“Instead of Saying ‘Had They Done Their Duty,’ It Would Be More True to Say ‘Had They Not Scandalously Neglected It:’” Policing Scandals in Periodical Publishing, c. 1865–1900

Abstract

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.

1. Introduction

Regardless of the nuances in the history of the press and the history of the police/detective systems across Britain, both of which have been contested in extensive (and sometimes exhaustive) scholarly conversation, they both remain a particularly ‘nineteenth-century’ invention (Emsley 1991, pp. 59–60). Whether the reader subscribes to the idea that the British police emerged with Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act in 1829, or whether they consider the history of the police to be more complex and borne out of a holistic, nonlinear development across the country—with small, often private, law enforcement organisations eventually giving way to a much larger, state-sponsored effort—is largely immaterial. Either way, the recognisable form type of police force that remains in operation in Britain was ‘invented’ in the nineteenth century (Emsley 1991, p. 65). Similarly, the history of British journalism often polarises those interested in exploring it. Some subscribe to a key ‘moment’ when the press was liberated to grow exponentially (often touted to be the abolition of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ across the 1850s and 60s) (Fox 1998, p. 273), while others contend that the growth of the press was more gradual, given that the ‘war of the unstamped’ had raged between the introduction of the first ‘tax on knowledge’ in 1712 up to the abolition of the last in 1861 (with a particularly ‘hot’ moment around 1830–1836) (Wiener 1969, p. 258; Anderson 1991, p. 1). Again, however, this is immaterial—we can at least conclude that the periodical and newspaper press grew the nineteenth century into a form that we would recognise today—especially in comparison to earlier periods (Drew 2011, pp. 110–11).

What is of concern here is how these histories are closely intertwined in under-theorised ways, particularly during the mid-to-late Victorian era (Saunders 2021, p. 20). The police and the press had a close, often turbulent relationship throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as the technological expansion and ideological liberation of the press after the 1850s collided with the nationwide establishment of uniformed policing. This article traces an underdiscussed element of this relationship: the reporting and the subsequent fictionalised representation of scandals that engulfed the police and detective systems during the mid-to-late Victorian period. It focuses on how the press developed its capacity for investigative reporting and sensationalised writing by focusing on the police and the (sometimes unfortunate) set of incidents that surrounded them. This subsequently influenced the way that police officers and detectives were depicted—sometimes in the same periodicals that reported on the police. It examines the interconnection between the police, journalism, and (indirectly) public opinion, and helps shape a wider narrative about how the history of genre—in this case, detective fiction—can only be properly understood by considering its interconnected nature with other forms of writing that occurred contemporaneously (Veeser 1989, p. xi), and which help us better understand the construction of both narrative and character within the detective genre itself.

2. The Scandals

There is a long history of scandals that engulfed the British police during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. As Francis Dodsworth suggests, the professionalisation of the police across the latter half of the Victorian era, which distinguished it from earlier localised models, caused ‘scandals’ involving the police to become perceived as principally an organisational, rather than an individual, problem (Dodsworth 2022, p. 63). Simply put, police scandals were no longer caused by the behaviour of a few ‘rotten apples’ but were now bound up with larger questions of force efficiency, trustworthiness, and the force’s ability to police itself (Dodsworth 2022, p. 63). Tracing these scandals, and the associated press responses to them, from c.1865 onwards helps identify a thematic landscape against which late-nineteenth century detective fiction was set. They can be organised into some broad themes that are subsequently reflected in the failings of detectives and police officers in periodical fiction: incompetence and overzealous bureaucracy, corruption, and occasionally violence.

I begin with incompetence and overzealous bureaucracy. After their nationwide inception in 1856, the police received significant scrutiny in magazines and periodicals, particularly those publications that were geared towards sociopolitical commentary—some unquestionably supportive, and some deeply sceptical, and these perspectives were often drawn along political battlelines (Saunders 2021, pp. 31–33). However, there was at least one mostly unifying perspective on the police: even those who criticised the institution of the police as an example of state overreach agreed with voices who welcomed their job of protecting the public (and their social and financial capital) that they would at least do the job—however (in)effectively (Emsley 1999, p. 30).

The Hyde Park Riot of 1866 and, even more so, the Clerkenwell Prison bombing on 13 December 1867 mark moments when this perspective began to change (Rzepka 2005, p. 111). These events sparked a crystallisation of public opinion of the police and skewed it towards dissent. In the Clerkenwell bombing, Irish nationalists triggered an explosion outside the prison wall in an attempt to free at least one of their incarcerated companions, Richard O’Sullivan Burke, during exercise in the yard. The bomb destroyed a section of the wall and demolished or damaged several houses and businesses on a nearby street, causing the deaths of at least 12 bystanders, while injuring around 120 others.

It quickly emerged that the authorities had been forewarned about the attack. The Examiner reported that the prison authorities had received intelligence from the Home Office that the bombing was going to take place, and that the prisoners should not be in the exercise yard at the usual time (between 3:00 and 4:30 p.m.) (“Fenian Attempt to Liberate Prisoners” 1867, p. 792). Indeed, the attackers had already attempted to bomb the prison on the previous day, but the device had failed to explode. The prison authorities decided to exercise the prisoners earlier than usual in anticipation of the attack and have them locked in their cells by the time the bombing was expected to take place. However, they seemingly made no effort to prevent the bombing from happening in the first place and only tried to mitigate its potential impact. Questions were thus raised around the authorities’ conduct. The London Review of Politics provides a useful example of the opinion press in the explosion’s aftermath:

The history of the Explosion at Clerkenwell would be incomplete if it were not recorded how effectively the police authorities and the prison authorities contributed to that event by their masterly inaction.

(“Captain Codd and Sir Richard Mayne” 1867, p. 669)

This piece went on to directly target Sir Richard Mayne, Commissioner of Police at the time of the explosion, and Captain Codd, governor of Clerkenwell Prison, for their apparent inaction:

Had the authorities done their duty, no explosion could have occurred. But this is a rather mild way of putting it. Instead of saying “had they done their duty,” it would be more true to say “had they not scandalously neglected it”. Sir Richard Mayne, as the head of the metropolitan police, and Captain Codd, as governor of the House of Detention, seem to have made it a point of honour to do nothing which they could possibly help doing to prevent a catastrophe.

(“Captain Codd and Sir Richard Mayne” 1867, p. 669)

Indeed, Mayne and Codd were frequently targeted. Reports from Bell’s Life in London suggest that the coroner had stated at the inquest into the explosion that he

thought that the Commissioner of Police [Mayne] should have done more than he had done, and he wishes that the governor [Codd] had put himself in more direct communication with Sir Richard Mayne as regards the defence of the prison. He considered that if the proper precautions had been taken the calamity would not have occurred.

(“Inquest on the Killed at Clerkenwell” 1867, n. p.)

The ‘Man About Town’ feature in the Sporting Gazette, meanwhile, pointed out that, despite there being “many excellent detectives […] too often even their practised sharpness is hampered by no end of red tape tomfoolery and student over-regard for precedents,” and hailed the potential for Mayne to retire as an opportunity for reform (1868, n. p.). Even Punch, best remembered for its satirical takes, took a serious tone when musing on the effects of the attack and on the police’s response to it, arguing that:

Had the police force been in a proper state of efficiency, the prison and the houses in Clerkenwell would probably not have been blown up the other day by the Fenians, whilst the Fenians’ own plot would.

(“Police! Police!” 1868, p. 63)

Punch also called for Mayne to retire, somewhat damning him with faint praise by arguing that his career had been so long that he could no longer be expected to manage a crisis of this magnitude. Finally, the Saturday Review, famed for its aggressive stance on most sociopolitical topics (Tilley 2009, pp. 557–58), referenced Codd’s inaction while musing extensively on the nature of politically motivated attacks on state infrastructure, pointing out that Codd essentially wanted the attackers to do his job for him:

The Chartists made a distinct challenge to society; they did what Captain Codd would have much liked the Fenians to do. Twenty years ago treason was courteous and chivalrous enough to say where it meant to plant its infernal machine, and to name the exact hour for which it had arranged the explosion.

(“The Public Safety” 1867, p. 796)

The same article, which begins by considering the nature of guerilla warfare, went on to discuss the incompetence of both Codd and Mayne in their respective roles, as well as the police themselves, for failing to protect the public from potentially unseen harm. On Mayne and Codd, the article excoriated their predisposition to each mind only their own jurisdiction and take offence at any suggestion by the other that they should overstep it—a perspective that led directly to loss of life:

Captain Codd and Sir Richard Mayne were so very careful about punctilio and etiquette; each bristled and bridled with such dowager and dignified sensitiveness at the thought of being advised or dictated to, that each did little more than was necessary to save appearances. […] Sir Richard Mayne knew his place, and he knew nothing else. Captain Codd knew his duties inside the prison; but the outside was not his department.

(“The Public Safety” 1867, p. 797)

The article then applies this line of thinking to the entire force, pointing out that hard departmental boundaries and predispositions to bureaucracy created inconsistencies in extent and quality of police coverage:

The regular police will not work with the special constables; the City police is one thing, the metropolitan another. The Volunteers are and are not private citizens and trained soldiers.

(“The Public Safety” 1867, p. 797)

The events at Clerkenwell thus sparked discussion around the efficiency of the police—particularly in the context of their supposedly overzealous attention to bureaucracy as preventing effective policework, with tragic consequences (“Inefficiency of the London Police” 1870, pp. 574–75). However, much of this discussion was eventually subsumed into a wider debate around the activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (more commonly known at the time as ‘Fenians’), and the impact that the attack would have on the public’s sympathy for the Fenians’ aim to establish an independent republic in Ireland. Other events, arguably, made a more direct contribution to the decline of the police’s reputation in the 1870s; the 1872 Charles Bravo murder, for example. In 1877, ten years after the Clerkenwell Bombing, the police themselves were thrust directly into the spotlight as a result of the “biggest police corruption scandal of the time” (Dodsworth 2022, p. 65)—which became contemporarily known as the ‘Great Detective Case’.¹ Four detective inspectors, named John Meiklejohn, Nathaniel Druscovich, William Palmer and George Clarke, were arrested and charged with taking bribes in return for forewarning criminals of the police’s movements against them (Saunders 2021, pp. 167–68; Dilnot 1928). The case was widely reported and, after a lengthy inquiry at Bow Street and a highly publicised trial at the Old Bailey, three of the inspectors were convicted and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour. The fourth, Clarke, was acquitted.

The newspaper press followed the events at both the Bow Street enquiry and the trial at the Old Bailey extremely closely, and for my purposes it is not necessary to detail the minutiae of the case’s reporting. Suffice it to say that both newspapers with large circulations (such as the Manchester Guardian, its sister paper the Observer, and Reynolds’s Newspaper), as well as smaller, local publications across the country published blow-by-blow accounts of the trial between July and September 1877—indeed, the Manchester Guardian and Observer’s coverage was almost daily. The story also generated scandals-within-scandals, which newspaper commentators seized and reported as well. Druscovich was (incorrectly) reported to have attempted suicide in his cell while awaiting trial, as reported by the Standard (“Attempted Suicide” 1877, p. 5) and the Edinburgh Evening News (“Attempted Suicide” 1877, p. 2). Druscovich’s brother, John Vincent, was also arrested for a different offence during the trial which, unfortunately for Druscovich himself, was used to further smear his reputation., Meiklejohn, meanwhile, was disparaged as just as proficient a thief as he had been a thief-taker in the Edinburgh Evening News and other local newspapers (Saunders 2021, pp. 176–79).

Periodical commentators, meanwhile, turned their attention to the impact the case had on the police itself and their ability to both protect the public and investigate and solve crime. As Haia Shpayer-Makov contends, the case served to confirm what the public had come to quietly fear after Clerkenwell: corrupt practices and the collusion of the police with criminals (Shpayer-Makov 2011, p. 38). The satirical press–magazines like Fun, Judy, and Punch—understandably seized the case, poking fun at the detective department and the detectives themselves. In April 1878, Fun took aim at the imminent restructuring of the Detective Department and argued that it was unlikely to make much difference:

There is no foundation for the statement contained in some of our contemporaries that detectives will in future be styled, “Officers of the Committee of Criminal Investigation.” They never catch any to investigate. Now Messrs. Meiklejohn and Co. were criminal investigators.

(“Unfounded Rumours” 1878, p. 159)

More seriously, the case caused commentators to question not only the competence, but also the trustworthiness and accountability of the police and detective forces. The Saturday Review, in particular, examined the detective force from multiple angles, including their lack of supervision or accountability …:

[T]he main questions which the Commissioners will have to decide will therefore be […] whether its organisation and discipline can be improved by more direct and minute supervision of the officers […]. The recent trial seems to show that at present the supervision over the Detectives is not sufficient.

(“The Detective System” 1877, pp. 682–83)

… as well as their potential for unknown corruption due to their invisibility to most of the public:

It is not the mere conviction of these prominent members of the Detective force that gives rise to uneasiness; it is the possibility thereby raised that many crimes may have hitherto remained undetected or unpunished through similar dereliction of duty.

(“The Detectives” 1877, p. 650)

The invisibility of plain-clothes detectives, interestingly, had been one of the arguments made against the formation of the Detective Department in 1842 (Shpayer-Makov 2011, p. 33), and so there is the ghost of a perception here that this argument had been proven correct in the intervening years. Ultimately, the Saturday Review suggested that the case had permanently shattered public opinion of the police, and in December 1878 it mused on the idea that not only were the police untrustworthy, but that this opinion was in stark contrast to the previously held public belief in the competence and trustworthiness of detectives:

[I]t must be said that distrust now to a great extent replaced the confidence which was once felt in this branch of the police. Of course this is in part due to the effect produced by the trial and conviction of the three men who are now undergoing punishment for aiding criminals.

(“Detectives” 1878, p. 780)

Elsewhere, the Graphic similarly pondered the effects of the case on public perception of the police. Founded on the principle that contemporary art and political commentary could intersect (Maidment 2009), it argued in August 1877 that the police were

not in high favour just now. […] There is a very prevalent impression that there is something “rotten in the state of Denmark.” Gigantic frauds and robberies of all kinds have been perpetrated one after another of late years, and the detective police seem to have been powerless to find a clue to them; while the rank and file of the force have in numberless instances covered themselves with disgrace.

(“The Police” 1877, p. 122)

Like many others, the Graphic followed the 1877 scandal closely, reporting on the preliminary enquiry, the trial, conviction and even the release of the convicted detectives. It even devoted a full two-page spread to a detailed illustration of the detectives on trial, which depicted the courtroom with all parties involved meticulously labelled (“The Trial of the Detectives and Mr. Froggatt at the Central Criminal Court” 1877, pp. 464–65). Similarly to the Saturday Review, the Graphic also used the case to question the competence, trustworthiness and accountability of the police and made an interesting connection to detectives in their fictional context:

Men whose business is to catch criminals, who think every kind of stratagem fair in so doing, and whose time is mostly spent in the haunts of vice and in the company of scamps, must in many cases get contaminated. The detective of the Inspector Bucket type is a rarity. What many detectives are was seen by the revelations at the trial of Druscovitch and Meiklejohn a few years ago […].

(“Convicts and Detectives” 1884, p. 343)

Inspector Bucket, Dickens’s infamous detective from Bleak House (1853), is held up here as an idealised standard to which other, real detectives should strive, and the connection to ‘real’ detectives here is perhaps what makes this reference most noteworthy. While Dickens consistently denied that Bucket was inspired by his police officer friend Charles Frederick Field (1805–1874) (Bannerjee 2013, n. p.), there is no doubt that a thematic connection exists (Miller 1988, p. 76), and that the connection was solidified in the minds of Victorian commentators. Consequently, ‘Bucket’ here can be read as code for ‘Field’, and so the Graphic essentially argues that the standard of policing had fallen since Field’s day, and that it was currently rare to witness efficient police officers. Finally, the Graphic perhaps summarised the effects of the ‘Great Detective Case’ on public opinion of the police when, in December 1877, it argued:

Confidence in the force has been so rudely shaken that nothing but a most searching public investigation can possibly re-establish it.

(“Legal” 1877, p. 523)

As we can see, then, the police and detective forces’ perception by the public press was on a steady downward trajectory throughout the late 1860s and 1870s. Prior to this, the police had enjoyed (perhaps uneasy) acceptance from the wider public (Emsley 1999, p. 30), and at the very least there had been a general acceptance that the police would be able to do their job, regardless of how well they did it. However, the 1877 ‘Great Detective Case’ had done much to damage the police force’s reputation among periodical commentators, and the Examiner went so far as to proclaim that the case had brought about ‘the end of the detectives’ (“The End of the Detectives” 1877, p. 1484). This perspective was to continue throughout the 1880s, where both the sense of mistrust and the perception of incompetence crystallised into a permanent state. In May 1884, a commentator for Chambers’s Journal concluded:

[I]t can hardly be denied that we require a new departure in the system of our Detective Police, for the simple reason that, as at present constituted, the practical results of the same are very much the reverse of satisfactory.

(“Our Detective Police” 1884, p. 337)

The Saturday Review also continued its campaign against the police, claiming in February 1884 that there had been no figure of note within the detective force since Inspector Field—and that famous figures within the force had largely become famous for entirely the wrong reasons:

Since the time of the late Inspector Field there has been but one man known to fame at Scotland Yard […] and that was the luckless Druscowitch [sic].

(“Detectives” 1884, p. 179)

And in 1886, the National Review mused that the force had grown significantly—especially in relative terms to the wider population, and as a result it was surprising that the force had not had as substantial an impact on crime as it might otherwise have been expected to:

[The] preventative and detective force has grown at a much more rapid rate than the population [and therefore] it is a matter for surprise that it has not been more successful in detecting greater criminals.

(Gregory 1886, n. p.)

This less than sympathetic perspective on the incompetence of the police intensified particularly in the wake of further scandals that engulfed the police throughout the 1880s and 1890s—particularly the ‘Thames Torso’ murders, a series of bombings attributed to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the ‘Bloody Sunday’ riot of 1887, and of course, the Whitechapel murders of 1888.

The Thames Torso murders occurred between 1887 and 1902, framing the much more widely remembered Whitechapel murders (Gordon 2002, p. 1). There are four ‘canonical’ Torso murders: the ‘Rainham Mystery’ of 1887, the ‘Whitehall Mystery’ of 1888, the murder of Elizabeth Jackson, and the ‘Pinchin Street Torso Murder’ (both from 1889). A few other cases were also tentatively suggested to be linked—the ‘Battersea Mysteries’ of 1873–1874, the ‘Tottenham Court Road Mystery’ of 1884, and the ‘Lambeth Mystery’ of 1902. The Torso murderer’s modus operandi was to dismember their victims and distribute the body parts across a wide area. The connecting feature, at least in the first three of the canonical murders, was the Thames itself, with remains found either in the river or buried in the mud along its banks. The Pinchin Street torso was discovered under a railway arch at Pinchin Street, near Whitechapel. The Ripper killings, meanwhile, have been very well documented across scholarship and need not be recounted here. It is sufficient to say that the killer targeted women living and working in Whitechapel and attacked them with frenzied slashes to their throat and mutilation of the body. The actual number of victims is still disputed (Gray 2018, n. p.), but the five ‘canonical’ victims of the Ripper were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.

There has historically been a strong distinction drawn between the Ripper killings and the Thames Torso murders, with most unwilling to entertain the idea that they were in any way connected: the modus operandi was different, the Torso killer never wrote to the authorities to discuss their killings in the way that the Ripper supposedly did on multiple occasions, and in at least one case the author of one of the ‘Ripper’ letters openly rejected the idea that they were responsible for the Torso murders (Gordon 2002, p. 2). Nevertheless, both sets of murders attracted significant press attention (and criticism of the police detectives charged with finding the killers), and it is difficult to separate out the critical comments on the police in the press and ascribe them to each set of murders individually, since (a) they were contemporaneous and (b) it was unclear at the time whether they were committed by the same person. Indeed, some publications also simply criticised the police regarding their response to all the murders that were taking place across East London, often collectively terming them all the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ (“Legal” 1889). As a result, it is far more sensible to explore the press response to the ‘Whitechapel Murders’ in general at this point, in the same way that magazines themselves treated the cases collectively.

The Pall Mall Gazette, a London-based two-column evening tabloid (Kent 2009), is a good place to start. Despite its status as a newspaper (as opposed to a periodical), in October 1888, the publication proclaimed that it was beginning a

series of articles upon “The Police and the Criminals of London,” which, when they are concluded, will, we trust, enable the public to understand better than they do at present the serious condition of the metropolis.

(“The Police, Available and Not Available” 1888, p. 1)

The first three pages of the Pall Mall Gazette issue of October 8 were then taken up with a systematic discussion of the different aspects of policing and detection, beginning with the claim that public confidence in the police and their overseers had been “destroyed” by the series of scandals that had engulfed the force in recent years (8 October 1888). The two sections that are of most interest here, however, are ‘The Headless CID’ and ‘Why Detectives Don’t Detect,’ in which the publication contended that:

There is not a capital in the civilized world where men do not read every morning in the papers about “the London murders”—they do not understand Whitechapel abroad, and every day, all around this planet, when the sun wakes up people in the morning, one of the first things they ask is whether or not the police have caught the London murderer. All kinds of explanations, excuses, apologies, are made for the failure—a failure which seems to some extent to reflect upon civilization itself, of the London police to discover the mysterious murderer, who seems to come and go and murder as he passes, with an impunity only less marvellous than the uninterrupted leisure he possesses for the mutilation of his victims. London is the greatest city in the world. Yet her detectives are at fault, utterly and apparently, hopelessly, at fault, because of this, because of that, because of the other, for there are as many explanations as there are explainers.

(“The Headless CID” 1888, p. 2)

The article goes on to blame the fact that, since the 1877 ‘Great Detective Case’, the oversight of the Criminal Investigation Department had changed hands so many times, and was managed by those who seemingly did not have the experience or expertise to perform the role effectively, that CID itself had been rendered essentially ‘headless,’ and unable to function properly. Incidentally, this highlights something of a catch-22 situation for the police—periodical commentators actively called for reform in the wake of the 1877 scandal, and yet other commentators directly blamed those reforms for the force’s lack of efficiency. It also recalls some of the original arguments made in the wake of the 1867 Clerkenwell Prison bombing—that overzealous and inefficient bureaucracy prevented the police’s effectiveness. Indeed, “Why Detective’s Don’t Detect,” from the same series of articles, openly argued that excessive red tape prevented the police from performing their role, concluding:

[I]t is not very surprising that our detectives do not detect. Detection of crime under these conditions resembles a game of blind man’s buff, in which the detective, with his hands tied and his eyes bandaged with red tape, is turned loose to hunt a murderer through the slums of this great city.

(“Why Detectives Don’t Detect” 1888, p. 3)

The reference to ‘blind man’s buff’, a children’s game in which a blindfolded central figure must attempt to capture or tag the other players who encircle them and try to dodge their grasp, was replicated in other magazines criticising the police’s lack of effectiveness in preventing further murders and apprehending the culprit of those already committed. In September 1888, Punch printed a cartoon of a blindfolded police officer, with his arms stretched wide, while a group of criminals evaded him. In the background, a poster with the title ‘Murder’ is being ripped down from the wall by another figure. The tagline reads “‘Blind-Man’s Buff’ (as played by the police):“ “Turn round three times and catch whom you may!” (“Blind-Man’s Buff” 1888, n. p.). Other satirical magazines found similar humour; in September 1889, Judy printed a short piece titled “The Way We Track Our Criminals,” which followed the efforts of ‘Detective Shortsight’ in his vain and sluggish efforts to apprehend a wanted murderer (1889, p. 147).

On a more serious note, other periodicals used the swathe of murders in Whitechapel to reflect on both the quality of policing and detection and the quality of the discussion in the press itself. In response to the murder of Annie Chapman, the virulent Saturday Review lamented the press attention to the cases, contending that it had not helped proceedings that the press had sensationalised the murders and/or attempted to provide insights or advice to the police, or indeed pressure the police into making mistakes or wrongful moves. It also complained that the wider police force was woefully under-resourced and inefficient, while the quality of detection within the police had declined severely when compared with earlier cases and other nations:

Neither the police nor their enemies in the press [my emphasis] can be sincerely congratulated upon the circumstances which have attended the fourth Whitechapel murder. […] The quality of the English detective has seriously declined. […] [I]n the detection of criminals they have fallen below their old standard, below the standard of foreign countries, especially France and America, even below the level attained by the police in the great provincial towns.

(“The Murder in Hanbury Street” 1888, p. 311)

In March 1889, the Saturday Review again criticised the police in response to the wrongful arrest of Charles Turner for the murder of Edward Williams, which the magazine dubbed the ‘Finsbury Park murder.’ The commentator suggested that, due to wider pressures for success felt by the police—again often from the pages of magazines—the police might prefer to arrest anybody rather than nobody:

[I]t is difficult to understand on what ground the prisoner [Turner] was put upon his trial, except that when the police cannot catch the right man, they sometimes atone for their remissness by laying hold of the wrong one.

(“The Finsbury Park Murder” 1889, p. 272)

As we can see, then, the opinion of the police and detective forces had perhaps reached its lowest point by the time of the Whitechapel and Thames Torso murders—and matters were further complicated by the perceived heavy-handedness of the police during the 1887 Bloody Sunday riot. Despite their best efforts, and with some recognition of the difficulty of policing such a busy metropolis and identifying the perpetrator of a crime with little evidence and no witnesses to draw upon, public opinion of the police had reached a stage where they were seen as inefficient, corrupt, ineffective and unreliable. This had a corresponding impact on contemporaneously published fiction, and the remainder of this article will trace some examples of this also published in the pages of periodicals.

3. The Fiction

In periodical fiction, there were two reactions to the narrative concerning the police that took place within criticism. First, there was a sharp increase in the depictions of idiotic, incompetent, corrupt or useless police officers. Second, there was a significant upswing in the representation and literary use of private detectives as replacements for their officially sanctioned and state-instituted counterparts.

The police officer became a common ‘bumbling’ figure in late-Victorian periodical fiction—and this was particularly strong in satirical renditions of the police in magazines like Fun, Punch or Judy. There are numerous examples of this—in March 1894, Fun ran a short story titled “The Destruction of London; or, Known to the Police,” in which an incompetent and oblivious police officer as well as a rather self-centred Home Secretary fail to prevent the destruction of the capital at the hands of the Amalgamated Society of International Bomb-Chuckers—a lightly veiled reference to the slew of bombings that took place in London during the 1880s. Judy, meanwhile, printed a story depicting ‘Handsaw’ the detective in March 1881, which portrayed the eponymous police officer as both incompetent and ethically questionable (“Handsaw, the Detective” 1881, p. 153; Saunders 2021, p. 207).

It was not just in the realm of satire that the bumbling or incompetent detective was a relatively commonplace motif towards the end of the nineteenth century. For example, readers of the story “The Manager’s Safe” in the Argosy of October 1892 witnessed the police allowing the perpetrator of the crime (the eponymous manager himself) to escape after being discovered. The crime is only resolved due to an accident during the manager’s attempted escape:

“How did the manager escape?” said Inspector Crump, deeply mortified at having been “bested,” in spite of all his suspicions and all his precautions. […] “… and by Jove! If it hadn’t been for the carriage accident in Paris, we should have lost him!”

(Fosbery 1892, p. 337)

A second example, which constitutes a useful segue from the depiction of incompetent police officers to the use of private detectives in periodical fiction, appeared in early 1897 in the pages of London Society, which published a three-part story titled “Running After Shadows.” This story depicted both the police failing to apprehend the perpetrators of several robberies, and the protagonists—one of whom is a priest named Giles—turning into private sleuths themselves in response:

[O]ne morning the policeman was found half murdered in the private garden of a gentleman’s house, not far from the church. The police then took more active steps to discover the perpetrators of this and the foregoing outrages. But all to no purpose! They have neither been able to capture the thieves, nor to lay their hands on any of the stolen property, though they continued their investigations for upwards of two weeks. […] “Right you are, my boy,” cried Giles, in the hearty voice he always adopted when he wishes to raise anyone’s spirits. “Here we are, and here we remain until this business is ferreted out …”

(“Running After Shadows” 1897, pp. 161–62)

Interestingly, what is suggested here is that the police only really take notice of what is happening when one of their own is attacked. This may be read as a (rather thinly) disguised comment on the officers’ supposed trustworthiness and integrity, alongside the more obvious conclusion that, despite their renewed vigour, they have still achieved nothing for a fortnight, prompting the amateurs to step in.

In perhaps an even more overt example, the long-running story ‘Jennie Baxter, Journalist’, published in the Windsor Magazine throughout 1897 and 1898, depicted Baxter herself, a tenacious and inquisitive character, determined to succeed in investigative journalism. In the Windsor, the story is attributed to ‘Cottrel Hoe’, but it was republished as a novel by the Scottish author Robert Barr in 1899, and Baxter also appeared in the Washington Post across June and July 1899. Initially turned down by the editor of a newspaper for a staff role (December 1897), Baxter becomes an investigator-cum-detective. When a large amount of gold is stolen from Austria’s national ‘war chest,’ she assists the royal family in identifying the perpetrators. Baxter is directly invited to assist the police as an amateur detective by the Austrian Princess, who initially suggests the journalist go undercover as a male detective:

“If you can place your dainty forefinger on the spot that conceals two hundred million florins in gold, I’ll go anywhere with you. […] Oh, yes, that reminds me. I spoke to my husband this morning and asked him if he could get you enrolled as a special detective, and he said there would be some difficulty in obtaining such an appointment for a woman. Would you have any objection to dressing up as a nice young man, Jennie?”.

(Hoe 1898, p. 51)

Baxter is understandably reticent, but is ultimately spared the indignity by the sheer desperation of the police, who seem to be willing to take all the help they can get:

“The Princess tells me,” said Jennie, “that you were kind enough to endeavour to get me permission to make some investigation into this mystery. Have you succeeded?” “Yes, Miss Baxter, as I said, I have succeeded quite beyond my expectations, for the lady detective is a comparatively new thing in Vienna. However, the truth is, the police are completely in a fog, and they are ready to welcome help from whatever quarter it comes.”

(Hoe 1898, p. 52)

Plenty of other examples of fiction that depicted police officers as incompetent, bumbling, untrustworthy and borderline ridiculous appeared in a swathe of periodicals throughout the 1870s and 1880s. In story after story, inept officers were fooled by prisoners who escaped (“Every Trade Has Its Tricks” 1881), tricked and nearly committed to asylums (“The Defeated Detective” 1879), robbed in the street without noticing (“Mr. Clumper, D.D.” 1888) and humiliated by an entire community simply for their own amusement (“Recollections of an Equestrian Manager” 1880). Across much of the landscape of periodical fiction in the late 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, the police officer was somewhat relegated to a position of untrustworthiness, incompetence and idiocy, largely as a result of the police force’s poor public perception and depiction in periodical commentary.

Yet, as the Baxter story also shows, there was a corresponding upswing in the representation of private or amateur detectives, who were more at liberty to follow their instincts, choose their own cases and investigative methods—allowing their authors a greater degree of creative freedom—and who were not tarnished by the brush of incompetent officialdom (Saunders 2021, p. 211; Greenfield 2002, p. 20). Private detectives were also able to use their discretion when it came to punishing offenders that they had caught, affording a stronger distinction between moral and legal righteousness. Using private detectives also facilitated further criticism of the official police, as some private detectives were depicted as successfully solving cases where official detectives had failed to do so.

C. L. Pirkis’s The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, originally published in the Ludgate Monthly between February and July 1893 and republished as a novel in 1894, depicts its protagonist working for a private detective agency, solving cases of murder, jewel robbery, and revenge, among others—and she often spots details of the case that the official police do not, or could not, see for themselves:

Loveday went on: “Of course, the ludicrousness of the diction of the letter found in the bag would be apparent to the most casual reader; to me the high falutin [sic] sentences sounded in addition strangely familiar; I had heard or read them somewhere I felt sure, although where I could not at first remember. They rang in my ears, and it was not altogether out of idle curiosity that I went to Scotland Yard to see the bag and its contents, and to copy, with a slip of tracing paper, a line or two of the letter. […] The letter, it seemed to me, had been begun with the intention of throwing the police off the scent […]”

(Pirkis 1892, pp. 411–12)

Female detectives had been popular literary figures in the 1860s, with W. S. Hayward’s Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) and Andrew Forrester Jr’s The Female Detective (1864) often touted as progressive moments and literary milestones within the detective genre (Kestner 2003). Both characters were framed by their respective authors as particularly effective detectives from a more egalitarian social perspective that would not expect women to operate in a normative role. Brooke herself is ‘justified’ in a similar fashion in the initial instalment of The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, where Ebenezer Dyer, the chief of the detective agency, describes her as

the most sensible and practical woman I ever met. In the first place, she has the faculty […] of carrying out orders to the very letter; in the second place, she has a clear, shrewd brain, unhampered by any hard-and-fast theories; and thirdly, and most important of all, she has so much common sense that it amounts to genius […].

(Pirkis 1892, p. 403)

It is also interesting to note that The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective both go out of their way to highlight the subversive nature of their protagonists-perhaps for maximising their sensational effect. At one stage, the protagonist of Revelations of a Lady Detective, Mrs. Paschal, literally (and symbolically) throws off her crinoline when it physically prevents her from entering a sewer system in pursuit of a suspect

Sinking on my hands and knees, I crawled with the utmost caution in the direction of the hole in the floor. Half a minute’s search brought me to it. […] I then made it my business to feel the sides of the pit to discover if there was any ladder, though the instrumentality of whose friendly steps I could follow the Black Mask. There was. Having satisfied myself of this fact, I with as much rapidity as possible took off the small crinoline I wore, for I considered that it would very much impede my movements. When I had divested myself of the obnoxious garment, and thrown it on the floor, I lowered myself into the hole and went down the ladder.

(Hayward [1864] 2013, p. 20)

Brooke, by contrast, is almost painstakingly justified as a lady detective to ensure that she both conforms to established social norms while also subverting reader expectations, thus retaining her position as an innovative literary device:

Ebenezer Dyer was not, as a rule, given to enthusiasm; but he would at times wax eloquent over Miss Brooke’s qualifications for the profession she had chosen. “Too much of a lady, do you say?” he would say to anyone who chanced to call in question those qualifications. “I don’t care twopence-halfpenny whether she is or is not a lady.”

(Pirkis 1892, p. 403)

Brooke is consciously portrayed as a detective at greater liberty to pursue her own ends than if she were to work for the official police. Indeed, another example of a female private detective in periodical fiction that appeared in the Sketch in January 1894 directly referenced this idea, when the detective in question states:

“[A]lways I endeavour to carry out my work in accordance with a certain principle.”

“What is that?”

“I refuse to undertake any affair which, in my opinion, smacks of injustice or degradation.”

(“A Lady Detective’s Experiences” 1894, p. 704)

These detectives are aware that they are freer than official detectives in practical terms and, by extension, the text is simultaneously freer in authorial terms, and the use of literary devices also plays into this idea of more liberal forms of creative expression. In fact, the motif of official police detectives abandoning the police force and setting themselves up as private detectives to be free to choose more interesting cases that align with their own moral convictions, or simply to make more money, also became common. An example appears in “The Detective Who Failed,” published in Belgravia in May 1895, where the detective decides not to pursue a line of enquiry and arrest a suspect he knew to be legally guilty but morally upstanding, and is therefore ejected from the official force but has been ‘happy ever since’ (p. 64).

Elsewhere, private detectives in fiction are often perceived as more worthy of their clients’ (and thereby their readers’) trust than the official police—either because they are bound by a financial contract between detective and client that did not exist in the official sphere of police work, or because they have specialist knowledge about the case that official detectives would miss or could not access. Private detectives could pick and choose their cases, but once they were employed by their client, they were bound to see the case through or else risk non-payment, or even legal ramifications of their own. A few examples of this crop up in periodical fiction—in an 1890 tale titled “A Private Detective’s Story” in Every Week, the detective-narrator states:

The police had, of course, taken up the case in earnest […] but, on the strength of my reputation for unravelling mysteries, I was privately employed, and, may add, fairly remunerated, to throw myself, so to speak, heart and soul into the case […].

(1890, p. 236)

The motif of a detective abandoning the official police and becoming a private sleuth is also relevant here. While this move allowed for more creative freedom, it also created a stronger financial contract between detective and client—and, indirectly, between periodical and reader. In Bow Bells in June 1891, the protagonist of “A Detective Success,” who has lost his previous job, feels obligated to fulfil a contract as a private detective after the opportunity presents itself, even though he does not actually feel any desire for this kind of work, and nor does he expect success:

It would have seemed all a dream but that before my eyes, and within my touch, there lay on the table, the ten glittering pieces of gold he had placed there, and these were a potent argument as to the reality of the interview! Who ever heard of the like? What could have made Mr. Fyles pick me out for such work […]? […] On the next morning, as arranged, I went to the office near Tower Hill. I felt terribly reluctant to do this, but I had weakly taken the merchant’s money, and, for all I knew, I might be subject to some penalty if I did not go on with the business.

(“A Detective’s Success” 1891, p. 549)

This motive was relatively common. In “A Private Detective’s Story,” published in Chambers’s Journal in January 1879, the protagonist gives the following reason for his choice of profession:

It matters not what my former occupation was; like many others, after dissipating fortune, I found myself alone in the world and without money. For the small amount of twenty-eight shillings a week I became a subordinate to a private detective […].

(“A Private Detective’s Story” 1879, p. 45)

A final reason why authors chose to depict characters who turned to private sleuthing, beyond financial gain or the incompetence of the official police, is that of specialised knowledge that official detectives simply would not have, which helps make them more effective detectives in specific contexts. In “A Private Detective’s Story from Belgravia of September 1886, for example, the narrator’s position as a bank clerk provides him with unique knowledge of the banking context that official police officers would not possess. In “The Noble Five”, published in Chambers’s Journal (1897), a female amateur detective is herself directly connected to the case and thus portrayed as both above suspicion and indispensable to solving the case. In these stories, the private detectives are in possession of specialist or personal knowledge unavailable to their official counterparts.

In short, a swathe of private detectives appeared in periodical fiction after, and in some ways in direct response to, the 1877 scandal and the subsequent journalistic campaigns against the police in the wake of the IRB bombings and the Whitechapel murders. For Victorian writers, using private amateur rather than police detectives had multiple benefits, and the case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes exemplifies all of these.

4. Sherlock Holmes

Heather Worthington argues that the early Sherlock Holmes stories tended to represent the police poorly directly because of the police’s severely damaged public image and the highly-criticised set of restructures and reorganisations in the wake of the 1877 ‘Great Detective Case’ (Worthington 2005, p. 65). While Worthington is entirely correct, the 1877 case (among other scandals) had an effect far beyond the Holmes stories.

But, the Holmes stories manifest the discontent with the official police force in the minds of the reading public and come to combine all the points this article has made about the way that police officers and private detectives were represented in fiction: the inefficiency of the official police, the creative freedom of private detection over official police procedure, and the financial and social contract that existed between private detective and client. And yet, the Holmes stories also encapsulate a much gentler criticism of state institutions such as the police, a position desired by the magazine and its editor, George Newnes.

Let us start with the charge of an incompetent and ineffective official police force. Lestrade springs to mind as the much-maligned representative of an incompetent police department—he is certainly less effective at solving cases than Holmes, and is often touted as both an incompetent foil to Holmes himself and a manifestation of official police ineptitude (Miranda 2021, p. 29; Gracia 2021, p. 292). But the portrayal of Lestrade is more nuanced than one might expect. Indeed, one might go so far as to call him ‘orthodox’ rather than ‘ineffective’–Holmes himself labels Lestrade “conventional”, even “shockingly so” in A Study in Scarlet (Doyle [1887] 2009, p. 13). ‘Conventional’ might indeed be read as a thinly veiled insult in the context of the contemporaneous public debate about the police–put simply, ‘conventional’ may have itself been a byword for ‘incompetent’, given that incompetence was considered the police’s standard operating practice—and Holmes is certainly frustrated by Lestrade’s ineffectiveness on occasion—as in the “Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891) when he refers to Lestrade as an “imbecile” (Doyle 1891, p. 413). Yet Lestrade, along with his colleagues in Scotland Yard, is, on the whole, considered a friend to Holmes and Watson, and Holmes even refers to him as “the best of the professionals” in The Hound of the Baskervilles (Doyle 1902, p. 247).

The lack of overt vitriol directed at the police is seemingly at odds with the way police officers were presented in other contemporaneous periodical fiction and in the case of The Strand, where the Sherlock Holmes short stories appeared in July 1891, this is at least partially due to its agenda of presenting a comfortable backdrop against which to set their fiction. Thus, the magazine worked to offer ostracised social institutions a route back into acceptance in society and aimed to improve the quality and variety of material, to bolster a reader’s overall cultural health in the face of less savoury media influences (Jackson 2001, p. 7; Pittard 2007, p. 1). Indeed, George Newnes, editor and proprietor of the Strand, felt that the magazine was designed more to entertain than to present highly charged political commentary (Friederichs 1911). Newnes had modelled his magazine on popular American publications such as Harpers and Scribner’s that he deemed “smarter, livelier and more interesting” than some of the older British magazines like Cassell’s or the Cornhill (Pound 1966, p. 30), and Jonathan Cranfield contends that Newnes consciously saw his publications as a way of maintaining a comfortable consensus with his readers (Cranfield 2016, p. 15). As a result, the Holmes stories walk a delicate line between reflecting literary trends and wider public opinion on the one hand and the Strand’s purpose to present a politically neutral social backdrop on the other. As Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko argues (Krawczyk-Żywko 2024, p. 181), Doyle avoided inserting references to contemporary cases into the Holmes canon (particularly the Ripper murders, even though Doyle was frequently asked his opinion on the perpetrator and maintained his own theory on the Ripper’s identity). This may go some way to explain why Holmes is often happy to allow Lestrade to take the credit for his successes. In “The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903), for example, Holmes states:

“I do not propose to appear in the matter at all. To you, and to you only, belongs the credit of the remarkable arrest which you have effected. Yes, Lestrade, I congratulate you! With your usual happy mixture of cunning and audacity you have got him.”

(Doyle 1903, p. 374)

Obvious sarcasm aside, Holmes later remarks that this act of generosity means he “is free to devote his life to examining these interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully provides” (1903, p. 376). Naturally, gifting Lestrade the credit helps to ensure that Holmes remains anonymous, which makes it much easier for him to work incognito. However, it also suggests that the magazine felt the police need not be a specific literary ‘target.’ The Strand’s non-fictional examination of the police itself also reflect this; throughout the 1890s and into the new century, the magazine published a few gentle pieces on the police, often focusing on the peripheral elements of the profession such as fingerprints (Finger-Prints Which Have Convicted Criminals 1905), policing in international contexts (Policemen of the World 1897), handcuffs (Handcuffs 1894) or police recruitment processes (Making a Policeman 1902). This reflects Newnes’s overt caution of “fueling crime scares” (Pittard 2007, p. 4) and perhaps gestures towards an attempt to guide readers back towards an uneasy sense of trust in the police (Saunders 2021, p. 218). It is also interesting to note that there is a tension between visibility and invisibility at play here. While Holmes requires invisibility to do his job, the police require, and almost desire, visibility to both restore their reputation and operate as an effective crime prevention force.

Holmes’s choice to credit Lestrade with his successes gestures towards the second theme identified in other periodical fiction that utilised the private detective over the police—the freedom to pick and choose the cases that he takes on, the way that he conducts them, and to a certain extent the outcome of the cases, too. As with other authors, this allows for more creative freedom, as it removes the necessity to follow procedure in the way that an official detective would have to, and also facilitates some slightly more unpredictable or unlikely scenarios or narrative structures. Indeed, in the first of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891), Holmes obtains a case from the King of Bohemia himself, and is at liberty to work on it alone—a situation that would perhaps be unlikely if Holmes were a detective of Scotland Yard. Holmes’s assertion in “The Adventure the Empty House” about his freedom to examine “interesting little problems” (Doyle 1903, p. 376) gestures towards the fact that he can select the cases he wishes to pursue and reject those that he does not. In addition, at times Holmes can also dictate the outcome of the cases: in “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891), Holmes (and the police) allow the character Hugh Boone to go free, and in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (1892) Holmes allows the thief Ryder to escape with his crime—the theft of the blue carbuncle gemstone:

“I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. […] I suppose I am committing a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul.”

(Doyle 1892, p. 85)

Holmes is conscious of the tension that exists between the legal and the moral good, and is aware that, as a private detective, he is far more at liberty to lean on the side of moral rectitude than an official detective would be. Police officers were bound by the law itself, which is sometimes inefficient, corruptible and vulnerable to external influence—all characteristics that Holmes himself is frequently portrayed as immune to (Symons 1972, p. 70). This, in turn, allows Doyle authorial control over the outcome of the case—and of the moral perspective this imparts.

However, while Holmes is not restricted by the law in the same way an official detective would be, he is bound in a way that official detectives are not—by the contract with his clients, which can either be monetary in nature or simply dictated by professional reputation. While official police officers may let a case go ‘cold’ without too much consequence (public reputation aside), private detectives are reliant on their success in order to generate more business and maintain themselves. Holmes is no exception. In “The Adventure of the Priory School” (1904), the private detective is at first reluctant to accompany Dr. Huxtable to the eponymous school to search for the missing son of the Duke of Holdernesse because Holmes is “retained in this case of the Ferrers documents, and the Abergavenny murder is coming up for trial. Only a very important issue could call [him] from London at present.” (Doyle 1904, p. 123) The issue is indeed important: The Duke of Holdernesse is revealed to be an ex-Cabinet Minister and the “greatest and wealthiest” subject of the Crown (p. 124). Holmes consequently has little choice but to engage in the case and is retained by the Duke to help find his missing son. In fact, Holmes even perceives himself in a contractual relationship with the criminal he pursues, remarking in this story that “[a] criminal who was capable of such a thought is a man whom I should be proud to do business with” (p. 131, my emphasis).

In short, the Holmes stories manifest several reactions to the social anxieties surrounding the police and detective forces which were prevalent throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s and which were observable in other periodical fiction that depicted detectives and police officers. The relationship between Holmes and Lestrade mirrors the tension between the public and the police in the wake of scandals like the 1877 ‘Great Detective Case’ and the Whitechapel murders of 1888 and how these events were reported in Victorian periodicals. Holmes also embodies the authorial and practical freedom to investigate and represent entertaining as well as socially and morally relevant cases. He provides credit to the police, thus helping them restore their reputation in line with the wider ideological leanings of the Strand and its editor, and he navigates the ethical tension between legal and moral rectitude.

5. Conclusions

This article has revealed and explored the connection between a swathe of scandals that engulfed the police in the second half of the nineteenth century, their treatment in the periodical press and fictional representations of police officers and detectives that appeared contemporaneously. The 1877 ‘Great Detective Case’, the campaign of bombings by the Irish Republican Brotherhood and several other politically driven scandals from the 1860s and 70s had severely damaged the reputation of the police, and by the time of both the Whitechapel and Thames Torso murders in the late 1880s, it had reached its lowest point. Despite their best efforts, and with slight recognition from more sympathetic periodical commentators, public opinion of the police had reached a stage where the force was largely seen as inefficient, corrupt and unintelligent.

This had a corresponding impact on contemporaneously published fiction, which represented police officers and private detectives. The latter were viewed as more trustworthy since they were bound to a case by a contract with their client and were therefore required to achieve a successful outcome or risk damage to the reputation on which they relied. They were also useful figures in the sense that they allowed their authors creative freedom to write more extravagant and more politically and morally ambiguous stories without having to follow a procedural narrative pattern.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes embodies all these attributes of the private detective and crystallises the wider response to police scandals at the end of the nineteenth century. He picks and chooses his cases (some of which are outlandish in nature), effects the outcomes of his cases with moral as well as legal rectitude in mind, operates outside the official sphere but with positive connections to the police force, and is aware of his social and monetary bonds to his clients. The Holmes stories’ treatment of the police also reflects the wider sociopolitical ideologies of the Strand, gesturing towards an uneasy tension between criticism of the police and the desire for a wide readership.

Data Availability Statement

No new data were created or analysed in this study.

Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Footnotes

Notes

1. In a particularly striking example, a pamphlet titled Police News Edition: The Great Detective Case–Trial, Summing Up, Verdict, etc. was published in 1877 immediately after the case had concluded.

Footnotes

Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.

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