discuss their latest criminal plan just steps away from their detective 52 nemesis. In this way, Hawkshaw quite conspicuously uses his performative zeal (and seeming skill) to further his investigative ends. His well-performed skit of oblivious drunkenness allows him to well-perform his police work. The policing efforts of this stage detective are thus conspicuously supported by his dramatic efforts, efforts that do not go unnoticed as the audience is invited to marvel at Hawkshaw’s theatrical skill. Acting and detection work as partners in crime, supporting and legitimating one another.

When, early in the scene, Hawkshaw turns to the audience, presumably breaking from his drunken performance, and announces his intention to “stalk [Dalton] like his shadow” (209; Act

4, Sc 1), he introduces an element of dramatic irony. As I’ve said above, if an audience didn’t immediately register that it was Hawkshaw underneath the wig and whiskers they are forced to make the recognition now. As such, any and all of Hawkshaw’s performance that occurs after this moment must be registered as such. More importantly it can now be sufficiently appreciated as a successful disguise; lacking such a nod to the audience, it remains invisible and decidedly unremarkable. His theatrical disguise is thus intimately linked with what I would call his

“reveal” - a moment of theatrical showmanship as he throws off his costume and announces his hidden self. The conspicuous inconspicuousness of what I have called his resting manner is here traded for the purely conspicuous as Hawkshaw yet again makes sure we know he is performing.

Of course, this brief “aside” hardly counts as a moment of such dramatic showmanship. It is, rather, a sly wink to the audience, inviting them to be a part of his game as he continues the scene in his deliberate disguise. He does, however, still get his big “reveal” as he makes an unexpected and striking revelation to one carefully chosen stage companion toward the end of the scene.

As Hawkshaw busily models drunken incapacity the scene bustles around him with Moss and Dalton brazenly planning their next robbery. They are, it would seem, intent upon blackmailing Brierly (whom they have prevented from keeping any honest work) into assisting 53 them in their grand plan to break into the office of Brierly’s former employer, Mr Gibson.

Brierly, it seems, has agreed to go along with the plan so that he can secretly alert Gibson to the impending theft. Taking advantage of a brief moment alone on stage (but for the apparently insensible Hawkshaw) he pens a letter to Gibson: “‘To Mr Gibson, Peckham. The office will be entered tonight; I’m in it to save the property and secure the robbers – R. Brierly.’” Having thus written the note, he stops to ask aloud, “But who’ll take it?” (219; Act 4, Sc 1). The answer, it appears, is Hawkshaw:

HAWKSHAW. (Who has got up and read the letter over his shoulder) I will.

BRIERLY. You?

HAWKSHAW. (Pulls off his rough cap, wig, and whiskers, and speaks in his own voice.)

Hawkshaw, the detective. (Gives a pistol.) You may find this useful – I shall be in

the way. (219; Act 4, Sc 1)

Having earlier disclosed his true identity and honest intentions to the audience in a sly “aside,” he now dramatically reveals this information to his onstage companion. In a grand gesture, well in keeping with the melodramatic mode described by Lewes above, he performs this revelation.

“Pull[ing] off his rough cap, wig, and whiskers, and speak[ing] in his own voice” he announces himself: “Hawkshaw, the detective.” The reveal, just like the disguise, becomes part of the performative act .13 In this way, Taylor reassures his audience that Hawkshaw’s performance is fundamentally distinct from the insidious invisibility of his French counterparts. The “reveal” ensures that Hawkshaw’s disguise remains overt and playful. It is part of the language of

13 By comparison, Marcol, the detective of Brisebarre and Nus’s Leonard, may rise and announce “Moi!” to Leonard’s question about who will take the letter but Brisebarre and Nus do not specify that he throws off any disguise nor does he grandly announce himself as Hawkshaw does; instead it is Leonard who calls him by his moniker, “Le Lynx!” (120; Act 7, Sc 8). 54 theatrical entertainment, recognized and appreciated by the audience rather than an allusion to the threat of unperceived detection and concealed surveillance.

Such reassuringly theatrical detectives were not in fact confined to the stage but could be found on the page as well. The police detectives of Dickens’ 1850s articles for Household Words display explicit pride in their ability to disguise themselves as well as significant satisfaction in the moment of revelation. In the issue of Household Words published on August 10, 1850,

Dickens continues recounting tales of his “A Detective Police Party,” begun the prior week. In this second installment, the “Butcher’s story” is told by an officer described by Dickens as

“fresh-complexioned and “smooth faced” (457). The tale is one of theft, illicit negotiation and the undercover police work undertaken to put an end to it. The detective’s satisfaction in his own disguise as a butcher as well as his delight in the surprise revelation at court is evident. Once the undercover work is complete and the jig is up, so to speak, the officer takes great pleasure in revealing his true profession to those he had formerly duped. His revelation marks the end of the tale as, taking a full two paragraphs to conclude his story, the Detective explains the process of his own “reveal” at trial:

‘You have no idea, Sir, what a sight it was, in Court, when they first knew that I wasn’t a

Butcher, after all! I wasn’t produced at the first examination, when there was a remand;

but I was, at the second. And when I stepped into the box in full police uniform, and the

whole party saw how they had been done, actually a groan of horror and dismay

proceeded from ’em in the dock!’ (458)

And he continues in this vein for a full paragraph following. His joy in the “reveal” is self- evident. The very flourish in court becomes the flourish of the tale itself, rounding out his narrative and concluding the “Butcher’s story.” This delight in his “reveal,” as a key punctuation 55 mark to the story of his disguise, demonstrates an affinity with important theatrical traditions of the time as these real-life detectives, as quasi-fictionalized by Dickens in Household Words use the vocabulary of theatrical performance to align their work with entertainment and reassure the reader of their benign intent.

I have already discussed Lewes’ view on a melodramatic actor, and feel confident in suggesting that Lewes would regard the butcher as an actor of the melodramatic rather than tragic style, but his collected essays, On Actors and the Art of Acting, make another point pertinent to our Dickensian Butcher/Detective. In writing about Charles Kean, Lewes takes pains to explain the importance of actor/audience communication:

Voice, look and gesture are the actor’s symbols, through which he makes intelligible the

emotions of the character he is personating. No amount of sensibility will avail unless it

can express itself adequately by these symbols. It is not enough for an actor to feel, he

must represent. He must express his feelings in symbols universally intelligible and

affecting. (“Charles Kean” 27)

Leaving aside Lewes’ keen interest in emotion and aesthetic sensibility, what is of particular note here is his concern for the audience’s experience and the communication between actor and spectator. It is all well and good, Lewes suggests, for an actor to feel (in fact he must feel) but if he does not sufficiently represent then all of his emotional effort is as naught.14 His ability to manage effect and successfully reach an audience is what allows him to be not just a feeling man

14 G. H. Lewes here echoes Diderot’s famous argument that the most successful of actors must not actually feel what they act: “First Speaker: […] If the actor actually felt what he was doing, would it honestly be possible for him to play a part twice running with the same warmth and the same success? He would be full of warmth for the first performance and exhausted and cold as stone at the third” (Diderot 103). While Lewes seems more willing to allow that the actor might feel as well as represent, he shares Diderot’s emphasis on representation and consistent legibility. 56 but a good, even great, actor. Picking up this same idea in his essay, “Shakespeare as Actor and

Critic,” he remarks that “the internal workings must be legible in the external symbols […] All art is symbolical. If it presented emotion in its real expression it would cease to move us as art”

(91). Again, putting aside his theories on art as symbolical, what is important to my purpose here is his recognition of the importance of communication, of being able to reach an audience and manage their response. It is this, I suggest, which is mirrored by the enthusiastic

Butcher/Detective. A similar recognition of the audience and a profound concern with their reaction binds the detective here with Lewes’ ideal nineteenth-century actor.

Moreover, Lewes’s theories of acting accept that acting necessitates a “departure from reality” (“Shakespeare” 91). An actor, he contends “is feigning and we know that he is feigning; he is representing a fiction which is to move us as a fiction” (“Shakespeare” 92). This open acknowledgement of the fictive element of acting is part of what Lynn Voskuil is responding to in her article, “Feeling Public: Sensation Theater, Commodity Culture and the Victorian Public

Sphere,” in which she addresses what she sees as the Victorian predilection for the consumption of “‘stage business’”; those “familiar theatrical images and endlessly repeatable bits of staged action that they could consume again and again” (259). As an example of this, Voskuil relates an

1867 account given by Thomas Wright, in which he tells of an audience so impressed with an actor’s “dying” that they demanded he “die again!” and, “in obedience to the call, Bricks got up and did “die again,” and the second dying was, if possible, harder than the first […]” (qtd. in

Voskuil, “Feeling Public” 260). Describing Bricks’s performance, Voskuil explains the following:

No slice of life, Bricks’s ‘hard dying’ moves his audience to appreciate his performative

talent and recognize his skill in manipulating the conventions of staged death. Like the

plots and sets of the plays themselves, the very gestures and actions of performer and 57 audience have become hyperconventional; while both draw on the conventions of

melodrama, they do so reflexively, actor and spectator playing only to each other.

(“Feeling Public” 260)

Voskuil’s primary interest here is in communal audience response and she moves on to pursue that. I’d like to pause, however, and address this recognition of an actor’s “performative talent” as well as the “hyperconventional” nature of the “‘stage business.’” Such audience appreciation of an actor’s “performative talent” seems precisely what is being played to in the detective/butcher’s final flourish. Fully anticipating an audience well-versed in such visible performative conventions, ones which as Voskuil suggests are becoming “hyperconventional,” the detective stepped expectantly into the box, resplendent in his police uniform. Interestingly, the reflexive nature of the actor/spectator relationship that Voskuil identifies, is here also maintained, as the detective explains to Dickens that just as the audience appreciated his transformation, he appreciated their response: “‘You have no idea, Sir, what a sight it was in, in

Court, when they first knew that I wasn’t a Butcher at all!’” (“A Detective Police Party” 458). In this way, the moment of “reveal” is the detective’s “stage business,” allowing him to reveal his

“performative talent” and revel in the appreciation of his audience. Without the “reveal” the performance may go unnoticed and unremarked; with it, however, the detective is the star actor in his own show, entwining himself with a theatrical culture that applauded such visible skill and performing talent. Moreover, it is such visible theatrics that get the job done. The elaborate disguise combined with the well-managed “reveal” are not just a performer’s flourish but are part of what enables these detectives to do their job. A critic for the Daily News drew a clear line between Hawkshaw, the stage detective, and the real-life plainclothes policemen, observing:

“The detective, as we have before hinted, is the ubiquitous, clever officer of romance, rather than the winking policeman in plain clothes of reality” (Daily News, 28 May 1863). Although he 58 concedes that Hawkshaw does have “a few touches of humanity about him,” his position is clear

– Hawkshaw’s dramatic inclinations pull him away from his policing ones. I would suggest that the line between the two is in fact rather thinner, as each at times bolsters the other.

A strange article and accompanying illustration that appeared in an 1862 Penny

Illustrated Paper – just a year ahead of Hawkshaw’s appearance at the Olympic – makes this point rather well. “Alarming Arrest of a Thief at the Exhibition,” exclaims a headline of the June

28 Penny Illustrated Paper. Noting, in a short piece, that there had been a number of thefts from the Austrian section of the International Exhibition, the paper explains the unusual methods adopted by the detective police:

A detective officer from Scotland-yard was wrapped up in green baize, like a statue, and

set upon the watch. He had not to wait long before the thief came and took a pair of

boots, with which he was quietly stealing away, when the figure he had supposed to be

lifeless embraced him. The fright of the larcenous captive was so intense that the captor

was in turn alarmed, thinking he should have to answer for having terrified the poor

wretch out of his wits or his life. [….] Our artist has made the incident the subject of an

illustration. (“Alarming Arrest of a Thief at the Exhibition”)

Whether such a bizarre and unquestioningly “stagey” incident actually took place, it is significant that not only the detective himself but the very work of the detective was co-opted into such an illusionistic culture. In his chapter, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Tom Gunning identifies and explores a kind of vacillation between belief and disbelief, something he maintains is fundamental to the functioning of stage illusion in the nineteenth-century:

59 The seeming transcendence of the laws of the material universe by the magical theatre

defines the dialectical nature of its illusions. The craft of late nineteenth-century stage

illusions consisted of making visible something which could not exist, of making the pay

of appearances in order to confound the expectations of logic and experience […] The

magic theatre laboured to make visual that which it was impossible to believe. Its visual

power consisted of a trompe l’oeil play of give-and-take, an obsessive desire to test the

limits of an intellectual disavowal – I know, but yet I see. (116-117)

The illustration which accompanies the story of the detective’s disguise – or perhaps, more accurately expressed, the illustration that the story accompanies – depicts just this moment of

“give-and-take.” Titled, “Startling Arrest of a Thief at the Great Exhibition by a Detective

Disguised as a Statue,” the moment illustrated is that of the detective’s self-revelation and the suspect’s capture; a rather grand image, it depicts the cloaked detective on a pedestal, reaching out to seize the overawed thief, the stolen boots tumbling from his grasp. Just as with the

Butcher/Detective recounted by Dickens in 1850, here the moment of revelation is memorialized and celebrated.

Figure 1. “Startling arrest of a Thief at the Great Exhibition by a Detective Disguised as a Statue.”

Penny Illustrated Paper, 28 June 1862.

The startling appearance of the detective is particularly significant in this case as it is not simply a crowning glory, intended to impress after the fact (or, as in Hawkshaw’s case, before), but it is also a moment of success as the instant of his revelation is here contemporaneous with the moment of capture. The shocked look of the would-be thief attests to the fact that he is experiencing the “I know, but yet I see,” moment as expressed by Gunning. Theatre is here pressed into the service of justice as the detective’s ability to arrest the scene facilitates his arrest 61 of the subject. In addition, justice works reciprocally to serve theatrical ends as the officer’s arrest simultaneously serves to arrest the scene, providing a moment of aesthetic value for the audience. For it is not the thief alone who experiences such a sensation of shock but the very readers of the Penny Illustrated Paper. Each reader’s own sensational moment of shock and disbelief, tinged crucially with that little bit of credulity, is itself facilitated by the detective’s spectacular arrest. In this way, the detective fits seamlessly into an illusionistic tradition identified by Gunning, specifically, as “an aesthetic of astonishment” dependent upon “a vacillation between belief and incredulity” (Gunning 119). Moreover, the careful manipulation of these two states – those of belief and incredulity – was that upon which a detective’s career depended. In other words, his successful theatrical performance, as so wonderfully captured by the sketcher of the Penny Illustrated, was entwined with the successful performance of his policing duties, as the spectacular facilitated the practical, with the dramatic “reveal” operating with a real-life efficacy. The functioning detective, understood in this way, becomes a realization of this nineteenth century aesthetic – his pedestrian work is the work of “astonishment,” or at least it is when depicted by the Penny Illustrated Paper.

Moreover, the detective’s proclivity to arrest both people and scenes further embedded him into a dramatic culture of melodrama that, as Katherine Newey suggests, “relied greatly on the creation of ‘telling’ scenes and ‘speaking pictures’ in its creation of arresting and interesting situations” (3). As Edward Mayhew explains in his 1840 text, Stage Effect: or, The Principles

Which Command Dramatic Success in the Theatre, “To theatrical minds the word ‘situation’ suggests some strong point in a play … where the action is wrought to a climax, where the actors strike attitudes, and form what they call a ‘picture’” (qtd. in Newey 14). The linguistic confusion, if it can be called that, makes plain just the generic commingling that was common at this time; pictures realized on stage and bodies frozen in time to create pictures that could be read. That the work of the detective was co-opted into such an aesthetic understanding is perhaps not surprising 62 but what may be more a little more unexpected is the way in which his work fit so neatly into this worldview. The Penny Illustrated Paper’s captioning of their front page image makes plain just how readily the detective’s practice fit into just such an aesthetic model: “Startling Arrest of a Thief at the Great Exhibition by a Detective Disguised as a Statue.”15 The nature of disguise, as

I’ve explained above, clearly predisposes the detective to the drama of such “situations” but so too does the nature of arrest as the language of police procedure echoes the nineteenth century tendency to fashion frozen pictures.16 In other words, the “startling arrest,” could well be a description of the artistic execution rather than the police process. The “arrest” of the image seems to represent at once the literal arrest of the suspect and simultaneously the entire event as arrested in sketch form. The word “startling,” moreover, is not clearly attributed, referring perhaps to the startled captive, perhaps to the startling nature of the event or perhaps the subsequently startling image as this alarming quality resonates throughout the event and its imagistic afterlife.

The detectives’ work fit into this illusionistic framework as these “situations” reverberate through the theatre and the press of the time. The predisposition of the detective to dumb-found, shock and arrest (in both senses of the word) is captured again by Dickens in his “Modern

Science of Thief Taking” published in July of 1850. The chattering thieves of this story are happily engaged at dinner when Witchem comes upon them by surprise:

You never saw such a change as his presence causes, when he places his knuckles on the

edge of the table and looks at the diners seriatim; the courtiers of the sleeping beauty

15 To be clear, the front-page image is titled “Startling arrest of a Thief at the Great Exhibition by a Detective Disguised as a Statue” while the story inside is titled “Alarming Arrest of a Thief at the Exhibition.” The wording varies slightly but the emphasis on the shocking nature of the arrest both for the thief and the reader/viewer of The Penny Illustrated is much the same. 16 The detective’s involvement in fashioning such pictures is particularly interesting when we consider that the tableau offered a moment of stillness, facilitating a kind of moral legibility in the melodrama of the time. See Chapter Three for more on the relationship between the detective and the moral order of melodrama. 63 suddenly struck somniferous were nothing to this change. As if by magic, the loud laugh

is turned to silent consternation. You now, most impressively understand the meaning of

the term ‘dumbfoundered.’ (68)

Here the narrative freezes in a theatricalised tableau – Witchem’s policing arrests the scene as he initiates a moment of static drama, dumbfounding the thieves and creating his own real-life tableau. The detective is thus not just a functionary facilitating civic justice but is a creator, facilitating moments of artistic significance and, moreover, using these very moments in the service of his duty. Hawkshaw’s “reveal” in the fourth act of The Ticket-of-Leave Man is part of this same trend as our stage detective uses his performative power to entertain, in the service of detection.17

Sight, Authentication and Authority – The Detective as Expert

The land of The Ticket-of-Leave Man is one ruled by fraud, trickery and deception, where nothing is quite what it seems and appearances most certainly cannot be trusted. Our hero, Bob

Brierly, is arrested at the end of the first act for attempting to pass off fraudulent bills, “passing

17 Despite the theatrical inclinations of detectives so noted, a couple of years after this production of The Ticket-of- Leave Man, Horace Wigan himself gave evidence to the court regarding just what and when a performance could be. A case had been brought to the courts alleging that the Alhambra in Leicester Square had infringed upon the theatrical rights of others. As reported in the Reader in January 1865 a number of theatrical managers, Horace Wigan (“as ‘lessee of the Royal Olympic Theatre’” by this time) included, gave evidence tying themselves into knots over just what did and did not constitute acting, theatre and performance. Despite his apparent contradictions and with a clear motive in mind it is of note that Wigan chose the following example: “Mr. Wigan considers that if he were to dance the Cachuca on the floor of the police court it would not be any thing particular; but that if he were to dance it on the stage, it would immediately become transformed into a drama” (Reader, 14 January 1865). The police court, according to Horace Wigan himself, is no space for performance; the stage, on the other hand, naturally is. Wigan’s motivations, as the author of the Reader article makes evident, were likely dictated by his financial and legal interest in the case but it is nevertheless a position of note. According to Wigan’s logic, these real-life detectives had no right to presume a theatrical air or call themselves performers; they may have been theatrical but they were not theatre. To Wigan’s mind, the theatricality of the detective is assured not by his performance but by the theatrical space. Hawkshaw’s performance is theatrical because it is really his own (that is Wigan’s) performed not in fact in the bar of the Bridgewater but on the stage of the Olympic.

64 bad money,” as May incredulously remarks (177; Act 1). Brierly, moreover, is himself deceived, having trusted in the honesty of the bills and of his companions: he is the unwitting victim unwittingly compromised by compromised bills. This artful deception is the culmination of the first act but it is certainly not the first deception perpetrated in a play that is replete with references to fraud, deception and general trickery. Within the opening moments of the play the following situation plays out between our two criminal characters:

MOSS. (Stirring and sipping his brandy and peppermint) Warm and comfortable. Tiger

ought to be here before this. (As he stirs his eye falls on the spoon; he takes it up:

weighs it in his fingers.) Uncommon neat article – might take in a good many

people – plated, though, plated.

(While Moss is looking at the spoon, DALTON takes his seat at MOSS’s table,

unobserved by him.)

DALTON. Not worth flimping, eh? (166; Act 1)

As Melter Moss sits waiting for his companion to arrive he picks up and assesses the spoon from the Bellevue Tea Gardens. Weighing it carefully in his fingers he speaks aloud to himself commenting on the handiwork which might take others in; it may look like a silver spoon but it is in fact plated. Things are not always what they seem. Dalton appears surreptitiously at Moss’s side to confirm that it’s “not worth flimping,” that is, thieving. It may appear to be valuable but it is in fact not. This is, as I’ve said, the first of many references throughout the play to objects that are forged, fraudulent or generally untrustworthy but it is not merely things that are not always as they seem, as this encounter transitions seamlessly from object to person:18

18 There are many references throughout the play to fraudulent bills or criminal tricksters: Mrs Willoughby, for example, likely stung by being taken in my the fraudulent bills of the first act suspects that the money returned to her by Brierly in private penance may be “only gilt washed,” as she’s “seen ’em at London Bridge a-sellin’ 65

MOSS. (Starting, but not recognizing him) Eh, did you speak to me, sir?

DALTON. What, don’t twig me? Then it is a good get up. (He lifts his hat, and gives him

a peculiar look.) Eh, Melter?

MOSS. What, Tiger!

DALTON. Stow that. There’s no Tigers here. My name’s Downy; you mind that John

Downy, from Rotheram, jobber, and general dealer. (166-167; Act 1)

It is not only the spoons and bills that may not be what they seem but the very people themselves whose appearances, whose very names and identities, slip and slide, impossible to know or to predict. In such an unreliable and epistemologically unstable environment it is perhaps not surprising that we might find a detective, someone who can authenticate and in so doing reassure the characters and indeed society at large. How then does Hawkshaw go about this work? How is he qualified for this work? Just how does he detect and thus authenticate? And what kind of force is he in The Ticket-of-Leave Man?

Hawkshaw may seem an obvious candidate for expert or authenticator extraordinaire. He is after all a detective and as Moss says the “’cutest detective in the force” (167; Act 1). He is, however, a somewhat compromised figure. His propensity to conceal his identity and to use misdirection in order to achieve his police ends implicates him in the very systems of disguise and deception that he might be supposed to untangle or authenticate. Even more concerning, his penchant for disguise quite specifically draws him close to his criminal antagonist, Jim Dalton,

sovereigns at a penny a piece” (191; Act 2); Green insists in Act 3 that he’ll take his money in “cash, you know, no curious sherry” (195; Act 3); and Emily St Evremond tells May that “When people have come down in circumstances, the best way that can do is to keep up their names. Like St. Evremond, it looks well in the bill, and sounds foreign. That’s always attractive – and I dress my hair á la Française, to keep up the effect” (178; Act 2)– hardly the kind of criminal deception we see elsewhere but nonetheless a kind of social ruse, depending on your perspective of course. 66 who is similarly engaged in such behaviour, as evidenced in the above excerpt as well as in his

Act Three city get-up: “Enter Dalton dressed as a respectable elderly commercial, man, in as complete contrast as possible with his appearance in first Act” (199; Act 3). Mirroring one another in their parallel attempts to enforce and evade the law, our master detective and master criminal are more similar than we might at first expect. Interestingly, quite a number of the contemporary critics seem to have detected this similarity, handling the performances of Mr

Wigan (as Hawkshaw) and Mr Atkins (as Jim Dalton) in the same breath:

Mr. Atkins will raise himself considerably in the opinion of Metropolitan playgoers by

his clever assumption of the villain Dalton, and his multifarious disguises were

maintained with exceedingly good effect. Mr. Horace Wigan, also, is entitled to high

praise for the dexterity with which he appeared under all sorts of forms, and destroyed his

own identity to add to the general illusion of the scene. (Era 31 May 1863)

Appearing through the piece in various disguises, Mr. Atkins in each had quite a distinct

character to maintain, and they were each supported with marked histrionic ability. A

well-contrived situation in the bill-broker’s office, where, obtaining a hint of the presence

of the detective Hawkshaw, the ‘Tiger’ changes his tactics, and, as a singularly

conscientious principal of a Liverpool firm, smoothes away the suspicion that has been

aroused, may be cited as giving scope to excellent acting as well as affording an example

of the writer’s constructive skill. The detective, who also has as many characters to

personate as if he had to contribute to the amusement instead of the safety of society,

found in Mr. Horace Wigan the most complete master of disguise. (Daily Telegraph 29

May 1863)

67 Such an apparently thin line separating the deceptive detective from the mendacious criminal was not, however, something that would have come as a surprise to a contemporary audience.

After all, Vidocq, the great French spy, had begun his career on the other side of the law and, as

Frederick Burwick notes, Jonathan Wild – the famous English thief and thief-taker of the eighteenth century, practiced both “jobs” at once: “His cunning was invested in thoroughly disguising the fact that he was employing a well-organized gang of thieves, while appearing to police and protect” (Burwick 171).

Linked through their performativity, the detective and his criminal counterpart highlight the potential instability in the theatre as well as society more generally. Dalton’s manipulation of theatrical convention demonstrates a destabilizing possibility inherent in the theatrical medium while the participation of Hawkshaw, a supposed civic and moral authority, makes this all the more disturbing. It is not that Hawkshaw is disturbing in and of himself, as David Mayer argues, but rather that the similarity of his tactics to those of the criminal class is potentially disturbing, for it might reveal an entire world order in which the “good” and the “bad” are not so distinct as we might hope. That said, the playful and insistently visible nature of these disguises works to alleviate these kinds of concerns as Hawkshaw and Dalton seem engaged in an entertaining game of deception and disguise. Their shared employment of these disguising strategies is thus both disturbing and reassuring: disturbing because of the ubiquity of such deception; reassuring because of its insistent visibility and ultimately effective employment in the service of good.

Despite (or perhaps because of) his apparent similarity to his criminal antagonists, Hawkshaw remains a formidable opponent to Dalton and Moss.

When, in the first few minutes of the first act, Dalton complains that “the Crushers are getting to know too much; then there’s the Nailer’s been after me,” Moss replies, “What,

Hawkshaw, the ’cutest detective in the force?” (167; Act 1). His acute nature means they have to watch their backs as he threatens to spoil their nefarious plans. In particular, I would suggest, it is 68 his hawk-eyed gaze (an attribute suggested by his very name) that might trouble their illicit endeavours. Hawkshaw’s proclivity to look well and to look closely is noted specifically by

Taylor in the stage directions. In a conversation with Dalton in the first act, he is described as

“watching him [Dalton] close” as he tries him with talk of forged bank-notes (170; Act 1).

Similarly, in Act Three, he is described as giving a “keen look of recognition” at Brierly whom he recognizes from his arrest in the first act and some time ago by the play’s reckoning (197; Act

3). This is not, however, restricted to such authorial instructions but finds its way into the very language of the play. As Hawkshaw strolls onto the stage at the beginning of the play he instructs his colleagues to “Keep an eye on him,” that is Moss, before later announcing to the audience in an aside that he himself will “keep an eye on ’em,” now referring to Dalton and Brierly (166,

171; Act 1). Significantly, it is not Hawkshaw alone who employs such language or who seems alert to the importance of his gaze. Brierly comments on Hawkshaw’s unnerving ability to really look, telling him that where he comes from, that is Lancashire, “we don’t like folks to look at us over close serious-like, as you’re doing now” (170; Act 1).19 Dalton, is not only displeased by

Hawkshaw’s propensity to look, but actually unnerved and not just by Hawkshaw’s behaviour but his very eye itself. Immediately following Hawkshaw’s aside about his plan to “keep an eye” on Dalton, Dalton himself observes, “I don’t half like the look of that fellow. There’s something about his eye – I must make out if Moss knows him” (171; Act 1). In other words, it is not just that Hawkshaw is watching but that his gaze is particularly penetrating; Hawkshaw it seems, has heeded Kent’s famous exhortation to Lear, to “see better.”

To say that nineteenth-century Britain was an intensely visual time and place, one obsessed with the seen and the seer has become almost a truism. As Amy Holzapfel observes in

Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama, questions about just how and what we see

19 This particular comment does not, in fact, appear in Lacy’s published version of the text but can be found in the original Licensing Copy. 69 become “particularly commonplace during the nineteenth century” and there is much important scholarship on the topic, from Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (1990) through Kate

Flint’s The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000) to Chris Otter’s The Victorian Eye: A

Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 (2008). As Jonathan Smith writes in

Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, “it is clear that nineteenth-century Britain was a time when there was much to see, and a plethora of ways in which to see it” (32). Jonathan Crary argues, in fact, that the very basis of visual understanding underwent a seismic shift during this period: moving away from the “fixed relations of interior/exterior presupposed by the camera obscura and into an undemarcated terrain on which the distinction between internal sensation and external signs is irrevocably blurred” (Crary 24). In other words, there was a shift away from the disembodied model of vision as represented by the camera obscura, and toward a physiological model, grounded in the individual and the body. Where the prior model had offered a “vantage point onto the world analogous to the eye of God,” this new understanding centred instead on each subjective being (Crary 48). Amy Holzapfel makes a similar point when she suggests that the interest in the physiology of looking and the study of optics meant that by the end of the century, vision had become a markedly proactive and embodied event:

By the turn of the century, vision had become a ‘performance’ starring two actors: the

eyes. Seeing was no longer perceived as a rational undertaking of the mind; it was now

understood as a chaotic act of the body. (2)

The question of Hawkshaw’s explicitly visible and notable “eye” becomes particularly significant in such a shifting visual landscape. Might his “eye” stand in for the loss of God’s eye in or on the world? Or, might his searching eyes be a “chaotic act of the body” that offer no special authority or superior vision despite his status as a professional detective? 70 Seemingly employed to look well, the status of Hawkshaw’s vision is of particular significance. As Otter observes, in his introduction to The Victorian Eye, “Who could see what, whom, when, where, and how was, and remains an integral dimension of the everyday operation and experience of power” (1). In an attempt to disrupt the popular cultural narratives of the

“panopticon” and the “flaneur,” Otter seeks other ways in which to understand the relationship between “light, vision and power” (Otter 3-8). Like Otter, I’d like to avoid the panoptical framework so tempting when talking about police and police power, not least because

Hawkshaw, and his “eye” in particular, are so decidedly visible; seen as well as seeing or, rather, seen in the act of seeing. It is not that Hawkshaw is an invisible and regulatory force, quite the contrary – the frequent references to his “eye” make it quite clear that he is the seer seen. The sight of Hawkshaw – “sight” meant in its reflective capacity to capture both the sight of

Hawkshaw himself and that which is seen by him – is an important locus of power, vision and expertise. What kind of expert is he, then, and what kind of expertise does he bring with his acute eye and sharp vision? What kind of experts existed in the mid-nineteenth century and where might Hawkshaw fit amongst them?

In their 2007 book, Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison trace the epistemic history of the concept of objectivity. Objectivity, they suggest, is one epistemic model amongst others and one which really took hold in the mid-late nineteenth century, following on, they suggest, from “a science of truth-to-nature,” and followed itself by what they call “trained judgment” (18). In general terms they describe objectivity as follows:

To be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears no trace of the knower – knowledge

unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving. Objectivity is

blind sight, seeing without interference, interpretation, or intelligence. Only in the mid- 71 nineteenth century did scientists begin to yearn for this blind sight, the ‘objective view’

that embraces accidences and asymmetries […] (17)

Though such a move toward the apparently “objective view” might seem at odds with Crary’s argument that this period saw a shift from the god-like vision implied by the camera obscura model toward the compromised subjective viewer, I suggest that, in fact, it might help to explain it. If vision itself was understood as subjective and contingent, then a striving toward “blind sight,” as described by Daston and Galison, makes sense, offering a solution to the compromised eyes of the scientist. At first glance it would be easy to assume that detectives are products of this drive to scientific objectivity; not least because the timelines seem to handily accord. As

Daston and Galison observe, “scattered instances of scientific objectivity in word and deed started to appear in the 1830s and 1840s, but they did not thicken into a swarm until the 1860s and 1870s” (49). The first detectives of the Metropolitan police appeared in 1842 and Hawkshaw trod the boards in 1863 – so far, so good. This is, however, a highly misleading approach, at risk of a kind of confirmation bias that presupposes a kind of mechanistic objective police force not dissimilar from the kind of argumentation that David Mayer is disputing in “‘The Ticket-of-

Leave Man’ in Context.” Hawkshaw is far from the kind of scientist required by “mechanical objectivity […] long on diligence and self-restraint, scant on genial interpretation” (Daston and

Galison 121). Far from the vanguard of scientific philosophy, Hawkshaw seems an epistemic throwback, resembling not the mechanistic self-denying scientists of the new objective school so much as the Enlightenment savants who preached what Daston and Galison call “truth-to- nature.”20

20 Interestingly, we might see here an important division between the figure of the bobby and that of the detective with the former leaning more toward the newer “mechanical objectivity” – described by Daston and Galison as the practice of “self-discipline, self-restraint, self-abnegation, self-annihilation, and a multitude of other techniques of self-imposed selflessness” and the latter toward the earlier model of “truth-to-nature” – that “‘genius of observation’ whose directed and critical exercise of attention could extract truth-to-nature from numerous impressions” (203). 72 “Truth-to-nature,” what they give as the guiding principle of eighteenth-century scientific thought, is described as follows:

Like most variants of truth, truth-to-nature had a metaphysical dimension, an aspiration to

reveal a reality accessible only with difficulty. For Enlightenment naturalists, like

Linnaeus [the Swedish naturalist who published Hortus Cliffortianus in 1737], this reality

did not entail a commitment to Platonic forms at the expense of evidence of the senses.

On the contrary, sharp and sustained observation was a necessary prerequisite for

discerning the true genera of plants and other organisms. The eyes of the body and mind

converged to discover a reality otherwise hidden to each alone. (Daston and Galison 58)

In other words, these Enlightenment thinkers used experience and expertise to observe, catalogue and judge. Hawkshaw fits seamlessly into such a model. His remarkable “eye” and deliberate way of looking make him an obvious candidate for this kind of Enlightenment expert.

Interestingly, when in the sequence cited earlier Brierly requests that Hawkshaw stop looking at him so particularly, Hawkshaw responds by aligning himself with a particular kind of such expertise:

HAWKSHAW. Ah, quite right to be cautious about the company you keep, young man.

BRIERLY. It’s a way we have where I come from, and another way we have, we don’t

like folks to look at us over close serious-like, as you’re doing now.

HAWKSHAW. I beg your pardon. It’s an old trick of mine. It’s what book-learned folks

call a physiognomist, one that reads character in people’s faces.

The detective was of course officially established a good 13 years after the bobby so it is interesting to see the ways in which the detective feels like an older figure, an appeal to the epistemic models of the past.

73 BRIERLY. I don’t chose my face should be read in –

HAWKSHAW. That’s a pity. I like the titlepage. (170; Act 1)

It should be noted that this particular exchange is found only in the version held at the Lord

Chamberlain’s Collection and not in Lacy’s and this line may not have found its way to the stage of the Olympic. Nonetheless, Taylor was happy to call Hawkshaw a physiognomist, in one version at any rate and I would suggest by so doing to imply an alignment with the kind of

“truth-to-nature” scientific thinking Daston and Galison describe above.

To be a little more precise, however, it is important first to understand exactly what

Hawkshaw might mean by calling himself a physiognomist. Hawkshaw’s own précis – someone who “reads character in people’s faces” – is not inaccurate, though Taylor’s line likely presupposed an audience familiar with the discipline. The idea of physiognomy or certainly physiognomic technique has a long history, one which stretches back centuries, but it really took hold in a serious and systematic way in the nineteenth century. Johann Caspar Lavater – a Swiss clergyman – first published his Essays on Physiognomy in 1774-8. A popular and controversial figure, his work was widely translated as well as abridged and adapted, before being disseminated across Europe. As Melissa Percival notes, his “work was widely available for nearly a century after his death” (17). A complex and often contradictory philosophy, Lavater’s physiognomy claimed, as Kevin Berland argues, to “seek signs of the inner person marked on the outside, backtracking from effect to cause to show how inclination leads to action” (25). In its most simple form, then, it offered a key to those around you, a manual to understanding, the ability to “read character in people’s faces.” As simple as it sounds, Caroline Warman, identifies something of a contradiction in Lavater’s philosophy. Lavater, she argues, “is not strictly logical: he talks of ‘perceiving … natural signs’ which, nevertheless, do ‘not immediately strike the senses.’ How then can these ‘natural signs’ be perceptible? How even can they be either natural 74 or signs if they are not so?” (Warman 95). This is, as Warman identifies, something of a logical knot but it is also something that is addressed by the introduction of the character of the physiognomist; that is, an expert who is able somehow to see better than most and so able to effectively read those around them. The popularity of physiognomic thinking may speak to a well-documented nineteenth-century obsession with information and cataloguing (see for instance Flint 2000 and Richards 1993) but the figure of the physiognomist retains more than a trace of an earlier attitude to expertise and scientific qualification. Hawkshaw then is not the empirical expert of emerging nineteenth-century objectivity we might have expected. He is instead a physiognomist in the “truth-to-nature” style identified by Daston and Galison. Like the naturalist Linnaeus, Hawkshaw is a trained expert with the knowledge, experience and training to understand and interpret just what he is looking at.

Fifteen years before Taylor’s detective Hawkshaw appeared on the stage, J.R. Planché depicted a physiognomist, depicted in fact a fictionalized Lavater himself, in his play Not a Bad

Judge (1848). Lavater’s appearance in the first act of the play is a kind of theatrical show – the kind of thing we have come to associate with the later amateur detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Lavater reads the room, and the people in it so well that he begins to unsettle them. One after another they proclaim their confusion and suspicion that he seems to know too much: “Never saw me before! Then how did you –,” “He knows my name too! Do you know me?” “How did he know I dressed rabbits yesterday?” and so on (5; Act 1). Hawkshaw may not ever read an entire room in such a showy way, but his ability to recognize, catalogue and assess faces in an expert fashion is demonstrated clearly in the third act. Having been released from Portland, Bob

Brierly is now working as a messenger in Mr Gibson’s respectable “Bill-broking office” in the

City (191; Act 3). When he took up the position in Gibson’s office, Brierly failed to disclose his criminal history and status as a ticket-of-leave man. As a result he becomes immediately agitated upon hearing of Hawkshaw’s impending arrival at the office on an apparently unrelated matter: 75

BRIERLY. (Starting) Hawkshaw!

MR GIBSON. Yes, the famous detective. Show him in when he comes. I’ve a particular

appointment with him. (Exit MR GIBSON into his own room.)

BRIERLY. Hawkshaw coming here! The principal witness against me at my trial.

Perhaps he won’t know me – I’m much changed. But they say at Portland, he

never forgets a face. If he knows me, and tells Mr Gibson, he’ll discharge me –

and today, just when we looked to be so happy! It would break May’s heart. But

why should I stay? I’m free for the day – I will not wait to meet my ruin. (Going

up.)

(Enter HAWKSHAW.) (197; Act 3)

Displaying a peculiar knack for walking in at just the right moment, Hawkshaw enters before

Brierly has an opportunity to leave. Confirming Brierly’s recollection that Hawkshaw “never forgets a face,” Hawkshaw enters, “gives a keen look of recognition at Brierly, who shrinks under his eye” and remarks to Brierly: “I’ve seen you before, I think!” (197; Act 3). Brierly lies to Hawkshaw, saying he does not “recollect” him and Hawkshaw, in a show of his performed nonchalance, relents admitting “carelessly” that he may be wrong – “Perhaps I’m wrong – though I’ve a good memory for faces. Take in my card” (197; Act 3). As Brierly exits,

Hawkshaw makes his true skill plain, announcing that “it’s Dalton’s pal, the youngster who got four years for passing forged Bank of England paper at the Bellevue Tea Gardens” (197; Act 3).

Hawkshaw here acts as a genial expert – able to identify and catalogue with ease.

Although in some senses his almost super-human ability may recall a mechanized power more commonly associated with the “highly procedural approach” of the mechanical objectivity described by Daston and Galison, it is in fact distinctly human (Daston and Galison 122): by 76 using his own experience, employing his specialist knowledge and exercising discretion,

Hawkshaw recognizes his former catch. It should be noted that though his manner of expertise recalls the Enlightenment savants, the focus on Hawkshaw’s vision and the process of viewing which leads him to his judicious conclusions, owes something to the nineteenth-century interest in the subjective process of vision, as identified by Jonathan Crary:

The work of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Ruskin, and Turner and many others are all

indications that by 1840 the process of perception itself had become, in various ways, a

primary object of vision. For it was this very process that the functioning of the camera

obscura kept invisible. (138)

Hawkshaw is this process made manifest. In other words, that which Hawkshaw so obviously and explicitly sees may lead him to employ his Enlightenment-style expertise but the play’s interest in the process of Hawkshaw’s own potentially compromised vision is distinctly contemporary.

Interestingly, Hawkshaw’s expertise here does not necessarily elevate him above his criminal nemeses but, as with his use of disguise, echoes their skills – just as Hawkshaw identifies Brierly dressed now as an employee in a respectable City office so did Moss identify the plated spoon in Act One. Hawkshaw, like Moss, recognizes the deceit. What though does

Hawkshaw do with this information? Rather than demonstrate his prowess as a physiognomist- detective by revealing Brierly’s deceit, Hawkshaw chooses to keep his knowledge of Brierly’s identity to himself, instead initiating the following conversation with Gibson:

HAWKSHAW. Your messenger, eh?

MR GIBSON. Yes. 77 HAWKSHAW. Had him long?

MR GIBSON. Six months.

HAWKSHAW. Good character?

MR GIBSON. Never had a steadier, soberer, better-behaved lad in the office.

HAWKSHAW. Had you references with him?

MR GIBSON. Why, I think I took him mainly on the strength of his own good looks and

his sweetheart’s. An honest face is the best testimonial after all.

HAWKSHAW. H’m – neither is always to be relied upon.

MR GIBSON. You detectives would suspect your own fathers. Why, how you look at the

lad. Come, you’ve never had him through your hands. (A pause.)

HAWKSHAW. No, he’s quite a stranger to me. (Turns away.) Here’s the cheque, young

man. Take care you make no mistake about it.

BRIERLY. (Aside, going) Saved, saved! Heaven bless him for those words. (Exit.)

HAWKSHAW. (Aside) Poor devil, he’s paid his debt at Portland. (Aloud) Now to

business […] (198; Act 3)

It is not Hawkshaw but Gibson, Brierly’s kind and fair employer, whose position is informed by the basic tenets of physiognomy – “An honest face is the best testimonial after all.” Hawkshaw instead plays devil’s advocate, suggesting that “neither [a good reference nor an honest face] is always to be relied upon.” Hawkshaw sounds skeptical, cynical even, rejecting Gibson’s simplistic physiognomical approach. Despite Hawkshaw’s own invocation of his physiognomic skill earlier in the play he here seems to reject this as a naïve attitude and instead moderates his own position based upon his own sense of civic justice. Hawkshaw’s trained expertise, that which keeps him distinct from any mechanistic objectivity, is more extensive than simple 78 physiognomy. Hawkshaw here assesses and synthesizes the information in front of him before passing an informed and expert judgment.

That Brierly is in fact not guilty – something which the audience has always known – is significant in this interaction. 21 It affects the way in which the audience receive Hawkshaw and his conscious decision to give Brierly a pass. By aligning himself with what the audience already know to be true – that is, that Brierly our hero is fundamentally good and essentially innocent –

Hawkshaw avoids looking naïve and instead looks wise and discerning. In other words,

Hawkshaw’s expert inclinations to leave Brierly alone are dramaturgically supported. In this way, he gives the impression of the “sort of deus ex machina in a plug hat” of which Rahill speaks, aligning himself with an implicit higher power – both theatrical and societal – that seems just to know of Brierly’s innate goodness (286). The “honest face” to which Gibson had alluded can, in fact, be trusted. I further explore this conception of the detective as moral and dramatic arbiter in the final chapter but for now I’d like to return to the question of Hawkshaw’s fallibility because while he does, significantly, get this right he does also err and misstep.

Shortly after this scene with Brierly and Mr Gibson, Hawkshaw encounters Dalton.

Instead of arresting his criminal nemesis he fails to even recognize him. Hoodwinked by

Dalton’s Act Three disguise, Hawkshaw laughs with him about how he was going to arrest him thinking he was responsible for an earlier fraud committed upon Gibson’s office. In fact, Dalton was responsible and was back to perpetrate another such fraudulent transaction but, tipped off by

Gibson’s incompetent attempts to assist Hawkshaw in his undercover work, Dalton changed his tune just in time. In a lovely piece of dramatic irony, Hawkshaw waxes on about his commitment to capturing Dalton, even despite Dalton’s canny ability to disguise himself:

21 Technically it is true that Brierly passed fraudulent bills in Act One, but he did so entirely unwittingly and, as the audience is aware, has since made restitution to the victims of his accidental crime. 79 DALTON. You know this Dalton?

HAWKSHAW. Know him! He has as many outsides as he has aliases. You may identify

him for a felon today, and pull your hat off to him for a parson tomorrow. But I’ll

hunt him out of all his skins, and my best night’s sleep will be the day I’ve

brought Jem Dalton to the dock!

DALTON. Mr Hawkshaw, I wish you every success! (202; Act 3)

Hardly fine police work there. To be fair to our detective it is not he alone who is involved in such comic and humiliating failures of recognition. In the first act we witness another encounter between Hawkshaw and Dalton but this time it is Dalton who fails to recognize to whom he is speaking, only admitting later that he doesn’t “half like the look of that fellow. There’s something about his eye” (171; Act 1). Clearly though, despite the apparently intimidating quality of Hawkshaw’s “eye,” it doesn’t always quite do the trick. What might we make of such blunders, such ineffectual vision on the part of our star detective?

David Mayer suggests that Taylor’s police are “not omniscient or particularly efficient,” arguing that Taylor in fact seems intent on showing the troubling aspects of the recently created police network:

Although Taylor answers some of the prejudices existing against the Detective Police, he

is as concerned to offset some of the baseless suspicions against ticket-of-leave men

raised by the current garrotting scare, and he also appears determined to criticise the

humiliating practices inherent in the ticket-of-leave system and to draw attention to the

possibility of abuses in the even more recent surveillance system. (38)

80 In other words, Hawkshaw’s ineffectiveness might be an example of the insidious ineptitude of police practice for Taylor’s audience to seriously consider. Though Hawkshaw’s errors may prompt some anxiety about the efficacy and accuracy of this “recent surveillance system,” I suggest that these occasional missteps work primarily to the opposite effect. As Mayer says,

Hawkshaw is “not omniscient or particularly efficient.” His lack of any apparent omniscience may incite some concern about a blundering unpredictability in the force but it also serves to humanize him. Audrey Jaffe suggests that “omniscience in general […] is a fantasy: of unlimited knowledge and mobility; of transcending the boundaries imposed by physical being and by an ideology of unitary identity” (n.p.). That our police detective is in fact not omniscient but simply an expert professional is reassuring to a public not entirely convinced by the need for or rights of the detective branch. Hawkshaw remains a highly skilled expert and leaves the fantasy of omniscient knowledge as just that.

Despite Hawkshaw’s evident fallibility he does nevertheless get it right in the end. He may arrest Brierly and allow his criminal counterparts to escape in the first act; he may fail to recognize Dalton at Gibson’s office and take really far too long to get his job done but ultimately justice is served. Ultimately Moss and Dalton are captured and Bob Brierly vindicated as order is restored through the collaborative efforts of a repentant Brierly and a dedicated Hawkshaw. His performative prowess and uncanny ability simply to be in the right location at the right time eventually lead him to the theatrical denouement which sees the guilty captured and the innocent vindicated. In thinking about Hawkshaw’s success it is important to remember that he is always theatrically situated. In other words, Hawkshaw’s detective mission is also always a theatrical one, shaped by the tenets of the dramatic genre as much as by the particulars of his detective duty. That is, there are specifically theatrical impulses that might send a stage detective along this particular trajectory of error and final vindication; something I discuss at some length in the final chapter on the detective in melodrama. Hawkshaw’s errors fit easily, sensibly even, into 81 such a framework as his theatrical role folds into his detective one. His police work follows the structure and the logic of nineteenth-century melodrama as his theatrical positioning modifies and clarifies the project of detection.

* * * * * * * * * *

Just over twenty years after the Detective Branch was officially established in London, Jack

Hawkshaw “stroll[ed]” onto the stage of the Olympic in Tom Taylor’s highly successful Ticket- of-Leave Man (166; Act 1). Establishing himself as the first English stage detective of real significance he both reflected and shaped English feelings on the twin concerns of both theatre and detection; twin not just because they coalesce in the character of Hawkshaw but because the very character and concerns of Hawkshaw and his fellow fictional, and indeed real-life, detectives, demonstrate the ways in which the two come together in interesting and important ways. In Hawkshaw we can see the development of what I call detective style – an insistently performed casualness with its visible invisibility – part and parcel of contemporary views on acting, performance and theatrical presence. Hawkshaw’s propensity to disguise himself draws him ever closer to a melodramatic actor as described by G.H. Lewes and his inclination toward the great “reveal” as well as the disguise entwines him within a theatrical culture that applauds visible skill and performing talent.

Hawkshaw’s clear appeal to such interests is apparent in the Daily Telegraph’s review:

“The detective, who also has as many characters to personate as if he had to contribute to the amusement instead of the safety of society, found in Mr. Horace Wigan the most complete master of disguise” (29 May 1863). Despite the Telegraph reviewer’s skepticism regarding

Hawkshaw’s commitment to actual policing, it is in fact his very theatrical expertise that allows him to get the job done – disguise, “reveal,” and pretended nonchalance are the performative 82 tools he uses in his policing and detective work; work necessary in the slippery world of inauthenticity that The Ticket-of-Leave Man seems to offer. With his oft-remarked upon “eye”

Hawkshaw observes and assesses the world around him. An expert seer he remains, nonetheless, one compromised by his errors and implicated by his similarity to those he claims to track.

Nevertheless, invoking older models of insight and expertise he succeeds in righting the dramatic ship and setting the dramatic world to rights. Just how and why does he do this? What moral and dramatic authority is he acting under? Is he a force to believe in and, if so, why? In the final chapter I return to these issues, examining the interplay between the theatrical, moral and social imperatives concerning justice and propriety and exploring how the detective navigates the melodramatic world order. First, however, I turn to Clement Scott’s 1875 play, The Detective, to further explore the tenuous position of the detective in a fraudulent world. 2

Line of Duty:

Developing The Detective

Just twelve years after the runaway success of Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man at the

Olympic Theatre we find Horace Wigan – the actor who had played Hawkshaw, the detective of the foregoing piece – once again engaged in representing a stage detective. Now the manager of

The Mirror Theatre in Holborn and hoping no doubt to replicate the success of this prior production, Wigan staged Clement Scott’s The Detective, taking for himself the title role. In this chapter I will examine the ways in which Wigan’s newest detective endeavour contributed to the development of a detective “line” – one which stretched beyond Horace Wigan and his particular theatrical skill set. By asking how the character of Walker and the performance of Horace Wigan contribute to this incipient stage type, I will be looking to identify just how this new stage type coalesced. Interrogating the contemporary critical reception I will also explore the question of whether “the detective” was recognized as a theatrical type and if so, how. To complicate matters further, even as The Detective so clearly contributes to the development of this type, the play positions itself as a kind of rehabilitation of this incipient figure. Clearly anticipating success in this undertaking, the final line of the play is given to Inspector Walker who hopes aloud that he has “gained […] some friends for ‘The Detective’” (65; Act 4). Such an attempt to rehabilitate the figure of the detective so deliberately, in a production which itself is contributing to the initial development of the detective line seems oddly precipitate – a defensive move, reasserting its position even as it asserts itself for the first time. Why might Scott find his central character in

83 84 need of such rehabilitation so early in his stage career? To answer this question, I will be looking closely at the issue of just who it is that is being rehabilitated and how, paying careful attention to the relationship between our stage detective and his real-life counterparts and asking just what the duties of the stage detective might really be.

On the face of it Walker seems an odd candidate for such a rehabilitative project. Like his predecessor, Hawkshaw, he commits serious errors and takes Lawrence – the clear candidate for melodramatic “hero” – for a murderer. Viewed one way, and the entire play is an opportunity for

Walker to go back and reinvestigate a case he initially mistook. On the basis of his initial detective investigation, Walker’s skill is certainly questionable. On what terms then might his rehabilitation be based? Like Hawkshaw, Walker is neither omniscient nor infallible. As in the case of Hawkshaw, this may not be the problem it at first appears. The fact that Walker is not a godlike figure of infallibility and foresight but a professional man willing and able to right his wrongs may speak for rather than against him. Despite some initial hesitance, Walker’s willingness to reinvestigate the case may in fact be the key as The Detective seems to redirect inquiry away from obvious competence or skill and instead toward questions of character and moral righteousness. Nor are questions of good character unique to Walker but link him with others in a network of mutually assured and assuring propriety: something I explore vis-à-vis

Walker’s relationship to Lawrence Lindon – the play’s wronged, if flawed hero.

Despite the emphasis on Walker’s character, over and above his police work, he is not portrayed as wholly incompetent or inexpert. Though his initial conclusions are incorrect, the range of skills he demonstrates throughout the play point toward his professionalism and training. Though Walker is clearly the lead detective, he is not the only policeman in the play nor is he the only person to undertake a detective function. A number of other characters model versions of official detection, unofficial investigation and unsanctioned curiosity. The audience is invited, both implicitly and explicitly, to make the comparison with Walker. His colleague, 85 Sergeant Fox, is a junior officer to whom Walker may impart his accumulated and accumulating wisdom as well as a foil by which the audience may judge Walker’s superior expertise.

Lawrence Lindon also takes on an investigative role, keen to assist Walker in clearing his name and pursuing the true murderer of his mother. Though Walker accepts Lawrence’s help he does so reluctantly with much made of Lawrence’s amateur status and lack of training. In this way, the audience is given the opportunity to compare Walker not only with a professional colleague but also with an amateur enthusiast. What is the audience to make of this comparison? How and why might Scott’s emphasis on Walker’s credentials, in contradistinction to Lawrence’s amateur and amateurish efforts, valorize the profession and the professional? Moreover, how might professional codification overlap with theatrical codification? Examining the ways in which our professional fares when placed alongside an enthusiastic would-be detective-cum-hero I will explore the relationship between professional and theatrical forms of authentication and codification.

Nor is Lawrence the only amateur keen to assist Walker. Ruth Leigh – Lawrence’s would-be lover and faithful advocate – also offers her service to Walker in a bid to clear

Lawrence’s name. Might Ruth be another amateur detective with whom we are invited to compare Walker? Not exactly, I will argue. Though Ruth aspires to assist Lawrence, her aspirations remain grounded in her own theatrical line – that of “heroine” rather than “detective.”

As I explore Ruth’s position in the play I will also examine the role gender plays in coding detective function and the virtue or value of curiosity. And just as a character’s gender influenced the reception of their curious impulses so were strands of curiosity themselves gendered, with virtuous and official inquiry typically coded as masculine, and prying inquisitiveness read as feminine. Returning to Walker, I will examine the relationship of his inquiries to the notion of curiosity, asking what kind curiosity he exhibits and why. The question of whose curiosity is sanctioned – who is pursuing decent and official inquiries – is significant; 86 significant particularly in a world of criminal fraud and deception and, moreover, one which is itself portrayed in the illusionary world of the theatre. In the final section of this chapter I turn to

Walker’s compromised and compromising position in this world of inauthenticity. Prone to disguise himself and to deceive those around him, Walker is drawn awfully close to the criminal element he is on a mission to pursue and expose. How does Walker’s relationship to the games of disguise and the play of entertainment affect his role as detective? Does Walker find his authenticity, and so his authority, compromised? Here again the relationship between the detective and the theatre is telling. I conclude this chapter by examining the ways in which the detective may be a cognate for the compromised world of the theatre with each responsible for perpetuating and puncturing the illusions they foster: at once working toward an entertaining deception and acknowledging the man behind the curtain.

The Codification of the Detective or, Developing a Line

That Wigan’s appearance as the titular detective of The Detective (1875) was a return to a favoured role was noted by many of the critics reviewing the play, many of whom made an outright association with Hawkshaw or invoked Taylor’s Ticket-of-Leave Man for direct comparison. The reviewer for the Echo observed that “the piece has evidently been chosen to attract that class of playgoers who have a love for the melodramatic, and to give Mr. Wigan an opportunity of resuming the róle [sic] of a detective officer which he played so efficiently years ago at the Olympic in the Ticket-of-Leave Man” (2 June 1875). The critic for the Globe and

Traveller reminds his readers of Wigan’s success in Taylor’s play before observing that “Mr.

Wigan [was] once more set to enact his favourite character” (31 May 1875). Of particular note are the similarities that so many of the reviewers draw between the character of Hawkshaw and that of Walker. The critic for the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News makes the connection 87 most evident, observing that “Mr. Horace revives all the old artistic excellence of Hawkshaw in his impersonation of the cool and astute Inspector Walker: both of his disguises – the Irish singer on the racecourse and the French sailor – are so perfect that he is scarcely recognisable by the audience, and in the latter his lingual accomplishments completed the illusion” (5 June 1875).

Many other reviewers comment upon Wigan’s success at disguising himself or comment upon his general demeanour in a similar manner. Indeed, it is not simply that the descriptions are similar but that in some cases, they are precisely the same, employing the exact same language to conjure up our detective of police. Four different critics use the adjective “astute” to describe

Detective Walker (Telegraph [31 May 1875], Observer [30 May 1875], Illustrated Sporting and

Dramatic News [5 June 1875], Graphic [5 June 1875]) and three additionally, or otherwise choose the word “cool” (Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News [5 June 1875], Graphic [5 June

1875], Times [31 May 1875]). This was, then not simply an actor/manager rummaging through his recent dramatic history to find and re-enact a successful role but instead appears to be the beginnings of a dramatic “line,” that of the “Stage Detective.”

That this is so can be evidenced beyond the use of identical language peppered throughout a number of these contemporary reviews. To this end, the observation from the

Echo’s critic, as cited above, that this play was chosen to give Wigan “an opportunity of resuming the róle [sic] of a detective officer which he played so efficiently years ago at the

Olympic in the Ticket-of-Leave Man” bears further analysis. Observing Wigan’s return to the role not of Hawkshaw specifically but rather “a detective officer” more generally, the reviewer implicitly acknowledges an incipient “line” in detectives. Despite the subsequent comparison with Wigan’s earlier role at the Olympic the reviewer for the Echo is nonetheless assuming the existence of a role or a type, of which we can presume, Hawkshaw and now Walker are examples. The reviewer for the Times implies as much when he refers to one of Walker’s “three distinct personages” as “the cool, calculating agent of the police” (the other two being his Irish 88 and French disguises) (31 May 1875). The critic for the Graphic makes a similar point when he observes Wigan’s “powers as the representative of cool, astute officers of police, with a faculty for the assumption of queer disguise” (5 June 1875) as does the reviewer for the Morning Post when he observes that Inspector Walker is “one of those studies of detective life in which this actor’s [Horace Wigan’s] supremacy is unchallenged” (3 June 1875). It is, however, the

Illustrated London News which makes the point explicit, stating that “Mr. Wigan evidently depended on its [The Detective’s] resemblance to ‘The Ticket-of-Leave Man,’ and the opportunity which it afforded him of impersonating a superior police character – a line of art in which he had already distinguished himself” (5 June 1875; emphasis added).

The critics’ response to Wigan as Walker in The Detective shows quite a shift from just twelve years earlier when no one, to my knowledge, made reference to an explicit character type or even alluded to common characteristics we might all recognize as those of the stage detective.

That Horace Wigan was personally entangled in the creation of this developing type seems clear and his presence in both productions may have encouraged some of these particular comments.

Nevertheless, the critical reaction is significant and goes quite beyond the recognition of a familiar actor playing another character with the same profession as previously. Instead, it implies and in some cases, explicitly observes, an entirely new stage type. Just over a decade following Hawkshaw’s appearance on the London stage, we have not just the hints of an incipient idea of the detective character but a commonly shared critical understanding of a recognizable detective “line,” a type in which an actor, such as Horace Wigan, might

“distinguish himself.” That Jerome K. Jerome included “The Detective” in his 1889 publication,

Stage-Land – ostensibly a guide to the “curious habits and customs of its inhabitants,” which includes other commonly found stage types such as the “Hero,” the “Villain,” the “Lawyer,” and the “Good Old Man” – is further confirmation of the detective’s swift and continuing theatrical codification. 89 The critic for the Observer went one step further, finding not only a new stage type but the locus for a new type of drama:

The romance of crime has had such unhealthy examples of heroism as its Claude Duvals,

its Barringtons, its Turpins, and its Jack Sheppards; but of late years there has grown up a

school of criminal romance which has a directly opposite tendency, inasmuch as its effect

is to exalt detection. The policeman, numbered, lettered, and helmeted, is not a very

heroic figure, and on the stage he is almost the especial property of pantomime; but strip

him of his official badges, and present him as a Mr. Bucket, communing mysteriously

with his ‘fat forefinger,’ invested with all the mysteries pertaining to that source from

which information is received, and we have a strong dramatic character which of late

years authors have not failed to make good use of. What the incomparable gentleman of

the fat forefinger is to popular fiction, Hawkshawe [sic], in ‘The Ticket-of-Leave Man’ is

to the stage. Remembering, doubtless, his success as Hawkshawe [sic] at the Olympic

some years ago, Mr. Horace Wigan selected for representation last night a new piece by

Messrs. Clement Scott and E. Manuel, called ‘The Detective.’ (30 May 1875)

Noting first the decidedly unheroic quality of the uniformed constable, a comic figure popular, he suggests, in pantomimes, the critic goes on to assert the “strong dramatic character” of the detective around which this new play is centred.1 The previous obsession with the perpetration of crime is being replaced, the Observer’s critic suggests, with an interest in the detection of crime as this new detective takes the place of the old and “unhealthy” criminal heroes. Not only is the

1 The reception of Robert Peel’s force of “bobbies” and “peelers” by a public skeptical of the need for such a centralized outfit is significant. The particular place of the “bobby” in the theatre and popular culture of the day as well as his relationship to his belated colleague, the plainclothes detective, is of especial significance. Unfortunately I do not have the space here to do justice to this topic but it is one well worthy of its own dedicated study. 90 detective a new “line” in which an actor gifted with a cool, curt manner and a penchant for disguise might “distinguish himself,” it is the fulcrum around which a new type of drama is moving.

That this play seems, to the critic for the Observer at least, so well to encapsulate the mood of the theatrical times should perhaps not be surprising – it was adapted for the English stage by Clement Scott, one of the most influential and important critics of the day. It should be noted, that though “C.W. Scott” is listed as the primary author on the play at the Lord

Chamberlain’s Collection, there are two further names which do appear on the script, that of “E.

Manuel” and one “‘John Doe.”” While the inclusion of “John Doe” is unusual and rather mysterious, the reference to “E. Manuel” makes a little more sense. A number of critics

(including the Observer critic cited above) do give the play as a joint venture between C. Scott and E. Manuel. “‘E. Manuel’,” likely the pen-name of Emmanuel Gideon, is described by Heidi

J. Holder as a Jewish playwright who “rose to a position of some influence at the Britannia early in the management of Sarah Lane” (114). 2 Such authorial confusion should not be surprising.

Playwriting in the period was generally fluid, collaborative and often plagiaristic. The fact, for instance, that this is an adaptation from a French play by Adolphe Belot, is nowhere on the text itself. It is hard to know exactly how much and in what way E. Manuel contributed.

Nevertheless, Clement Scott was the author of note and he to whom the critics defer, at times even critiquing the play explicitly on the basis that it was penned by this established dramatic critic.

Despite his vast influence and incredible importance, Scott has been rather written out of nineteenth-century theatre history. “Famous for a single phrase,” Scott’s vehement and well-

2 The disguise of Sleeky as “Israel Jacobs,” in Act 3 – someone whom Paget describes as having “Shylock’s very phiz.” – takes on a particular significance in the context of “E. Manuel’s” authorial contribution, though outside the scope of this chapter, is certainly worthy of further exploration (44 and 48; Act 3).

91 publicized dislike for Ibsen’s Ghosts has for too many years reduced him to the rubbish heap of theatrical history (Bratton, “Tribal Scribe” 3). He may not have been enamoured with Ibsen but he was, as Jacky Bratton observes, a significant critic and a major player on the theatrical scene in the mid-late nineteenth century:

Scott was a prolific writer of stories, dramatic translations and travel books, and a

powerful theatre critic, working for many journals including The Era and The Sunday

Times before he settled as the Daily Telegraph’s theatre columnist from 1871 to 1897 and

also editor of The Theatre, a periodical devoted to supporting Irving’s work at the

Lyceum from 1880 to 1889. (Bratton, “Tribal Scribe” 3)

In addition to his critical output, he also published The Drama of Yesterday and To-Day in 1899

– two lengthy volumes running to over a thousand pages. Looking back over his time in the theatre, each volume is filled with his thoughts and personal anecdotes about the drama of the past hundred years. As a result, as Bratton suggests, “we might find in his work a perspective that is usefully close to the ground in the nineteenth century before Ibsen”: a useful counterpoint to G.B. Shaw’s Our Theatres in the Nineties and William Archer’s series, The Theatrical

“World” of … published in the 1890s (“Tribal Scribe” 3). In other words, if we might expect someone to understand the theatrical tastes and fashions of 1875 London, Clement Scott would be a likely candidate. Though of course we cannot discount Horace Wigan’s own influence in choosing a play which offered him the opportunity to revive the line in which he had proven so successful twelve years prior, it is significant that Clement Scott was the man who actually penned the adaptation. That two such important influential theatrical men of the period, Horace

Wigan and Clement Scott alike, believed that a play titled simply The Detective with its focus so squarely upon its titular figure might be a success is significant. Though Scott’s adaptation may 92 suggest he was better suited to the critical line than that of playwright – the reviewers’ response was fairly middling with praise for Wigan and some other elements but also criticism that the piece was too long and at times confusing and repetitive and some acknowledgement that even

“the verdict of the first night’s audience was uncertain” (Globe and Traveller, 31 May 1875) – the likely popularity of a detective and indeed, a detective drama, does seem to have been recognized and affirmed by the critics.

And a detective drama it certainly was. Beginning with the alleged parricide of Mrs

Lindon at her St. John’s Wood home the play first follows Inspector Walker and Sergeant Fox as they investigate the crime before arresting Lawrence, her son, for the murder. Lawrence protests his innocence but is arrested nonetheless. The second act opens in Walker’s Scotland-Yard office as we learn that the magistrates have dismissed the case, unconvinced by the police evidence.

Lawrence arrives in Walker’s office to once again protest his innocence and to ask for Walker’s help in clearing his good name. After some persuasion, Walker is convinced. He agrees to help

Lawrence, in part because he is becoming increasingly convinced that some notorious members of the so-called criminal class, Sleeky and Mike, have been in the area. Before the act drop,

Walker also entertains Ruth Leigh, a kind but poor girl who loves Lawrence and seeks to aid him in his quest. Walker, Lawrence and Ruth then proceed hot on the heels of Sleeky and Mike.

Walker takes on the disguise of an Irishman in the “lion’s den” that is Sleeky and Mike’s home base before getting in and out of some figurative hot water (26; Act 2, Sc 2). We then shift to the auditorium of a music hall on the Ratcliff Highway where Walker is again disguised (this time as a French sailor) and he encounters Mike similarly disguised as a French sailor – high jinks ensue.

The last act is dedicated to the final investigation and detective revelation as Sleeky and Mike attempt a burglary, this time planting evidence in an attempt to pin it on Jack Paget – a general

“man of business” for Mrs Lindon as well as the family of Emily Winslow, a hard-hearted woman who serves as a foil to the faithful Ruth (2; Act 1, Sc 1). Sleeky and Mike are, however, 93 caught red-handed – this time anticipated by Walker who now knows their plans. Arrested by the triumphant detective, Inspector Walker, the play closes with a marriage, or rather the anticipation of one. Lawrence announces that the ever-faithful Ruth will now become his wife and offers

Walker his heartfelt thanks. The play concludes with Walker’s hope that he has “gained, I trust, some friends for ‘The Detective’” (65; Act 4). As this brief synopsis makes clear, the focus of the piece is clearly on Inspector Walker and his trials and tribulations. Originally a French drama titled Le Parricide, by Adolphe Belot (a stage adaptation of his own novel), even Scott’s shift in title – from Le Parricide to The Detective – marks his focus. Making it evident just where the interest of the piece lies, he signals clearly to potential spectators just what, and more importantly, whom they will be paying their money to see.

That this play was keying into and solidifying this developing theatrical line seems clear.

Wigan’s return to the line that had served him so well a decade prior makes this plain and as the critics observe regularly, there is much of Hawkshaw to be found in Walker. What is particularly significant about The Detective, however, is not simply that it was a drama featuring a detective but rather that the play takes the detective as its very subject. By this I do not mean simply that the detective was in the lead (indeed the title role) though that is significant, but rather that there is an attempt throughout the play to comment upon, and indeed specifically to rehabilitate, the reputation of the detective officer. To this end, Scott’s capitalization and scare-quoting of the play’s final phrase – “‘The Detective’” – as cited above, is significant. His employment of capitalization, quotation marks and the proper noun suggest neither an individual nor the whole profession but something in between. It is both specific and generalized at once. It seems, in fact, to suggest an individual standing in for the general abstract concept – a rather neat definition of a theatrical type. To return to the change of title, it is significant that Scott not only avoided the easy translation of The Parricide, but that he chose The Detective rather than Inspector Walker; the generic rather than the specific. This is a play concerned not only with the art and 94 entertainment of detection but with the very idea of the detective. Not satisfied simply with replaying and codifying the incipient theatrical type, The Detective becomes its own intervention, committed to rewriting the reputational history of this developing detective.

“I have gained, I trust, some friends for ‘The Detective’” – Rehabilitating the Detective

FOX. They are precious fond of abusing the police, but I wish the public could see how

they work. I’m obliged to stop here, and wait for fear anybody comes to see

Walker, and scribble till my eyes ache. (16; Act 2, Sc 1)

So opens the second act of the play; with Fox, discovered writing at a desk in “Inspector

Walker’s office at Scotland Yard,” before coming downstage to make the above complaint. This is the first of many appeals to the audience or the other characters to have pity on the detective police treated so badly by the media and the general public. As Fox continues just a few minutes later, this time speaking to Emily, Lawrence’s would-be (but ultimately insufficiently faithful) lover, “We never rest in Scotland Yard, though the papers are always bullying the police” (17;

Act 2, Sc 1). In this way, The Detective explicitly positions itself as a defender of members of the police force, whom it implies are unfairly maligned. Given the clear stance it seems to take on these matters, the actual events of the play and the behaviour of its detectives might seem a little perplexing. At first glance, The Detective might seem an odd choice for the express purpose of rehabilitating the detective police. Taken in by circumstantial evidence and misled by the wily criminal class, Inspector Walker reads the crime scene incorrectly and arrests the wrong man.

Lawrence is saved from conviction only by the skeptical nature of the magistrate:

95 PAGET. No circumstantial police-cooked evidence for this worthy beak. He had no faith

in detective science they all said around me, and I fancy that some of my

neighbours in the body of the court spoke from experience. What a case of

checkmate for Walker the wonderful! (19; Act 2, Sc 1)

Hardly the start expected for a play apparently intent on rehabilitating the unfairly maligned detective figure.

In one of the most critical reviews, the reviewer for the Graphic similarly questions

Walker’s fitness to his job and any rehabilitative agenda of the play more generally:

It is, however, a curious peculiarity of The Detective that it does not by any means tend to

exalt the popular conception of the detective’s functions, nor does it all help to divest the

ordinary policeman of those ludicrous associations which, chiefly we believe owing to

the ungenerous treatment to which he has long been subjected in pantomimes, have

inseparably attached themselves to the force. If it is not too presumptuous to address a

hint on this subject to the authors, one of whom is not only an accomplished writer but a

dramatic critic of reputation, we would say that the police element in this drama is

imprudently developed. There is one occasion when a considerable proportion of a

division in the regulation helmet and blue frock make their appearance all at once

without, however, doing much to justify their show of activity. Besides this there is a

sergeant who makes frequent attempts to arrive at discoveries by a process of analytical

investigation, which invariably conducts him into a mare’s nest. Even Mr. Wigan himself

does not entirely escape from these disparaging influences. He too reasons and

investigates, but is at least once compelled to confess that his confident conclusions were

entirely wrong; and, though he is as great as of old in the assumption of disguises, his 96 power in this way is brought into disrepute by the fact that nearly every other prominent

character is busy with similar mystifications. (5 June 1875)3

The Graphic critic’s lengthy critique that Scott does little to “exalt the popular conception of the detective functions” seems reasonable given the play’s stated intention of finding friends for the unfairly maligned detective officer. It does also sound rather like a common critique of the newer social problem plays – that is, that they were insufficiently idealized. The reviewer’s allusion to

Clement Scott’s own credentials as a dramatic critic make such a reading all the more plausible.

Scott, in other words, should have known better. Given Scott’s own well-known contempt for

Ibsen’s Ghosts (calling it, in 1891, “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly” [qtd. in Shaw, Quintessence 91]) there is a certain irony that his own play should provoke a critique premised upon the same theoretical position, albeit a much more muted one.

The Graphic’s review is probably the unkindest one, and many others looked much more favourably upon the exploits of Walker and his colleagues. Nevertheless, you could be forgiven for asking whether this is a rehabilitation at all. The answer, I suggest, is twofold. On the one hand, stage detectives may be given a certain allowance for error. As in the case of Hawkshaw,

Walker’s initial error propels the plot before allowing him the opportunity to see again, to re-do and to catch the real criminals after a couple of hours’ worth of dramatic activity. By so doing,

The Detective puts the matter of work before the audience. Those watching cannot help but see the labour which constitutes detective practice and which is so often necessarily obscured, for detection, like acting, is a form of labour which must at times obscure itself in order to be effective. By having Walker so deliberately re-investigate, Scott highlights the careful navigation between visibility and obscurity in which the stage detective is doubly embroiled. Moreover, a

3 The fact that the critic for the Graphic here elides Horace Wigan with Inspector Walker – actor with character – where he did not with Sergeant Fox, is significant and speaks to Wigan’s centrality in the codification of the detective figure. 97 certain fallibility, it seems, gives a stage detective and his antagonists some (theatrical) room to maneouvre – without it, crime dramas threaten to turn into tedious labours in dramatic certainty.4

In this way, Walker, like Hawkshaw before him, occupies a pivotal place in the dramatic structure as well as the societal one. It is Walker’s initial error that precipitates the play’s (and his) pursuance of innocence and his correction that allows for the subsequent vindication of that same innocence. The structural integrity of the play waits on Inspector Walker. This relationship between the lead detective and the intertwined dramatic world order and parallel social mores is something I explore further in the following chapter, where I examine Sergeant Cuff’s dramatic positioning in Wilkie Collins’s stage adaptation of his novel, The Moonstone. To return though to Walker, such an error need not condemn him. Not only does it facilitate the dramatic events of the play and influence their structure, it also speaks to his human fallibility. As in the case of

Jack Hawkshaw, this may be more reassuring than it is anxiety-inducing. That is because it reassures the audience that the detective is no infallible and omniscient deity so much as a professional man, well-trained and well-skilled but certainly capable of error. It is Walker’s desire to correct these errors that really matters and it is this which primarily answers any questions about the effectiveness of Scott’s rehabilitative project.

Looking to immediate competence as a marker of police efficacy, as indeed the critic for the Graphic does, makes eminent sense. What, though, if these are not the terms upon which

Scott’s dramatic rehabilitation is based? Though the professional standing of Walker is significant and something to which I will return, his success in detection is not really where

Scott’s rehabilitative efforts are focused. Instead, The Detective seems much more concerned with Walker’s character and his personal temperament, things which may contribute to his

4 The question of just what this might do to police reputations is an interesting one and one which speaks to the question of just what the relationship between our stage and street detectives might be and whether our stage detectives did in fact owe a duty of rehabilitation to their real-life counterparts. 98 professional aptitude but are not quite the same thing. In acknowledging the restorative efforts of the play, the reviewer for the Illustrated London News implicitly honoured such a distinction:

The piece is renamed ‘The Detective,’ and the moral of it aims at reinstating the

policeman in the good opinion of the public; and we are expected to appreciate the good-

hearted official whose blunders certain newspapers rejoice in the opportunity of

exposing. Mr. Inspector Walker, in Mr. Wigan’s hands, becomes a very respectable

character; but he has erred in too readily accepting the force of circumstantial evidence

which tended to prove that a son had been base enough to murder his mother, whom two

acrobat rascals have planned to rob and kill. (5 June 1875)

Walker, as he observes, “becomes a very respectable character” though he has “erred in too readily accepting the force of circumstantial evidence.” In other words, Walker may have made a mistake but he is, nonetheless, a “very respectable character.” Judging by Walker’s own words on the subject this certainly seems to be his primary concern. In particular, he is exercised more than once by the suggestion that he has no “heart.” When Lawrence first suggests that “certain delicate feelings naturally escape your comprehension,” Walker agrees that it “is the common prejudice against us” (23; Act 2, Sc 1) and when a few minutes later Lawrence apologies with

“Forgive me, sir, I thought you had no heart” Walker exclaims, “Confound it! I have so mixed with scoundrels that I begin to believe sometimes that there are no honest men in this world at all!” (25; Act 2, Sc 1). Though he acknowledges that the society to which his work exposes him may threaten to push him toward a certain insensitivity – that which Lawrence and others expect

– he is not, he insists, hard-hearted.

His work may threaten his own natural inclination to a kind of fellow-feeling but, as

Walker himself explains, his character is not only to be found in and shaped by his work. Asking 99 Ruth, and indeed the audience, to believe in his good nature and decent character, Walker had, just a little earlier in the scene, expanded upon his own domestic situation:

WALKER. Look here, my dear, I’m a rough fellow, but not a bad one at heart, and I’ve

seen more trouble than you would believe. A detective has got a heart, like every

one else – perhaps a better one – more indulgent – for he knows of what weak

stuff poor humanity is made. I’ll just make a little proposition to you, and I bet my

life the missus will thank me for it. You must come home to my place. I’ve got a

wife in a little house down Brixton way – and she shall talk to you. You look

astonished. You never thought that inspectors had wives, or that policemen and

detectives had little children watching for their return home – a sad return, too,

sometimes – when daddy comes all pale and bleeding! (21; Act 2, Sc 1)

Prompted only by Ruth’s assertion that she herself is a poor orphan, Walker takes the opportunity to expound upon his own familial life. Walker here places himself in clear contradistinction to his junior counterpart, the “bobby” on the beat – a figure intended to be dispassionate, unattached and unmoved. An author writing for the Quarterly Review admired these specific qualities in the 1850s:

A wild young fellow … should become a machine, moving, thinking and speaking only

as his instruction-book directs … Stiff, calm, and inexorable, he seems to take no interest

in any mortal thing; to have neither hopes nor fears. Amid the bustle of Piccadilly or the

roar of Oxford-street, P.C. X. 59 stalks along, an institution rather than a man. We seem

to have no more hold of his personality than of his coat buttoned up to the throttling-

point. (“Article IV” 171) 100

“Stiff, calm, and inexorable” – this officer has so internalized his new role as to become the force itself. Pushed to its logical limit this emphasis on neutrality, non-interference and even-temper becomes mechanistic, inhuman and authoritarian. Each officer should become a living incarnation of a bureaucratic, anti-individualistic authoritative institution, dispersed across the city streets and within the men themselves.

Walker’s invocation of his own domestic set-up is significant not only because it helps him to draw a line between himself and his junior colleagues, nor because it allows him to extend a compassionate hand to the poor and unfortunate orphan, Ruth, but because it speaks directly to the status of his character. More particularly, his domestic life not only demonstrates but, in fact, assures his good character. Moreover, such domesticity also guaranteed Walker’s successful performance of mid-century masculinity – a central plank of the good character he is so keen to protect. John Tosh argues in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in

Victorian England, that despite the common critical belief that the domestic arena was feminine space, “the domestic sphere” was, in the period, also “integral to masculinity” (4). “Never before or since,” Tosh argues, “has domesticity been held to be so central to masculinity. For most of the nineteenth century home was widely held to be a man’s place, not only in the sense of being his possession or fiefdom, but also as the place where his deepest needs were met” (1). Such

“domesticity supposedly allowed workhorses and calculating machines to become men again, by exposing them to human rhythms and human affections” (6). In this regard, perhaps surprisingly,

Walker’s domestic life becomes a guarantor of his masculinity, threatened in fact by the particularly automatonic nature of his work. The fact of his having a wife allows him access to a middle-class masculinity not necessarily available to his more mechanical junior, the “bobby.”

We do not in fact ever visit Walker’s home, only his office, but as Tosh argues, “at a symbolic level the family became indistinguishable from the domestic space which it occupied” and so the 101 family which Walker so proudly asserts functions as a metonymic marker for a domestic space we do not actually see (4). In such a framework, then, Walker’s insistent need to mark his family life is not borne of a desire merely to show his softer side, to demonstrate the “heart” that so many believe he lacks, but is also part of a complex construction of masculine success, a persistent concern of the nineteenth-century detective.

Domesticity may have been a significant marker of masculinity at this time, but Tosh suggests that it did not go unchallenged, in large part because it was tricky to reconcile with other versions of masculinity which emphasized male company and the value of combat or valiant exploits:

The heavy moralizing of home ties conflicted with two longstanding aspects of

masculinity. The first was homosociality – or regular association with other men.

Moralists might dismiss this as indolent (and sometimes sinful) pleasure-seeking, but

clubs and taverns were the forum in which masculine standing was appraised and

recognized, and often a means of reinforcing gender privilege […] Secondly, domesticity

was difficult to square with the traditional association of masculinity with heroism and

adventure […] It is no coincidence that the heyday of masculine domesticity from the

1830s to the 1860s was for the most part a period of peace, when the country was

untroubled by external threat. Middle-class men did not imagine that they were ever

likely to be called to a life of adventure, as soldier, sailor, emigrant or frontiersman. Their

public ambitions were professional or entrepreneurial success – as ‘captains of industry’

but hardly captains of men. But there was a limit to how long this kind of denial could be

practical; from the 1870s the view was increasingly heard that domesticity was

unglamorous, unfulfilling and – ultimately – unmasculine. (6-7)

102 Inspector Walker, of the 1875 The Detective, then is indebted to a more old-fashioned and slowly declining version of masculinity, which put its stock in the home and the family. It is interesting to note that in two different adaptations of Dickens’s novel Bleak House produced in the mid-

1870s – both J.P. Burnett’s Jo and George Lander’s Poor Jo - Inspector Bucket refers to his wife, while just a couple of years later, Sergeant Cuff of Collins’s The Moonstone, seems to be a bachelor, much like Baxter in Henry Arthur Jones’s 1882 play, The Silver King.5 The figure of the stage detective seems loosely to follow this shifting pattern of masculinity; moving from a professional man whose good character could be assured by the existence of his wife and children gathered around his hearth to an independent and self-reliant bachelor.6

Walker’s character is thus grounded in a domestic reality he regularly invokes. It is not, however, here alone that his character is formed and assured. The “homosociality” which Tosh also invokes as central to mid-century masculinity likewise plays a part. The relationship between Walker and Lawrence is particularly significant as it works to establish the character of each. It is Lawrence’s vehement and sustained protestations of innocence, in the second act, that prompt Walker to express a crisis of confidence:

WALKER. (Bursting out, rising and going C.) But what on earth do you want of me,

young man – speak! Have you sworn to torment me, to mock at my failure. Be

satisfied. Yes, ’tis true, I doubt. I do not know what to make of you. This fresh

search – I have ordered it myself – I am not satisfied with my work. Are you

content? You are right. Ever since I first set eyes upon you I have watched, spied,

5 The earlier composition date of Dickens’s original novel (1852/3) as compared with Wilkie Collins’s (1868) further suggests that there was a shifting view of masculinity marked differently by these novels and plays as we move through the nineteenth century. 6 Though Hawkshaw does not speak of his wife and family he does invoke his friend and colleague, Joe Skirrit, and the loyalty he owes to him. As such, his character is not so much grounded in the family but in the “homosociality” of which Tosh also speaks. 103 and studied your every look. I have never ceased thinking of you from the

moment I took you into custody! And I can’t read from your face what you are!

Not a day goes by but I ask myself if you are the cleverest of clever scoundrels or

the most unfortunate man in the world. (23; Act 2, Sc 1)

Demonstrating an interiority entirely alien to Wigan’s prior detective characterization,

Hawkshaw, Walker here shows an allegiance to the world of melodrama where a character’s

(typically heightened) emotional state was the key to their character. The emotional intensity of this outburst guarantees the authenticity of Walker’s existential anxiety; an anxiety, no less, about the legibility of the world and the character of those in it. He simply cannot read from

Lawrence’s face what kind of man he is and he can’t help but harbour reservations about

Lawrence’s guilt. The lingering doubt over just what can be read in a man’s face is significant. In a theatrical world in which a man’s character should be legible in his features as in his behaviour,

Walker’s crisis is particularly troubling as it threatens the stability of the contemporary theatrical epistemological framework.

With that said, Walker’s reservations are in the end proven correct – Lawrence is innocent of the crime for which he was arrested. The play’s epistemological certainty is troubled but not ultimately undermined. In a world where criminals plant evidence and deliberately mislead the police, the middle class can rest assured that their good faces and good reputations will ultimately protect them. Indeed, the actual fact of Mrs Lindon’s murder fades quickly from view and what we’re left with is an attempt to restore Lawrence’s reputation, now maligned in good society. Walker is not so much pursuing criminals as he is Lawrence’s good name and in the process, his own. The two men stand to guarantee one another in a mutually beneficial way.

In the simplest sense, by rescuing Lawrence from social approbation Walker is able to regain his standing as a professional detective of upright character. But it is more complex than that for it is 104 only because of Walker’s already existing good reputation and social standing that he can and does guarantee Lawrence’s own reputation and social standing. And, significantly, Lawrence here stands in for any middle-class man who has found himself in a “difficult” position. The rehabilitation of the detective figure (and his relentlessly good character) is thus entangled in the reassurance that the middle class and the status quo will be supported rather than challenged by the police. A middle-class man can rest assured that Walker’s good character will protect his.

Despite the overt theatricality of The Detective – something to which I will return – such an approach implies the assumption of a fundamentally consistent character, something which might reassure Victorian audiences. Alison Byerly suggests that the popularity of performed recitation – that is, reading aloud for paying audiences – gained its propriety on a similar basis.

In other words, as Byerly writes, “recitation performances were able to escape the taint of theatricality” for a number of reasons, one of which was “their reliance upon the power of the individual voice to confer authenticity where a cast of characters would suggest artifice” (126).

The Detective’s insistence that good character could be relied upon betrays a similar assumption.

The fact that three of the people Byerly lists as engaging in such performances – Wilkie Collins,

Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens – were all occupied with writing novels and/or plays of and about detection suggests the intertwining of detection and suitably authentic and thus authoritative performance.

Qualifying as a Detective

Though Scott’s rehabilitative focus seems to prioritize Walker’s character over and above his skill in detection, Walker is not portrayed as entirely incompetent or unprofessional. He may, as the critic for the Graphic observes, be “compelled to confess that his confident conclusions were entirely wrong,” but he is nonetheless held up as a kind of detective expert with his police 105 credentials regularly stressed (5 June 1875). Not only does Scott give Walker the opportunity to reinvestigate the case, inviting the audience to watch his expertise at work, he also includes several other detective figures to whom the audience may compare Walker’s second police performance. The most obvious foil is Walker’s junior, Sergeant Fox – a committed if uninspiring counterpart who is even more easily misled than Walker himself. While Fox may be the only other detective in fact, he is not the only other detective in function. As the critic for the

Observer complained: “Every character in the piece appears to be absorbed by one of the two contending influences, and either becomes a criminal or a detective” (30 May 1875). But though there are a number of different characters performing detection, they are not all detectives. Scott makes this point clearly, with much emphasis laid upon Walker’s professional credentials and the distinction drawn explicitly between his professional standing and Lawrence’s amateur status. Why should this distinction be so clearly signaled to the audience and so strongly maintained? What is the effect of insisting on Walker’s credentials? How, moreover, might his professional standing relate to his theatrical one? For it is significant that just as Scott is developing the “line” in theatrical detectives so his own detective is engaged in a parallel attempt at professional codification – two mutually-reinforcing types of authentication and codification.

Inspector Walker may be the most senior detective in the play, but he is not the only official investigative officer to appear. His junior, Sergeant Fox, is present at the initial investigations and pops up throughout the play before reappearing in the final act to assess the second criminal attempt before Walker arrives on the scene. Acting mostly as a foil to Walker,

Fox offers Walker the opportunity to conspicuously guide and correct his investigative efforts:

FOX. Very strange footprints in the garden; small, narrow foot; high heel; pointed toe.

The murderer is a gentleman.

WALKER. Don’t be so positive, Fox. Be more cautious. How about the other marks you 106 noticed, looking like the footprints of a man who had walked on tip-toe. Come,

now; they might be the traces of the real murderer; while the small ones might be

those of Lawrence Lindon, for instance, who no doubt walked through the garden

last night. ’Tis easily settled. (Whispering to FOX) Come now, Fox, get your wits

about you. He used to live here. See if there is a lumber-room in the house. Look

in any cupboard in the room he occupied. You will be almost sure to find a pair of

his old boots. (FOX nods affirmatively, and exits L.1E) (11; Act 1, Sc 3)

Walker here cautions Fox to be more circumspect and to learn the art of more sophisticated detection. The fact that Walker is himself ultimately incorrect, arresting Lawrence despite these reservations, rather complicates this relationship and opens Walker to further critique. In any case, Fox may be another officer performing detective functions but he is clearly Walker’s inferior, modeling a second-rate style of detection to Walker’s more reflective style. Walker teaches Fox, and so demonstrates clearly for the audience the careful and exacting style of looking well that comes to be a hallmark of the stage detective and something to which I will return in the next chapter. But it is not this alone which marks him as superior, for while Fox does appear intermittently throughout the play it is Walker who takes on the additional burden of extrajudicial investigation. In other words, it is Walker who agrees to the investigative high jinks involving disguise and undercover performance and, while Fox and other officers appear on occasion, it is Walker who goes beyond the bounds of obviously official investigation. In so doing he more clearly aligns himself with a theatrical tradition of performance and binds himself to the incipient line of stage detectives like Jack Hawkshaw who swagger, perform and entertain as they investigate.

It is Walker alone who agrees to reinvestigate a case that he seems to be under no professional obligation to reconsider. Fox and his professional compatriots remain present but 107 linger very much in the background as Walker, Ruth and Lawrence instead fraternize with the enemy. Such behaviour draws Walker away from his professional colleagues and the centralized police force – something suggested by the critic for the Observer who splits Walker off from the conceptualized “‘force’”:

[Lawrence] is charged with the murder, but the proof is not complete, and the detective is

baffled. Lawrence, released from custody, vows to ‘trace the murderer of his mother, and

he asks the aid of the sagacious detective, but he is still regarded by the ‘force’ as the

criminal, till a clue is given to the operations of some professional burglars, who have

passed the stolen notes. (30 May 1875)

In drawing such a distinction between Walker, that “sagacious detective,” and the “‘force’,” this critic acknowledges a distinction between our lead detective and his colleagues. Walker may have the tacit support of the police network but he nonetheless seems more like a maverick – out on his own to find a justice that eluded him in his first, more traditional evidence-based attempt.

Such methods may draw Walker further from the force but they may simultaneously help to establish his place in the developing line of stage detectives.

In Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863), Walker’s predecessor, Jack

Hawkshaw, consistently muddles personal and professional motivations. Throughout Taylor’s play Hawkshaw chases criminals in the pursuit of a general social and moral justice but he also does so, in part, on the basis of a personal vendetta. Jem Dalton, as the audience knows, is guilty and deserves to be caught for his crimes against society, but Hawkshaw has another reason for wanting him captured: “Now Jem Dalton,” he exclaims as he arrests him in the final act,

“remember poor Joe Skirrit – I promised him I’d do it. I’ve done it at last” (222; Act 4, Sc 3).

Jem Dalton, it becomes clear, had attacked Hawkshaw’s friend and colleague, Joe Skirrit, giving 108 Hawkshaw a personal as well as professional motivation. He serves the cause of revenge as well as justice. Walker shares a similar intertwining of the personal and professional.7 Like

Hawkshaw, Walker has official reasons to want to pursue career criminals, Sleeky and Mike. As

Walker exclaims, they will not go unpursued and unpunished:

WALKER. […] Ah! my boys! you have made a fool of me this once! Good, all’s fair in

love and war; but Inspector Walker will be even with you yet. My turn next! (To FOX.)

Whereabouts can we drop on them now? At once! (24; Act 2, Sc 1)

Though Sleeky and Mike are Walker’s professional nemeses – career criminals for a career detective – his very exclamation is couched in the language of personal revenge: “my boys! you have made a fool of me this once! […] Inspector Walker will be even with you yet” (my italics).

With that said, Scott does lay an explicit emphasis on Walker’s professional interest in this case and in its reinvestigation. It is Lawrence’s continued needling that Walker has failed in his duty – “there may be ugly things said about Scotland Yard” (23; Act 2, Sc 1) – that really gets under Walker’s skin. As he admits, upon Lawrence’s pressing, he has in fact already ordered a fresh search because, as he says, “I am not satisfied with my work” (23; Act 2, Sc 1). Troubled by the possibility of professional error he wants to make sure he puts right any possible investigative missteps. A desire for revenge – betrayed by occasional outbursts which emphasize a sense of personal vendetta – may inform Walker’s decision but he nevertheless seems to be motivated primarily by the fear of professional embarrassment. In this way, though Scott retains something of the blurred distinction we find in The Ticket-of-Leave Man, he seems to be shifting

7 This confused combination of personal and professional motivation is actually something we can trace beyond Hawkshaw in The Ticket-of-Leave Man. Eugène François Vidocq, the notorious French police spy of real-life, dramatized in both English and French, betrays his own seemingly personal desire for revenge in Frederick Marchant’s 1860 play. For more on the ambiguous relationship between personal and professional motives in these officers see Footnote 10 in Chapter 1. 109 the stage detective in a more professional and less personally-driven direction. That Clement

Scott might be expected to pen such a piece, rather sympathetic to the idea of a hard-working but often mistreated professional police officer, is suggested by an off-hand comment made in his self-reflective theatrical tome, The Drama of Yesterday and To-Day. Having recounted his own trouble attempting to cover the Diamond Jubilee Day due to a snobbish official who was disinclined to think well of journalists he did not know to be also a “gentlemen”, Scott makes a telling comparison with the police of the day:

“Show me your card.” (Very rudely.)

“I have already shown the card, and I am in my proper place. But I have no objection to

show it again, as you are so extremely civil.”

Whereupon I produced the special invitation from Lord ------, of the Royal Household.

“Why did you not tell me that you were a ‘gentleman’ before?”

There was no apology, no expression of regret, no amende honorable whatever. But this

is a fair sample of the manner in which newspaper writers are treated who endeavour to

do their duty to their paper and the public. Middle class life has by no means the

monopoly of snobs.

Like the policeman, the reporter’s life when it crosses the official world, is certainly not

“a happy one.” (1: 538)

By denying this official the information that would have proven his social status, Scott demonstrates to his reader just how his professional status is underappreciated. Drawing a comparison with a fellow professional, the “policeman,” he implies that neither is given the respect they deserve in “the official world.” Despite the antagonism of which Fox complains, from the “press” in general, Scott seems to recognize an affinity between the journalist and the 110 police officer. 8 Both are professional men, attempting to “do their duty” in a society which, in

Scott’s eyes, often resents their efforts, underestimates their importance and undervalues their credentials.

Walker, like Scott himself, is keenly aware of the importance of his professional standing. Walker is motivated not only by the cause of justice – clearing Lawrence’s good name and catching the true murderer – but also by the fear of professional embarrassment. By clearing

Lawrence’s name and assuring his social status, so Walker will clear his own and so assure his professional status, the reliability of which has been called into question. Though the two men work in tandem to achieve this mutually beneficial outcome, they are thus quite differently motivated, and of pointedly different standing. Walker’s reputation may be under threat but there is no question that he is still a professional detective. He has the rank and experience of an inspector; he has an office into which Lawrence and the (eyes of the) audience are invited; and he works in concert with the rest of the police force. In short, Walker is a trained and experienced officer in an extensive and official police network – something Lawrence is not and has not, despite his enthusiasm for justice. The distinction between the two men is something noted by several of the play’s critics. As the reviewer for the Observer notes, “aided by Ruth

Leigh, Lawrence becomes an amateur assistant to the astute inspector” (30 May 1875). Despite his criticism of an over-preponderance of criminals and detectives in the piece, he is careful to draw a distinction between Inspector Walker and his “amateur assistant,” Lawrence Lindon. The critic for the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News retains a similar distinction, referring to

“Walker and his two amateur assistants” – that is Lawrence and Ruth Leigh (5 June 1875). The critic for the Morning Post tends to disregard Ruth and elevate Lawrence: “Two detectives,

8 For more on the complex inter-relationship between these early detectives and the contemporary media see Haia Shpayer-Makov’s The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England, where she argues that “there were few if any occupations then whose public image and self-image evolved so singularly from its interrelationship with the media” (8). 111 accordingly, one professional the other amateur, are working towards the detection of the same crime” (3 June 1875). Promoting Lawrence to full “detective” he nevertheless retains the professional/amateur distinction; a detective, it seems, may be defined by purpose as well as by position. And Lawrence certainly has the purpose.

Having had the initial charges dismissed by the magistrate, Lawrence comes to Walker’s office in order that he might beg him to reinvestigate and allow him, that is Lawrence, to be a part of this second investigation:

LAWRENCE. […] The verdict of the Magistrate to-day is an act of justice. But I have a

duty to fulfil. My whole life is about to be sacrificed to the discovery of my

mother’s murderer, and by avenging her death my character shall be vindicated.

You are the only man who can assist me to do this, and I have come to ask your

aid.

WALKER. (Aside) The man is mad – raving mad! or else he’s laughing at me. He is the

most extraordinary character I ever came across! (Aloud, brutally). All this is

useless – my time is valuable, and you have no right to interrupt me.

LAWRENCE. (Interrupting) So you refuse my request? You will not let me even serve

in the police, and under your orders?

WALKER. Impossible! Your friends will tell you what is necessary before such a thing

can take place. We are not recruiting serjeants in Scotland Yard, and do not enlist

the first person who comes and asks us. You had better step across to Charles

Street and try the Army. (22; Act 2, Sc 1)

Concluding with a quick dig at the army and its professional standards (or lack thereof), Walker makes it clear that Lawrence cannot simply take on the police mantle. Walker instead advises 112 Lawrence that he might simply become an amateur detective, noting that there are already plenty of substandard ones around:

WALKER. […] There is nothing in the world to prevent your working alone; what

necessity is there that you should enter the detective force? Become an amateur

detective. There are scores of them and very bad ones. Search for yourself and

bring me your results.

LAWRENCE. What can I do; alone and inexperienced? I must be advised, directed, and

told my duty; I cannot work in the dark. (22; Act 2, Sc 1)

The profession of detective, then, is not open to Lawrence, but the purpose, according to Walker, is always available. Lawrence, though, will not be satisfied with such an obviously substandard attempt and insists that he become an assistant to Walker. Our professional detective eventually relents and the two set out to right the wrong of the first act. In this way, the audience is given the opportunity to compare Walker’s professionalism with Lawrence’s amateurism.

The superiority of Walker’s abilities when compared with those of his amateur assistant, is evident. Getting his second investigation quickly underway, Walker appears amongst his criminal nemeses disguised as an “Irish singer and dancer” (32; Act 2, Sc 2). Savage Mike is immediately suspicious of a stranger in their midst but Sleeky happily reassures him that Walker is no police officer: “Look at him, a copper couldn’t come out like that if he tried ever so” (35;

Act 2, Sc 2). His disguise, it seems, is effective. Just a few moments later, Lawrence arrives, and the audience is given the opportunity to directly compare the efforts of the two. Disguised as someone named Ted Swinkey, Lawrence immediately draws the attention and ire of Mike.

“Come now, my boy, to tell you the truth,” says Mike, “you look more like a copper in disguise than a real flash cove” (37; Act 2, Sc 2). Increasingly confident of his discovery, Mike follows 113 up this insinuation with a direct accusation: “You’re a slop, a crusher, a detective, who has faked himself up to come and cop us on the cross” (37; Act 2, Sc 2). Where Walker, our true detective, had merely raised an eyebrow, Lawrence, his amateur assistant, finds himself immediately and directly accused of being the “crusher” he can only aspire to be. The irony is clear. To ensure his plan is not derailed at this first opportunity, Walker himself steps in, rising from his pretend slumber “as if awakened by the sound of the quarrelling” (38; Act 2, Sc 2) and distracts Mike, before whispering instructions to Lawrence – “Don’t try to defend me. Pretend not to know me” and so on (38; Act 2, Sc 2). That Lawrence is precisely the kind of committed but ineffective amateur Walker had feared is only further compounded in the following act when Walker is forced to explicitly direct Lawrence’s behaviour:

LAWRENCE. (Going quickly to Walker, with outstretched hand) So we meet again, and

safe, thank goodness.

WALKER. Be careful for mercy’s sake. I don’t know you. Sit down, take that newspaper

and turn your back to me. (LAWRENCE sits R. of table L., face towards L.

WALKER sits in a chair with his back towards LAWRENCE, face towards R.

Each take up a programme and speak to each other without turning round.) (51;

Act 3)

Just a few moments later and Walker is having to reiterate – “Don’t look at me! Look at your programme” (52; Act 3). It seems Walker had good reason to first reject Lawrence’s pleas to be taken on by the force.

The difference between the professional, Inspector Walker, and his amateur sidekick is apparent. Lawrence’s vested interest and zealous commitment are no replacement for Walker’s professional training. That our professional detective should be so elevated and his amateur and 114 upper-middle class sidekick so (relatively) denigrated is significant. We are still a decade or so away from the hyper-intelligence and creative flair of probably the world’s most famous private detective, Sherlock Holmes. Always one (or really, many) steps ahead of his uninspiring professional counterpart, Inspector Lestrade, Conan Doyle’s amateur detective Holmes leaves the rather plodding police in the dust. By contrast, Lawrence’s efforts are marked and ineffective. Perhaps Lawrence is simply too close to the case. In pursuit of his mother’s murderer along with the restitution of his own good name, Lawrence has a personal interest in the resolution of the case. As such, he lacks the necessary disinterest demanded of casual upper-class dilettantism and is unable to make an effective amateur. What is more, the distinctly professional quality of Sleeky and Savage Mike – card-carrying members of the so-called criminal class – would seem to call for a professional detective; something which may come to change, as criminality is increasingly acknowledged as diffuse and unpredictable, but here is reassuringly restricted to those who make a profession out of it. That Clement Scott might tend to favour a professional detective over an upper-middle class amateur is also not surprising. Given his belief in professional achievement and his fondness for professional fraternities – fraternities that might include policemen as well as journalists – it makes perfect sense that his professional officer should be the one to manage the show and save the day.

Moreover, Walker’s dual obligation to both manage the show and save the day is indicative of the overlap between his theatrical and societal obligations which bespeaks the symbiosis of his theatrical codification (by way of the developing “line”) and his societal authentication (by way of his professional status). His superior professionalization and increasing theatricalization are mutually supportive, as each form of authentication helps to maintain the other. Such authentication requires an audience to assist in this twin project of official sanction(s), given the opportunity to doubly credential the detective figure. Acting as a kind of ad hoc credentialing organization the audience can affirm both Walker’s professional and 115 theatrical standing. An actual audience of critical observers, however, may not quite be so willing to fulfil this duty as the idealized notion of an abstract audience might be. Taking note of the implicit invitation in the exchange cited above between Walker and Lawrence, to move behind the scenes and become party to the detective process at work, the critic for the Globe and

Traveller takes the opportunity to do his own detective work. Following up what he sees as loose threads abandoned carelessly in the plotting, he blurs the line between dramatic critic and criminal detective, assessing failures in detection as theatrical shortcomings (or vice versa):

The action, however, which starts out briskly, becomes languid as it progresses many

matters are left unexplained, the scenes are disconnected, and the audience is not seldom

at a loss to understand what is set before them. A single instance of negligence will serve.

Among the reasons why guilt is ascribed to the hero are the finding of footmarks

resembling his in the garden, the discovery of a sleeve link belonging to him, and the fact

that his sweetheart, who also was stabbed believes him to be her assailant. No inkling as

to the manner in which the stud and the footprints got into the garden is afforded those

who study closely the progress of the plot. No information whatever as to how the

heroine could take her lover for the murderer is even attempted. The true criminal is as

unlike the supposed as he can well be, and though he claims to be father of the youth, a

supposition which might explain it, the statement is proved to be false. (31 May 1875)

In critiquing the plot he becomes his own detective, unsatisfied with the slipshod plotting (or is it detection?) which would leave a footprint and a sleeve link unexplained. At once a professional critic and an amateur detective, the reviewer reveals the tricky elision between careful stagecraft and thorough detection where reviewers might become detectives of plot. Using his position as a 116 professional critic he becomes an amateur detective finding fault with the plotting and detection at once.

And so, Walker remains the trained expert and professional authority, not quite ready to give up the reigns to the upstart amateurs or private detectives, like Sherlock Holmes, yet to come.

Despite his evident fallibility, Walker’s supreme professionalism is stressed throughout The

Detective. Though, like Hawkshaw before him, Walker tends to blur his personal and professional motivations, he nonetheless remains committed to his professional standing and official position. With an inferior junior officer in Sergeant Fox, and an enthusiastic but inept amateur sidekick in Lawrence Lindon, Walker is time and again given the opportunity to prove his policing chops and demonstrate the need for and superiority of a committed professional detective. Such an emphasis on Walker’s professional codification parallels the increasing theatrical codification that the figure of the detective continues to undergo. The audience thus becomes party to these twinned authentications, invited to assure both theatrical and professional codification. Reaching out to the audience was, however, not without risk. Though quick to recognize Walker’s official standing as a professional stage detective, individual critics continued to find fault. As professional critics and amateur detectives they could challenge

Walker’s aspirations to both theatrical and professional sanction and assurance.

Curiouser and curiouser! Detection and the Status of Curiosity

Walker’s insistence upon his professionalism, as distinct from Lawrence’s amateur efforts, contributes to the sense of a proper investigation and official inquiry. This is significant because, though Walker is a credentialed officer of the detective police, his necessary interest in investigation and the inquiries it entails, has the potential to draw him into a world of unseemly curiosity and illicit prurience. Though official inquiry might seem quite distinct from 117 meddlesome prying or improper snooping, the concept of curiosity has in fact a complex and often contradictory history – at times the subject of scorn and derision, at others that of reverence and admiration and at others still both applauded and repudiated at once. As Barbara Benedict explains in Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry, “in literature, empirical investigation may define the bold explorer, the private eye, or the medical genius, but it frequently denotes naiveté, corruption, vice, or debility: the monster-seeker and the monster himself” (1). The detective’s habit of looking well implicates him in this system of inquiry and curiosity, aligned unpredictably with vice or virtue. How is Walker positioned in The Detective?

How is his curiosity distinguished from that of others? Does his professional status and official position really insulate him from the unseemly potential of curiosity satisfied?

In his potted summary of the shifting reception of curiosity, P. Fontes da Costa like

Barbara Benedict, lays bare what he calls its “often ambivalent value” (147). Beginning with the hostility of the earliest Christianity to “a source of danger for the soul,” he then moves to an eighteenth-century reception troubled by an association between curiosity and luxury rooted in the novel “objects of curiosity” and, in the case of Edmund Burke, somewhat dismissive of curiosity as “‘the first and the simplest emotion’” (147). Its reception though was not wholly negative and despite “a moralistic understanding of luxury” which tended to denigrate the status of curiosity, “a more widespread view defended curiosity as a passion for inquiry, and in particular a desire to learn more about rare, new or remarkable things” (147-148). Despite its association with the “pursuit of knowledge,” Fontes da Costa observes, curiosity did not secure

“an unproblematic status” (148). “One of the main problems,” he concludes, “was that the borderline between what was considered licit and illicit knowledge was not always clear and changed with different periods and contexts” (148). The status of curiosity was flexible and unassured. Moreover, its “ambivalent value” was strongly informed by just who was looking, at what, and why (Fontes da Costa 147): 118

Early modern culture teases out the ambition in curious people and ridicules or reveres it

as a rejection of social identity. Curious men – scientists, journalists, critics – are often

depicted either as bourgeois, amateur collectors whose acquisitiveness is a feeble

compensation for their sexual and social inadequacies, or as virile explorers boldly going

where no man has gone before. Women, servants, laborers, and marginalized people like

children and foreigners who collect, quest, or question usually appear as agents of pride,

the central vice of mankind’s fallen nature; their curiosity constitutes an attempt to poach

the status of their social superiors. (Benedict 18)

Gender, class and social position could have a striking effect on how someone’s curiosity was viewed in the early modern period. Such attitudes, I suggest, were not restricted to the early modern period but can be seen in Scott’s nineteenth-century play as the curiosity of different characters is marked and evaluated quite distinctly.

In the first act, after the murder of Mrs Lindon has been committed, Walker and Fox are quick on the scene to investigate. Having spoken first to a local doctor, Walker moves to question Kitty, the house servant:

KITTY. He had been quarrelling with his mother.

WALKER. Why did you not say so at first? Did you hear high words?

KITTY. Yes, sir. Young Mr. Lawrence kept on asking for money. Mrs. Lindon refused

and refused; and then he spoke of gambling debts, and a beautiful lady he was in

love with. I did not catch the name, because you see, I don’t listen at keyholes; I

don’t, I assure you. 119 WALKER. (Drily) So I perceive. He leads a fast life, this young fellow? (10-11; Act 1,

Sc 3)

Pre-empting the societal reprimand she suspects is coming, Kitty is quick to deny her own unsanctioned curiosity. Given the private knowledge she seems to have acquired about her mistress’s family, Walker raises a proverbial eyebrow nonetheless. Kitty’s position as a maid in the Lindon household means that she belongs to two of the classes designated by Benedict as likely to be perceived negatively vis-à-vis their curious intent. As both a woman and a servant,

Kitty’s curiosity would, according to Benedict, be read not as “virile explor[ation]” but as sinful pride. As Benedict elaborates, “curious people who ask impertinent questions, especially women and servants, abuse social decorum by winkling out private information for their own, prurient pleasure” (20). Walker’s arch response certainly suggests that he considers her behaviour improper.

Kitty’s prying is here coded as illicit inquisitiveness, something suggested by her status and compounded by the fact that the subject of her snooping is her social superior. Her class and position might seem the most immediately relevant part of her identity but her gender is also significant. Whether servant or mistress, women were regularly viewed as prying gossips with little right to the information they improperly sought. Miss Clack, the evangelizing woman of

Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone: A Play, is treated similarly. She is not the mistress of the house but she is certainly the sort of visitor the Verinder household would expect to receive.

Nevertheless, her endless questions and need to know are characterized in clear contrast to

Sergeant Cuff’s persistent inquiries. Where he is direct, ordered and efficient in his relentless questioning, she is a meddlesome and tiresome irritation:

MISS CLACK. […] Penelope! (PENELOPE enters sulkily.) Has Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite 120 gone out?

PENELOPE. Yes, miss.

MISS CLACK. You don’t know when he will return?

PENELOPE. No, miss. (Aside.) I believe she’s sweet on Mr. Godfrey – at her time of

life!

MISS CLACK. Is Miss Rachel in her room?

PENELOPE. I suppose so. (Aside.) How many more questions, I wonder!

MISS CLACK. (Eyeing PENELOPE’s cap ribbons.) Have you read your tract, Penelope?

Are you aware of the enormity of your cap ribbons? (The Moonstone: A Play,

667; Act 2)

Why though might such so-called feminine curiosity be modeled in this negative way? For one, as Barbara Benedict argues that in the eighteenth century, “female curiosity attract[ed] a passionate new derogation. It is,” she suggests, “represented as the co-opting of knowledge: the seamy obverse of elite inquiry” (118). The reception of Miss Clack and Kitty is clearly informed by this same frame; a frame that denied them the right to the information they sought, therefore casting their inquiries as feminine snooping. As Marjean Purinton observes, “men are encouraged to peep into nature’s crevices of curiosities, but women are not to open Pandora’s box” (255). This distinction between male and female curiosity is well-illustrated in the above encounter between Walker and Kitty. In the very process of satisfying his curiosity Walker derides Kitty for hers; the fact that Kitty’s own personal prying assists Walker in his professional inquiries and aids him in his detective investigation goes unremarked.

Shortly after Walker’s exchange with Kitty he casually arranges to spy on Ruth with the assistance of Lawrence Lindon and the local doctor. Ruth was injured in the same attack that resulted in Mrs Lindon’s death and so she may prove a valuable witness: 121

WALKER. […] (To Lawrence) You will now see the poor girl who was stabbed at the

same time as your mother.

LAWRENCE. Ruth!

WALKER. Let us stand on one side. She had better not see you. (They go up L. at back.)

(Enter RUTH R. 1 E., supported by DR. SELWYN.)

[…]

RUTH. We are alone, are we not? As you promised me. All those Policemen are gone

now, are they not?

DOCTOR S. (To whom Walker is making signs) Yes, yes; they went away just now. You

will not see them again. (14; Act 1, Sc 3)

When Lawrence does appear, Ruth, mistakenly believing him to be her attacker, proceeds to accuse him of having “blood upon his hands” (14; Act 1, Sc 3). Despite this, her enduring love for him means that she is horrified when she discovers that Walker has in fact been listening in:

LAWRENCE. (Rushing toward RUTH) Ruth, Ruth, be calm! Collect yourself, try and

remember.

RUTH. (Rising) Do not approach! Do not come near me! Help! Help! (Then, seeing

WALKER and POLICEMEN from the garden, who advance.) Those men; the

detectives! They were listening; what have I said? Gentlemen, good kind

gentlemen, pay no attention to my wild words. The ravings of delirium – the

fever; I am not myself! You see I am not myself! (Puts both hands to her breast,

and falls fainting on to the chair R. of her, the DOCTOR looks after her. Re-enter 122 FOX, with a dagger, door R. 1 E., goes extreme L. to WALKER, L. of him,

LAWRENCE R.C.) (15; Act 1, Sc 3)

Walker’s spying means that he is now privy to information Ruth had not intended to share with him. One suspects that Kitty might have a word or two to say about Walker’s illicit listening.

The particular style of Walker’s investigation here seems awfully close to the snooping that Kitty had improperly engaged in, the previous evening. Might Walker, despite his gender, be guilty of a kind of feminized curiosity? Though the gender of the curious person affected the reception of their inquisitiveness so too was the very concept of curiosity gendered. Or more particularly, so too were different strands of curiosity, gendered. In the 17th and 18th centuries,

Barbara Benedict identifies two distinct ways of understanding curiosity:

Whether interpreted as the masculine activities of collecting and of scientific

experimentation, or as the feminine quality of impious peeping and unregulated spying,

curiosity stirs up both cultural pride and resistance. (19)

Walker may be a man but he may, nevertheless, be guilty of a kind of feminized curiosity characterized by “impious peeping and unregulated spying.” Here though his professional status comes to bolster the license already afforded him on the basis of his gender. He may spy but he is never quite entirely “unregulated.” In a further discussion of the distinctly gendered strands of curiosity in the eighteenth century, Benedict observes one significant point of divergence – purpose. “Curiosity without method and without justification,” she writes, “became female”

(Benedict 118). Thus, when Walker spies on Ruth, much like Kitty had spied on Mrs Lindon, the nature of his official inquiries protects him from charges of prurience and impropriety. 123 Walker eavesdrops on Ruth with a clear and distinct aim – to discover who murdered Mrs

Lindon and injured Ruth. The professional nature of his inquiries thus helps to shield him from charges of improper inquisitiveness levelled at the snooping amateur. Indeed, his role as a detective bestows upon him an enduring sense of investigative purpose which insulates him from an eighteenth-century charge of illicit or feminized prurience. Benedict suggests that where female curiosity remained “excluded from public life, seem[ing] to riot behind the scene,” male inquiry was monitored by “the public if unstable institutions of journalism and the Royal

Society” (118). The police force and Scotland Yard – a place where, as Jack Paget observes “the very walls have ears!” (19; Act 2, Sc 1) – provide a similar function for Walker. Moreover, given

Walker’s theatrical setting the audience performs a similar duty. As I argued earlier, acting as an ad hoc credentialing body, the audience assists in the confirmation of his professional status and in so doing also affirms the legitimacy and propriety of his inquiries. By monitoring his curiosity the audience members, along with these professional fraternities help to sanction his investigative inquiries; inquiries which might otherwise be understood as the disturbing curiosity of an impertinent upstart. Without the title, Inspector Walker might not be so different from Kitty after all.9

If Walker might be at risk of slipping into a kind of feminized curiosity, is it possible that one of the female characters is pursuing a style of investigation that might be understood as more masculine? Though I suggested above that Lawrence is the most important comparator by which to gauge Walker’s detective skill, he is not the only person providing Walker assistance in the course of his investigation. As the critic for the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News

9 The question of just who could ask questions of whom and, indeed, where is significant. As Nicholas Thomas suggests, “what is powerful yet shallow, insecure and morally problematic at home, may nevertheless figure as an appropriate discussion abroad” (124). Though Thomas speaks quite literally of “home” and “abroad” in a discussion of Captain Cook’s voyages, I would argue that the same logic applies metaphorically to the distinctions understood between private and public, between sanctioned and unsanctioned. For more on the detective as domestic intruder see Chapter 3 where I explore the ways in which Sergeant Cuff’s presence in the Verinder household is understood. 124 observed, the “vagabonds” of the play are properly pursued and ultimately arrested due to “the endeavours of Walker and his two amateur assistants” (5 June 1875; emphasis added). While

Lawrence Lindon is one, Ruth Leigh – Lawrence’s loyal devotee and would-be lover – is the other. Though, like Lawrence, Ruth is marked as an amateur by this critic she is also, like

Lawrence, marked by another critic, as a detective. As the reviewer for the Times observes:

“Thus there are three detectives – one professional, the other two amateurs” (Times 31 May

1875). Might Ruth then assist Walker with an appropriately-contained and officially-designated masculine style of curiosity?

Ruth is, on the face of it, a surprising candidate for the title of “amateur detective.” She is a kind and unassuming woman of modest means – one who is discovered in the first act “at work, sewing” (1; Act 1, Sc 1). As Mrs Lindon explains: “Left an orphan, and exposed to all the temptations that surround a young girl in this great city, you have the courage to work from morning till night at that post-office to earn an honest but not very lucrative livelihood” (1; Act 1

Sc 1). Interestingly, though the Times’s critic sees fit to describe her as a detective, the play itself seems much more hesitant to give her such a designation. Though she helps convince Walker to reinvestigate and begs to be allowed to assist – “And why not tell me what to do? I would give my life to help prove young Lawrence innocent” (21; Act 2, Sc 1) – Walker is clear about what her societal position and theatrical status are:

WALKER. I am about to venture into the midst of a gang of desperate men who, if they

knew my real character, would kill me like a dog, and be proud they’d rid the

earth of me! Their suspicious eyes will watch my every movement. They will

never leave while I am in their company, so that I cannot communicate with

Scotland Yard unless I enlist some one who will not lose sight of me by night or

day, but who like a faithful shadow will follow me at a short distance, see 125 everything and not be seen, not be caught in the dangerous task, and who will

come to my side when I make a sign, to carry the hastily scribbled message that

from time to time I may manage to drop on the ground unobserved.

RUTH. (Interrupting) Let that task be mine! These wretches will never suspect a woman!

WALKER. My very thought! Ruth you have proved yourself a true woman, you can

become a heroine. Let us go. (25; Act 2, Sc 1)

Ruth is thus taken on by Walker as an integral part of his dangerous investigation but she is not designated as any kind of “detective,” amateur or otherwise. Instead, Walker takes the opportunity to confirm Ruth in her own idealized societal and theatrical roles, that of a “true woman” and now “heroine.” As in the case of Walker, The Detective seems ready to fix Ruth in her theatrical “line” – her commitment to Lawrence proves her position and her worth.

Despite Walker’s acquiescence to Ruth’s desire to be of assistance in his reinvestigation, she is not given the license to indulge any curiosities she may have. Significantly though, she doesn’t seem to possess any. Despite the apparently obvious evidence to the contrary, she knows

Lawrence to be innocent. Ruth’s unwavering devotion to her love is in fact contrasted directly with that of Emily Winslow – the wealthy young woman to whom Lawrence had recently turned his attention. Unlike Ruth, Emily is ready to drop Lawrence absent proof positive that he is innocent; even the quashing of the verdict is not enough for Emily who declares that her

“decision will be the verdict of the world” (20; Act 2, Sc 1). In fact, Emily’s explanation sounds an awful lot like the kind of cool, calculating reason we might expect to go hand in hand with an explicitly masculine curiosity:

EMILY. (Continuing) For those who calmly reflect – who are not hurried away by the 126 impulse of the moment, who try to form a serious and reasonable opinion, - the

terrible proofs still exist. Besides being a question of evidence, it is a question of

common sense. Come, Mr. Paget! (Takes PAGET’s arm.) (20; Act 2, Sc 1)

Emily is uninterested in pursuing any further inquiry. She is already, quite literally, out the door.

It is instead Ruth who stands by her man. And I would argue it is this which qualifies her to be

Walker’s assistant; not an officially-sanctioned masculine curiosity but the very opposite, a feminine disinclination to ask uncomfortable questions along with a complementary desire to support her man in his time of trouble. As John Tosh argues, this was the kind of selfless and unquestioning support traditionally expected from a woman in the mid-nineteenth century:

They [women] were told emphatically [in the “advice literature of the day”] not to expect

full equality of emotional support. When the husband returned from work, the wife must

be all attention to lighten his load and calm his spirit, and she must present a demeanour

of ‘cheerful complacency’ […] The needs of the husband took priority. The wife’s

obligation to minister to them was the quid pro quo for the material sustenance and

protection she received from him. (54)

Ruth is not so much investigating along with Walker as she is being given an opportunity to demonstrate her suitability to be Lawrence’s wife and to minister to his emotional needs in perpetuity. As such it is not Ruth’s curiosity (whether masculine or feminine) which qualifies her for the part of Walker’s assistant but her absolute lack of curiosity, her desperate insistence that

Lawrence is innocent and her unwavering commitment to prove that to be so.

At this point The Detective seems to be settling into a conservative framework, one which applauds Ruth for her appropriately feminine a-curiosity and sanctions Walker’s curiosities as 127 official, and thus masculine, inquiries. Despite Scott’s seemingly conservative, even reactionary, attitude, however, the position of Walker in this value-based system of curiosity is more precarious than it might at first appear. Walker’s dependence on the audience to assist in assuring his professional and theatrical standing signals this potential precarity. For just as the theatrical setting assists in sanctioning Walker’s position so too does it compromise that very standing. A professional stage detective may use the audience to sanction his developing theatrical line and confirm the officialdom of his investigations but such an invocation also carries with it a reminder that he is in fact a theatrical creation and creative illusion. In the broadest sense, the fact that Walker is a fictional detective, played by Horace Wigan – an increasingly stalwart performer of the detective line – on the stage of The Mirror in Holborn, imparts a certain purposelessness to his dogged investigations: investigations which work primarily toward the entertainment of the crowd rather than to the efficacy of the criminal justice system. Curiosity merely performed or played as a theatrical endeavour might be understood not as masculine inquiry informed with purpose but as a kind of futility understood as feminine.

Moreover, as Barbara Stafford argues in Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education, the line between entertaining theatrics and serious scientific experimentation was itself precarious and could be hard to maintain. Looking primarily at the eighteenth century, Stafford notes that “in an epoch in which specialization and professionalization were just getting under way, the public and frequently heroic performance of experiments could appear embarrassingly like a magic show” (xxvi). Tracing backward, Stafford suggests that “for the early moderns an analogy existed between the legerdemain of experimentalists in all fields and the maneuvers of the con man” (79). Such confusion persisted into the nineteenth century, a time in which a scientist, a magician, a con man and an actor might all practice sleights of hand, differentiated only by their status and motivation. As an entertaining investigator, Walker embodies this precarious duality, occupying a middle ground 128 somewhere between art and science, between masculine and feminine, between deliberate and unnecessary. That the contemporary stage was primarily a place of amusement is noted somewhat disappointedly by the reviewer for the Telegraph who observes that “the modern stage is avowedly directed towards the amusement rather than the enlightenment of its patrons” (31

May 1875). No matter the focused intention of Walker’s curiosity it is always already encapsulated within a fictional world and more particularly, one which the Telegraph argues, will only ever lead to the entertainment as opposed to the edification of its audience. Whether this is an entirely fair assessment of theatrical purpose and effect in the 1870s is debatable but it is certainly significant as regards the developing detective line. That is because Walker, like

Hawkshaw before him, undertakes his stage detection in such a way as to confuse any investigative purpose with a showman’s swagger rather than to belie the association. Walker’s own official curiosity rubs shoulders with entertaining theatrics – often his own – thus challenging just how necessary and official his investigations might be.

Detection and Deception – Policing in a Fraudulent World

Like his predecessor Hawkshaw, Walker likes a good disguise. That Walker, like Hawkshaw, should employ well-acted and sustained disguises, suggests again a developing detective line – one which featured disguise alongside an otherwise “cool” and “astute” demeanour. When the critic for the Globe and Traveller observed that “Mr Wigan acted capitally as the detective, and was quite unrecognizable in his disguises” (31 May 1875), his easy conjunction between the performance of the detective and his performance of disguise betrays an assumption of their interconnectedness. As the critic for the Graphic observes, “it is perhaps no very bold surmise that the choice of subject was made with special reference to Mr. Horace Wigan’s power as the representative of cool, astute officers of police, with a faculty for the assumption of queer 129 disguises” (5 June 1875). Wigan as Walker takes on two distinct and fully-fledged disguises.

Like Hawkshaw again, these disguises work in the service of detection as well as entertainment.

The first disguise he takes on is that of an Irishman. “Dressed,” as the stage directions outline clearly, “as the Irish singer and dancer of the racecourse, with a shillelagh, piece of board under one arm, and a few bottles of champagne under the other” and with a brogue to match:

WALKER. (As Paddy): Save me, bhoys! Save me for the love of Heaven! Its [sic]

lynchen law they’re havin’ wi’ me; I shall be kilt entirely. (32; Act 2, Sc 2)

As with Hakwshaw’s performance of an intoxicated navvy in the Bridgewater Arms, Walker’s performance is fulsome and sustained. Similarly, in the following act Walker appears “dressed as a French sailor, red shock head and whiskers” and again with the lingual performance to match:

WALKER. (French accent) Gasçon! Gasçon!

WAITER. (Coming down to him from L.) A Frenchy! Here you are, Mossoo.

WALKER. I did not see ze lady. Vous comprenez ce qus je dis, ze lady of ze murder, ze

chanteuse de l’assassinat (motion of cutting his throat). Tzing! Tzing! (45; Act 3)

In both cases, Walker’s disguise proves effective. In the first, despite some initial suspicion,

Sleeky and Mike accept his Irish masquerade. It is Lawrence whose ineffectual performance really draws their attention.

Walker’s disguise is so elaborate and so committed that Sleeky actually comments on how convincing it is:

130 SLEEKY. (Aside) What an accent! What a success! I don’t know what gibberish he’s

talking, but it’s exactly like French. (45; Act 3)

Except of course commenting upon the success of a disguise that was designed to take you in hardly recommends the success of that disguise. That would be, except that Sleeky is in fact not knowingly praising Walker at all but instead commending what he believes to be the disguise of his criminal compatriot, Mike. For by the most theatrical of coincidences both Walker and Mike have plans to appear in the disguise of a French sailor at this same time. Sleeky believes mistakenly that he is looking at Mike, something he makes clear at Walker’s entrance: “Mike, by the Lord! If I hadn’t arranged the fakement myself, burn me, if I should have recognized him!”

(45; Act 3). When Mike does appear just a few minutes later, “dressed exactly like Walker” only with “villainous” French, confusion reigns (46; Act 3).10

Though the two are dressed exactly alike, they are nevertheless distinguished by their lingual achievements. That is, Walker’s disguise is distinguished primarily by its superiority to that of Mike’s – Walker can speak French where Mike speaks mostly gibberish. In other words,

Walker is a smarter and more able performer than his criminal counterpart. An able police officer in a world of ineffective criminals might sound comforting. Walker’s virtuosic performance as a

French sailor seems to confirm his professionalism and legitimate his mission. Despite the fact that Sleeky and Mike are career criminals, Mike is significantly less skilled than his detective counterpart. Such a direct comparison thus assures the audience of Walker’s superiority – judged by the exact same criteria, Walker easily comes out on top. This should be reassuring. After all, what use is a detective who cannot outdo his criminal nemeses? However, to borrow the term

10 The (compromising) bond between criminal and detective is something actually acknowledged by both Walker and Mike at the very end of the play. Having at last been caught by Walker, Mike observes that “there’s no going agin that [the law]. And if the law’s my master, Mister Inspector Walker, it’s yours too” (61; Act 4). To which Walker responds, “I know that” (61; Act 4). 131 used by the critic for the Graphic, this issue is something of a “mare’s nest” because the very idea of a chameleon-like detective who could deceive those around him with his theatrical skills was itself of immediate contemporary concern (5 June 1875). Charles Clarkson and J. Hall

Richardson refer to such suspicions in their 1889 history of the new police force, quoting an anonymous 1830 satirical poem titled “The Blue Devils, or New Police,” and excising one of the notes given: “The watchmen of the ancient régime, and the people of the present day, have not unfittingly christened this force by the name of Jenny Darbies – the English way of pronouncing gens d’armes, a French civil force, or military espionage, which answers the twofold purpose in that country of watching the streets and the people” (qtd. in Clarkson and Richardson 70). A detective officer who, by virtue of his efficient disguise, could roam undetected was much more able to engage in this kind of surreptitious surveillance. The question of just how surreptitious

Walker’s performance might actually be, is important because though he goes undetected by

Sleeky he is not theatrically invisible. In other words, his performance might hoodwink those on the stage but it does not, nor is it intended, to deceive those in the audience. Though Sleeky mistakes Walker for Mike and could lead the audience into the same error, Walker’s aside, “He thinks I don’t recognize him, the fool!” reveals his disguise to the audience; something further confirmed as the act proceeds (45; Act 3). The audience is quickly in on the joke; invited to see through Walker’s disguise. Scott’s careful employment of this quasi-dramatic irony allies the audience with the detective in a shared position of epistemological superiority. Such a move mitigates the subversive potential of Walker’s disguise but never wholly dissipates it.

The ambiguous position Walker occupies vis-à-vis performance and deceit is well illustrated by a moment earlier in the play when he appears in his first disguise. When his performance as a drunken Irishman leads him into a tight spot – tied up “to the tent pole” at the end of the second act (38; Act 2, Sc 2) - he laments that he lacks the skilful trickery of the

Davenport brothers: “If I only knew that Davenport trick I’d be out of these cursed ropes in two 132 minutes” (39; Act 2, Sc 2). Famous spiritualist/illusionists of the day, the Davenport brothers

“effectively transformed the presentation of spiritualist phenomena into an illusion show”

(During 155). In fact, their “association with serious spiritualism,” During suggests, “stimulated a plethora of critical imitations, exposures and denunciations” (155):

John Nevil Maskelyne, a young Cheltenham watchmaker and amateur conjurer, watched

a Davenport séance at Cheltenham Town Hall in March 1865 and saw Ira Davenport

manipulate a bell inside the cabinet that a spirit was supposed to ring. In his desire to

unmask the fraud, and frustrated by Dr. Ferguson in his attempts to denounce the séance

that night, he and a cabinetmaker friend, George Alfred Cooke, decided to replicate the

Davenport performance, not as a spiritualist demonstration but as a stage illusion […]

William Morton (1838-1938), a music hall agent, was so impressed by their mock-séance

as to take over the management of their act. After encouraging them to extend their

repertoire (they incorporated a decapitation trick), he toured them through the provinces

and finally booked them into London’s Crystal Palace. (During 156)

It is hard, therefore, to know exactly what point Walker is trying to make. Is he attempting to invoke their spiritualist power or merely the performative dexterity exposed as “stage illusion” by people like John Nevil Maskelyne and George Alfred Cooke? Given the relatively recent appearance of such exposés in the U.K. we might presume the latter, with Walker then bemoaning the fact that his performative dexterity is limited; if only he were a better performer he would be able to slip his ropes, dodging the irritatingly insistent laws of physics. His lack of theatrical virtuosity in this moment may speak against him. If he were a more skilled performer, he implies, he would be out of the ropes in no time. That said, his particularly theatrical reference may help instead, perhaps counter-intuitively, to confirm his bona fides as an honest detective – 133 one who cannot trick his way out of trouble or perform his way out of a literal bind. In that case, his expression of longing – “If only I knew that Davenport trick” – would instead betray a potentially worrying desire to exceed the reassuringly prosaic skills of the quotidian detective.

The meaning of Walker’s performances practices – his skills, his shortcomings and his aspirations – is ambiguous. At times they seem to support his position of official investigation whilst at others, they seem to undermine his position, drawing him closer to rather than further from his criminal adversaries.

Walker’s theatrical endeavours are vital contributors to his success but seem to carry with them the potential to undermine the serious business of his police work. In 1863 the critic for the

Telegraph raised an eyebrow at Hawkshaw’s methods, noting that he seemed to have “as many characters to personate as if he had to contribute to the amusement instead of the safety of society” (29 May 1863). His complaint could be summarized thus – the stage detective is more

“stage” than “detective.” Although the Telegraph critic seems to be complaining less of the insidious potential of such associations and more of their unprofessional levity both speak to the uneasy relationship between theatre and entertainment, deception and fraud, and the policing of the latter in the realm of the former. The world of The Detective is an intensely metatheatrical one and the particular theatricality of the bizarre coincidence which sees both Mike and Walker disguised as French sailors does not go unacknowledged. The “stupefied” waiter observes that

“he’s a double man! One of them’s real and the other is his fetch! But which is which? I’ll tell the guv’nor to engage them for the Dromios” (47; Act 3). That the dramatic value of such an incident would immediately strike the waiter is owing no doubt to the location of this act; it is no pub or bar but the auditorium of a music-hall, “Smith’s Hall of Harmony and Temple of Muses,

No. – Ratcliffe Highway” to be precise (40; Act 3). The theatrical potential that the waiter sees in the accidental French sailor double-act of Walker and Mike is one in fact already being played out for the audience of The Detective at The Mirror, Holborn. The comic interchange between 134 the two men, as Mike attempts to keep up with Walker’s superior French, is a useful indication of how successfully they might play in a, no-doubt burlesqued, Comedy of Errors. Walker not only appears in an environment of professional entertainment, he also wittingly (in his disguise) and perhaps unwittingly (in his exchange with Mike) takes part in that entertainment himself. He does not retain a discrete disinterest but is himself implicated in the world of crime and entertainment. The instability of this dubious criminal landscape with its metatheatrical frame is emphasized by the waiter’s initial observation – that “one of them’s real and the other is his fetch.” He in fact presumes too much in assuming any grounded reality of this scene for, in fact, neither sailor and, indeed neither man, is “real” in any sense of the word.

Though his comic exchange with Mike may be an unwitting performance that he does not entirely intend, Walker does shortly show himself alert to the reception of his own performance. The scene I discussed earlier, in which Walker essentially trains Lawrence in the ways of undercover policing, takes place a little later on in this same act. Given the setting, even the more innocuous elements of subtle police work take on a particularly performative quality –

Walker, it seems, is offering Lawrence some direction in the art of undercover detection. That said, though this exchange with Lawrence shows Walker’s awareness of the importance of a kind of playful misdirection, it is still a passive kind of performance. In other words, it is one designed not to be noticed; one, if successful, that goes unseen. Later on in the act, however, Walker employs a different kind of performance – one intended to deceive its audience and so to elicit the required response. Arranging for the “simulated arrest” of Lawrence (who is still in his disguise as Ted Swinkey) by Fox, Walker hopes to make sure that “Mike and his partner will be off their guard” (56; Act 3). Walker designs a kind of theatrical skit to be played by a professional police officer and an amateur assistant for the benefit of his unwitting criminal audience and ultimately to the benefit of his own investigation. In other words, Walker, our stage 135 detective, intentionally instigates a fictional scene to help get the job done – performance in the service of detection.

Walker’s employment of the tools of performance and entertainment may render him an unintimidating police officer, more concerned with the amusement than the safety of society, as the Telegraph critic observed of Hawkshaw, or it may suggest something more insidious than that. For, as the waiter’s offhand remark suggests, the stability and legibility of this criminal- cum-theatrical world is questionable. The world of performance slips all too easily into the realm of deception, and “artful deception,” as James Cook writes in The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum, “carried at least a whiff of its opposite: criminal fraud” (23).

Walker, our upright professional, is thus implicated in a game of deceit that carries with it connotations of not only art but also of crime. By visually twinning our lead detective with one of his criminal nemeses – our very own Dromios – The Detective invites a comparison of the two performances and, more particularly to my argument here, their motivations. That both Walker and Mike are engaged in misrepresentation is apparent – the question then becomes, how might we distinguish these kinds of deception and why?

As Michael Pettit observes in The Science of Deception, the question of just who had the right to deceive and on what grounds was a complicated one. Examining the rise of psychology in nineteenth-century America, Pettit writes at length on contemporary concerns with deception and fraud. Discussing the psychological exposés of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century in which psychologists exposed the so-called fraud of mediums or spiritualists, Pettit observes the following:

Despite their claims about scientific method, psychological exposés relied more on

carefully choreographed dramaturgy. In this regard, psychologists followed [P.T.] 136 Barnum in claiming that certain forms of deception might serve the greater good, while

condemning the deceits of others. (119)

Walker, I would suggest, stands similarly on this somewhat shaky ground. His own dramatic deceptions, which perhaps resonate even more strongly with American showman, P.T. Barnum than those of these American psychologists, are supposed to serve his honorable and professionally-sanctioned desire to catch the murderers and mend Lawrence’s unfairly tarnished reputation. As Pettit also observes, “exposures [of “fake” mediums by journalists or scientists] were a contest over who had the moral authority to deceive” (83). Scott’s focus on Walker’s character in this detective rehabilitation project makes particular sense in such a context for it is

Walker’s upstanding character that should assure his right to deceive. In other words, it is his character rather than his behaviour which distinguishes him from those he pursues. Or, to be more accurate, it should distinguish him from those he pursues. The question of whether it actually does is a little harder to answer. That Walker should appear dressed in the exact same disguise as one of the criminals he pursues brings him especially close to the criminal world of disguise and deception and reinforces the uncomfortable closeness of the detective and the criminal. His good character may offer the key distinguishing factor and yet the sustained similarity, the dramatic twinning, can’t help but have some (dramatic) effect. The detective remains precariously close to those he pursues, both benefiting from and tarnished by his theatrical association.

The relationship between the competing concepts of deception and authentication is always at stake in theatre practice and performance. The status of what could be called theatrical honesty is always contingent and somewhat ambiguous. This is particularly so in the world of nineteenth-century drama. Alison Byerly suggests, “the nineteenth century saw a strong revival of interest in theatrical productions, but also, Jonas Barish points out, the ‘development of a 137 puritanical distrust of qualities like mimicry, ostentation, and spectacle’” (125). This troubled relationship between authenticity and theatricality at once explains and complicates J.S.

Bratton’s observation in Acts of Supremacy, that “theatres attracted interest by the topicality and relevance of a play’s title and supposed subject-matter, perhaps explicitly claiming to deal with authentic information” even as “the tale told was endowed with meaning by formal principles not determined by the events it supposedly reflected or reported” (Introduction 4). In particular, as

Frederick Burwick observes, “in the broad array of crimes represented in the melodrama that thrilled the spectators, fact was preferred to fiction” (141). The 1823 case of John Thurtell, used

(amongst others) by Burwick to illustrate his point demonstrates well the complex performance history of these productions. The evolving relationship between the play, the real-life crime, and the managers’ navigation of the sometimes hostile judicial system makes plain the complex interplay of fact and fiction and the uncertain status of authenticity in these apparently fact-based crime dramas:

Just 24 days later [that is, 24 days after the murder], while the case was still in trial the

crime was made the subject of not one but two sensational stage performances: The

Gamblers; or, The Murderers at the Desolate Cottage (Coburg, November 17, 1823) and

The Gamblers (Surrey, November 17, 1823). On Monday, November 20, 1823, after two

nights, further performances of The Gamblers were halted at The Surrey because the play

might influence deliberations while the incident was in trial. John Thurtell was

pronounced guilty on January 9, 1824. On January 12, 1824, The Gamblers reopened at

the Surrey with authentic artifacts: “Featuring the identical Horse and Gig, together with

the Table on which the Party supped, the Sofa as described to be slept in with other

Household Furniture, as purchased at a late auction.” Attempting to circumvent the

closure ordered by the court, the managers at the Coburg argued that their play had 138 already been prepared when the notorious crime was reported and that they had simply

made adjustments to align the play and character with the current news. Therefore, as

announced on the playbill for November 20, 1823, they would change the title. (162)

This vexed relationship between fact and fiction and a desire to somehow authenticate theatrical experience with genuine articles or events can be seen in The Detective, more than fifty years following.

While Walker and Savage Mike busy themselves playing French sailors in the auditorium of Smith’s Hall of Harmony, Ruth Leigh is due to appear on the stage itself. As Jack Paget confirms at the opening of the act, “Ruth Leigh, of the St. John Wood tragedy” has been engaged to sing (44; Act 3). This was, it seems, as Paget suggests and the waiter agrees, as smart and lucrative a decision in 1875 as it was in 1823:

PAGET. I say, your guv’nor as you call him, beats Barnum all to fits. This idea of

engaging Miss Leigh to sing, and announcing her as principal witness in the St.

John’s Wood tragedy, is a stroke of genius. Particularly as she was never called to

give evidence in the case at all.

WAITER. That’s nothing, sir. The gov’nor’s [sic] a wonderful man! There was a

shipwreck last year – only one survivor! Well, the guv’nor had him here every

night, with the identical rag what he waived as a signal of distress. That was

before the Patagonian Giantess and the Telegraph Boy, a precocious genius, and

so clever, that if you pulled his ear, his mother felt it in New York. The people

wouldn’t stand that, ’cos they couldn’t see the mother. They are so precious

particular! If Miss Leigh don’t draw the guv’nor says he’ll wait till there’s a good

ghastly railway accident, and then engage the real engine-driver, if he ain’t too 139 much hurt, with a real red flag, and a real railway lantern, and the orchestra to

blow a whistle, and rattle some chains like a train a-coming! Oh! he’s wonderfully

clever is the guv’nor! (44; Act 3)

There’s a lot going on in this quick exchange which speaks to these issues of authentication, fraud and detection in contemporary theatre and performance.

Much like the manager of The Surrey in 1823/4, the “guv’nor” of this fictional music-hall is well aware of the value to be found in authenticated crime drama. Where The Surrey had employed what Burwick calls “authentic artifacts” – a gig, a sofa and so on – Smith’s Hall of

Harmony employs Ruth Leigh. In her capacity as authentic witness to the “St. John’s Wood tragedy” she should prove a lucrative draw. If not, as the waiter says, they’ll simply find a more enticing tragedy. The fact that Ruth was never actually called to give evidence is, as Paget observes, merely further indication of the “guv’nor’s” genius; one which finds a marketable authenticity in a falsified, or at least exaggerated, experience. Paget’s invocation of famed

American showman, P.T. Barnum, is instructive and worthy of further examination. For Barnum, as Neil Harris observes, “used deceit and exaggeration, deception and disguise, to make his fortune” (4). Indeed, as James Cook argues, “as long as there have been books on Barnum, writers have pointed to deception as a fundamental component of the showman’s cultural production: it is the single skill (along with circus management) for which he is best remembered today” (12).11 And yet, as Cook later elaborates, there was in a sense more than one Barnum:

11 Michael Pettit suggests that across the pond, Americans were not so much taken in by a charlatan and a fraudster as they were paying for the opportunity to weigh evidence and pass their own judgment:

Barnum’s marketing strategy hinged on societal norms that placed relatively little value on the final authority of experts. Although historians have challenged the reality of participatory democracy, it was in ascendancy as a political ideal during Barnum’s early career [that is, the 1830s and ’40s]. Just as the “ordinary man” was expected to participate in the politics of the republic, the political culture demanded that the individual observer take responsibility for assessing the authenticity of these sorts of spectacles. (Pettit 10)

140

The Feejee Mermaid made Barnum the most famous trickster of the nineteenth century.

But there was another mode of trickery in his repertoire – not so much Barnum in the role

of Prince of Humbug – the winking puffer behind half-exposed deceits – but Barnum as

the straight-faced producer of seamless deceptions. This second aesthetic mode was

especially common in his living curiosity exhibitions – General Tom Thumb, for

example, whose name, age, history, and appearance Barnum embellished with great

success and in many respects represented a strategic reversal of the aesthetic priorities

and marketing methods employed in the Mermaid campaign. Rather than focusing public

attention on the boundaries between authenticity and fraud, Barnum’s living curiosities

depended on a presumption of at least partial authenticity, as well as the perception that

the showman was largely uninvolved in creating their curious features. (119)

To which Barnum then might Paget be referring? The “winking puffer behind half-exposed deceits” suggests a playful kind of deception which invited an audience into the game where the

“second aesthetic mode” hopes to hoodwink the audience entirely. While Jack Paget knows enough to understand the ambiguous authenticity of Ruth (true victim but never trial witness), the performance depends upon the audience’s relative ignorance. It is a deceit that hopes not to be queried.

The question of what to make of this kind of deceit is tricky. Paget’s admiration for the

“guv’nor” certainly seems indebted to a system in which such fraudulent misrepresentation could

Every man is an expert – at least every American man. As James Cook observes, quoting Andie Tucker, “‘Working through and solving a hoax,’ […] became a kind of ‘republican right,’ for it ‘demanded from every citizen the democratic duty of judgment. It offered to every citizen the democratic delight of choice. It allowed to every citizen the democratic satisfaction of participating in public life’” (Cook 76). Whether there was such eagerness to solve such theatrical hoaxes in London is debatable. Barnum received a mixed reception – sell-out shows combined with a viciously hostile press. His productions appealed strongly to some and were, apparently, just as strongly disavowed by others. 141 be read as commendable manipulation of the materials available; “a stroke,” as Paget says, “of genius.” Cook suggests that we should not read such “artful deceptions […] so much in terms of zero sum choices (truth-making versus unmaking, fraud versus exposé) but as a more slippery mode of new middle-class play – a play whose moral ambiguity and epistemological flexibility were always built into the larger process” (28). Within such a framework Paget’s response makes perfect sense. Indeed, the waiter’s disappointment that the Telegraph Boy was no success because people “are so precious today” indicates a public attuned to the kind of play that Cook identifies. Nevertheless, while the waiter seems resigned to navigating an audience of skeptical spectators and Paget seems on board with marketing such deceptive authenticities, I would suggest that The Detective seems somewhat skeptical of the whole enterprise. The waiter’s breathless excitement about the various tragedies they have in the past or intend in the future to market gives the whole exchange a slightly unseemly quality. This, combined with his easy assertion that should Ruth fail to sell they’ll merely replace her with the engine-driver from a

“good ghastly railway accident” seems indicative of a questionable morality in the business of selling knock-off tragedies.

That the fields of performance and experimentation might be associated with seedy criminality is suggested by Sophie Lachapelle who notes the way in which such a connection elicited frustration from a contemporary French conjuror:

In his memoirs, Raynaly deplored the fact that conjuring was so often associated with

theft: “Which one of my colleges has not been more or less a victim of this friendly joke?

‘So, you are a conjurer, sir? Damn! I must pay more attention to my pockets then, do not

conjure away my watch, at least, or my wallet, etc’” (100)

142 The overlap between scientific experimentation and entertaining theatrics Barbara Stafford identifies in the eighteenth century has here expanded to include criminal activity, as the magician’s work is confused with that of a con man (Stafford xxvi). Much to Raynaly’s irritation, no doubt, The Detective tacitly acknowledges such a link. In Act 4, it is the criminal mastermind, Sleeky, who invokes the lexicon of scientific magical experimentation and performance. Having played with the knobs of the safe for some time, he alerts Mike to its imminent opening in the following manner:

SLEEKY. […] Look, Mike! Nuffin in my hands, nuffin up my sleeves! (Door of safe

flies open – bowing). Ladies and gen’elmen, the experiment has puffickly

succeeded! (58; Act 4)

Sleeky thus elides the worlds of magic (“nuffin in my hands, nuffin up my sleeves!”), performance (“bowing”) and scientific investigation (“the experiment”) with that of crime (“door of safe flies open”). Performance and fraud seem to go so naturally hand-in-(empty) hand. Where does this leave our master detective? In a world of such expansive fraudulence, can he retain any kind of meaningful propriety and honesty?

The world of theatre and performance so deliberately delineated by Scott in this highly metatheatrical play is thus one associated not only with criminal activity but also the grasping aspirations of disreputable waiters and their “guv’nors.” Here, creative illusion slides all too easily into fraud, and the most successful criminals wear their performativity on their sleeves.

Such a world inhabited by such a cast of characters seems an odd setting in which and through which to rehabilitate the stage detective. With that said, the self-conscious metatheatricality, the knowing demonstration of the ways in which theatre can deceive, may in fact make it a more trustworthy enterprise. It is, in other words, not the second Barnum but the first – inviting the 143 audience into the illusion and so rendering it more honest, not less. Both sustaining and shattering the illusions that it creates, the theatre offers a counter-intuitively honest if compromised medium by which to tell a kind of truth. Walker, the star detective of The

Detective, has a cognate kind of self-authenticating authority, positioned as a master of truth despite his willingness to take on disguises.

* * * * * * * * * *

We see in Inspector Walker a clear continuation of the incipient line in English detectives begun only a few years earlier. Wigan, as Walker, demonstrates the cool manner, the habit of adopting elaborate disguises and the keen eye the critics seem already trained to expect. Horace Wigan’s appearance as both Hawkshaw in 1863 and then Walker in 1875 guaranteed a certain similarity and fostered a continuity that the critics were quick to recognize. To this increasingly established index of recognizable mannerisms and inclinations, Clement Scott adds one more: the duty of rehabilitation. For it is not so much that the figure of the stage detective is to be rehabilitated by

Scott but that one of the stage detective’s duties is rehabilitative. Indicative of the complex interplay between the newly-staged detective and his real-life counterpart, Inspector Walker seems primed to provide rehabilitation to the detectives of the street. A theatrical riposte to any criticisms and complaints that might be lodged about the man on the street, Scott’s theatrical work seems ready to address a societal issue. Whether Scott actually added such a duty to the detective line or merely emphasized a possibility latent in figures like Hawkshaw, it is a noticeable shift in emphasis.

Scott’s focus on character, professionalism and official sanction thus reveal the ways in which he believed a stage detective might work toward a rehabilitative purpose. Despite such a clear emphasis, Walker’s performance is not without fault. As the critic for the Graphic 144 observes, Walker makes fundamental errors, mistaking his case and pursuing at first the wrong man. Nevertheless, such blunders work primarily to allow for the possibility of his reinvestigation and detective improvement, creating the opportunity to show those both on stage and off just how he is qualified to be a detective. To this end, Walker’s upstanding character is regularly and explicitly emphasized. He is, we are shown, an upright man, with a curiosity sanctioned by professional purpose and a masculinity guaranteed by the domestic life he paints.

Set apart from the feminine prying of Kitty and the self-serving motivations of his criminal counterparts, Walker is quite decidedly not an interfering spy, anxious to improperly expose the lives of others. Walker’s often emphatic attachment to his professional status, something highlighted by the direct comparison with his amateur assistant, Lawrence, is a similar attempt to guarantee his authority and officialdom. The emphasis on Walker’s character and his professional status seems a particularly important intervention in a world where fraud and deception reign supreme.

In addition, the importance of Walker’s character, professionalism and reliability are underlined by the marked unreliability of the so-called evidence driving the plot; something only fully realized in the final act of the play. For, as we discover at the very end of the play, Walker did not pursue Lawrence without cause but rather because he was led there by the pre-emptive work of the knowing criminal class who have learnt detective practice and are now anticipating the work of the police. In the final act, we witness Sleeky and Mike creating a trail of circumstantial evidence for the credulous police to follow, this time to the door of Paget. “The trap’s baited now!” says Sleeky, as he sets up the final crime scene of Act 4 ready for the police to (mis)read (59; Act 4). Fox appears first on the scene and does just as intended, accusing the innocent Paget of the theft. It is only upon Walker’s entrance that the confusion is clarified and the true criminals caught. Replaying the investigative efforts of the first act, we again watch as

Walker instructs his junior in the ways of proper policing. But, where in the first act Walker had 145 encouraged Fox to look deeper and see better, this time he instructs him how to ignore evidence that is pointing in the wrong direction:

WALKER. (To FOX, sarcastically) Fox, you are a very clever fellow, and ably follow in

the footsteps of your master. The guilt of Mr. Paget is as clear as that of Lawrence

Lindon, and the proofs against him are just as conclusive.

FOX. Of course; just what I said.

PAGET. Good. I’m a murderer now.

WALKER. Therefore, my friend, I shall not quarrel with you for falling into the same

trap as I did.

FOX. What trap?

WALKER. You are wrong, Fox, you are wrong! I tell you this young man (pointing to

PAGET), in spite of all these circumstances, seemingly dead against him, is as

guiltless as you or I. (62; Act 4)12

Walker has learnt his lesson and now knows when to mistrust such seeming evidence. In Famous

Cases of Circumstantial Evidence With an Introduction on the Theory of Presumptive Proof,

S.M. Phillips excoriates those who would convict a man based on supposition and presumptive proof alone. “Suspicion,” he explains, “is to be distinguished from proof, - a thousand suspicions do not form one proof” (xxvi). “We can never bring ourselves to believe,” he opines, “that it is necessary to forfeit the life of a man on bare suspicion, on presumptions without proof, and on

12 The pagination of this manuscript is somewhat confused and so I have given this page number as 62, to match its numbering in the manuscript. It should be noted, however, that in order of events it should rightly be numbered as page 61. That is because the manuscript is mis-bound and this page placed out of order. Though its typed number remains accurate (making clear the binding error), the pages were re-numbered by hand to take account of additional handwritten material added and so this page is numbered as though it were bound in the correct order, which it is not. 146 inferences unsupported by evidence” (xxvii). Phillips, one imagines, would approve of Walker’s final rejection of such circumstantial evidence.

In a world where criminals plant evidence designed specifically to misdirect the police,

The Detective seems to assure its audience that the detective will not be misled – at least not in the final reckoning. Rather than following circumstantial clues that lead fraudulently toward the innocent middle class, Walker shows that the detective can be trusted to protect the status quo.

The way in which Walker has come to make such an alternate reading and pursue such a different conclusion is, however, potentially troubling. In order to get to this point, to dispute

Fox’s initial reading of this latter criminal attempt, Walker has engaged in an elaborate game of disguise and deceit that has enabled him to follow, anticipate and ultimately undermine the actions of Sleeky and Savage Mike. Such trickery and game-playing thus implicates Walker in the criminal world of fraud and deceit that Sleeky and Savage Mike so ably manipulate and profit from. Nor is Walker an unwitting participant in such criminal escapades, at times even exhibiting a kind of playful irreverence regarding his work. When Sleeky and Mike are finally in hand, at the end of the play, Walker triumphantly announces: “I guessed the last card you would try to play. It’s useless; the trick’s mine” (64; Act 4). Specifically invoking the language of card games, and even hinting at the illicit practice of gambling, Walker demonstrates a disturbing affinity with the potentially compromising world of entertainment. The troubling similarity between the methods of Walker and his criminal adversaries explains the strong emphasis laid on

Walker’s character and professional status. They become the key distinguishing factors in a world where even the detective must lie and deceive in order to achieve his (just and noble) ends.

Here though we must return to the precarious status of Walker’s professional position.

Throughout The Detective, Walker’s superiority and his credibility as an officially-sanctioned detective are regularly emphasized. The constant assertion of Walker’s status and position along with the emphatic insistence on his rehabilitation, however, can’t help but remind the audience of 147 his contingent position – the detective may protest too much. In addition, the process of professional authentication parallels the process of theatrical codification as the audience is tacitly invited to credential, and so confirm, both his professional and theatrical status. So doing may help to confirm Walker’s increasingly established position – both in the force and on the stage – in a mutually beneficial way. However, in the process of confirming his professional position, something which should help to insulate him from any allegations of criminal fraud that might derive from his own propensity to deceive, he is in fact drawn closer to a world of professional deception and misdirection, that of the theatre. Nor does the status of the theatre go unchallenged in The Detective. It is an exciting and entertaining place but it is also a seedy world engaged in the business of selling tragedy on the stage and providing a setting for criminal activity in the seats.

Ultimately, the insistent metatheatricality of The Detective along with its exposure of tawdry theatrical get-rich-quick schemes highlights a counter-intuitive theatrical honesty. It is honest in its portrayal of deceit. Such honesty is mirrored by our lead detective. He is a figure that, like the theatre in which he appears, is truthful about his dishonesty – winking at the audience and ultimately throwing off disguises used in the pursuit of criminal dishonesty. The

Detective thus solidifies and develops the incipient figure of the stage detective. Though the rehabilitative mission seems not so much for the benefit of the stage detective as it is a duty performed by the stage detective in service to his real-life counterparts, his performance is nevertheless wound into the fabric of the theatre. Like the theatre itself, Walker is both compromised by the dishonest methods he employs and paradoxically vindicated by the open acknowledgement of such dishonesty. Though responsive to the needs of his real-life counterparts, he remains a detective not only on the stage but very much of the stage: a figure both supported by and compromised by the opportunities and challenges of the theatre itself. 3

Mediating Melodrama and Playing the Dandy:

Staging Sergeant Cuff

In June of 1860 a young boy was found viciously murdered at his home in Wiltshire. The case proved difficult and sensitive and after the local police failed to make much headway, Scotland

Yard was asked to send a detective from London. Inspector Whicher was dispatched. Upon his arrival at Road Hill House, Whicher turned suspicion not toward the servants as might have been expected but toward the young boy’s sister, Constance Kent. The case was a sensation – covered not only in the local press but in London too – with a public keen to participate, sending letters to

Police Commissioner Mayne and the Home Office with suggestions of how best to proceed or theories on the identity of the killer (Summerscale 163-4). The case at Road Hill House became a truly Victorian scandal – a middle-class home defiled by murder before being violated by the prying eyes of a London detective. And though the case in Wiltshire was notorious, attracting far more sustained media attention than most, Inspector Whicher was not alone in attracting such intense interest from the press and public. Just a few years earlier, the Rugeley Illustrated Times dedicated fourteen full pages crammed with tiny print and multiple illustrations to what it called

“The Rugeley Tragedies,” featuring a large illustration of Whicher’s old colleague, Inspector

Field (2 February 1856).1 Stories about the men of Scotland Yard proliferated, appearing not

1 Though Field, having retired from the police force, was by this time “not only not an inspector, but also not a detective, according to the meaning attached to the word” he is nonetheless designated “Inspector Field” throughout

148 149 only in news reports but bouncing from column to column and genre to genre. They slipped quickly into periodicals like Household Words and the cartoons of Punch as well as into the serialized novels and then stage adaptations of men like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, both of whom fell victim to what Collins’s own character, Betteredge, would identify as

“detective fever” (Collins Moonstone 182).

Constantly undergoing a process of cultural mediation, these detectives were adapted and revised, accommodating not only the particular desires of each author but also the formal constraints and opportunities of each medium. In examining three stage adaptations of two popular Victorian novels, The Moonstone and Bleak House – novels whose detective officers were indebted themselves to Whicher and Field, I explore the complex cultural creation at work.

Specifically, focusing on Wilkie Collins’s 1877 stage adaptation of his own novel, The

Moonstone, along with two unauthorized adaptations of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, J.P.

Burnett’s Jo and George Lander’s Poor Jo,2 which appeared on the London stage in 1876, I examine the particular moment of theatricalization, as distinct from a more generalized fictionalization. Exploring just how Sergeant Cuff and Inspector Bucket were theatricalized I ask how these detectives became stage ready and, how in turn, they might influence the stylistic and generic expectations of the contemporary theatre. Beginning with the ways in which Collins adapted his long and rangy novel for the stage and manipulated his detective’s role within it, I lay out the potential theatrical hurdles in presenting a character who is underwhelming by design.

Cuff, like Bucket, may be underwhelming in style but that does not mean he is reassuring or

the article and described as the man selected “as the most competent person to carry out the investigation” (Rugeley Illustrated Times 2 February 1856, 93). 2 The manuscript of J.P. Burnett’s play, housed at the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, is in fact given simply as Bleak House: A Drama in Three Acts. I refer throughout the chapter, however, to Burnett’s play by the title Jo as this is the way in which all contemporary critics and advertisements reference the play. Similarly the published manuscript of George Lander’s play is titled Bleak House; or, Poor “Jo.” As all contemporary critics refer to it simply as Poor Jo, I have adopted that designation throughout. In each case I give both titles in the Works Cited. 150 entirely unthreatening. He is improper and, at times, transgressive. Cuff violates the secure sanctity of the Verinders’ upper-middle class home just as Bucket inserts himself into a domestic dispute between a brick-maker and his wife; both men reminding the characters and the audience that nowhere is free from the detective’s prying eye. He disrupts the everyday, challenging the otherwise settled social and moral order of people like the Verinders and the Dedlocks. His disruptions, though, are not restricted to the domestic sphere alone but extend to the theatric world order.

For both Cuff and Bucket have at times a manner that seems to disrupt the theatrical style and tone, at generic odds with the plays in which they feature. Does the detective here operate as a bulwark against melodramatic excess just in the same way that he functions as a guard against criminal behaviour? At first glance this seems a compelling argument but I will show that despite his aloof manner and his measured commitment to reason and evidence, which might seem to count him out of the hyperbolic world of melodrama, the detective in fact occupies a pivotal position in a melodramatic world order, facilitating theatrical justice and moderating the moral outcome. Like the comic man, his distinct manner and tone in fact contribute to what Jacky

Bratton describes as the “contending discourses” of melodrama and help to facilitate both plot and position (qtd. in Williams 205). By so doing, Sergeant Cuff and both Inspector Buckets find themselves often entwined in the moral judgments of melodrama, something complicated by the genre’s own social and political status which had the capacity to be reactionary as well as progressive and, as Carolyn Williams suggests, sometimes both at once (202).

Despite his transgressive appearance, it seems that he may in fact operate as an agent of social, moral and theatric world order. What then are we to make of his aloof demeanour and leisured nonchalance? Despite his apparent allegiance to melodrama this stylistic mismatch is 151 significant. If it does not signal his resistance to a melodramatic world order what might it suggest? This, I will argue, does not so much disqualify him as a melodramatic player so much as it situates him in a pivotal position in a changing theatrical landscape. For, not only do the stage detectives in the plays of Collins, Burnett and Lander take a critical position in a melodramatic landscape they simultaneously cast forward to a society theatre yet to come. The lounging manner of these detectives anticipates Lord Goring and his dandiacal compatriots of the

1890s even as their dramatic function grounds them in a melodramatic world. For Sergeant Cuff and the two Inspector Buckets, I will argue, are fundamentally intertwined with the dramatic world and imbricated in developing theatrical style.

Whicher, Witchem … Cuff; Field, Wield … Bucket – Theatricalizing the Detective

Neither Inspector Field nor Inspector Whicher were strangers to the press or unused to journalistic scrutiny. The murder at Road Hill House was, without doubt, Whicher’s most high- profile case; one which has been re-appraised even in the twenty-first century in a popular nonfiction work, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, but it was in fact not the man’s first encounter with the local or London hacks. Similarly, the Rugeley Times’s coverage of Field and “The

Rugeley Tragedies” came years after Dickens’s almost obsessive interest in the man, and a couple of years after the publication of Bleak House featuring its own Dickensian detective. That

Charles Dickens was fascinated by the detective branch is well-documented. As Peter Haining observes, “Dickens was no armchair detective-story writer. [Rather] he travelled the night streets of London in the company of detective officers to see their work at first hand. He frequently attended the London magistrates courts and was present at a number of important murder trials” 152

(10).3 Thus when Dickens set out in 1850 to write “A Detective Police Party” for Household

Words, ostensibly a recounting of conversations held between himself and detectives of the

Metropolitan Police, we should not be surprised to find his compromised and compromising claim to “make it, so far as in us lies, a piece of plain truth” (Dickens “A Detective Police Party”

Part I 409). This artful equivocation about his own veracity betrays the hazy relationship between these real-life detectives and their fictionalized selves. Such equivocation is particularly apparent in his winking appellation of his detective colleagues: Field becomes “Wield,” Whicher

“Witchem.” They are of course instantly recognizable – there is no attempt to deceive – but there is a subtle signal to his readers that these are cultural creations as much as they are real-life men.

Rhyming “Wield” with “Field” or sliding “Whicher” into “Witchem,” Dickens makes playful characters of these early detectives who are still, nevertheless, grounded in a kind of authentic reality. Whicher and Witchem (like Field and Wield) are interdependent characters with each strengthening the other; Whicher lending a truth-factor to Witchem who, in turn, lends his own

Dickensian charm and aesthetic playfulness to Whicher. Inspectors Bucket and Cuff, of Bleak

House and The Moonstone, no longer retain a cheeky nod to their likely progenitors, Field and

Whicher, but they are nonetheless implicated in this ongoing process of creation and fictionalization. 4

3 Inspector Bucket of Bleak House is no doubt Dickens’s most famous contribution to detective fiction and the detective canon but Dickens’s writing on the detective was much more extensive than simply this one character. Before he wrote Bucket into existence he had dedicated many pages and many articles to the men of the detective branch. In the years 1850-1851, Household Words was well served with detective tales, with “The Modern Science of Thief-Taking” appearing in July of 1850, before the two parts of “A Detective Police Party” in July and August, “Three ‘Detective’ Anecdotes” in September and “On Duty with Inspector Field” the year following. 4 These detectives, it seems, are available for a kind of fictional reworking, hovering in a grey area between authenticity and aestheticization. In this regard, their later theatricalization becomes particularly significant as Lynn Voskuil suggests that, at this time, the relationship between the apparently antagonistic concepts of authenticity and theatricalization was in fact a complex and self-supporting one. “Rather,” she argues, “than engaging in furtive acts of theatricality that subverted their convictions of authenticity at certain well-defined transgressive moments, Victorians developed a sophisticated capacity to suspend their disbelief, to act authentically and be theatrical at the same time” (Acting Naturally 2-3). In this way, we might begin to better understand the fictionalization and theatricalization of these detectives as part of a concomitant process of authentication. 153

Field is generally supposed the inspiration or basis for Inspector Bucket of Bleak House; the next step in his increasing fictionalization, as the character becomes nominally unmoored from his inspiration. Though Dickens had himself felt free to manipulate his own experience of

Scotland Yard men in a creative fashion he was less than impressed by the prevalence of hack adaptations which, unauthorized, refashioned his material into dramatic shape. Dickens’s death in 1870 put an end to his outspoken resistance to such theatrical “theft” and, as H. Philip Bolton argues, “a fourth epoch [of Dickens dramatization] arose during the early 1870s, when almost nothing restrained the dramatic adaptors, and the greatest burst of theatrical enthusiasm for

Dickens occurred” (4). This is when the two adaptations I will be covering in this chapter, those by J.P. Burnett and George Lander, made their way to the stage. Both J.P. Burnett and George

Lander authored two remarkably similar versions of Bleak House which appeared on the London stage in 1876, engendering a well-documented theatrical spat between, if not Lander and Burnett, then J.A. Cave and Edgar Bruce, the men entrusted with the production of each. J.P. Burnett’s version, produced under the direction of Edgar Bruce and called simply Jo, appeared first. It found its first life in the United States before coming to England. Primarily a vehicle for J.P.

Burnett’s wife, Jennie Lee, in her starring performance as the titular crossing-sweep, Jo was produced at a number of houses, ultimately finding a home at the Globe in February of 1876.

Despite a very warm reception, with particular praise directed toward Lee herself, the production had previously agreed to a closing date with a promise to return in September of that year. In the interim, J.A. Cave produced a strikingly similar adaptation, written by George Lander and in this case entitled Poor Jo. Quite possibly designed to capture some of the approbation directed toward Burnett’s Jo, Lander’s Poor Jo was produced at a number of houses before it too found its way to the Globe where it occupied the same stage, even using the same set, as the 154

Burnett/Bruce production before it.5 While the remarkably similar Burnett and Lander adaptations concentrate on the sentimental life and death of Jo6, the crossing sweep, and assign a decent role to Inspector Bucket in the process (a role taken in the Burnett/Bruce production by none other than Burnett himself), it should be noted that some of the many other adaptations in fact do not feature the detective at all.

Like Dickens, Collins seemingly reached back into the world of true crime and detection for his detective inspiration as well as, in Collins’s case, the very basis of The Moonstone’s plot.

The content of The Moonstone bears a striking resemblance to the murder at Road Hill House, mentioned above, and its subsequent investigation by Jonathan Whicher. As Steve Farmer notes:

The Moonstone’s reader sees immediately that Collins borrowed extensively from the

case as he devised the mystery surrounding the theft of the diamond […] Though Collins

substituted theft for murder and smeared paint for blood, a family linen-list and a missing

stained nightdress lie at the heart of his story. He also seems to have modelled the

bungling Superintendent Seegrave of his novel after Mr. Foley, the very real local

policeman whose ineptitudes caused innumerable problems for later professional

5 Upon the appearance of the Lander/Cave production at the Globe, Edgar Bruce produced a circular ostensibly to warn the public of the difference between the two productions. J.A. Cave then published a letter in the Era insisting that “the Management cannot understand that it should have made any difference in their programme, as they are utterly unable to suppose that Mr Bruce claims a monopoly in the brain of our great novelist” (20 August 1876). Cave is no doubt being more than a little disingenuous – his version by Lander bore more resemblance to that by Burnett than it did to Dickens’s enormous tome, Bleak House. While Lander/Cave’s production was successful it did not receive the kind of positive response as the other with many critics commenting on the similarity between the two and the Penny Illustrated Paper suggesting that “the dramatic world in town can scarcely be expected to waken into life for another fortnight. Mr. Cave’s production of ‘Poor Jo’ at the Globe must be pronounced no go. It is Jennie Lee’s Jo that is the life and soul of the only successful dramatic version of ‘Bleak House,’ and playgoers are content to wait till they can see that talented artiste again in September” (26 August 1876). Nonetheless the show(s) must and did go on: a very nineteenth-century spat which well demonstrates the complex and often contradictory relationship between theatricality, authorship and authenticity on the London stage at the time. 6 Though the Burnett manuscript employs the spelling, “Joe,” the title given on the playbill uses “Jo.” For clarity’s sake and to avoid any confusion I refer throughout the chapter simply to “Jo.” 155

investigators. And Collins’s Detective Cuff is clearly modelled after Inspector Jonathan

Whicher, a renowned detective whose sagacity and ingenuity were not immediately

recognized or appreciated by others investigating the crime. (Introduction 27-28)

Jonathan Whicher, like his colleague Charles Frederick Field, seems to be undergoing a process of inconsistent and intermittent but nonetheless ongoing fictionalization, moving onto the pages of Household Words, All The Year Round (where The Moonstone was serially published in 1868) before finding his way to the London stage. In this way, a long and complex process of cultural appropriation lands on the stage, contributing not only to the particular histories of Whicher and

Field but to that of a developing stage type and theatrical figure, the stage detective.

While Dickens stopped short of actually putting his detective on the stage, leaving the way clear for others to try their hand, Wilkie Collins decided to theatricalize Sergeant Cuff himself. No stranger to adaptation, between 1867 and 1877 Collins had adapted some six of his novels for the stage. At the latter end of this period, The Moonstone appeared on the stage

(Farmer, Appendix 610). Published in serial form over the summer of 1868, The Moonstone,

Collins’s eighth novel, had been a huge success:

Each week in June and July, people lined Wellington Street outside the office of Charles

Dickens’s weekly magazine All the Year Round, the publication in which the novel was

then appearing, waiting to buy the new installment, hoping to be among the first to solve

Collins’s puzzles. William Tinsley, the London publisher who had purchased the rights to

the three-volume first edition of the novel, described crowds “of anxious readers waiting 156

for the new number” and remarked enthusiastically that these “were scenes … that

doubtless did the author’s and publisher’s hearts good.” (Farmer, Introduction 9)

Garnering much critical attention from its initial publication, Collins’s novel has been called the first English detective novel by many, including most notably T.S. Eliot who wrote that “The

Moonstone is the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels” (qtd. in

Farmer, Introduction 10-11). A long and complex tale of Orientalist fantasies, English propriety and relentless detection, the novel tells the story of the Moonstone, a diamond, supposedly cursed upon its theft from its rightful home in an Indian shrine. The stone, having been stolen many years before by the morally bankrupt Herncastle, is given as a birthday gift to young

Rachel Verinder toward the opening of the novel. Franklin Blake, a cousin of Rachel’s, is the unhappy bearer of the jewel: unhappy because he suspects the diamond may indeed be cursed and has been followed from London by three Indian men who seem intent upon recovering it any cost. Upon receiving the jewel, Rachel places it in her cabinet for the night and goes to bed.

When she wakes, she discovers the Moonstone has been stolen. Detective Cuff is called in to solve this impossible crime and finds a household mixed in their reception of his efforts. There are many twists and turns but eventually we learn that the Moonstone was “stolen” by Franklin himself. Unwittingly the subject of a medical experiment by the local doctor who was attempting to demonstrate that he could improve Franklin’s sleep with the secret administration of opium,

Franklin slept-walked into Rachel’s room and pocketed the diamond. Upon waking he had no recollection of the act, although Rachel had seen his actions and believed him to be guilty. The diamond remains lost because Rachel’s other cousin, Godfrey Ablewhite, had taken this opportunity to pilfer the now-missing diamond and attempted to sell it himself. Toward the end 157 of the novel Godfrey is found dead, murdered spectacularly by the three Indian men of the opening, who take the diamond and return it to India. The novel itself is made up of the recollections of different characters (from Rachel’s trusted house steward, Gabriel Betteredge to the tiresome, evangelizing Miss Clack), ostensibly an attempt by Franklin Blake to reconstitute this incredible tale.

Given its runaway success it is perhaps not surprising that Collins decided to adapt it for the stage approximately ten years later. That said, it is a long novel full of incident which doesn’t immediately present a clear way to bring it to the somewhat condensed format of the theatre.

Collins nonetheless persevered and brought to the theatre a piece in drastically altered form.

Produced at the Olympic under the management of Henry Garside Neville (who also took the part of Franklin Blake), the play found a decent critical reception but only moderate success, closing after nine weeks and replaced in the repertoire by a Tom Taylor melodrama, Henry

Dunbar. Far from the extensive and wide-ranging quality of the novel, the play restricted itself to

24 hours in the Verinder household – a household transplanted from Yorkshire to Kent, presumably to allow for a more credible railway timetable, one which could take the characters believably from London to Kent in the time given. Reduced massively in scale the play features only seven characters of significance - Franklin Blake, Rachel Verinder, Detective Cuff, Gabriel

Betteredge, Godfrey Ablewhite, Miss Clack and Mr. Candy, the doctor – and revolves around only one incident of the lengthy novel; that is, the accidental theft of the diamond by Mr.

Franklin Blake. Gone is the Indian subplot and most of its mystical overtones, gone is the strange and opium-addicted Ezra Jennings, gone too is the mysterious housemaid, Rosanna Spearman, with her unspoken love for Franklin Blake and her subsequent suicide at the shivering sands.

Instead, we discover early on that Franklin took the diamond while sleep-walking in the house 158 and watch the doctor’s attempt to replay this event and so discover the Moonstone’s whereabouts. Perhaps cognizant of the novel’s great success, Collins was aware that he could not simply dramatize the mystery – much of his audience already knew the way the mysterious cookie crumbled. As the reviewer for the Illustrated London News remarked: “He has successfully resisted the temptation to found his plot upon the principle of surprise, and has substituted for it that of expectation” (22 September 1877). It is, in essence, a dramatized medical experiment designed to prove Franklin’s innocence and allow for the marriage of Rachel and Franklin at the end of the final act.

Detective Cuff is one of the characters that remains in the move from page to stage, although his, like many others, is an obviously adapted part with marked differences from as well as similarities to his novelistic counterpart. Played by Thomas Swinbourne, whose most famous role Steve Farmer suggests followed a few years later, “as Claudius (alongside Edwin

Booth’s Hamlet) at the Princess’s Theatre production of Hamlet in 1880” (Appendix 630).

Wilkie Collins initially offered the part to Charles Collette who refused to accept it until he had read the script, something of which Collins was seemingly unaware. The note of irritation in

Collins’s August 6th letter is clear:

I hear by a letter from [Henry G.] Neville, received this morning, that your engagement is

not completed yet – although he has put off his ‘opening’ to suit your convenience. // If

you had told me, when I had the pleasure of seeing you here, that you would not accept

the part without first reading the piece, some time and trouble might have been saved. As

it is, I of course hasten to send you the only copy of the piece that I possess. It is in rough

proof, with corrections which were only intended for the printers’ eye. But everything 159

must give way to the absolute necessity of settling the ‘cast’ at once. // […] The part

which is offered to you is “Sergeant Cuff” (the detective policeman of the novel).

(“Letter to Charles Collette” 6 August 1877)

Collins and Neville clearly wanted Collette to take the part, even putting back the opening for his approval. Collette, however, refused and the role was instead taken by Thomas Swinbourne who played it to mixed reviews. Some critics positively liked Swinbourne as Cuff praising both actor and author, as in case of the reviewer for the News of the World who called Swinbourne “an excellent actor, and always welcome [who] did full justice to the part of Detective Cuff” (23

September 1877). Others appreciated Swinbourne’s efforts but complained that he was essentially in the wrong line. The Times reviewer suggested that Swinbourne “invests the part with a solemn air of high tragedy, which, save on the supposition that it is his natural manner, is somewhat difficult to account for” (21 September 1877), the reviewer for the Echo observed that

Cuff was a “capital part” and that Swinbourne gave “a capital, well-sustained performance, but hardly the character suited to [his] peculiar vein” (19 September 1877), and the critic for the

Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News observed that “Mr. T. Swinbourne, a new accession to the Olympic company – though out of his usual line – was calmly quiet and appropriately self- contained as the rose-loving detective, Sergeant Cuff” (22 September 1877). Others felt

Swinbourne acquitted himself well but did so in a thankless part: “Mr T. Swinbourne, in certainly the very worst part it has been his lot to undertake, showed what can be made of poor materials by able hands” (Era 23 September 1877); while others still found the whole performance simply “competent, without being in any respect remarkable” (22 September 1877) or perhaps even worse “childlike and bland” (“Moonstone review – unattributed 3”). 160

Perhaps Collins was right to want Collette for the part; perhaps Collette was right to refuse. The rather mixed response to Swinbourne as Cuff and the confusion about just where praise (or blame) might be due indicates the challenging task of delineating a character who is in some sense unremarkable by design. Recalling Hawkshaw’s decidedly and deliberately unremarkable mode in Tom Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man (1863) might incline us to be generous toward Swinbourne as Cuff. Perhaps he gave a performance of obvious and unremarkable competence because that is what Cuff called for – a deliberate ordinariness and self-conscious camouflage. Though I’m inclined to believe that certain critics simply didn’t take to Swinbourne’s particular style it is interesting to observe the potentially risky theatrical territory that a less accomplished actor or playwright may find themselves in when tasked with playing or writing an early stage detective. A tricky proposition – writing or playing a deliberately deliberative character without boring the audience. Of especial concern to

Swinbourne, this particular and peculiar style – one of inconspicuousness mixed with just the right amount of theatricality – is liable to be read not as a production problem but as actorly incompetence. If such an underwhelming manner was misunderstood, assigned to actor rather than character, not only did the production risk failure but the actor risked particular censure. Of note is the particularly theatrical nature of this problem. It is, in other words, a challenge that asserts itself in the transition from page to stage, a challenge particular to the staging of the detective.

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Domestic Interference – The Detective as Intruder

By placing Cuff on the stage of the Olympic in 1877, Wilkie Collins did not simply create performative challenges for Thomas Swinbourne but afforded specifically theatrical opportunities to his now dramatized detective. In her foundational work, A Theory of Adaptation,

Linda Hutcheon attempts to come to a clearer definition of the rather broad term, “adaptation”

(16). Acknowledging that “in many cases […] adaptations are to a different medium,” she suggests “re-mediation” as a useful term:

In many cases, because adaptations are to a different medium, they are re-mediations, that

is, specifically translations in the form of intersemiotic transpositions from one sign

system (for example, words) to another (for example, images). This is translation but in a

very specific sense: as transmutation or transcoding, that is, as necessarily a recoding into

a new set of conventions as well as signs. (16)

Shifting Cuff from his original home in a rather lengthy novel, dominated by words, to a landscape of images and action, Collins essentially re-mediates his police detective. Forced to navigate a new semiotic system, Cuff becomes a specifically theatrical detective. When Cuff finally makes his first entrance, in the second act, he does so in a way that makes clear his compromised and compromising relation to stage space. As Godfrey wanders alone, speaking of his plans to propose to Rachel, Cuff appears upstage, arriving not through one of the interior doors but, directly, from the garden:

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GODFREY. […] I should like to feel sure of my charming cousin before I leave her –

with Franklin in the house! She was in the rose-garden when I last heard of her.

(He approaches the window, and is met by SERGEANT CUFF, entering from the

garden.)

CUFF. Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite, I believe?

GODFREY. (A little surprised) You know me?

CUFF. Everybody knows you, sir.

GODFREY. (Rather suspiciously) May I ask to whom I have the pleasure of speaking?

(CUFF takes a card out of his pocket-book, and silently hands it to GODFREY.

GODFREY starts as he reads the name.) “Sergeant Cuff, Detective Police

Force.” (He turns to CUFF, speaking rather confusedly). How is it, Sergeant, that

you – I mean, why are you left to find your way in here, without a servant to

announce you?

CUFF. It’s a habit of mine, in cases of theft to slip in quietly, and take the place, as it

were, by surprise. (660-661; Act 2)7

Cuff’s unusual navigation of stage space, which is here standing in for domestic space, is an affront to domestic decorum. He has slipped onto the stage and into the house unannounced. Nor does Cuff apologize for such an intrusion, instead suggesting that such an unusual and improper

7 The particular playtext from which I am quoting is that published (for the first time) as an appendix to Steve Farmer’s edition of The Moonstone and is that to which I refer to throughout this chapter as The Moonstone: A Play for clarity’s sake. Farmer gives the provenance of his text as follows: “The text of this play comes from an edition that Collins had printed privately for his own use and convenience by the Dickens and Evans printing house […] Collins entered the play at Stationers’ Hall to secure copyrights, though the copyright system at the time did little if anything to protect the author. Letters written by Collins suggest that this version of the play was printed before the theatre productions took place, and there is evidence that the texts for the stage play differed slightly from the texts [sic] which appears here” (Appendix 624). 163 use of space is in fact a detective strategy, allowing him to “take the place, as it were, by surprise.”8

In a world in which an Englishman’s home was still very much his castle – “It is with this thoroughly innate feeling of security that every Englishman feels a strong sense of the inviolability of his own house” (Morning Post 10 July 1860, qtd. in Summerscale 37) – such an affront to domestic integrity by this Scotland Yard man was significant. Martha Vicinus implies, in her article “‘Helpless and Unfriended’: Nineteenth-Century Domestic Melodrama,” that in fact the strong line between the domestic and public spheres was one championed by melodrama, a genre responding to this increasing division under capitalism:

Melodrama can be seen as a cultural response to the growing split under capitalism

between production and personal life […] In increasing numbers, which became an

avalanche in the nineteenth century, people no longer worked close to or in their homes,

but worked in factories and workshops at the hours set by their masters. Even the

expanded cottage industry increasingly involved an outside taskmaster. In the close-knit

traditional communities, such as coal-mining villages, work remained the social,

emotional and cultural center, but elsewhere, despite unionization, the psychic center of

life was separate from work. It was for all classes overwhelmingly in the family, and this

became the arena for domestic melodrama. The home was the setting for passion,

8 In this way, the character of Cuff recalls a story told by Witchem (that is, Dickens’s quasi-fictionalized Whicher) in which he recalls just how he recovered a stolen diamond pin: “‘I saw which one of ’em took it; and when we were all down on the floor together, knocking about, I just gave him a little touch on the back of his hand, as I knew his pal would; and he thought it was his pal; and gave it me!’” (Dickens, “Three ‘Detective’ Anecdotes” 95-96).

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sacrifice, suffering, and sympathy; the work place for action, for earning money to pay

for the home comforts. (129)

Domestic melodrama puts the home at the centre of the struggle and though I wouldn’t call The

Moonstone: A Play a domestic melodrama per se, it is nonetheless significant that Sergeant Cuff appears to test the edges of this melodramatic home. Five years later, Baxter, the detective, of

Henry Arthur Jones’s wildly popular melodrama, The Silver King, at the Princess’s, follows suit, behaving in fact even more indecorously than his forerunner, Cuff, seeming to make a habit of entering people’s houses not through a door at all but through their windows (55; Act 2, Sc 1 and

97; Act 5, Sc 1).

Cuff, as Baxter after him, not only shows a disdain for the usual social niceties

(something noted by Godfrey when he asks, “How is it, Sergeant, that you – I mean, why are you left to find your way in here, without a servant to announce you?”) but poses a threat to the integrity of the domestic space. Moreover, Cuff’s intrusions must be viewed theatrically as well as domestically for the space into which he intrudes is, of course, a theatrical space representing a domestic one. His challenge to the domestic space is thus also a challenge to the theatrical space. In the case of The Moonstone: A Play, Cuff finds himself not only enclosed in the typical middle-class interior so popular in the bourgeois theatre of the time, but one formed with conscious respect to the delimiting impulse of the French neo-classical unities – those of time, space and action. This is something markedly different from Collins’s diffuse and wide-ranging novel and something laid out quite insistently in the original playbill which notes that “the action of the Drama extends over twenty-four hours, and passes entirely in the Inner Hall of Miss

Verinder’s country-house” (“Moonstone Playbill” 17 September 1877). Cuff’s entrance, in fact, 165 challenges the unities of the play in more ways than one for not only is his arrival through the garden a challenge to the spatial integrity of the domestic and theatrical landscapes, it is also a challenge to the temporal coherence of the play. Franklin sends for Sergeant Cuff who then arrives at the house impossibly quickly. By way of explanation, we are told that Cuff was already on his way. While this explanation stands up it feels flimsy. It seems an inadequate attempt to paper over the detective’s flouting of space and time; an attempt which can’t help but show the cracks. The reviewer for the Athenaeum laments the loss of “the supernatural” in the stage version, noting that “the [excised] figures of the three Indians dogging the possessors of the sacred emblem, though they lend themselves easily to ludicrous associations are not without an element of absolute terror” (22 September 1877). Perhaps though it is not entirely lost, simply reascribed, as Cuff’s challenge to the orderly proceeding of time and the predictable use of space imparts to him a modicum of the supernatural.

Whether the reviewer for the Athenaeum would have been convinced by Cuff’s qualifications to the supernatural is questionable for Cuff, like Bucket, remains decidedly mired in the prosaic social problems of his time. His literal and improper incursions into the domestic time and space of the theatre are mirrored by his indecorous questions and meddlesome desire to find the truth. This is something handled quite explicitly in J.P. Burnett’s Jo, when Inspector

Bucket identifies a “bad bruise” on the face of a brick-maker’s wife (76; Act 3, Sc 2):

BUCKET. […] And so your husband’s a brick-maker, is he?

JENNY. How did you know that, sir?

BUCKET. Why, you see, I’m pretty quick of observation – it’s a gift with me – and I 166

imagine so from the color of the clay on your dress. I know brick-makers go about

working at piece work, in different places; and, I am sorry to say I have known

them cruel to their wives too. Where’s your husband now?

JENNY. He got into trouble last night, sir, but he’ll look for me at the lodging house.

BUCKET. He’ll get into more trouble if he often misuses his large heavy hand as he has

misused it here.

JENNY. Oh, sir, don’t injure him.

BUCKET. Now, that’s always the way with you women; you would rather he should do

it again than he should suffer; but if I catch him at it, I’ll make a caution to him.

(76-77; Act 3, Sc 2)

No longer just an indelicate and improper entrance through the backdoor or the window,

Burnett’s Inspector Bucket uses his detective expertise to notice domestic abuse before encouraging a woman to report her husband. Whilst on the face of it Cuff’s first conversation with Godfrey Ablewhite has little in common with Bucket’s unusually presumptuous challenge to a battered woman, it does in fact reveal a similar attempt to insert himself in others’ relations and upend social norms and niceties. In fact, though Bucket’s intervention may seem at first glance far more significant than Cuff’s improper entrance and ensuing conversation, Bucket’s assumed social superiority to the working-class woman may allow him to voice his disapproval in a way that would have in fact been more socially acceptable than Cuff’s indelicate navigation of the upper classes. In any case, both detectives challenge the accepted social order and the social roles of others, challenging domestic integrity in more ways than one. 167

Cuff, already having signaled a casual assumption of power with his unaccompanied entrance, one which can dispense with polite practice, proceeds to consolidate his own position of power while challenging Godfrey Ablewhite’s social position, asking “Mr Godfrey

Ablewhite, I believe?” Asking the question rather than simply stating the fact is the one concession he does make to the terms of polite conversation, but Cuff is clearly only confirming that which he already knows. Godfrey’s startled reply, “You know me?” puts him on the back foot, as he struggles to regain his own position throughout the conversation. Having to admit that he does not know who Cuff is, and subsequently being forced to read Cuff’s name off of his own card as Cuff stands silently by, further undermines any social superiority he might presume to have. Indeed, his reading of Cuff’s name aloud forces Godfrey into the position of a stage butler, as he announces the detective for the room and the audience. The two men are contrasted throughout this scene, with Godfrey supposed to appear always a little out of sorts – “a little surprised,” “rather suspiciously,” “rather confusedly,” “recovering himself” before later

“distrustfully” (660-662; Act 2) – in direct contrast no doubt to Cuff’s confident and self-assured manner. Cuff is described with few adverbs – he “takes a card out of his pocket-book, and silently hands it to Godfrey,” he speaks “with his eye on Godfrey,” and “watching Godfrey’s face” (661; Act 2). Indeed, aside from “silently” which clearly modifies the verbal phrase “hands it over” the only adjective ascribed to Cuff in this opening encounter is “indignantly,” and it relates not to Godfrey but to the rose-garden (661; Act 2). Cuff’s temper it seems is very much in check when it comes to his work, rising only in relationship to the trivial matter of roses: “Cuff

(indignantly): Just look at that rose-garden!” (661; Act 2). Seen another way, his indignation at the roses is simply another part of his strategy of control. Clearly not desiring to respond to

Godfrey’s questions about the case, Cuff uses the roses and his passion thereon to deflect the 168 conversation in a direction he would prefer. This opening encounter with Godfrey is afforded further significance when we consider the fact that Godfrey is the guilty party of the piece – something Cuff suspected from the outset, as he admits at a much later point in the play. Godfrey may be Cuff’s social superior but ultimately he finds himself in Cuff’s own custody.

Cuff then, is a somewhat threatening intruder who, despite his invitation from Franklin, is not entirely or unreservedly welcomed into the home. Given his entrance and his subsequent behaviour that is perhaps not entirely surprising. Deliberately mirroring the illicit activity of those he seeks, he treads a fine line between that which is proper and improper, that which is polite and that which is unseemly. In testing the edges of the Verinder home he finds gaps, both literal and metaphorical, letting himself through the garden and similarly letting Godfrey’s true nature reveal itself. In his pursuit of the mysterious Moonstone as well as the truth he challenges the social niceties and domestic decorum of an upper-class home. As D.A. Miller writes of the novel, “not only does an outsider [Cuff] watch what is not supposed to be watched,” and I would add, intrude where he should not intrude, “he also construes what he sees by other rules than the ones this community uses to regulate itself” (38). The fact that he finds both the Moonstone and the truth makes his uncomfortable search with its occasionally unseemly tactics all the more justified and all the more concerning for an upper-class family or a middle-class audience. He is, it seems, both reassuring and alarming – supposedly a force of social order but one who is constantly testing the strength of the social fabric, in order to arrive at the truth. Cuff demonstrates that the Verinder household may seem impenetrable but with a little detective 169 dazzle the wheels start to come off.9 The home becomes a stage and the social roles become merely theatrical, with a detective adept at manipulating both.

“Duty’s duty, duty is” – Who does the detective serve?

Given Cuff’s apparent ability to fundamentally unsettle the world about him, the question of just who it is that he serves becomes significant. To whom or to what does our stage detective owe his allegiance? There are, of course, societal answers to this question but there are also theatrical ones. I shall begin from the societal perspective, exploring the nature of his allegiance and its troubling implications for our Verinders and Dedlocks, before moving to the more theatrical perspective, examining the ways in which our detectives find their function delimited, defined and indebted to their dramatic status. These two perspectives – societal and theatrical – tend to collapse into one another as each moderates and modifies the other.

The indecorous and improper nature of Cuff’s entrance into the Verinder household is mollified somewhat by the fact that he has in fact been called to the house and seems at times to defer both to Franklin and Rachel. When Rachel interrupts Cuff’s hypothesizing with an impatient “What do you want?” he replies, “Your authority, miss, to give my orders to the laundry-maid” (666; Act 2). Rachel accedes and Betteredge introduces Cuff to the laundry maid.

When, however, a few minutes later Rachel refuses her consent to have her wardrobe searched

Cuff makes plain just where in fact his duty lies:

9 In this way, Cuff casts forward to Stephen Daldry’s 1992 production of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (1945). The prying questions of, in that case, an inspector, precipitate a literal collapse of the house that mirrors the collapse of its inhabitants and their social fabric. 170

RACHEL. (With a furious look at FRANKLIN) I refuse to let my wardrobe be examined!

I refuse to let this shameful farce go on any longer.

CUFF. Please reflect, miss, before you decide. I have undertaken to conduct this inquiry,

and I have a duty to perform to my employer here. (He indicates FRANKLIN.)

RACHEL. (Suddenly stepping up to CUFF) Your employer? Do you mean to tell me Mr.

Franklin Blake sent for you?

FRANKLIN. Certainly, Rachel, I sent for him. (669-70; Act 2)

After Rachel’s exit, Betteredge, the Verinders’ old house steward, and by implication guardian of the family’s propriety, insists Cuff cannot enter Rachel’s room without her leave. Cuff insists it is his “duty to search the room” and he does so, appearing shortly thereafter with Franklin’s own dressing-gown (670; Act 2). Again, the domestic impropriety seems plain. Cuff has once again intruded indecorously into a domestic space not his own, emerging from a lady’s bedroom with her cousin’s dressing-gown. The intimacy of the space is here compounded by the intimacy of the piece of clothing.

Interestingly, the reviewer for the decidedly middle-class magazine, the Graphic, is particularly annoyed by what they see as Rachel’s inability to assert her own domestic authority:

Still, her [Rachel’s] conduct does not commend itself to the common-sense of the

audience […] Why does she not therefore at once demand restitution? Why does she

submit to be annoyed in her own house by a ridiculously incompetent detective, whom

she has not sent for, and whose services she does not require? (22 September 1877)

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Whether Cuff is in fact “ridiculously incompetent” is debatable but this reviewer’s frustration at

Rachel’s inability to manage her home and to fend off the incursion of this irritating detective is significant. Cuff’s disruptive and potentially subversive force is worrisome to a middle-class reviewer no doubt anxious of their own social status; one that Cuff has already implied, in his earlier exchange with Godfrey, might be negotiable. Despite the anxiety betrayed by the critic for the Graphic, Cuff’s authority remains contingent and somewhat conditional. Before actually entering Rachel’s room, Cuff reassures the obviously agitated Betteredge:

CUFF. Don’t distress yourself, Mr. Betteredge. I’ve hushed up worse cases than this in

my time. (He goes into RACHEL’s room.) (671; Act 2)

Tempering the intimate intrusion he is about to make with a pre-emptive assurance, Cuff makes clear that he does in fact work for them. There may be complex familial dynamics and incorrect assumptions at play to worry Rachel (she does, for one, mistakenly believe Franklin to have stolen her diamond), but ultimately Cuff seems to be their servant here, willing and able to hush up anything he or they might deem necessary. Franklin may be Cuff’s immediate employer (and of course a man) and so is able to countermand Rachel’s protestations but ultimately, Cuff suggests, the family can be taken care of.

The position and class of Collins’s Sergeant Cuff is no small matter in his relations with the household nor in his status as some kind of sanctioned intruder. The detective occupied a strange and unusual space as regards class. The detective branch, though different in style and focus from the uniformed “bobbies” to be found on their beats, was nevertheless a part of the same hierarchical system. Promotion through the ranks was encouraged for all but the most 172 senior positions, determined (in theory at least) by skill, dedication and length of service rather than social position or family connection (Taylor 50; Emsley 247). A detective was therefore not only a working man marked effectively as middle class by the very fact of his employment but could very well be a working-class lad from an inauspicious family: someone, in other words, who had climbed the ranks. The real Jonathan Whicher was himself the son of a gardener.

Rachel Verinder objects strenuously to Franklin’s having sent for the police, insisting that “I won’t have the police in the house!” (657; Act 2). She is in fact motivated by a desire to protect

Franklin whom she mistakenly believes deliberately stole her diamond and so is keen to keep the police out of the case and out of the house. Rachel sees Cuff as a social intruder and is keen to keep his public eye out of her private affairs. But although this is her driving motivation, as we later learn, the particulars are not acknowledged at the time. Instead, her rather frantic exclamation rests upon her assumption that any respectable person would be justified in wanting to keep the police out of their home. Though she does not say it, their decidedly lower social status is likely one of the reasons for such logic. Moreover, Cuff’s unstable positioning – the possibility that he is a working-class lad made good, as it were – may further trouble her own attempts to keep the social position of herself and her cousin secure. Cuff’s potentially mutable status thus further reinforces the troubling supposition that social position may be performative and so performatively undone.

Rachel may not explicitly comment on the questionable class of the detective but Mrs

Snagsby, the rather irritating wife of Mr Snagsby, certainly does in George Lander’s Poor Jo, insisting, in the presence of Inspector Bucket, that “I don’t want to lower myself by speaking to a common policeman” (18; Act 4, Sc 1). Mrs Snagsby’s self-importance and lack of polite decorum allows her to say what others might only imply – a policeman, even a detective, was 173 someone of a confused and sometimes compromised social standing. That the Inspector Bucket of J.P. Burnett’s adaptation might not sufficiently know his own position in the social hierarchy is something suggested by an unknown critic who is displeased by the disrespect he sees communicated by way of the policeman’s hat:

Mr. Burnett was a satisfactory Bucket, though details of his performance are open to

improvement, as for instance the absence of respect to Mr. Tulkinghorn in their first

interview, where the inspector strolls about the room with his hat on. (“Jo review –

unattributed”)

Bucket’s flouting of the rules of social decorum is seen by this critic as a defect so serious as to be a production fault (and one perpetrated by the adaptor-cum-actor himself, J.P. Burnett). I have found no other critical allusions to this moment and it may have been merely an error or a one- night misstep but it may also betray the detective’s contested social positioning as Burnett’s

Bucket (twice over) demonstrates either an ignorance of or a disregard for a social nicety that he is, in either case, aloof from.

In fact, the two Inspector Buckets of the Burnett and Lander adaptations respond to this question of duty and allegiance quite differently from Sergeant Cuff. When Sir Leicester warns the Bucket of J.P. Burnett’s play that he should “be careful” not to “overstep it [his duty],” he is counting on the kind of discretion Cuff seems to offer but which Bucket is more hesitant to guarantee, responding as he does with “Duty’s duty duty is, Sir Leicester Dedlock Baronet and

I’ll endeavour to discharge it faithfully” (70; Act 3, Sc 1). Unlike Cuff, Burnett’s Bucket here suggests that there are competing forces at play that might pull him in different directions. In 174 fact, Bucket’s somewhat irritating catchphrase throughout Burnett’s adaptation is the “Duty’s duty duty is” that he repeats here. Having agreed to encourage poor Jo to “move on” in the first act, Bucket reflects upon this somewhat unpleasant duty in the second:

BUCKET. There he [Jo] goes! Poor devil! It’s devilish hard! But duty’s duty, duty is!

and I’ve promised Mr. Tulkinghorn to move him on, so I’ll move him on! It ain’t

right though. – He’s done nothing wrong. – But then Tulkinghorn wants it and

Society demands that these poor devils be chivvied out. Now I know that

crossing’s his living – it gives him a morsel to keep body and soul together, - but

they want him removed. The law backs me, and Society requires it! But it ain’t

right! Society, when you step off the curb-stone and take to the gutter, you’re a

humbug! That’s what you are! – But there (shrugging shoulders) I’ll be easy with

the poor devil, but he’s got to move on, that’s what he’s got to do! (49; Act 2, Sc

Here Bucket moves beyond Tulkinghorn to rail against society which, he says, requires this of him. He still undertakes his duty but he lets the audience know that he, Inspector Bucket, is answering unhappily to the instructions of an unfeeling society. At the end of the play, when we finally come to Jo’s unhappy demise, Bucket breaks down entirely, unable to utter even his catchphrase, “Duty’s duty du- (breaks down),” in the face of Jo’s suffering and death (86; Act 3,

Sc 3). The detective here becomes the unhappy servant of society, broken by its cruel demands.

Despite his challenge to society’s pitiless requirements, Bucket’s own unhappiness and empathy 175 for Jo would have spoken well for him. Played to great acclaim by Burnett’s wife, Jennie Lee, the character of Jo was really the star of the piece and contributed to its continuing success.

Being given the opportunity to cry over Jo’s death was no doubt part of the show’s attraction and staging it in this way allows for the detective to become a kind of audience proxy in this melodramatic moment. His kind but compromised tears betray his, and our, compromised relationship to a social problem exploited for theatrical gain by a genre that traded in tears.

Carolyn Williams suggests that even domestic melodrama, often written off as decidedly more conservative than its nautical or gothic forerunners, could maintain its radical potential through a certain “intertwining of progressive and conservative elements” (202). “Focusing on the poor and dispossessed,” she continues, “can carry a radical significance even when the plot seems to inculcate fidelity” (202). Viewed from such an advantage, Bucket seems to embody this melodramatic uncertainty. His equivocal response to the plight of poor Jo – torn between sympathy for the waif and fidelity to the state – echoes the equivocation of the genre. Where

Williams’s argument offers the possibility a play unsure of its place on a radical-conservative continuum the contemporary reviewer for the Times sees only inefficacious indulgence and hypocrisy:

In the play we have Jo, and nothing but Jo. The little chords of pathos, which in the novel

are touched comparatively but occasionally, and with the delicacy of a hand cunning to

discern how much the ears of his audience could hear, are in the play struck again and

again, till we begin to grow somewhat weary of the strain, and even to doubt the truth of

the harmony. If, however, we may judge from the reception the piece, or, rather, Jo – for

Jo is the piece – met with on the first night, there are many who will not agree with us, 176

and who will be pleased to shed a tear without inquiring why or at what they weep. (25

February 1876)

Objecting to the play’s extreme and unrelenting attitude of pathos, this critic wistfully recalls the subtle and apparently delicate mood of the novel. Though ostensibly a critique of tone – in variation and degree – it is in fact an objection rooted in the generic shift engendered by the inter-medium adaptation. It is, in effect, an objection to the “melodramatization” of Dickens’s novel. Though the Times critic doesn’t describe it in these terms – doesn’t, in fact, ever use the word “melodrama” – his critique of overplayed pathos on the stage and unnecessarily provoked tears in the audience sounds an awful lot like the melodrama described by Matthew Buckley in his chapter, “The Formation of Melodrama.” In an attempt to counter more Brooksian approaches that position melodrama as a radical and progressive genre, Buckley argues that melodrama should rightfully be viewed as “a mass-produced vehicle of emotional intoxication, a consistently formulated commodity from which consumers expected the economical and reliable production and reproduction of a specific state of feelings” (469). The naïve tears are the precise expression of the kind of reliable emotion Buckley argues such playgoers would have paid money to experience. Buckley’s suggestion that such culture was “mass produced” – and by implication, produced for a mass audience – helps to explain this critic’s disdainful response.

Writing for a respectable and high-brow newspaper, his tone bespeaks a surety that such melodrama, mass-produced for the masses, was beneath his intellectual and emotional notice.

Though the critic for the Times is rather sidetracked by the overblown pathos he sees in the play’s attitude to Jo, other reviewers spoke more directly to the social problem Jo tended to represent. Some reviewers take pains to explain that Dickens’s is a historical critique and one 177 which they hope is no longer relevant (“It is now, happily, no longer true that no effort is made to save the body, the mind, or the soul of those whom misfortune has deprived of natural protectors and thrown upon the streets. In the days when Dickens wrote, it was wholly and deplorably true” [Globe and Traveller 24 February 1876]) whilst others more readily acknowledge the relevance to their own time and place (“Its sad lesson needs, indeed, to be taken to heart. In a sense this story of Jo’s sufferings is an idyll of our streets. As the sound of

Conseulo’s kisses still clings to the walls of Venice, Jo’s hoarse and plaintive murmurs, as he is driven forth along his restless path, may yet be supposed to echo through our courts and byways”

[Athenaeum 26 February 1876]). Bucket’s early complaint and later breakdown may be part of a challenge to the hypocritical tenets of a society and audience, eager to simultaneously move Jo on and cry for his death, but if so it was not one especially keenly felt.

Despite the emotional breakdown of Burnett’s Bucket, it is in fact the Inspector Bucket of

Lander’s adaptation who is in general a kinder force throughout. Leaving much of the more unpleasant work (that which so troubles Burnett’s Bucket) to the bobbies, he is a more genial and generally kindly figure throughout. In this way, he seems again more comfortable conversing in the libraries of barristers and baronets than “moving on” Jo, the poor crossing sweep.

Nevertheless, unlike Cuff, he does refuse an order from the lawyer, Tulkinghorn:

BUCKET. What may be your motive for hunting Lady Dedlock down?

TULKINGHORN. The honour of a great and noble family has been tarnished by Sir

Leicester’s union with her. What has she been? Let her former connexion with

that degraded ex-officer and law-writer answer. Is a woman with a dark page in

her life fit to be the wife of Sir Leicester Dedlock? Certainly not. 178

BUCKET. But look here, sir. They are man and wife, and if you prove her to be the worst

woman in the world, what can Sir Leicester do? There’s nothing holds so fast as

marriage lines, sir.

TULKINGHORN. That may be; but she shall be exposed, and her intolerable pride

humbled. I have this opinion of Sir Leicester, that if he found she was an

unworthy woman, he would no longer live with her.

BUCKET. Are you all friends, sir?

TULKINGHORN. We hate each other.

BUCKET. Look here, sir. You applied for a detective officer, and I was told off for the

duty. Now I don’t mind hunting down a thief, a swindler, or a murderer, but a

woman who has once forgotten herself, and has had the good fortune, or the

pluck, to get up again, and be respectable, and get a position – damn it if I like to

hunt her down.

TULKINGHORN. (Sneeringly) A detective with a conscience.

BUCKET. Beg pardon, sir – with a heart. (11-12; Act 3, Sc 1)

Tulkinghorn is out for his own justice and Bucket refuses to be a part of that. Placing his worth above such petty missions of personal persecution, Bucket makes plain his objection to hunting

Lady Dedlock down. Bucket may be refusing the order of his so-called employer but he is doing so in order to reiterate his own self-appointed position as social and moral guardian. He sees no need to persecute a woman who has erred and righted herself nor indeed to disrupt the marriage ties that Tulkinghorn shows no respect for. In this way, Bucket may be challenging an order but he is doing so in order to preserve his own sense of a superior moral order. In particular, when 179

Tulkinghorn sneers about his being a detective with a conscience he corrects him and notes, proudly we can assume, that it is not a conscience but “a heart.” The “heart” has a place not only in Bucket’s own social and moral order but I would suggest in a melodramatic world order centred so often on matters of the heart. In this way, Bucket’s sense of his own moral and social sensibilities reverberate theatrically. How then might this detective “with a heart,” and perhaps also those without, find their place in a melodramatic world?

“Calmly quiet and self-contained”? The Detective’s Place in Melodrama

James L. Smith begins his book, titled simply Melodrama, with the rather apposite question:

“What is melodrama?” (1). No one is entirely certain or, perhaps more importantly, everyone has a different idea with no clear agreement on the genre’s constituent parts. As Smith suggests, “ask a musician, or a literary scholar, or even that convenient abstraction the man in the street. You will get three very different answers” (1). The serious consideration of melodrama began shortly before Smith penned this work in 1973 with Michael Booth’s English Melodrama a significant

(if not the very earliest) intervention in 1965 – “a formalist critical survey of various subgenres of Victorian melodrama,” which views “melodrama as an escapist ‘dream world’” (Gilmour

344). Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination, which appeared in 1976, is a critical contribution to the field, arguing in opposition to Booth, for the grounding of melodrama in the real world. More particularly, as Gilmour observes, “Brooks’ overarching assertion is by now familiar: melodrama emerged in the aftermath of the French Revolution as ‘the principal mode for uncovering, demonstrating, and making operative the essential moral universe in a post- sacred era’ (15)” (Gilmour 345). In 1995 Elaine Hadley responded to Brooks’s invocation of a 180 melodramatic “mode,” agreeing that there are what she calls “melodramatic tactics” but resisting what she sees as Brooks’s “anachronism” which is at risk of “mov[ing] melodrama out of history and, occasionally, into pathology” (Hadley 9 and 231). She “takes a different, historicized approach in arguing that it is ‘an antagonistic response to the consolidation of market practices throughout nineteenth-century English culture’” (Gilmour 347). Though there are many other important contributions to the field, it is these three critical approaches that I find most valuable in assessing the detective’s place in the world of melodrama.

Collins’s play contains much to recommend it as a play of the melodramatic type. It is peopled by the “stock character types of melodrama” identified by Michael Booth (15) – we have, for instance, the unrepentant villain in Godfrey Ablewhite and the wronged innocent in

Franklin Blake. In addition, that “bright sword of justice” that “always fall[s] in the right place” does so here and “the bags of gold” are “awarded to the right people” (Booth 14); Godfrey is arrested, the Moonstone returned and perhaps most importantly, our hero and heroine are reconciled with a marriage expected just after the final curtain drop. In addition, the play is peppered throughout with the “emotional agony” so common to the genre (Booth 14). As Peter

Brooks elaborates, “the desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode. Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship” (4). Franklin and Rachel seem to have taken heed of this in the following exchange:

FRANKLIN. (Staggering back) You believe that I stole the diamond!

RACHEL (Following him up furiously). Believe? I saw you steal the diamond with my 181

own eyes!!! (FRANKLIN throws up his hands with a faint cry, and drops in a

swoon at her feet. RACHEL starts back with a cry of horror.) Oh God! have I

killed him? Help! help! (BETTEREDGE and CUFF enter together by the hall

door. RACHEL appeals to them distractedly.) Look! oh, look at him! (683; Act 2)

Henry Neville (the Bob Brierly of Taylor’s Ticket-of-Leave Man) received positive reviews for his portrayal of the anguished Franklin: “Mr. Neville was excellent in all respects as the hero, and marked very ably the different stages of astonishment, indignation, and shame he experiences at finding himself the subject of so shameful a charge” (Globe and Traveller 18

September 1877). As these extreme emotions – “astonishment,” “indignation,” and “shame” – attest, it is a role inflected with a melodramatic tone and Franklin and Rachel remain, throughout this sequence, both safely in the melodramatic style.

Despite what I see as an obviously melodramatic tone, style and essential moral order, a number of Collins’s contemporary critics disagreed as to the genre of the piece. The rather critical reviewer of the Graphic notes, for instance, that though Collins might have made a very successful melodrama of his original novel he has, this critic asserts, chosen otherwise: “To figure in this instance as a melodramatist is however not Mr. Collins’s desire. He has aspired to write ‘a dramatic story’ under the self-imposed and wholly unnecessary conditions of the classical drama” (22 September 1877). For this reviewer, Collins’s respect for the unity of time and place counts his work out of the melodramatic mode and for reasons this reviewer cannot fathom: “The curious circumstance is that he does not seem to have felt that in all this has he was simply sacrificing his story without any counterbalancing advantage” (Graphic 22 September

1877). An unknown reviewer agrees with the Graphic’s critic, suggesting that “this was 182 obviously a theme to be handled in the spirit of melodrama; but Mr. Collins has thought otherwise. Accordingly, all startling incidents are rigorously banished, or, at all events, not exhibited […] Further, that there may be no possibility of mistaking this for a melodramatic work, Mr. Collins, as he is careful to note in the playbill, has chosen to confine himself strictly within the classic limits of time and place” (“Moonstone review – unattributed 2”). Collins’s choice to jettison much of the supernatural and more mysterious aspects of his novel and to limit his piece to twenty-four hours in the hall of a country house seem to be, then, his primary transgressions against the melodramatic. Not all, however, saw these choices as reasons to count his piece out.

The critic for the Globe and Traveller observed the successful transition of Franklin from page to stage despite what he sees as the limits of melodrama: “The only character who appears precisely the same as in the original story is Franklin Blake, the hero, who suffers no further deterioration than is involved in the absence of that delicate shading which is easy in a novel and next to impossible in melodrama” (18 September 1877). Whether quite such delicate shading was retained might be disputed by another critic who viewed the play primarily as a sort of generic blend, but one that certainly included melodrama in its constituent parts: “Perhaps the best way to describe ‘The Moonstone’ would be to define it as a mixture of Prince of Wales’s theatre, refined comedy, and transpontine melodrama” (“Moonstone review – unattributed 1”). It is, this critic suggests, “the story, in its improbability and the artificial manner in which it is treated [that] reminds the spectator of those playhouses where the niceties of details are held of less account than are broad effects of incident and passion” (“Moonstone review – unattributed

1”). 183

Where then do we find Sergeant Cuff amongst these “broad effects of incident and passion”? Cuff’s generally calm demeanour – with Swinbourne’s performance described by one critic as “calmly quiet and appropriately self-contained” (Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic

News 22 September 1877) – would seem to exclude him from this world of melodrama.10 Just a few minutes before this scene between Franklin and Rachel, Cuff had stopped and reprimanded himself for a potential collapse into this mode: “What’s the matter with me? Is my heart beating faster than usual? I declare I am excited for the first time in my life! This will never do! I must compose my mind – I’ll have a look at the roses” (674; Act 2). The “spine-tingling thrills and chills” identified by Lynn Voskuil as central to an audience’s experience of sensation theatre are a threat that the cool-headed detective must resist (“Feeling Public” 249). Kate Summerscale even suggests that Cuff (in the novel at any rate) might act “as a foil to the novel’s sensation, a thinking machine to interpret the palpitations and pulsings of the other characters. By identifying with Cuff, readers could shield themselves from the thrills they sought – the story’s untrammelled emotion, the tremble of danger” (268-9). Cuff, it would seem, stands outside the melodrama, watching and even managing, but remotely. Perhaps he is merely an emissary from the “refined comedy” identified by the unknown reviewer above and just a little out of step with the passions of his melodramatic colleagues.

In this way, Cuff seems the rational man of science bringing clear-headed empiricism to a world otherwise overrun with emotional melodrama. And indeed, Collins’s particular dramaturgy may additionally support such a hypothesis. The reviewer for The Illustrated London

News observed that “Mr. Collins has arranged it on a safe plan. He has successfully resisted the

10 The performance of Inspector Bucket by J.P. Burnett in his own adaptation is described similarly with the reviewer for the Telegraph noting his “quiet, easy manner” (23 February 1876) and the critic for the Observer praising the “force and repose” with which he played the Inspector (27 February 1876).

184 temptation to found his plot upon the principle of surprise, and has substituted for it that of expectation.” “This,” he continues, “is the true dramatic principle, as the reader will perceive who takes the trouble to peruse what Coleridge wrote upon it so long ago in his Biographia

Literaria” (22 September 1877). Dion Boucicault, that most prolific of melodramatists, may have had cause to disagree with this reviewer’s views on “the true dramatic principle.” Just a few months after The Moonstone: A Play opened, at the beginning of 1878, Boucicault penned an essay, “The Art of Dramatic Composition,” for The North American Review. In it, he explains the following:

The emotion we commonly call interest is the pleasure we feel while contemplating the

gradual production of a complete and symmetrical form. It is composed of expectation,

suspense, and reflection. // Expectation is aroused by the beginning, suspense is

maintained by the process of development, and reflection is invited by the repose to

which the action is conducted. (46)

A play founded primarily, even exclusively on expectation would not have satisfied Boucicault’s requirements, especially as Boucicault continues, saying “Of these the middle is the most important, that is, the suspense” (46). Of course the audience’s enforced waiting, to discover whether Franklin would indeed be redeemed by Cuff’s investigations and Mr. Candy’s experiment may be counted as the “suspense” of the piece, but there is no denying that it is a play founded not so much on melodramatic suspense as on empirical expectations. Moreover,

Cuff seems to be the primary agent of such an empiricist approach. 185

Similarly, Inspector Bucket seems intent on preventing the moral self-flagellation so often expected of the melodramatic heroines. Not only does George Lander’s Bucket reject

Tulkinghorn’s instructions to shame Lady Dedlock as a woman with a past he in fact goes out of his way to follow Lady Dedlock, refusing the logic of her own exile as self-imposed punishment.

Following her through a literal storm – that well-known trope of particularly gothic melodrama – he arrives too late to put a stop to this melodramatic version of justice:

Scene III – A wild and bleak track of country – Lights quite down – Storm Music – Storm

and Crash

LADY DEDLOCK, meanly dressed, weather-beaten and wretched, enters at back, R.

LADY DEDLOCK. (Shrinking from the storm, and moving as if over rough and uneven

country) Oh! what a dreadful night! I think I shall die with terror, or go mad! I

dare not turn back! No, no, I must go onward! (Crash and flash, L., drives her

back as she is going, L.) Oh! this is dreadful! (Gets back – Rain.) I am drenched

to the skin! What shall I do? Where go? I see no shelter! I must go onward,

onward, but where? (Crash and flash) Merciful heaven! Oh! am I not punished? I

am chilled to the bone! Where shall I rest till the storm is over? (Shouts off “Hi!

Hi!” – She listens and looks L.) A carriage is coming this way! (Shouts off L., as

of urging horses on) They are after me! I must fly! (Going R. – Crash and flash

R. repeated, which drives her back. She sinks down C.) They must come! I can

endure no more! (By a great effort rises and rushes off R., as BUCKET, carrying

a lantern, enters with ESTHER L.)

BUCKET. What a nuisance the carriage breaking down. But never mind, I’ve sent the 186

postillion [sic] forward on one of the horses to the next village, to see if he can get

a wheelwright. (20-1; Act 4, Sc 3)

Shortly following, Bucket and Esther exit, Lady Dedlock re-enters and utters her final words before perishing; she is found thereafter by Bucket and Esther. The storm here works as a neat melodramatic trope, a literal manifestation of her own sense of heavenly justice. Lady Dedlock recognizes this – “Merciful heaven! Oh! am I not punished enough? I am chilled to the bone!” – in her own high-flown observations of her predicament. Like Cuff, Bucket along with Esther is seemingly working against this melodramatic schema. Bucket’s more prosaic intent (to prevent

Lady Dedlock’s own self-imposed and merciless punishment) is matched by his more prosaic language. Lady Dedlock speaks of “terror”, of “heaven” and of her embodied predicament in a mode of hyperbolic despair. By contrast, Bucket talks of wheelwrights, postilions and the

“nuisance” of a broken carriage. Though he and Esther arrive too late to save the lady, their stated intent was to prevent the melodramatic justice that ultimately calls for the downfall of

Lady Dedlock. The question that remains, however, is whether Bucket is a rational force attempting to disrupt this melodramatic schema or simply a necessary obstacle put in place by

Lander to prove the force of a literal and metaphorical melodramatic storm? Or indeed, is it possible he is some combination of the two?

I suggested earlier that perhaps Cuff, like Bucket here, seemed to offer a kind of prosaic rationality in the melodramatic scene. Perhaps though, also like Bucket, his presence is a little more ambiguous. On a superficial level, Cuff does seem to be a cool and composed figure, standing aloof from the melodrama of the play and bringing ratiocinative thought wherever he goes. I would though like to suggest that Cuff, like George Lander’s Bucket, is in fact an 187 important part of the melodramatic schema, allowing the play to function effectively along typical melodramatic lines. There is no doubt that Franklin Blake is the hero of the piece. The casting of Henry Neville in the part – still famous for his portrayal of wronged innocent, Bob

Brierly, in Taylor’s The Ticket-of-Leave Man – suggests as much. Moreover, Franklin is, as

Michael Booth declares of the melodramatic hero, “a handsome young man of action and courage, eternally devoted to sweetheart or wife” (16). He lacks the physical prowess perhaps but is also, as Booth suggests, if not “really rather stupid,” certainly “always in trouble, and spend[ing] much of his time trying to clear his good name of crimes the villain has committed”

(17). The villain is clearly Godfrey Ablewhite, and the heroine Rachel Verinder.11 The wrong that Franklin suffers is perpetrated primarily by Godfrey. It is, after all, he who seizes his chance to steal the diamond once Franklin has accidentally pocketed it in his sleep. And yet it is not

Godfrey or another character of villainous intent that accuses Franklin so much as his own nightgown:

CUFF. (Firmly) Compose yourself, sir. I know my trade a little better than to trust to

appearances. (He throws the dressing-gown across a chair.) As matters stand, I

grant you, the right reading of the riddle seems hard to guess. Patience, Mr.

Blake! Time will do for us what we can’t do for ourselves.

FRANKLIN. Patience? There is the dressing-gown accusing me on the plainest evidence

of being a thief! Who can be patient under that?

11 I would suggest that in fact the relationship between Franklin and Rachel and their respective roles as hero and heroine is a complex one. Though traditional gender expectations would tell us that Franklin is the hero and Rachel the heroine, their behaviour oftentimes challenges this easy dichotomy – Franklin faints and though Franklin makes his love for Rachel abundantly clear it is she who in the last moments of the play announces to him that she is his wife. While unfortunately outside the scope of this chapter, there is clearly more work to be done on this gendered interplay. 188

BETTEREDGE. (Angrily) The dressing-gown’s a liar!

CUFF. Gently, Mr. Betteredge. The dressing-gown is only a witness that can’t speak.

(672; Act 2)

This exchange makes evident that in this particular melodrama the problem seems to be one of empirical fact: that is, it is not a person but a seemingly indisputable dressing-gown that makes the accusation. Betteredge’s comic interjection here highlights the apparent absurdity of this and allows Cuff to reassure the assembled characters that he is the man for the job; he knows how to approach this bizarre dressing-gown witness. And of course, it is ultimately Sergeant Cuff and

Mr. Candy – the detective and the medical man – who save the day, clearing our hero’s name and allowing for a marriage. More particularly, Sergeant Cuff becomes a perfect agent of an empiricist fantasy. In a departure from the novel, where Cuff errs and mistakes, Collins ensures that his stage detective is only ever right. Unlike Hawkshaw who makes many mistakes, proving the “fantasy” of omniscience to be just that, Cuff allows the audience to indulge (Jaffe n.p.).

Michael Booth suggests that it is the “comic man” who typically contrives for our happy ending, noting that “in many plays he [the comic man] is much better at coping with the villain than the hero is, and is frequently entirely responsible for the triumph of virtue” (34). Though neither Cuff nor Mr. Candy are particularly comic, if we pause for a moment to consider just why the comic man might be so “much better at coping with the villain,” Cuff and Candy may yet have something in common with this stock figure. Carolyn Williams argues that the comic man and woman of English melodrama “set in relief and cast an ironic light on the high tensions of the main plot” (205). As Williams further observes, “Jacky Bratton helpfully calls these the

‘contending discourses’ of melodrama” (205). While the detective’s style is not akin to the low- 189 brow “comic malapropisms” of these figures, his distinct tone and manner offer another kind of

“‘contending discourse,’” allowing him to fulfil a similar function (Williams 205). That is, his own rational manner casts a similar “ironic light” on the proceedings, thus allowing him to best assist our hero in trouble. So he behaves when he dismisses what looks like damning empirical evidence – the stain on the nightgown – cautioning Franklin, and the audience, to be patient, that things are not always as they seem. Refusing to be led by the most obvious clues, Cuff uses his superior intellect and “eye” to see beyond that which others can see. In his opening encounter with Godfrey, Cuff had remarked to Godfrey, “If you will look about you, sir – which most people won’t do, […]” – something which in retrospect sounds a little like a threat (662; Act 2).

But looking about him has not yielded further pieces of physical evidence. Instead it allows him to discover for the audience the melodramatic certainties which had only been obscured for a while. With knowledge of Godfrey’s nature he is able to confirm for the audience what they had no doubt expected – that Franklin is innocent and Rachel destined to be his wife. Peter Brooks suggests that melodrama is “not only a moralistic drama but the drama of morality,” arguing:

[I]t strives to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to ‘prove’ the existence of a moral

universe which, though put into question, mashed by villainy and perversion of judgment,

does exist and can be made to assert its presence and its categorical force among men.

(20)

Cuff acts to assure us of this. Seeing beyond the apparently empirical evidence of the nightgown, seeing beyond even that which Rachel had seen with her own eyes (“Believe?” she says to 190

Franklin, “I saw you with my own eyes” [683; Act 2]), Cuff sees to the heart of the melodrama and exposes just such a moral universe.

In this way, Cuff makes visible Peter Brooks’s “moral occult,” that “repository of the fragmentary and descralized remnants of sacred myth,” as well as his position in it (5). Elaine

Hadley suggests that what she calls the “melodramatic mode” worked similarly to make visible, to embody even, the dehumanizing and dehumanized mechanisms of the nineteenth-century state:

Primarily operating within the realm of representation, but firmly engaged with historical

events, the melodramatic mode, as I see it, took what were considered to be

dehumanizing and materially influential rhetorics produced in market culture, such as

bureaucratese and statistics, and translated them into narratives propelled by social

feelings, not feelings for society. The disembodied agents of the bureaucratic state […]

were thus personified as villains in an inverted version of personification. Instead of

universalizing a trait of the human individual, as Siskin would have it, this new sort of

personification humanizes what were literally nonhuman institutions. (30)

The real-life detective must figure prominently in such an epistemological framework. Though far apparently from villainous intent, the detective does hover somewhere between visible and invisible, a literal embodiment of a nonhuman institution. This, Hadley argues, makes him party to or a part of this melodramatic mode. Accordingly, Whicher and Field, along with the other real-life detectives, are always already part of a melodramatic framework. Sergeant Cuff of The

Moonstone: A Play thus doubles down on this melodrama, doubly visible as a detective (by 191

Hadley’s definition already part of the melodramatic mode) performing visibly his role of melodramatic facilitator. Cuff may lack the comedy of a true “comic man” and the handsome, charming nature of the more typical “hero,” but he nevertheless occupies a necessary position in

The Moonstone: A Play’s melodrama. It is significant too that Cuff, as Bucket and even

Hawkshaw, is entangled in vindicating innocence as much as in pursuing guilt. Both Cuff and

Bucket are “engaged in producing” that “social innocence” which prompts D.A. Miller to suggest that “the detective story might well take for the motto of its enterprise, ‘The truth shall make you free’” (34). Clearing Franklin’s name is ultimately as important as arresting Godfrey; a melodramatic kind of justice, I would suggest, that is part of the hero’s attempt to “clear his good name of crimes the villain has committed” (Booth 17). And so though seemingly an empirical check on the melodramatic events, Cuff is in fact an arbiter of the melodramatic universe – ensuring the moral order is restored and dramatic satisfaction achieved.

Performing Detection: Playing the Dandy

I suggested above that Cuff’s dramatic purpose may align with that of the comic man not because of any particularly amusing interjections but because his style, like that of the comic man, is somewhat different from the melodramatic posturing and grand passions of so many of the others. In other words, the fact of his unusually non-melodramatic style is part of what counts him in as a key player in the melodramatic universe, helping him to function as an agent of the melodramatic world order. The specific quality of his particular style is worthy of further examination as it is indicative not only of Cuff’s character and the development of detective style but bespeaks a significant connection to the developing theatrical tastes of the period. 192

When Cuff first steps onto the stage, Godfrey’s response is: “May I ask to whom I have the pleasure of speaking?” (661; Act 2). Even though Godfrey recognizes Cuff’s name instantly, and moreover, knows that he had been called to the house, when Cuff actually arrives Godfrey cannot identify him. Cuff’s reputation precedes him – simultaneously notorious and inconspicuous, his detective persona is known but his face is not. This odd conflation of visibility and invisibility may serve a very specific police purpose but it also aligns him, perhaps surprisingly, with a figure of nineteenth-century indolence and leisure – the dandy. As Clara

Tuite observes:

In contrast to the macaronic excesses of the 1770s, Brummell’s understated mode of

glamour is predicated upon a set of distinctions between visibility and invisibility, display

and secrecy, distinction and democracy, effeminacy and masculinity. Dandyism

reconstitutes ornament as detail. Detail is the sign of distinction and singularity, but it is

not – and this is where it differs from the ornament – conspicuous. As [Captain William]

Jesse explains [in his Life of George Brummell (1844)], “Brummell’s chief aim was to

avoid anything marked, one of his aphorisms being, that the severest mortification a

gentleman could incur; was, to attract observation in the street by his outward

appearance” (I, 59). (147)

I suspect that any glamorous and indolent dandy would have been horrified by the suggestion that he might have something in common with a detective but Cuff’s vacillation here, particularly between “visibility and invisibility” and “display and secrecy” aligns him with this figure nonetheless. In fact, much of Cuff’s behaviour throughout The Moonstone: A Play 193 demonstrates a surprising correspondence between these superficially converse nineteenth- century types.

Baudelaire’s 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” serves as a useful touchstone for understanding contemporary views of the dandy. As Baudelaire discusses his friend and colleague, Monsieur C.G., the eponymous “painter of modern life,” he turns his attention to the figure of the dandy, wondering whether Monsieur C.G. might fit the bill:

I might perhaps call him [Monsieur C.G.] a dandy, and I should have several good

reasons for that; for the word ‘dandy’ implies a quintessence of character and a subtle

understanding of the entire moral mechanism of this world; with another part of his

nature, however, the dandy aspires to insensitivity, and it is in this that Monsieur G.,

dominated as he is by an insatiable passion – for seeing and feeling – parts company

decisively with dandyism. (9)

A combination of “character” imbued with “an understanding of the entire moral mechanism of this world” along with a certain aspiration to “insensitivity” sounds rather like Sergeant Cuff.

The “insensitivity” is enough to count Monsieur C.G. out of the class but this kind of coldness again suits our detective rather well. When, in the second act, Cuff risks getting overexcited by his own investigations he is “puzzled by his own symptoms” and, as cited above, forces himself into composure:

CUFF. […] What’s the matter with me? Is my heart beating faster than usual? I declare I 194

am excited for the first time in my life! This will never do! I must compose my

mind – I’ll have a look at the roses. (674; Act 2)

Struggling, apparently for the first time in his life, with excitement Cuff forces himself back into an “insensitivity” he deems proper. Baudelaire’s further assertion that the dandy engages in “the joy of astonishing others” whilst maintaining “the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished” again sounds rather like Cuff (28). As Godfrey is identified in the final stages of the play, the frantic Betteredge asks “Sergeant, you’re not going to let that damned rogue escape scot-free?” only to be met with Cuff’s calm and calming response, “Don’t alarm yourself, Mr

Betteredge. The policeman is outside” (701; Act 3). Similarly, at the close of the second act,

Cuff’s response to finding the Moonstone is not an exaggerated act of excitement but a simple, albeit triumphant, snap of the fingers (683; Act 2).

Finally, Baudelaire notes the “bodily attitudes” of the dandy. They are, he suggests

“always relaxed but betray an inner energy, so that when your eye lights upon one of those privileged beings in whom the graceful and the formidable are so mysteriously blended, you think: ‘A rich man perhaps, but more likely an out-of-work Hercules” (29). Whilst I wouldn’t call Sergeant Cuff graceful exactly he does nonetheless seem to marry a relaxed demeanour with the “inner energy” of which Baudelaire speaks. In clear contrast to his junior counterpart, Cuff stands conspicuously “with his hands in his pockets, looking through [the window]” – a pose of pensive leisure explicitly disallowed the constables on the beat (661; Act 2). Similarly, he has a tendency when in good spirits he says, to whistle “The Last Rose of Summer” (662, Act 2).

These particular habits of Cuff seem, moreover, to align him with the muddled distinction between effeminacy and masculinity particular to the dandy, as observed by Tuite above. The 195 bobby’s mandated pose of stiff uprightness is no doubt indebted to ideals of metaphoric and literal upright masculinity and the detective’s deviance from this is significant. In addition,

Cuff’s unusual obsession with roses, alluded to in his choice of air for whistling, again aligns him with the dandy and his well-documented obsession with his buttonhole. Moreover, such louche quasi-dandiacal behaviour is not, it would seem restricted to Sergeant Cuff but seems to be part of a developing trend. Lander, for instance, notes that his Bucket speaks after “putting his hands in his pockets, and coolly surveying them” (18; Act 4, Sc 1); Burnett’s Bucket, in order to trap Hortense, emerges suddenly from behind a door before closing it and “lean[ing] back on it”

(72; Act 3, Sc 1); and Baxter, of Jones’s Silver King, “Turns his back to the audience and,” like

Cuff, “stands looking at picture on wall, whistling” (78; Act 4, Sc 1). The deliberately casual attitude displayed by Tom Taylor’s Hawkshaw seems here to be shifting into a habit of dandiacal indolence.12

Pushing this dandiacal style to an extreme are the Inspector Buckets of the adaptations of both J.P. Burnett and George Lander, both of whom take a seat next to Hortense, the French maid, as they put on the handcuffs and arrest her for the murder of the lawyer, Tulkinghorn.

Though Burnett’s Bucket is often gruff and unforgiving, in this scene he displays a relaxed, almost flirtatious manner in his arrest of the French maid, Hortense. Insisting that Hortense resume her seat Bucket continues:

12 It is also interesting to note that while Hawkshaw, like Cuff after him, engaged in an attitude of performed leisure, Hawkshaw’s performance was more deliberately directed toward police ends. In other words, he performed a kind of casual detective style in order to keep an inconspicuous watch over the patrons of the Bellevue Tea Gardens. Though Cuff may be perpetually watchful and suspicious with a demeanour of ease intended generally to disarm those he suspects, this is quite different from Hawkshaw’s particular ends. Where such a pose of leisure was for Hawkshaw a distinct tactic of surveillance it is interesting to see that in Cuff it is becoming more style than substance. 196

There – and I’ll sit down by you (sits). Now take my arm, will you. I’m a married man

you know; you’re acquainted with my wife. Now my dear put your arm a little further

thru’ mine and hold it steady, and I shan’t hurt you (puts handcuff on her). That’s one.

Now the other, darling. Two, and all told. That’s more like it. Duty’s duty duty is my dear

[…] (Burnett 73-74; Act 3, Sc 1)

Displaying no doubt the “quiet, easy manner” remarked upon by the reviewer for the Telegraph

(23 February 1876), Burnett as Bucket is more like Baudelaire’s dandy – “relaxed” but with an

“inner energy” – than a uniformed constable on the beat, cajoling Hortense and manipulating her body in a relaxed and leisurely manner. Hortense’s own position as a maid, and a defiant French maid at that, invites a rather more titillating interpretation of this arrest than would be proper and likely prompts Bucket’s apparently reassuring mention of his wife. Bucket’s reminder that he is

“a married man,” however, only serves to highlight the potentially compromising quality of this arrest. His relations with Hortense aside, the fact of Bucket’s sitting at all is significant. Tom

Taylor’s earlier Hawkshaw, for instance, sits at tables to hoodwink criminals or talk with colleagues but he certainly doesn’t take a seat on a sofa with a French maid, even to arrest one. If a bobby stands upright and a dandy lounges Bucket’s sitting on the sofa seems a move toward the latter. Of course it is important to note that Bucket still calls the sofa a “sofy,” a reminder that though he may bear a resemblance to the dandy in attitude and style, he is still very much a working man of a much lower class (Burnett 73; Act 3, Sc 1). Cuff and Bucket may emulate the leisured posing of the dandy but they do so without the actual leisure. In other words, these stage detectives adopt the nonchalant attitude of an aristocratic dilettante whilst performing labour that is owed through professional obligation – something quite alien to the upper-class dandy. This 197 mismatch between manner and class – that is, the style of upper-class casual disinterest paired with the labour of a middle- or working-class professional – may signal a shift in the identity of the stage detective. Sergeant Cuff and these two Inspector Buckets stand between the obsessively professional working man of Scotland Yard, as embodied by Clement Scott’s Inspector Walker staged only a couple of years prior in The Detective, and Sherlock Holmes, that most famous of upper-class amateurs still yet to come.

Such an apparent dandiacal attitude may speak not only to his shifting social position but also to his position in a shifting theatrical landscape. In a 1917 review of Verdi’s 1853 opera, Il

Trovatore, George Bernard Shaw comments appositely on the villain’s costume:

The costumes and scenery need to be studied and guarded with the most discriminating

care. For example, there is only one costume possible for the Count di Luna. He must

wear a stiff violet velvet tunic, white satin tights, velvet shoes, and a white turban hat,

with a white puggaree falling on a white cloak. No other known costume can remove its

wearer so completely from common humanity. No man could sit down in such a tunic

and such tights; for the vulgar realism of sitting down is ten times more impossible for

the Count di Luna than for the Venus of Milo. (“Spoof Opera by a Ghost from the

’Eighties.” 689-90)

The generic mode of Verdi’s opera would, according to Shaw, make a mockery of a seated villain. He must stand and declaim in his velvet tunic and velvet shoes; anything else looks ridiculous. Shaw did of course go on to seat his own villains, if we want to call them that.

Sartorius, of Widowers’ Houses (1892) “takes a chair” (40; Act 2), making perhaps a new kind of 198 villain for a new kind of drama; the kind of villain of the “later high society melodrama” who, according to Booth, “dresses more elegantly than this burnt cork predecessor, with evening dress, cape, top hat, gold-headed cane, gloves, and cigarette-holder” (20). Bucket is obviously not the villain of Burnett’s Bleak House but it is interesting to see the ways in which he nonetheless seems to be slipping from the codification of an older kind of drama derided by Shaw and into the mannerisms of the society dramas that would become so popular in the following decades. In this way, the dandiacal detective seems to develop along with the theatre of the period, moving away from a more declamatory, obviously melodramatic style and toward a manner fit for the high society dramas to come. Interestingly, in one unattributed review of The Moonstone: A Play one contemporary critic suggests that Collins’s play is in fact something of a generic and stylistic muddle – somewhere in between refined comedy and low melodrama:

Perhaps the best way to describe ‘The Moonstone’ would be to define it as a mixture of

Prince of Wales’s theatre, refined comedy, and transpontine melodrama. The furniture,

the dresses, the appointments, the effects, and the style of acting are all of the modern

comedy order, whilst the story, in its improbability and the artificial manner in which it is

treated, reminds the spectator of those playhouses where the niceties of details are held of

less account than are broad effects of incident and passion. (“Moonstone review –

unattributed 1”)

If we agree this is so then The Moonstone: A Play may be a snapshot of theatrical transition as the dandiacal detective vacillates between the two. 199

Cuff may emulate the leisured dandy in attitude and anticipate the style of the refined society comedies yet to come but he remains, nevertheless, a working man. He has been called to the Verinder household to perform a very particular duty, that of police detection, and unlike his counterpart in Collins’s novel, our stage Cuff makes quite a show of his work. The Sergeant Cuff of the novel is predominantly pensive and introspective, revealing little of his process he remains often impenetrable to the other characters. The Sergeant Cuff of the play, however, whilst retaining an air of mystery and reserve, quite conspicuously performs detection. This is particularly apparent in the following exchange with Betteredge:

CUFF. When the diamond was put away for the night, where was it put?

BETTEREDGE. (Pointing to the cabinet) In that drawer.

CUFF. (Examining the cabinet) Were the cabinet doors locked? (He tries the lock.) I see!

The lock won’t act. (He looks again at the cabinet, and puts his nose to it.) Has

this cabinet been varnished lately? (RACHEL suddenly puts down the paper and

listens.)

BETTEREDGE. Varnished by Mr. Franklin Blake no later than yesterday evening.

CUFF. (Still examining the cabinet) Where is Mr. Blake?

BETTEREDGE. He heard you had come, Sergeant, and like the rest of us, he didn’t

know where to find you. When last I saw him he was off to the stables to question

the man who drove you.

CUFF. (Pointing to a place at the lower part of the cabinet) Hullo! here’s a smear on the

varnish!

BETTEREDGE. Lord bless us, so there is! I saw no smear there when I locked up the 200

house close on twelve o’clock last night.

CUFF. (Looking at the smear through a magnifying glass) Was the varnish dry then?

BETTEREDGE. No, sir. Mr. Franklin told me it would not be dry before two in the

morning.

CUFF. (To himself) Aha! (He looks again through the magnifying glass, and, while he

looks, whistles the first notes of his favourite air.) (665; Act 2)

Asking four questions in quick succession, Cuff works quickly and conspicuously to gather information.13 He then proceeds to visibly examine the dresser – not only does he look closely at the cabinet, but he “tries the lock” and even smells it before attending again to Betteredge’s answers. Upon discovering the smear in the varnish he does not simply announce its presence but points to the offending mark before observing it through a magnifying glass and exclaiming

“Aha!” – the well-known sound of curiosity satisfied. Using not only his voice to narrate the process but also his eye, his nose and his touch, he makes quite the detective spectacle.

Here we can see most clearly the effects of the kind of inter-medium adaptation Linda

Hutcheon identifies as “re-mediation” (16). In discussing the shift from long-form novel to film, and in particular, the 1992 Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End,

Hutcheon observes that “we cannot […] get at the interior of the characters’ minds as they listen

[to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony]; they must visibly, physically embody their responses for the

13 Interestingly this particular tendency – to demand information from others and question them relentlessly – is one shared with Miss Clack, who is afforded none of the respect or deference offered a professional detective but instead is viewed by the others as a tiresome irritation, always prying and meddling. The reasons for this difference seem significant – is it a gender-based distinction? Is it grounded in a fear or expectation of the false prophet? Or might it be a way, conscious or not, of more safely betraying an unease with the prying eye of the detective? I discuss this more in Chapter 2. 201 camera to record, or they must talk about their reactions” (25). Returning later to this question of interiority expressed, she invokes the English novelist and literary critic, David Lodge:

In the move from telling to showing, a performance adaptation must dramatize:

description, narration, and represented thoughts must be transcoded into speech, actions,

sounds, and visual images. Conflicts and ideological differences between characters must

be made visible and audible (see Lodge 1993: 196-200). (Hutcheon 40)

In the scene cited above – in which Cuff examines the dresser – the audience watches as Cuff dramatizes the detective process, just as Lodge and Hutcheon describe. Cuff’s new navigation of this different semiotic system results in a noticeably different kind of detection from that found on the page. Any thoughts which may have been “represented” as interior process in the novel are here “transcoded into speech, actions, sounds and visual images.” The performance of what could be interior thought becomes a necessary hallmark of the developing stage detective as this process of “re-mediation” leaves its mark.

Cuff’s performance of detection is in this way quite distinct from that of Hawkshaw, his stage predecessor. While Hawkshaw similarly performed detection, his performance was closely intertwined with the detection itself. In other words, his performance of leisurely indifference allowed him and his colleagues to keep watch over the Bellevue Tea Gardens and catch Brierly passing fraudulent bills; his performance as a drunken navvy allowed him to overhear the criminal plots and ultimately assist Bob Brierly in stopping the robbery and arrest his nemeses.

Not only did the detection become performance but the performance became detection as 202

Hawkshaw used his theatrical skills to entertain the audience and capture criminals simultaneously. What Cuff is engaged in here is I’d suggest quite different. For Cuff the detection may be performed but it is not as a performance that it will succeed as detection.

Instead, Cuff appears to be performing the process of thought.14 Far from Hawkshaw’s elaborate and sustained performances of disguise, Cuff asks deliberate questions and carefully observes stains on the furniture. A little while later Cuff forgoes the dresser altogether and merely reflects out loud:

The linen for the wash has wasted my time, and has told me nothing. Thanks to that

extraordinary female, I know what article of clothing to examine next. Miss Rachel’s

own conduct associates the dressing-gown with the smear on the varnish. Why was she

so angry when that polite spinster noticed the dressing-gown? And what was she doing

with a dressing-gown at this time of day? (669; Act 2)

In this way, Cuff’s thoughts are shared with the audience in a performance of considered reflection.

Cuff’s performance of deliberation may be an attempt to theatricalize the otherwise internalized intellectual quality of the detective, something Frank Rahill suggests made Arthur

Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales rather resistant to melodramatic adaptation. Rahill

14 This phenomenon of thinking aloud is explored by Andrew H. Miller in “Reading Thoughts: Victorian Perfectionism and the Display of Thinking.” Miller suggests that “the Victorians regularly thought of themselves as isolated from each other [… and] in such conditions, one’s thinking is not inevitably on display for others but is naturally obscure, requiring laborious revelation. And that labor was valued on account of its possible effects: watching others think could spur one to become oneself; allowing others to see oneself thinking could spur them to become themselves” (n.p.). Cuff’s tendency to speak his mind and narrate his process can thus be understood not only as a performance of detection but a performance of his (detective) identity and one which might spur others to reveal themselves and so more fully become themselves. By speaking his thoughts aloud, Cuff thus contributes not only to his constitutive identity but to that of those around him. 203 observes that “William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes (1899), a hit in England and America for years, is an adaptation only in the loosest sense,” noting that the “playwright merely borrowed a few of Doyle’s characters and incidents” (288). He goes on to wonder about just what the problem might be:

Perhaps Doyle’s stories […] were too much the intellectual stunt, too exclusively the

mathematical puzzle, to admit of ready adaptation to the physical, dynamic medium of

conventional melodrama; their very virtues were a handicap. (289)

Cuff’s explicit performance of thought, his working and wondering aloud might help to address some of these concerns. While there are many reasons for a play’s success or its failure it is interesting to note that The Moonstone: A Play was much less successful than Tom Taylor’s The

Ticket-of-Leave Man with its “physical” and “dynamic” Hawkshaw. That being said, Henry

Arthur Jones’s Silver King was a runaway success featuring as it did, the detective Samuel

Baxter, who, like Cuff performs not as a kind of theatrical side-show so much as a thinking man of reason:

BAXTER. […] Now when and where have I had that man through my hands? Deuce take

my memory! (Comes slowly away from window.) Dear! Dear! (Snaps his fingers

and taps his forehead to aid his memory as he crosses the stage, then stops

suddenly.) Good heavens! Yes! That’s the man! Derby night four years ago! The

skittle alley at the Wheatsheaf – the revolver, whew! Here’s a find! John Franklin,

millionaire, philanthropist and Silver King, an unhung murderer. The hair grown 204

grey but the same face. By Jove! What a catch for me! (Music. Exit very swiftly

and with great animation.) (80; Act 4, Sc 1)

The Silver King achieved its success upon production at the Princess’s in 1882, five years after

Collins’s Moonstone had been performed at the Olympic and almost twenty years since

Hawkshaw first appeared on the stage.

Thus, these detectives are embedded in the theatrical developments of the period. While

Hawkshaw’s more declamatory and exaggerated style suited the overblown villains of The

Ticket-of-Leave Man, perhaps Cuff makes more sense in a play where the villain is a cousin of the aristocratic victim and Baxter seems more fitting sharing a stage with Skinner, the well- dressed “sardonic” villain of The Silver King (Jackson 7). If the villains here seem to be shifting toward the 1880s villains described by Michael Booth above perhaps the detective can and must shift too. Burnett’s Bucket may retain much of Hawkshaw’s earlier gruffness but he nevertheless sits down on a sofa to arrest a French maid – a commingling perhaps indicative of Jo’s extended creative history, produced in 1875/6 but with roots in a novel of the 1850s. A reviewer noted that

Sergeant Cuff called Hawkshaw to mind (“we have also in the cast Mr. T. Swinbourne, as the

Detective, seeing whom a vision of Mr. Horace Wigan, the Hawkshaw of ‘The Ticket-of-Leave

Man,’ will rise up before you” [Whitehall Review 22 September 1877]) but his style of detection is entirely different. Cuff certainly owes a debt to his detective progenitor, Hawkshaw, but he also moves beyond this earlier style. Cuff is a keystone in his melodramatic universe but simultaneously anticipates the dandiacal style of the society comedies yet to come. Samuel

Baxter may retain a certain amount of Hawkshaw’s ineffectual policing but he does so in a style now firmly rooted in the society comedy of the period. The more languorous dandiacal attitude 205 of these later detectives seems to be matched by a more thoughtful process of detection and the two together contribute to a shifting theatrical landscape, characterized by performed ratiocination and stylish disinterest.

* * * * * * * * * *

Detectives Cuff and Bucket are thus not merely theatricalized versions of Whicher and Field, created merely in order to facilitate the adaptation of Collins’s and Dickens’s highly successful novels. They instead become a necessary part of a theatrical vocabulary, subsumed into a theatrical milieu which they at once facilitate and simultaneously challenge. Cuff’s improper use of domestic space is amplified by his challenge to the theatrical unities of time and place so decidedly introduced by Wilkie Collins. His improbably speedy arrival and his illicit entrance through the back door challenge the theatrical integrity of the scene and in so doing challenge the integrity of the home, testing the edges not only of neo-classical rationale but those of domestic sanctity itself. In such a context, the question of just who it is that Cuff and his colleague Bucket might work for becomes all the more urgent and it is a question to which there are many often unsatisfactory and somewhat contradictory answers and with which the three plays, The

Moonstone: A Play, Jo and Poor Jo, all grapple: Is it some abstract notion of law and order? Is it

“society” as Burnett’s Bucket laments? Is it the upper classes as Betteredge is reassured by Cuff?

While the societal answer remains somewhat elusive, the theatrical context in which the action plays out becomes increasingly significant, increasingly present.

Not only does the theatrical nature of Cuff and both Buckets inform their own positioning, threatening the destabilization of a social order predicated on performed roles, it also 206 speaks to the structural and generic reality of the theatrical context in which they work. In other words, it becomes clear that they are specifically theatrical creations, serving a theatrical world order. Cuff may seem, at first glance, to sit outside the particularly melodramatic concerns of The

Moonstone: A Play with his aura of rationality and attitude of aloofness but in fact he does serve them and serve them well. Acting as a servant of Peter Brooks’s “moral occult” Sergeant Cuff allows the melodramatic cogs to turn and for theatrical justice to be done. And yet, even as Cuff operates as a linchpin in this melodramatic schema he signals that he is ready to move on and develop as the theatrical fashions do. He serves the melodramatic world order well but even as he does so, aspects of his own style anticipate the society comedies that are to come. His sometimes leisured demeanour and casual posing, like that of his theatrical colleague Bucket, suggests the society comedies of the 1890s with their Wildean dandies and men of leisure. If theatre will soon move on from the popular melodramas of the 1870s the theatricalized detective seems ready to go with it. Conclusion

“But then until lately we have known little of detectives”

A cursory flip through Jerome K. Jerome’s Stage-Land (1889) will reveal, after “The Good Old

Man” and “The Irishman,” the figure of “The Detective.” Described as “a ’cute one he is,” “The

Detective,” like the stage types who come before, is viewed by Jerome as sufficiently commonplace and sufficiently codified to warrant inclusion in his guide to the “curious habits and customs of [the stage’s] inhabitants” (147). By 1889 “The Detective” had arrived. In a remarkably swift codification, a figure nonexistent in the United Kingdom before 1842 and one still so new to the London stages that even by the mid-1870s a critic might observe that “until lately we have known little of detectives,” had in a few short years made his way into Jerome’s stage guide (“Moonstone review – unattributed 3”). A cool, calculating fellow with a flair for the dramatic, the stage detective had quickly coalesced into a recognizable theatrical type; a type, moreover, that was highly performative and in constant conversation with the performance tropes and conventions of the day. More than this, the performances of the stage detectives were entwined with the labour of stage detection, as the theatrical skill of each man contributed to his success in the work of detection and vice versa. The detective function and dramatic success of the stage detective were interwoven in a pattern of mutual beneficence: he could hoodwink thieves via the distraction of an entertaining disguise and arrest people by arresting scenes.

Jerome K. Jerome’s inclusion of “The Detective” in his guide to the 1889 stage not only suggests his increasing presence and importance on the stage but bespeaks his formal and structural significance. In other words, it is not just that the detective was becoming an increasingly common sight on the English stage but that he was bound up with the formal requirements and theatrical schema of the time. Indeed, Jerome’s inclusion of “The Detective” in

207 208 his guide to those curious inhabitants of the London stage suggests that he is not a quixotic character rooted in the unpredictability of everyday life but has instead become a conventionalized function of the theatre. As Jerome explains:

He is the only man, in the play, who does not swallow all the villain tells him and believe

it, and come up with his mouth open for more. He is the only man who can see through

the disguise of an overcoat and a new hat. […] Even the bad people, who, as a rule, do

possess a little sense […] are deceived by singularly thin disguises. // The detective

comes in to their secret councils, with his hat drawn down over his eyes, and, followed by

the hero, speaking in a squeaky voice; and the villains mistake them for members of the

band, and tell them all their plans. // If the villains can’t get themselves found out that

way, then they go into a public tea-garden, and recount their crimes to one another in a

loud tone of voice. (147, 149)

In descriptions which seem to owe more than a little to the plays examined in this dissertation,

Jerome K. Jerome expounds on the ways in which the detective is woven into the structural fabric of the plays in which he features. Much like the “Hero” – another “inhabitant” included in

Jerome’s guide to the stage – “The Detective” has a clear theatrical function.

Looking back from the fairly immediate vantage point of 1889, Jerome K. Jerome feels confident in asserting that “The Stage detective is, in fact, the earthly agent of a discerning and benevolent Providence” (150) – something I discuss at length in my final chapter on the detective in melodrama. While I concede that the stage detective often serves just such a structural function I would hesitate to agree that he is utterly conventionalized or divorced from reality. The stage detectives upon whom this dissertation is based are in fact rooted in and 209 responsive to immediate social and political exigencies as well as implicated in the broader cultural questions and more abstract epistemological concerns of the period.

Despite the theatrical significance of the stage detective, there has been scant scholarly attention paid. This seems an oversight not merely because it is such an obvious gap in our theatre history but because the detective was so obviously theatrical, so clearly performative. If any character deserves their place in theatrical history, “The Detective” is he. My close examination of the stage detectives that preceded and precipitated Jerome K. Jerome’s guide to the stage, allows not only for a fuller theatre history that includes this important figure but allows for a richer and more complicated understanding of the theatre of this period. Moreover, because the detective’s manner and method as well as his performance and position speak to so many of the epistemological questions of the day – from the nature of expertise and authority to the question of fraud and authenticity as well as the meaning of justice – a close look at these early

English stage detectives helps to illuminate these issues and see them anew. Because this is such an understudied area of theatre history, this dissertation is really a first a foray into a field of considerable range and depth with much more remaining to be explored. I end here by outlining briefly just a few areas suggested by this work, which could be fruitfully explored both with respect to and in awareness of this long-forgotten theatrical figure.

In the Introduction I outlined how the Metropolitan Police Force (or New Police, as it was first known) was formed, focusing in particular on the ways in which the concept of performativity shaped the creation of the new recruits and informed their earliest reception.

Unlike the detective, the “bobby” was always quite explicitly performative. He wore a uniform, patrolled his beat in a prescribed manner and was castigated for lounging – a posture indicative of a subpar performance. There is much further research to be done on the real-life performance of these early constables and their relationship to the archetypal “bobby” that developed simultaneously in the popular conscience. The figure of the “bobby,” like his later colleague, the 210 detective, also moved quickly to the London stage. Featuring not only as a common bit-player or facilitator of plot but in farces such as W. E. Suter’s John Wopps; or, From Information or

Received (1860) and Frederick Hay’s Caught by the Cuff (1865), whose very titles are indicative of his centrality. There is much work to be done on the stage “bobby.” What was his role in such farces? Was it primarily, almost exclusively, comic? The critic for the Observer seems to suggest as much when in 1875 he observed that “the policeman, numbered, lettered, and helmeted, is not a very heroic figure, and on the stage he is almost the especial property of pantomime” (30 May

1875). Such a comic reputation is seemingly confirmed by the critic for the News of the World who speaks approvingly of “Mr. Lionel Brough’s droll impersonation of Policeman X

[performed at a benefit for J.A. Cave] (received with the laughter that this original performance never fails to elicit)” (2 April 1876). If it is true that the policeman was commonly viewed as such a comic figure, why might this be the case and what was it that distinguished the

“numbered, lettered, and helmeted” constable from his apparently more heroic counterpart, the detective? To the best of my knowledge, there is currently no scholarship on the early stage bobby and a study of this figure would prove a welcome addition to existing theatre history.

As well as prompting a look back to the earlier figure of the “bobby” in order to trace the detective’s dramatic roots and theatrical history, this work also gestures forward to the world’s most famous private detective, Sherlock Holmes. While there is much existing scholarship on the figure of Sherlock Holmes and his appearance in the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, this dissertation suggests a different focus and approach – one which would take account of the importance of the original staged Holmes in the creation of the cultural figure we have come to know. The significance of Holmes’s theatricalization may thus be more fully appreciated, for it is the performance of Holmes and the performance of his detection that has come to be known the world over. Performing such primarily cerebral work can be a theatrical challenge as much as an 211 opportunity.1 Placing the staged Sherlock in conversation with his professional predecessors, who similarly encountered both the possibilities and limitations of the stage, would allow for a more thorough understanding of his brand of detection performed. Does it resemble the flamboyance of Hawkshaw or the understated but literally outspoken performance of Cuff who sniffs the furniture and exclaims “Aha!”? What has Holmes inherited from the stage and what from the page? Taking Holmes not as a singular figure but as a stage detective amongst others would allow for a renewed and more sophisticated understanding of this famed stage (and now, television) detective. He would, in effect, become part of a longer-standing lineage of stage detectives, one which took account of his professional and amateur predecessors.

In addition to a more sophisticated look at other stage detective characters, this work also prompts further exploration of what I have called detective function – that is, the process of detection, whether undertaken by a detective in name or by someone else. In the plays that form the crux of this dissertation there are characters who take on the work of detective labour (more and less successfully) whether they are professional police officers or simply amateur enthusiasts. The question of who can perform detection and who can perform it well, and why that might be so, is of central concern. It is a concern shared by Susan Glaspell’s 1916 play,

Trifles. Though Trifles is an American play that comes some 40 years after these Victorian dramas and is entirely different in style and tone, it nevertheless provides an interesting successor to these early British detective plays. In Glaspell’s play we have characters utterly unequipped, and ultimately unable, to do the detective work. Here though it is not the amateurs who fail but the professionals and, more importantly, the professional men who fail where the amateur women succeed. Here we see the failure of arrogant orthodoxy which cannot read that which it does not know. Detective function is effectively severed from detective position because

1 In one attempt to address the silence of much cerebral effort, the internationally-popular recent television series, Sherlock (2010-2017) flashes words across the screen to denote observations made silently by the amateur sleuth. 212 that which qualifies someone to be a detective or an attorney – the fact of being a man – is precisely that which disqualifies them from being able to read the environment of the play.

Detective power and detective authority is shown in this play to be contingent and problematic. It is reflective of an authority so staid and patriarchal that it is utterly dysfunctional, though it is also blind to that dysfunction.

Travelling further on in time again and we come to Joe Orton’s Loot (1965) and Tom

Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound (1968). Here too the rigid authority of the police seems ineffective and old-fashioned. Though retaining some of the energy and flamboyance of their predecessors, these characters, by the 1960s, are no longer part of a new and modern force but bespeak an old-fashioned and outdated form of intimidating, if absurd, authority. In fact, the very things which came to define the original character of the detective – an absurd enthusiasm twinned with a certain critical dispassion – are precisely that which form the basis of these officers’ intimidating authority. Bouncing almost madly around the plays, they accuse at one moment and are bemused the next. As in the case of Walker and Hawkshaw, Inspector Hound makes mistakes and fails to see – fails, quite spectacularly, to see the corpse of the murder victim

– and though this is funny and engaging it is also troubling. The anxiety surrounding detectives who pop up as if from nowhere – who enter houses through gardens or awake from a pretended stupor – here remains, found again a hundred years following the detectives’ first foray onto the

British stage. The detective’s penchant for disguise similarly remains but asserts itself, in the case of Hound, in the form of an unsettling metatheatrical confusion of character, role and position in the play-with-the-play. This confusion is indicative of the detective’s continuing and insistent implication in (theatrical) fraud, as well as the instability of Stoppard’s postmodern universe. Perhaps because of this postmodern worldview, however, the Victorian detective’s ability, as Jerome explains, to act as an “earthly agent of a discerning and benevolent 213 Providence” no longer resonates (150). Instead the audience is left merely with anxious laughter and uncertainty.

Jumping forward again in time, we reach the late twentieth and early twenty-first century where crime drama has come to dominate the small screen in the UK and elsewhere. From Lewis

(2006-15), a spinoff of the enormously successful Oxford-based 1990s detective show, Inspector

Morse (1987-2000), and Midsomer Murders (1997-2017), a series set in a quaint English county so beset by crime it beggars belief that anyone would continue to live there, to Line of Duty

(2012-17), a popular drama focused this time on coppers chasing coppers, in an anti-corruption unit, and the resurgence of Sherlock Holmes in Moffatt and Gatiss’s internationally-renowned

Sherlock (2010-17), there is today no shortage of detectives on the small screen. So many of these incredibly popular and successful shows seem to be exercises in nostalgia. The quaint, albeit murder-rife county of Midsomer, offers its viewers cultural escapism and encourages nostalgia for a middle-England that may never have existed; Sherlock is both relentlessly contemporary but nevertheless rooted in familiar stories of the nineteenth century; and the multiple spin-offs of Inspector Morse – there is Endeavour (2012-17) as well as Lewis – are demonstrative of a cultural nostalgia for the detective genre itself. While nostalgia for the genre itself may be new, a certain nostalgia as part of the genre is not. Gatiss and Moffat’s Sherlock plays to a desire for the comforting certainty of detective authority, echoing a similarly old- fashioned type of authority displayed by Hawkshaw back in 1863. The questions raised by the

Victorian playwrights, of whether such epistemological certainty is desirable, let alone possible, linger on. Line of Duty – with its hard-nosed critique of the police force itself and its focus on anti-corruption – seems less inclined to a rose-tinted view of the police or their apparent positivist certainty and moral authority. Like The Detective, Line of Duty does query the source of a police officer’s authority but, though the professional position as guarantor of Walker’s 214 sincerity and morality is here under threat, the possibility for and authority of a good police officer remains.

In addition to the continuing popularity of these fictional detectives of the small screen, there has also been a recent explosion of television shows and podcasts – the first season of

Serial (2014), The Jinx (2015), Making a Murderer (2015) and S-Town (2017) as well as The

Keepers (2017), to name just a few – dedicated to true crime and what I might call documentary justice. Programs like these are based on fact rather than fiction and aim to pursue extrajudicial investigations in cases where the producers or journalists feel justice has not been satisfactorily served. Though years and worlds away from the early detective plays which form the basis of this dissertation, the questions of authenticity and authority they raise are not new. Each one of these programmes have inspired passionate debate about the value of such extrajudicial investigation and the invasion of privacy it necessarily entails. Though the investigators are not professional detectives – indeed, in a flip of The Detective’s values, their amateur status is often used to guarantee their disinterest and passionate commitment to truth – they function similarly.

Their prying may uncover horrifying systemic scandal that has been brushed under the rug (as in the case of The Keepers) but it may also risk exposing a man’s personal history to international scrutiny without permission and perhaps without adequate cause (as in the case of S-Town). In other words, while some of the work is no doubt laudable and/or artistically valuable it comes at a cost. The troubling habit of the Victorian stage detective to prod and to pry, uncovering information others would rather keep hidden, seems to reassert itself here. The questions raised by The Detective regarding curiosity and the sanction we give to investigation and investigators would be well put to these contemporary podcasts and true-crime television series, as we continue to consider the value of privacy in the face of detection.

These are just a few of the areas suggested by this study but there are, no doubt, many more. The detective was an important theatrical figure on the nineteenth-century British stage 215 and his performative legacy endures: from William Gillette’s success with Sherlock Holmes or

Susan Glaspell’s critique of the arrogant social and institutional authority of men to the resurgence of Sherlock Holmes on the small (and silver) screen and the innumerable journalist- cum-detectives of true crime television and podcasts. The detective is an important social, political, cultural and theatrical phenomenon and the questions of detective performance coupled with police power are not going anywhere. A better understanding of the formation and early development of the detective on the Victorian stage allows therefore, not only for a better understanding of Victorian theatre but also for a better understanding of police performance today, on the stage, on the screen and in the streets.

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