Puestos de Trabajo: Tareas, Funciones y Responsabilidades

My thesis has two primary goals. The first is to counterbalance a historiography of policing and surveillance weighted heavily towards policing done in uniform and late- Victorian and Edwardian political policing. The second is to determine what mid-

Victorian detectives were actually doing and how they were doing it. Without an explicit understanding of how detective policing functioned in these early years, historians cannot adequately explain the sudden appearance of detectives in 1842, the consistent growth of the force and its responsibilities, or the rapid expansion of state security services in the 1880s, the end of the period covered by my thesis.

Records of detective investigations are scanty in official files and only a few late- Victorian detectives left memoirs. The paucity of obvious resources is a likely reason why the Detective Department has received little serious historical attention.137 I have relied heavily on the records of the Metropolitan Police and Home Office for operational details and to identify individual detectives, since no rosters for the force survive. I have also used the Old Bailey Proceedings Online to locate detectives in trial records and establish a benchmark for their felony investigations. Newspapers from London and the provinces have also proved indispensible. The Times’ trial reports in particular are some of the most detailed available for this period.

My research contributes to the understanding of an understudied aspect of policing nineteenth-century England, a topic that has focused almost exclusively on the

development of official uniformed police throughout England and the social and class repercussions of this extension of government power. The mid-nineteenth century was a revolutionary era in Europe and refugees flooded into England.138 It was also a period where the Home Office expanded its activity – largely into social welfare and policing of all kinds – and the Detective Department was a convenient and flexible institution used by the Home Office to offset its own increasingly burdensome responsibilities.139

Foucault characterized the growth of European state power in the nineteenth century as “state control of the methods of discipline.” His seminal Discipline and Punish (1975) argued that eighteenth-century population growth and industrialization put pressure on governments to assert control over individual members. Although Foucault focuses on how modern prison and penal culture effected this desire, he makes special note of the development of the police in the nineteenth century, arguing that they helped the state’s

137

Murder case files, however, have been mined extensively for use by trade authors. See, for example: Cobb, Critical Years at the Yard and The First Detectives; Lock, Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders and Scotland Yard Casebook; Payne, The Chieftain; Summerscale, The Suspicious of Mr. Whicher.

138

See chapter 6, section 4.2.

139

Jill Pellew, The Home Office, 1848-1914: From Clerks to Bureaucrats (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982), 3.

will to power through “permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance.”140

We need to be careful, however, about over-emphasizing state power and, in particular, the ability of the police to maintain constant and effective surveillance. Foucault’s prime example is France, where government and police differed dramatically from England. The French state was highly centralized and grew in size and influence over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaching its apex during the Napoleonic period.141

While Foucault identifies several broad themes about the growth of state power in the nineteenth century, he was a sociologist and primarily concerned with France. His

assertions about a police state, in particular, fit uncomfortably into the realities of English political, institutional and social history. While it is certainly true that the English

government had pretentions to more effective police surveillance and control, the English police, and the Metropolitan Police in particular, were hardly omnipotent. Victor Bailey challenges Foucault’s state-monopolization thesis through an examination of policing and society in London’s East End during the final decade of Victoria’s reign. Community control, he alleges, was asserted by, not on, the community and the Metropolitan Police presence in the East End was characterized by “hesitancy” and “intermittency.” “It is clear,” Bailey argues, “that working-class Londoners by the 1890s were willing to bring, and capable of bringing, some level of discipline to bear on their streets, whether to deter illegal activity or to manage numerous instances of anti-social behaviour, all without the recorded intervention of the police.”142

My exposition of the activities of Scotland Yard’s detectives between 1842 and 1878 will not only reveal a new era of policing in England, but also a new era of governance. Under

140 _{Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:}

Pantheon Books, 1977), 213-14.

141

Napoleonic government remained the blueprint for French government in the years after Waterloo. See Woloch Isser, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994); David Laven and Lucy Riall, Napoleon’s Legacy: Problems of Government in Restoration Europe (New York: Berg, 2000).

142

Bailey, Charles Booth’s Policemen, 69 and 81-82. Bailey acknowledges that there were times when East Enders sought police and judicial help when community policing failed. Ibid., 126-135.

the auspices of the Home Office, the work of the Detective Department reflects the most significant concerns of the government during a period of rapid population increase, cultural and administrative change, and social and political upheaval abroad. Scotland Yard’s detectives were employed in a variety of ways: to help manage crime in London and the provinces, to investigate and monitor foreign nationals, to oversee the extradition of criminals to and from England, to investigate cases of undetected crime, to enforce public order during major events, and to investigate the growing problem of white-collar crimes. The scope of their work indicates key shortcomings in the ability of a purely preventive police to properly survey the population and the steps taken by the English government to correct this. The expansion of government information gathering and surveillance is also something of a contradiction in an era known for laissez-faire principles in government.143 This was less the case in policing, however, because after 1829 in London, and after 1856 in the rest of the country, the principle of central coordination and government involvement in police matters was accepted. The London Metropolitan Police, in particular, flouts the laissez-faire model because, for lack of any central governing authority, the police commissioners worked directly for the Home Office and the Met’s detectives often worked for the home secretary.

The perceived need to monitor the population and the political ability to do so is a strong indication about changes in public opinion and government practice in the mid-nineteenth century. Public opinion is a notoriously difficult concept to apply to historical practice. Nineteenth-century state growth in England coincided with an enlarged electoral

franchise that was opinionated and voiced its opinions through a vibrant newspaper press. The press is central to debates about public opinion because, as Habermas alerts us, parliamentary governments and their citizens negotiate power via the press. The literary bourgeois public in England used the relative freedom of the press to express, at times, “coercive force” while the lawmakers likewise saw newspapers as a forum to “legitimate

143

Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).

themselves” and their politics.144 For criminal justice historians, newspapers are key sources for crime reporting but also to gauge public feeling about government practice. Maintenance of public order is a significant government responsibility and the English press was vocal when it perceived shortcomings in government policy. To offer clarity, I restrain my use of the term ‘public opinion’ and try instead to portray ‘newspaper’ or ‘press’ opinion, though there is obviously a good deal of the former within the latter.