TY - JOUR
AU - Guest,, Kristen
AB - Abstract My argument here considers the ways that anxieties and aspirations raised by ideas about the plain-clothes detective’s ability to ‘adapt’ his appearance were reflected in diverse mid-century representations of his work. Building on scholarship of material culture, I examine how and why some depictions of the police detective worked purposefully to render him an ‘obvious and unmistakable’ figure whose clothing tells us everything about his identity we need to know, while others envision him in quite different terms as an aspirational figure of class mobility. Taking up contrasting representations of the detectives in the work of Charles Dickens and the casebook fiction of ‘Waters’, I suggest that representations of the police detective suggest how material culture both prompted anxieties about social mobility and offered the prospect of reshaping one’s class identity in the Victorian era. 1. INTRODUCTION In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), Mr Toad breaks out of prison and is pursued by a hodgepodge of lawmen including ‘shabbily-dressed men in pot-hats, obvious and unmistakable plain-clothes detectives’.1 Recognizable even at a distance, the police detective’s identity is belied by the visible badge of his social rank: the cheap suit and mass-produced bowler hat that place him as a member of Britain’s lower-middle classes.2 Grahame’s passing reference to the plain-clothesman as an individual so obviously legible as to be humorous suggests how this figure had come to be understood as a classed subject within the semiotic lexicon of British culture by the end of the nineteenth century. It also suggests the extent to which material possessions – one’s clothing, personal items, and household objects – anchored perceptions about identity and helped to imaginatively stabilize fears about the ways appearance could be manipulated in an increasingly complex and mobile urban environment. Yet, Grahame’s portrayal of the plain-clothes detective as a figure characterized by comic obviousness belies the struggle to come to terms with questions about the visibility of the police detective in the years between the formation of the Detective Branch in 1842 and the end of the Victorian era. As figures who commanded the power of the state but were predominantly recruited from among the working classes, Victorian policemen – particularly those employed as part of Robert Peel’s New Police in Metropolitan London in the years after its formation in 1829 – embodied significant contradictions.3 In large part, such issues were managed by emphasizing the visibility and formal supervision of uniformed officers, whose power was made palatable to the middle classes by emphasizing their role as ‘servants’ to society, and to the lower classes via the proliferation of caricatures and epithets that associated the uniform with comic stereotypes.4 Once he replaced the uniform with a suit, however, the plain-clothes detective highlighted the difficulty of visually differentiating lower-middle-class white-collar workers from the more affluent ranks of the middle class. As Richard Price suggests, from mid-century onwards ‘in terms of the “paraphernalia of gentility” and respectability, the lower middle class were making considerable strides and the differential between the lower and middle sectors of the middle class was narrowing’.5 In the case of the police detective, moreover, the ability to blend in to the point of invisibility was part of his job. Indeed, Grahame’s appeal to the comedy of the obvious made assumptions about legibility that were not characteristically borne out in practice in the case of the detective. The work itself, one mid-century Quarterly Review commentator noted, ‘must, to succeed, never see the light’, and thus required that its practitioner remain invisible.6 As retired commissioner James Monro suggested in the 1890s, these operatives required the ability ‘without exciting the attention of even interested observers, to adapt themselves, as regards outward appearance, to any society where their vocation leads them’.7 For many Victorians, the idea that the police detective might infiltrate criminal gangs or hunt down murderers was comforting, while the idea that he might be able to move seamlessly and invisibly through the social hierarchy was not. In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, for example, Gabriel Betteredge suggests the difficulty raised by a figure illegible in traditional class terms when describing the feelings of discomfort occasioned by Sergeant Cuff: ‘He was dressed all in decent black, with a white cravat round his neck’, Betteredge notes; ‘He might have been a parson, or an undertaker – or anything else you like, except what he really was.’8 Far from identifying him as a detective, in fact, Cuff’s clothing suggests the ways that emerging norms of male dress blurred the lines between apparently rigid social classes, posing a problem for those reliant on material culture as an index of social affiliation. Difficulties posed by a figure whose work required him to be unreadable were further heightened for some by concerns that he might capitalize both on his knowledge of codes related to dress and on the cultural capital with which they were associated, such as speech and behaviour, in order to advance in the social hierarchy. ‘White collar workers were notorious for their aspirations for mobility’, Geoffrey Crossick suggests, and shifts in status were expressed visibly via one’s possessions.9 My argument here considers the ways that anxieties and aspirations raised by ideas about the plain-clothes detective’s ability to ‘adapt’ his appearance were reflected in diverse mid-century representations of his work. I examine how and why some depictions worked purposefully to render him an ‘obvious and unmistakable’ personage whose clothing tells us everything about his identity we need to know, while others envision him in quite different terms as an aspirational figure whose choice of objects refracts immaterial qualities of middle-class character. Taking up contrasting representations of detectives in periodicals and casebook fiction, I suggest that the latter use the plainclothesman to explore the possibility that knowledge about material culture could be used to reshape one’s class identity, while the former attempt to assuage anxieties about movement between classes by drawing attention to failures of self-fashioning. Though I draw from a range of sources, I focus specifically on two examples: Charles Dickens’s writing about the detective police, first in Household Words in the early 1850s and later in Bleak House (serialized in 1852–3), and the casebook fiction of Waters (the pen name of William Russell), which appeared originally in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal between 1849 and 1853. Both examples are among the earliest sustained engagements with the Metropolitan London police detective in Victorian print culture following the emergence of the Detective Branch and, as contemporaneous contributions to public discourse about the detective, suggest how and to what ends this figure was differently imagined. Contrasting Waters and Dickens not only offers a glimpse of the diverse imaginative social trajectories of detective narratives at mid-century, I suggest, it also highlights points of friction between them that suggest the difficulty of anchoring ideas about class to markers of material culture. My concern with the policeman’s ‘things’ – his clothing and personal objects – offers an alternative perspective to literary scholarship that has tended, since the publication of D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police, to focus on Victorian policemen as figures of social power and discipline. Early in his study Miller sets aside questions about the policeman as a specifically classed and gendered body, opting instead to see ‘the police’ as an abstract figure for the disciplinary regime that emerged in the nineteenth century ‘on which the very identity of the liberal subject depends’.10 Though engaging much more deeply with diverse Victorian representations, the excellent work of both Caroline Reitz – on the detective as a figure who helps reconcile ‘profound cultural struggle over the meaning of English authority’ – and Heather Worthington – on the disciplinary function of casebook fiction – maintains a broad focus on the police detective’s implication in struggles to formulate, impose, and exercise structures of power.11 By turning instead to the ways that representations of plain-clothes policemen also engage with questions about the relationships between material culture and subjectivity, my argument considers the detective as a figure who draws attention to the uncertain borderlines between, and uneven connections amongst, one’s things and one’s social identity. The turn to ‘thing’ theory in literary studies offers a useful framework for considering the ways that anxieties about matters of class identity, gender, and vocation intersected in depictions of the Victorian plain-clothes detective. To some extent, representing the detective as an embodied figure aligns him with the economic limits of his material culture rather than with the privileged abstraction of a seemingly classless liberal character ‘not situated in any particular time or place or category’: an entity, Elaine Hadley argues, with ‘no body’, and which Lauren Goodlad describes as ‘an antimaterialist concept of the individual’.12 If attempts to make the plain-clothes policeman visible as a classed body emplaced within material culture were intended to address concerns raised by his troubling mobility and often illegible appearance, however, the complex function of ‘things’ in Victorian culture suggests the limits of such moves. As Hadley argues, the quality of ‘self possession’ central to liberal character – comprising one’s intellect, merit, and capacity for feeling – was anchored and validated by ownership of actual property.13 Though perhaps aspiring to the self-disciplined detachment and complex ‘many-sidedness’ that David Wayne Thomas associates with the broad currents of liberalism, then, middle-class Victorians were also ‘the first people to be so closely identified with their belongings’. 14 This is a response, Deborah Cohen suggests, to an historical context ‘in which once-rigid distinctions of class and rank seemed to be rapidly eroding’ and in which possessions ‘offered a lifeline for coming to terms with one’s own identity’.15 At its core, then, the liberal ideal of independent ‘self-possession’, to borrow Hadley’s phrase, was ultimately secured through ownership of things that offered proof of one’s distinction as a subject.16 If some affluent Victorians attempted to forestall the advancement of social classes beneath them by drawing attention to their missteps in choosing things, they were also anxiously defined by the possessions and consumer choices that confirmed their status as subjects in command of immaterial forms of cultural capital such as taste and education. As Claire Pettitt argues of the collection of objects amassed at Gad Hill, Charles Dickens’s residence, ‘objects are to some extent prosthetic – extensions of the author’s body’.17 If object-choice functioned as a litmus test of social position in some instances, however, it also offered a route to advancement that capitalized on notions of liberal subjectivity as a position theoretically open to anyone. As Bill Brown indicates in a much-quoted passage, objects can be used both to demarcate boundaries and to challenge them: ‘to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies’.18 In what follows, I argue, attempts to fix the detective’s identity through assessments of his body and possessions were counterpoised by the possibility that knowledge of things offered a means by which to reshape identity. 2. THE PLAIN-CLOTHES POLICEMAN AS SOCIAL SEMIOTICIAN AND SOCIAL TEXT The prospect of policemen who were themselves undetectable was a cause for public concern even before the establishment of the Detective Branch in 1842. From the time the New Police were established through the 1830s, suspicion about government surveillance circulated in public discourse at all levels of society. This concern seemed borne out when the activities of police constable Popay, accused of spying when he attended union meetings in plain clothes under a counterfeit identity, prompted a report to the House of Commons that affirmed English ‘abhorrence of all disguise’.19 By the 1840s, however, the complexities of modern urban life – and growing awareness that the innocent could be fooled by appearances – prompted a shift in public sentiment. Though beliefs in liberty and sincerity as cornerstones of Englishness continued, they did so alongside concerns about the ease with which appearance could be counterfeited. Early condemnation of plans to employ plain-clothes police detectives thus gave way to acknowledgement that the public benefits they conferred outweighed the risk they posed to personal liberty. Writing in Fraser’s in 1837, one supporter of the New Police described the problem thus: The magnitude of the place (London), and consequent ignorance of individuals of many by whom they are surrounded, precludes all nice scrutiny into motives and purposes; even the distinctions of wealth and rank are almost lost in the crowd, and all that can be relied upon is either a confidential introduction, or certain external appearances, which may be either genuine or counterfeit. Police detectives were uniquely situated to address this problem, the author maintained, since ‘like men accustomed to work in the dark, things which to other persons are invisible, to them appear as clear as day’.20 Similarly, the inaugural issue of The Detective, published in 1859, cautioned of widespread practices of fraud, noting that ‘Bubble companies, Loan Societies, Quack Doctors, and a host of Disinterested Advertisers, spread their nets to catch the unwary, borrowing for their nefarious purposes the guise and speech of honest men’. As a result, the editor concludes, ‘It requires a special Detective Agency to cope with this legion of knaves, and to discover and expose their ingenious designs upon public faith and credulity’.21 Although the Detective Branch was formed to investigate a range of crimes, plain-clothes officers were frequently associated in the periodical press with the kinds of social semiotics noted by both Fraser’s and The Detective. Attentive to the smallest material clues that might solve complex cases related to murder and theft, these figures were also associated in the public imagination with the control of ‘swell mobs’, the organized gangs of well-dressed pickpockets whose genteel appearance masked criminal activities and low origins. As one Quarterly Review commentator pointed out in 1856, the swell mobsman ‘has his clothes built by the most correct tailor, and gets himself up as much like a gentleman as possible’. ‘Still’, the author continued: though he may manage to pass free in a crowd, and frequent fashionable assemblies without being suspected by the public, the professed thief-catcher is rarely to be deceived by such appearances. As the hunter marks his quarry by peculiar signs known only to the craft, so the detective can ascertain whether the fine gentleman walking carelessly along is ‘wrong,’ as the slang term goes, or is a respectable character.22 Such characterizations of the detective’s ability to read the minutiae of appearance and determine the difference between ‘wrong’ and ‘respectable’ aspects of gentlemanly demeanour were both reassuring and unsettling to readers. On the one hand they ensured that the public was protected from deceit. On the other, such expertise in social codes meant that the detective’s knowledge might allow him to refashion himself into a middle-class professional. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the police detective’s role as an undetectable subject, then, was his recognized status as a disciplinary expert associated with immaterial qualities of expertise, intelligence, and a capacity for unsupervised activity that prompted comparisons with middle-class professionals and signalled his potential social mobility. Writing in praise of this figure at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, retired commissioner James Monro insisted that the detective ought not to be closely supervised, as was the case with beat constables, but instead ‘left to himself – to his own ingenuity and to the development of his trained commonsense’; for Monro, the only restriction required was that the detective’s ‘operations must be strictly within the limits of the law’.23 Writing in Blackwood’s, Alex Innes Shand went further, noting the excitement, variety, and freedom associated with the detective’s work: he is always playing a peripatetic game of chess, against some clever antagonist, who is only to be checkmated by profundity of thought and promptitude of decision. And when, like a brilliant Queen’s counsel, he has risen to the top of the tree, he is one of the few industrious City men who are always having agreeable outings.24 The simile central to this passage highlights how the detective might – as a result of his much-praised energy, talent, and adaptability – be grouped alongside ‘a brilliant Queen’s counsel’, the epitome of successful, middle-class, professional masculinity. By the 1880s, such concerns were sufficiently widespread that a major public commission considered, among other things, whether plainclothesmen should be recruited from among the ranks of university educated middle-class men to differentiate them absolutely from their uniformed, working-class colleagues.25 If concerns that the police detective’s expertise and intelligence might end in his work coming to be included among the professions caused anxiety for some members of middle-class society, his position was quite different among the upper working and lower middle classes, to whom he offered a democratic model of rising as a result of intelligence, disciplined hard work, and demonstrated merit. Peel’s system of hiring instituted with the formation of the New Police was both novel and noteworthy insofar as it forbade nepotism and enshrined principles of promotion by merit from within the ranks. Though comparatively few policemen were actually promoted to the highest positions in the Metropolitan force, Shpayer Makov points out, the much-publicized possibility that anyone with talent and drive might aspire to the highest ranks connected the police service with class mobility in the public imagination.26 As a figure accorded special status despite his class origins, the detective became – at least for some – an aspirational figure who modelled the potential for advancement associated with certain forms of cultural literacy. Representations of the police detective that began to appear after mid-century suggest the ways in which anxieties and class fantasies prompted by this figure crystallized in popular fiction. Charles Martel’s The Detective’s Notebook (1860), an early example of popular casebook fiction that capitalized on the success of Waters, introduces a detective who models the possibilities for class mobility. In a brief introduction, the detective observes that his natural talent manifested when he was a boy growing up in a small rural village, and that later work in a printer’s office in London led to employment as a watchman and finally with the police. These references suggest his social antecedents but are framed by his closing remark that in retirement he is ‘very comfortable’ with his pension and savings.27 In the cases themselves, the detective’s method and industry are foregrounded in descriptions that highlight the physical mobility and intellectual freedom he enjoys in the course of his work. Such associations with engaged, self-directed forms of labour in casebook fiction not only piqued interest in the detective police among the aspirational working classes, but also among women. In her introduction to The First Female Detectives, for example, Dagni Breseden notes that advertisements for and queries from women seeking work as detectives in private firms appeared in newspapers from the 1870s onward, prompted, to some degree, by casebook fiction featuring fictional female detectives employed by the police.28 In sensation fiction, by contrast, the detective was often celebrated for his remarkable skill even as his class limitations were represented in ways that identified him as an outsider to middle-class material culture and social norms. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s first novel, The Trail of the Serpent (1860), features Mr Peters, a mute detective whose excellent professional qualities are rendered less threatening by his oft-noted ‘dirty hands’ and comically inept attempts to establish a ‘respectable’ household along middle-class lines.29 Published several years later, Henry Dunbar (1864), also by Braddon, includes a more subtle scene in which the otherwise competent detective Carter of Scotland Yard amuses the middle-class narrator by ‘lolling in his arm-chair with what he called the “wine-cart” in his hand’, ostentatiously inquiring about the qualities of cheap hotel port.30 Central to both novels are the ways that professional capability is circumscribed by limited or incorrect knowledge of social codes and poor object choices. Both novels turn on cases of stolen identity rooted in the manipulation of appearances where the police detective’s success in differentiating between real and counterfeit gentlemen is offset by his own social missteps and object choices. Martel’s detective, by contrast, does not describe his own appearance but rather asserts his possession of ‘feelings’ in the book’s opening: ‘there are times when a policeman finds out that he has got a heart, like other men, and often in the right place too. A man can do his duty and still be a man.’31 Flowing from concerns with the policeman’s possessions in mid-century narratives where he appears, such representations suggest the highly interconnected relationship between material and immaterial markers of identity in Victorian society. Even at the level of text, these narratives represent speech lexically in ways that render it as a material possession (or encumbrance, as the case may be). Martel’s detective, for example, speaks in a manner unmarked by class or regional influence, without dropping consonants or utilizing slang. By contrast, Braddon’s Peters spells out his class associations, literally, when he manually signs his dialogue in ways that explicitly reinforce assumptions about his hygiene and questionable choices in home decor. In one exchange with the domestic servant he engages to keep his house, for example, he informs her he is a ‘Detecktive’, ‘embellishing the word’, the narrator explains, ‘with an extraneous k’. Peters continues in a manner that denotes his class status via highly coded stereotypes: ‘So you takes a hinterest in this ‘ere murder, do yer?’32 Similarly, Carter’s appearance and his speech patterns place him in explicitly classed terms. Though he appears in a suit and is characterized as ‘businesslike’, Carter’s ‘shabby black satin stock’ and ‘coat buttoned tightly across his chest’ suggest to the narrator ‘something between the aspect of a shabby-genteel half-pay captain and an unlucky stockbroker’. In concert with his clothing, which places him explicitly as a failed middle-class subject, Carter’s speech suggests working class origins. Giving the narrator instructions about how they will proceed, for example, Carter suggests ‘Write down the answers as plain as you can. They’ll all come of a heap, or anyhow; but that’s no matter. It’ll be my business to sort ‘em and put ‘em ship-shape afterwards’.33 Such patterns of connection and difference make their earliest appearances in the work of Dickens and ‘Waters’, whose narratives helped to shape the divergent class preoccupations of subsequent detective fiction. Probing more deeply into the construction of these emerging conventions allows us to better understand the ways that possessions functioned as markers of identity in the Victorian era, and the ways they were imaginatively connected to immaterial qualities of subjecthood such as speech and affect. In both cases, the material culture of the detective grounds other class-coded aspects of his character that suggest or limit our perceptions about his potential for social mobility. 3. VISIBLY DIFFERENT: DICKENS WRITES THE DETECTIVE In the early 1850s Charles Dickens devoted space in Household Words to a series of features on the New Police, and especially the Detective Branch. Dickens is frequently recognized as one of this unit’s earliest and most influential supporters – though, as Philip Collins notes, he also insistently reminded his audience that the detectives he profiled were not his, or their, social equals.34 If he praised the intelligence and capability of the plain-clothes police, then, Dickens also addressed middle-class anxieties by offering readers imaginative access to what was otherwise invisible: placing the detective under scrutiny via descriptions of his appearance, speech and bearing. While he affirms that the new detective police are ‘one and all, respectable-looking men; of perfectly good deportment and unusual intelligence’, he also makes a show of revealing class-coded aspects of identity that delimit the policeman’s claims to social mobility.35 By adopting a strategy of making the policeman visible to the readers of Household Words, Dickens undertakes to demystify and render him familiar. In ‘A Detective Police Party’ (July 1850), the first in a series of articles on the subject, Dickens writes in character as the editor, introducing readers to the detective police in an intimate setting, the ‘Sanctum Sanctorum of Household Words’. The reader is asked to imagine ‘a round table in the middle, with some glasses and cigars arranged upon it; and the editorial sofa elegantly hemmed in between that piece of furniture and the wall’.36 Subsequently, the detectives in attendance – all of whom are actual Metropolitan operatives whose names have been slightly altered – are also described one by one. Thus, for example, Inspector Wield (Field) ‘is a middle-aged man of a portly presence, with a large, moist, knowing eye a husky voice, and a habit of emphasizing his conversation by the aid of a corpulent forefinger’; Dornton (Thornton) is ‘about fifty years of age, with a ruddy face and a high sun-burnt forehead’; while Witchem (Whitcher) is ‘shorter and thicker-set, and marked with the small pox’.37 When the narrative subsequently shifts to accounts of their work, the reader is thereby established in a privileged position in relation to the detectives, who are not only seen and known, but situated as outsiders to the imaginative space of the periodical, represented in explicitly material terms as the scene of this gathering. As a visible body, the policeman becomes a text to be decoded and categorized by the reader, rather than an abstract, invisible, and anxiously unknowable entity. Though credited for his qualities of intelligence and observation, he is also subject to scrutiny as a classed subject whose origins are marked in the narrative by speech patterns punctuated with slang, dropped consonants, and archaic turns of phrase. Lexically distinct from the editor, who functions as a surrogate for the reader, the detectives are presented in terms that highlight their difference from the self-possessed liberal subjects they have been invited to address. This strategy of making the police detective materially visible as a classed subject (both descriptively and lexically) was extended in subsequent representations. ‘On Duty With Inspector Field’, which appeared in June 1851, records the experience of a night-time tour of London’s criminal underworld with Inspector Frederick Field, the original of ‘Inspector Wield’ in ‘A Detective Police Party’. In ‘On Duty’, Field is both embodied – he ‘comes in, wiping his forehead, for he is of a burly figure’ – and represented in ways that highlight the power associated with specific body parts: ‘Inspector Field’s eye is the roving eye that searches every corner of the cellar as he talks. Inspector Field’s hand is the well-known hand that has collared half the people here’.38 This connection of eye and hand also links the detective’s power of observation and the manual character of his labour, the hands-on experience of collaring thieves, that differentiates his work from the more purely intellectual kind performed by professional men. This insistent materialization of Field’s presence contrasts with the disembodied voice of the unnamed journalist, which manifests an interior response to the experience that situates him as a form of the liberal subject that Deborah Epstein Nord describes as ‘the disembodied narrator of urban fiction, who sees all but is never seen’.39 This alignment subsequently anchors the key difference between Field and Dickens, in character as journalist, whose narrative recurrently contrasts his own responses to scenes of poverty and horror with those of the detective. Field is represented as detached, or machine-like in his actions, while the narrator demonstrates a capacity for empathy and fine feeling. Thus, for example, he concludes a lengthy passage of imaginative identification with the miserable poor by describing ‘a young, modest, gentle-looking creature, with a beautiful child on her lap’ in a den of thieves: ‘She has such a pretty, quiet face and voice and is so proud to hear the child admired . . . Is she as bad as the rest, I wonder?’ The response, ‘Inspectatorial experience does not engender a belief contrariwise, but prompts the answer, Not a ha-porth of difference’, juxtaposes both the different linguistic registers of the two men and their relative capacities for emotional engagement that distinguish the middle-class sensitivities of the editor.40 The final impression of the tour is thus to highlight the ways in which Field’s acquired expertise contrasts with the inborn affective qualities of his companion – and, by extension, those of Dickens’s readers. Unlike the detective, who advances by mechanically acquiring knowledge, Dickens as narrator conjoins intelligence with a capacity for feeling that constitutes his claim to special status as a liberal subject. Where the detective’s expertise in decoding the social text may be learned and applied to the detective himself by the canny middle-class observer, then, the ability to register the affective qualities of a scene are presented as innate differences that distinguish the ‘true’ gentleman. Such differences are amplified in Dickens’s later use of Field as a model for Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. Indeed, though Bucket seems to other characters to possess supernatural powers of invisibility, for the reader he is represented as a visibly classed subject whose possessions belie his identity. Bucket’s manner suggests a way of managing people by an ‘engaging appearance of frankness’, which nonetheless marks itself to the reader – via visual prompts such as the emphasis placed on the word ‘appearance’ – as constructed rather than natural.41 Though some characters within the text may be deceived by his performance, the details of his appearance encourage the reader to judge Bucket’s appearance in much the same way that he himself decodes the appearance of suspects. Frankness and transparency – suggesting a fundamental relationship between appearance and inner being – were central to Victorian beliefs about the gentleman’s character, but were also manifest in beliefs about his clothing. Discussing the gentleman’s appearance, one Victorian conduct book insisted both on the importance of simplicity and quality in a gentleman’s garments, and on his demonstrating an understanding of what ‘figure, position, age, and, remember it, your means require’.42 The purposeful emphasis on ‘means’ in this list, like the narrator’s emphasis on Bucket’s ‘appearance of frankness’ in Bleak House, highlights the importance of dressing according to one’s station by brandishing the spectre of vulgarity associated with false appearances. The suspect nature of Mr Bucket’s assumed ‘appearance’ of frankness is in fact signalled by class-coded aspects of his dress: the ‘great mourning ring’ and ‘brooch, composed of not much diamond and a good deal of setting’.43 As Jean Arnold argues, diamond pins were laden with significance in the context of gentlemanly dress at mid-century ‘as a cross-class sign of upward social mobility’.44 If the diamond communicated one’s financial claims to status, however, it could not confer the inner qualities of gentlemanly character, as Arnold’s discussion makes clear. In Bucket’s case, the diamond suggests not only pretension to a higher social station than he occupies, but also a failure to fully mobilize the power of the sign insofar as the brooch is ‘not much diamond’. Similarly, his ‘great’ mourning ring communicates a misstep that highlights his vulgar appropriation of signs above his means and station. As The Gentleman’s Book of Etiquette warned, jewellery for men should be ‘neither large not showy’. ‘False jewellery’, it enjoined, ‘is not only a practical lie, but an absolute vulgarity, since its use arises from an attempt to appear richer or grander than one is’.45 If Bucket’s possessions identify him with the impulse to rise above his station on the strength of false appearances, his mourning ring also suggests the disconnection between surface and the expression of depth and feeling central to gentlemanly character. Vulgarity was a descriptor associated not only with appearances, Susan David Bernstein and Elsie Michie suggest, but with the ways possessions communicated ‘ways of thinking and feeling’.46 Though a much earlier invention signifying intergenerational connection among the wealthier classes, mourning rings were mass produced by the mid-Victorian era, and therefore a fashion that could be adopted by a much broader segment of society.47 They were also, as John Plotz points out, both ‘intensely personalized’ tokens of sentiment, and ‘fully commodified’ objects that functioned as ‘portable property’.48 In Bucket’s case, the show of a ‘great mourning ring’ suggests not a comfortable knitting together of feeling and property, but rather a disconnection between affect and commodity that announces his status as a class outsider. Not only is Bucket willing to counterfeit displays of feeling to advance his career, he also evinces a related lack of understanding of the special status accorded private feelings and private spaces by middle-class society. Thus, for example, he employs disguise and false displays of feeling to gain entry to Bagnet household in order to collect information on Mr George. Later, he exploits his own domestic sphere when he employs Mrs Bucket to carry out surveillance on Hortense by taking her in as a lodger – which she does, in comic fashion, by communicating secretly with her husband ‘in the baker’s loaves and in the milk, as often as required’.49 Indeed, Bucket’s public disclosure of Hortense’s guilt includes an account of conjugal pillow talk: ‘My whispered words to Mrs Bucket, when she had the sheet in her mouth, were, “My dear, can you throw her off continually . . . Can you do without rest and keep watch upon her, night and day?”’50 Over the course of the novel, indeed, Bucket displays serial failures of affect that suggest his fundamental misunderstanding of domestic culture organized by structures of feeling, and that manifest visibly in his choice of personal objects. Taken together in Bleak House, objects that bespeak an attempt to appear respectable by adopting the outward appearance of gentility confirm the detective’s failures to grasp the middle-class structures of feeling they are intended to signify. Indeed, these personal objects suggest metonymically that Bucket himself is more cheap setting than gem, a flawed social performance empty of content or true character. A necessary – and even admirable – feature of modern life in his capacity as detective, Bucket’s potential claims to augmented status are foreclosed by the flawed choice of objects that signify his interior failures. His appearance is not only made visible to the reader, moreover, it is knit together with his lack of understanding of deeper markers of genteel middle-class identity such as affective response and the sanctity of the domestic sphere. By fixing Bucket within the parameters of misplaced attempts at self-fashioning, in effect, Dickens reveals the policeman’s class pretensions and lack of liberal self-possession. 4. SEMIOTIC ASPIRATION IN CASEBOOK FICTION If Dickens made the police detective a focal point of interpretation by highlighting his misunderstanding of middle-class norms, casebook fiction – particularly the series by ‘Waters’ that appeared in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal between 1849 and 1853 – adopted a quite different strategy for representing this figure. As Heather Worthington suggests, Waters is ‘a character with which the middle-class reader and his family could identify themselves’, insofar as his narratives foreground professional demeanour and domestic relationships, and adopt a neutral style ‘which neither attempts to reproduce working-class dialogue or thieves’ “cant,” nor does it aspire to the convoluted conversational style of the upper classes commonly depicted in fiction’.51 In attempting to communicate within the ideological and stylistic framework of middle-class norms, however, the Waters cases do not exclude readers from other strata. Indeed, rather than highlighting the difference between readers’ and characters’ knowledge of social norms and material culture as Dickens does in his journalism and fiction, the Waters cases focus instead on questions of becoming a self-made man that cut across the ranks of upper-working, lower-middle and middle-class readers that collectively comprised Chambers’s audience.52 Where Dickens highlights gaps in knowledge as a way to expose the police detective as an outsider to middle-class values and knowledge structures, the Waters cases offer indirect education to readers about what it means to become middle class via the experiences of the police detective. Extending significantly the fact-based, ‘improving’ approach of periodicals such as Chambers’s, the Waters stories both expose readers to a range of social signs, and suggest the ways in which such knowledge informs class mobility. As a genre, casebook fiction was well suited to such ends. Originally representing a range of professions including medicine and the law, Heather Worthington points out, by the 1840s and 1850s casebook fiction focused largely on the work of police and private detectives.53 Among the earliest examples of this genre were the ‘Waters’ cases published initially in Chambers’s and later collected as The Recollections of a Detective Police Officer (1856). Although fictional, the series purported to offer true narratives of actual crimes; at the same time, it assured readers of its respectability – suggesting in the preface to the collected volume that because the contents had first appeared in Chambers’s ‘nothing can be found in these brief memoranda of a varied experience to in the slightest degree aliment a “Jack Sheppard” vocation, nor one line that can raise a blush on the most sensitive cheek’.54 As a fictional construct that claims a ‘true’ connection to the Metropolitan police, Waters offers a useful point of departure for considering the ways that casebook police detectives focalized class aspirations at mid-century. Contemporary assessments of the Metropolitan force in the periodical press almost universally commented on the fact that advancement by merit was integral to the organization of the Metropolitan London Police, even as they emphasized the detective’s intelligence and capacity for independent activity. Waters’s stories similarly emphasize the importance of merit – a combination of hard work, integrity, and talent – as central to the success of a self-made man. Significantly, however, Waters departs from the working-class profile of most real-life London policemen: he is a middle-class gentleman who joins the police force because he has been defrauded of his fortune by a swell mob’s gambling scam. As he informs us in ‘Recollections of a Police-Officer’, the first case in the series, ‘my own reckless follies’ ‘compelled me to enter the ranks of the metropolitan police, as the sole means left me of procuring food and raiment’.55 The cases that make up the series are knit together loosely by the narrative arc of Waters reclaiming his position through effort and application, and in doing so confirm his identity as a self-made man who independently earns his right to middle-class status. Many of the cases mirror Waters’s own struggles, as in the first case in the series where he revenges himself on the criminals who have plundered his fortune and rescues an aristocratic young man from a similar fate. Waters is thus a figure of class fantasy: though clearly an exception to the norm, his path to self-possessed liberal subjectivity (like advancement through the ranks in the Metropolitan Police) is theoretically open to all. If they position Waters as an example of liberal inclusivity, however, these casebook stories also function as a primer of middle-class manners and material culture for readers. During his first case, for example, Waters must question an aristocrat who evinces confusion at his appearance: ‘differing, as I daresay it altogether did, from her abstract idea of a policeman, however attired or disguised’. However, Waters’s gentlemanly manner and appearance win over his interlocutor, whose ‘haughty stare’ is replaced by ‘condescendent civility’.56 Via such episodes, the stories model critical aspects of middle-class character: from what to wear and how to comport oneself when dealing with a range of social classes, to useful points of self-education (such as foreign languages) and, finally, to the proper domestic relations and demonstrations of cultivated feeling central to gentlemanly character. Though he loses almost everything when he is ruined, Waters retains possession of two key advantages that ultimately help him to reclaim his position: an accomplished upper middle-class wife and a good suit. Before proceeding to his first interview, he tells us, he dresses ‘with great care – the best part of my wardrobe had been fortunately saved by Emily from the wreck of my fortunes’.57 It is not insignificant in the Waters stories that the material markers of superior status are intertwined with an exemplary domestic life and appropriately supportive and tasteful wife. Throughout the series, Heather Worthington notes, Waters is noteworthy as pater familius and gentleman: chivalric to women in distress, ‘that chivalry serves to conceal the construction of women as property which, like any other valuable or commodity, must be protected’.58 Like the suit that distinguishes him in the eyes of Lady Everton, Emily’s presence in the stories affirms both Waters’s intrinsic identity as a respectable Victorian man and the capacity for feeling that identifies him as a gentleman. In ‘X.Y.Z.’, for example, Waters struggles to distance his emotional response to suffering from his professional duty when a family fallen from ‘their former position in society’, who have ‘bravely and honestly stood up against an adverse fate for so many years’, seem implicated in a crime; ‘it would not bear thinking about’, Waters suggests, ‘and I resolutely strove to look upon the affair as one of everyday routine. It would not do, however’.59 Here, Waters’s effort (and ultimate failure) to remain detached aligns him with a capacity for feeling similar to the response Dickens associates with the journalist’s perceptions (rather than those of the detective) in ‘On Duty With Inspector Field’. This feeling is explicitly connected with Waters’s domestic life and personal struggle to bear his lot ‘bravely and honestly’, moreover, when at the case’s conclusion the family, having successfully resumed their position in society, send Mrs Waters ‘bride-cake, and two beautifully-engraved cards’ to announce their daughter’s wedding. Of this gesture, Waters suggests, ‘I was more gratified by this little act of courtesy for Emily’s sake, as those who have temporarily fallen from a certain position in society will easily understand, than I should have by the costliest present’. 60 Unlike Mrs Bucket, then, who participates enthusiastically in her husband’s business and makes use of their domestic space in a way that recalls lower middle-class shop-keeping practices that blur the lines between private and public matters, Emily Waters’s involvement in her husband’s work respects the boundaries associated with middle-class privacy and domestic sensibility. Emily does not mix with criminals or take in lodgers; rather, when necessary she helps her husband to shield respectable female victims of crime, offering shelter without remuneration when delicacy and a woman’s presence are required. Where Inspector and Mrs Bucket treat their home like a business, the Waters’s family respects the sanctity of domestic space and model a lifestyle untainted by vulgarity. If Waters’s family life is marked by normative domestic relations and sentiments, however, he and Emily also share a deep knowledge of distinguished objects that allow them to differentiate false appearances from true ones. ‘Mary Kingsford’ opens with Waters observing ‘finely-attired, fashionable’ gentlemen who he immediately identifies as members of a swell mob: To an eye less experienced than mine in the artifices and expedients familiar to a certain class of ‘swells,’ they might perhaps have passed muster for what they assumed to be . . . but their copper finery could not for a moment impose upon me. The watch-chains, were, I saw, mosaic; the watches so frequently displayed, gilt; eye-glasses the same; the coats, fur-collared and cuffed, were ill-fitting and second-hand; ditto the varnished boots and renovated velvet waistcoats; while the luxuriant moustaches and whiskers, and flowing wigs, were unmistakeably mere pièces d’occasion – assumed and diversified at pleasure.61 In this extended inventory of counterfeit appearance, Waters seamlessly combines gentlemanly familiarity with articles of dress, with professional expertise and attention to detail. His mode of doing so, moreover, differentiates ‘varnished’ surfaces in a way that confirms a knowledge of fine things that is heightened by his casual use of a French phrase. The passage thus communicates that though fortunes may be lost, immaterial constituents of identity such as knowledge of cultural codes are intrinsic possessions that distinguish the middle-class subject. Later in the story, Mrs Waters displays similar expertise when she helps to clear the name of a young woman – a family friend who is implicated by the same swell mob in the theft of a purportedly expensive brooch. Using her skill as ‘a pretty good judge of the value of jewels’, Emily determines that the object is a fake. Her judgement is subsequently confirmed by a jeweller who concludes that ‘apart from the workmanship, which was very fine, the brooch was valueless’.62 As a couple, then, Waters and Emily offer readers indirect instruction about the relationship between material objects and immaterial aspects of distinction: directing attention to ways identities may be counterfeited and, at the same time, alerting them to the differences in quality and authenticity it will be necessary to understand in order to advance into better classes of society. Indeed, the Waters stories use the detective’s method to catalogue and assess the attitudes, habitus, and forms of cultural capital associated with different status groups and in doing so frame strategies for studying the codes associated with social position. Like the conduct book and genre of self-help literature that found enormous popular audiences from mid-century onwards, such casebook fiction works indirectly to promote a culture of self-education in matters of social and material culture. 5. CONCLUSION That the police detective was, by the end of the Victorian era, a figure stereotyped by his cheap suit and bowler hat is not surprising given the ways that claims to professional status were mobilized by the affluent, educated middle classes from mid-century onwards. Negative views of the detective as a figure limited by his class origins crested in the final decades of the nineteenth century and are particularly evident in the Sherlock Holmes stories, which use the police detective as a foil for the great detective’s superior mind and method. Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard appears recurrently and is not only represented as an unimaginative and limited counterpoint to Holmes’s eccentric genius, he is also described by Watson – in a way that significantly anticipates Kenneth Grahame’s decision to cast stoats and weasels as stand-ins for the working classes in The Wind in the Willows – as ‘a lean, ferret-like man, furtive and sly-looking’. Significantly, Lestrade is immediately recognizable in implicitly classed terms. ‘In spite of the light brown dustcoat and leather leggings which he wore in deference to his rustic surroundings’, Watson notes of their first meeting, ‘I had no difficulty in recognizing Lestrade’.63 It is significant in context that the detective’s clothing choices and lack of ease in carrying them off render him immediately legible to the otherwise obtuse Watson, whose identity as a gentleman is underscored by his ready grasp of class codes related to material possessions despite his much-remarked shortcomings as a detective. Yet, despite the idea that the police detective’s clothing or working-class ‘ferret’ features offer evidence of his fixed class status in Conan Doyle’s work, the problem of his legibility as a classed subject remained. In Sidney Paget’s illustrations that appeared alongside the stories published in the The Strand Magazine through the 1890s, for example, representations of Lestrade (Figure 1) clad in a suit and bowler hat are not significantly different than illustrations of Watson published around the same time (Figure 2). Figure 1. View largeDownload slide ‘He held out his hands quietly’. Illustration from ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, The Strand Magazine, 5 (January 1893), p. 71. Illustration courtesy of the Internet Archive, sourced from <http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/pagets/60.html> [accessed 7 June 2018] Figure 1. View largeDownload slide ‘He held out his hands quietly’. Illustration from ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, The Strand Magazine, 5 (January 1893), p. 71. Illustration courtesy of the Internet Archive, sourced from <http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/pagets/60.html> [accessed 7 June 2018] Figure 2. View largeDownload slide ‘We had the carriage to ourselves’. Illustration from ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, The Strand Magazine, 2 (October 1891), p. 401. Illustration courtesy of the Internet Archive, sourced from <http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/pagets/72.html> [accessed 7 June 2018] Figure 2. View largeDownload slide ‘We had the carriage to ourselves’. Illustration from ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, The Strand Magazine, 2 (October 1891), p. 401. Illustration courtesy of the Internet Archive, sourced from <http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/art/illustration/pagets/72.html> [accessed 7 June 2018] Such black and white illustrations cannot, of course, register the crucial differences that distinguish the bespoke quality of a gentleman’s suit from the lesser version purchased off the rack, but they do suggest the fine attention to detail and cultural knowledge necessary to decode aspects of male dress. Indeed, Martin Danahay suggests, issues of visual resemblance complicated attempts to arbitrate questions of class through the second half of the nineteenth century as status became ‘theoretically available to anybody with enough money to buy the right clothes’.64 In the visual register of The Strand Magazine then, we encounter the difficulty posed by the police detective from the 1840s onwards: the fact that the moment he sets aside his uniform, our ability to visually decode his appearance becomes a difficult undertaking that is rendered even more problematic by the prevailing ideas about the immaterial qualities of character considered central to identity apart from one’s wealth or possessions. Such problems of visually distinguishing the police detective are evident much earlier and persist over time in visual representations of Inspector Bucket. In the illustrations for the 1853 edition of the novel by Phiz, for example, Bucket is unrecognizable as a police detective in the scene at the Bagnet home (Figure 3), but instead – dressed in a suit – almost serves as a double for Mr George, who is seated to his left. Visual representations and theatrical realizations of the Inspector in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries similarly depict him in ways that suggest the difficulty of reading the policeman’s appearance in classed terms. Kyd’s 1910 illustration of Inspector Bucket, reproduced as one of the cards for John Players cigarettes (Figure 4), depicts the detective in a frock coat looking, Philip V. Allingham suggests, ‘like a professional man, a physician or lawyer’.65 Finally, though Bucket does not appear in the earliest stage adaptations of Bleak House, the 1883 Dick’s edition of George Lander’s Bleak House; or Poor ‘Jo’, first performed at the Pavillion Theatre in 1876, notes the following in the costume directives: Bucket should be dressed in ‘An ample frock-great-coat, closely buttoned up, and with side pockets, black trousers, rather tight, high collar, coloured neckerchief, stout boots, moderately high hat, carries a stout cane with silver top’.66 The costuming differentiates Bucket both from Sir Leicester – who appears richly and appropriately dressed – and from Snagsby, whose showy clothing is explicitly identified as vulgar. For further details, it advises ‘reference to the novel, and plates by Phiz’.67 Figure 3. View largeDownload slide ‘Friendly behaviour of Mr Bucket’. Illustration from Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853) by ‘Phiz’ [Hablot Knight Browne]. Illustration scanned by George Landow, courtesy of The Victorian Web <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/bleakhouse/31.html> [accessed 7 June 2018] Figure 3. View largeDownload slide ‘Friendly behaviour of Mr Bucket’. Illustration from Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853) by ‘Phiz’ [Hablot Knight Browne]. Illustration scanned by George Landow, courtesy of The Victorian Web <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/bleakhouse/31.html> [accessed 7 June 2018] Figure 4. View largeDownload slide ‘Inspector Bucket’. J. Clayton Clarke (‘Kyd’) 1910, reproduced on John Player cigarette card no. 49. Scanned by Philip V. Allingham, courtesy of the Victorian Web <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/kyd/51.html> [accessed 7 June 2018] Figure 4. View largeDownload slide ‘Inspector Bucket’. J. Clayton Clarke (‘Kyd’) 1910, reproduced on John Player cigarette card no. 49. Scanned by Philip V. Allingham, courtesy of the Victorian Web <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/kyd/51.html> [accessed 7 June 2018] In the mid-century representations of the police detective I examine, such questions about the ways one gains knowledge of identity are enmeshed not only in anxieties about questions of visual resemblance or difference related to possessions, but also to the claims of liberal subjectivity to render one independent of one’s things. Assumptions about liberal self-possession as a quality that translates material possessions into signifiers of merit were central to attempts to differentiate the gentleman from his others through the Victorian era. Yet despite its tendencies to abstraction, Jordanna Bailkin argues, liberalism was profoundly bound up with material culture in the nineteenth century: ‘a way of seeing and being seen’ that hinges on a hierarchy of value related to people and their things.68 Plain-clothes police detectives not only highlighted the erosion of visual codes as an index of identity in the Victorian era, their expertise as readers of material culture also suggested a path to social mobility. In the divergent fictions about the detective as a classed subject examined here, I would suggest, liberal ideologies underpinned attempts to foreclose on the social aspirations of working and lower middle-class people, but they also offered points of entry and appropriation to these same groups, for whom the abstract embrace of individual freedom and merit offered a blueprint for self fashioning. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Footnotes 1 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, ed. Peter Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 90. 2 Until they were replaced by helmets in 1863, Metropolitan London Police constables in uniform wore reinforced ‘chimney pot’ top hats. By the 1890s, bowler hats, the accepted male accessory for a suit, were commonly referred to as ‘pot hats’. See correspondence on ‘Hats’, Notes and Queries, 7th series, 12 (1891), pp. 169, 170, 256. 3 See, for example, Haia Shpayer-Makov, The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 8. 4 On early representations of the New Police among the working classes see, for example, ballads and caricatures included in Charles Hindley’s The Life and Times of James Catnatch, (Late of Seven Dials), Ballad Monger (London: Reeves and Turner, 1878), pp. 203–11. For an overview of the ways police constables were presented to the middle classes see Clive Emsley, ‘The English Bobby: An Indulgent Tradition’ in Myths of the English, ed. by Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 114–35. 5 Richard Price, ‘Society, Status and Jingoism: The Social Roots of Lower Middle-Class Patriotism, 1870–1900’, in The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914, ed. by Geoffrey Crossick (London: Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 89–112 (p. 93). 6 A. Wynter, ‘The Police and the Thieves’, Quarterly Review, 99 (1856), 160–200 (p. 175). 7 James Munro, ‘The London Police’, North American Review, 151 (1890), 615–29 (p. 627). 8 Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 96. 9 Geoffrey Crossick, ‘The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain: A Discussion’ in The Lower Middle Class in Britain, ed. by Crossick, pp. 11–60 (pp. 21, 31). 10 D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), x–xi. 11 Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2004), xxi; Heather Worthington, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-century Popular Fiction. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 141. 12 Elaine Hadley, ‘The Past is a Foreign Country: The Neo-Conservative Romance with Victorian Liberalism’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 10.1 (1997), 7–38 (p. 13); Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. ix. 13 Hadley, ‘The Past is a Foreign Country’, p. 11. 14 David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. x.; Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. xi. 15 Cohen, Household Gods, pp. xi–xii. 16 Hadley ‘The Past is a Foreign Country’, pp. 11–12. 17 Claire Pettitt, ‘On Stuff’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 6 (2008): <http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/69/volume/0/issue/6/> [accessed 23 April 2017]. 18 Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 4. 19 William Cobbett, Popay the Police Spy, or, A Report on the Evidence Laid Before the House of Commons (John Cleave: London, 1833), p. 24. 20 ‘Principles of Police, and Their Application to the Metropolis’, Fraser’s, 16 (1837), 169–78; (pp. 173, 176). 21 ‘Address’, The Detective: A Journal of Social Evils, 1.1 (1859), 1. 22 Wynter, ‘The Police and the Thieves’, p. 180. 23 Monro, ‘The London Police’, p. 626. 24 Alex Innes Shand, ‘The City of London Police’, Blackwood’s, 140 (1886), 594–608 (p. 608). 25 Metropolitan Police, Report of the Departmental Commission to Inquire into the State, Discipline, and Organization of the Detective Force of the Metropolitan Police (London: Home Office, 1878); Public Record Office, HO 45/9442/66692, ‘Organisation of detective force’ (1887). 26 Shpayer Makov, Ascent of the Detective, p. 287. 27 Charles Martel, The Detective’s Note-Book (London: Ward and Lock, 1860), p. 5. 28 Dagni Breseden ‘Introduction’, in The First Female Detectives: The Female Detective (1864) and Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864), ed. by Dagni Breseden (Ann Arbor, MI: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 2010), pp. vi–vii. 29 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The Trail of the Serpent, ed. by Chris Wills (New York, NY: Modern Library, 2003). 30 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henry Dunbar (Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 2007), p. 339. 31 Braddon, Henry Dunbar, p. 1. 32 Braddon, Henry Dunbar, p. 49. 33 Braddon, Henry Dunbar, p. 329. 34 Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1994), p. 219. 35 Charles Dickens, ‘A Detective Police Party’, Household Words, 1 (1850), 409–414 (p. 410). 36 Dickens, ‘A Detective Police Party’, p. 409. 37 Dickens, ‘A Detective Police Party’, p. 410. 38 Charles Dickens, ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, Household Words, 3 (1851), 264–70, (pp. 264, 266). 39 Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 238. 40 Dickens, ‘On Duty’, p. 268. 41 Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 329. 42 Cecil B. Hartley, The Gentleman’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (Boston: J. S. Locke, 1874), p. 149 43 Dickens, Bleak House, p. 330. 44 Jean Arnold, Victorian Jewellery, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 51. 45 Cecil B. Hartley, The Gentleman’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (Boston: DeWolfe and Fiske, 1873), p. 138. 46 Susan David Bernstein and Elsie Browning Michie, ‘Introduction’, in Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture, ed. by Susan David Bernstein and Elsie Browning Michie (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 1–16 (p. 3). 47 Marcia Pointon, ‘Intriguing Jewellery: Royal Bodies and Luxurious Consumption’, Textual Practice, 11.3 (1997), 493–516 (p. 494). 48 John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 184, n. 14. 49 Dickens, Bleak House, p. 771. 50 Dickens, Bleak House, p. 771. 51 Worthington, Rise of the Detective, p. 144. 52 For a discussion of Chambers’s audience see Worthington, Rise of the Detective, p. 160; and Charles Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p. 95. 53 Worthington, Rise of the Detective, p. 3. 54 ‘Thomas Waters’ [William Russell], The Recollections of a Detective Police Officer (London: J. C. Brown and Company, 1856), n.p. 55 ‘Thomas Waters’, ‘Recollections of a Police-Officer’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 12, new series, (1849), 55–59 (p. 55). 56 ‘Waters’, ‘Recollections’, p. 56. 57 ‘Waters’, ‘Recollections’, p. 55. 58 Worthington, Rise of the Detective, p. 145. 59 ‘Thomas Waters’, ‘Recollections of a Police Officer, X.Y.Z.’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 12, new series (1849), 308–12 (p. 311). 60 ‘Waters’, ‘Recollections of a Police Officer, X.Y.Z.’, p. 312. 61 ‘Thomas Waters’, ‘Recollections of a Police-Officer, Mary Kingsford’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 15, new series (1851), 274–79 (p. 274). 62 ‘Waters’, ‘Mary Kingsford’, p. 278. 63 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 202–17 (p. 207). 64 Martin Danahay, ‘Dr Jekyll’s Two Bodies’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 35.1 (2013), 23–40 (p. 25). 65 Philip V. Allingham ‘Inspector Bucket’, The Victorian Web <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/kyd/51.html> [accessed 25 June 2018]. 66 I am grateful to Julianne Smith, whose extensive knowledge of Bleak House adaptations was invaluable in helping me sort out theatrical representations of Inspector Bucket. 67 George Lander, Bleak House; or Poor ‘Jo’ (London: John Dicks, 1883), n.p. 68 Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Place of Liberalism’, Victorian Studies, 48.1 (2005), 83–91 (p. 86). © 2018 Leeds Trinity University This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Right Stuff: Class Identity, Material Culture and the Victorian Police Detective
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1093/jvcult/vcy053
DA - 2019-01-11
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-right-stuff-class-identity-material-culture-and-the-victorian-UG5ImN4EE8
SP - 53
VL - 24
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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