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As Francis Dodsworth argues, histories of nineteenth-century British policing and detection have neglected to examine the extent, influence and legacy of corruption, scandal and organisational mismanagement within the police itself. Rather than face these issues head on, studies generally prefer to touch upon the subject carefully, incidentally, and in a perhaps ‘curated’ manner, leaving a significant gap in the history of police reform driven by public outrage and political influence. However, this also means that the influence of scandal and corruption in the police force on the development and representation of police officers and detectives in contemporaneous fiction also remains under-examined. This essay contextualises the presence of police officers and detectives in popular fiction from the mid-to-late nineteenth century against a swathe of contemporaneous scandals and corruption cases, as well as organisational mishaps and the resultant downturn in public opinion of the police, as they were reported in the periodical and newspaper press. It builds a more sophisticated picture of the relationship between the police, the press, and the publishing industry in the latter half of the nineteenth century, using events such as the 1867 Clerkenwell Prison bombing, the 1877 ‘Great Detective Case,’ the 1888 Whitechapel Murders, and the 1888 Thames Torso Murders, among others, as anchor points, and contextualises them against contemporaneous writing to argue that the history of ‘detective’ fiction should be historicized alongside ‘detection’ itself.
