48 four out of five dismissals, of a total of three thousand, were for drunkenness. The estimate of Colonel Rowan and Richard Mayne, the Police Commissioners, given to a parliamentary select committee in 1834. See The English Police: A Political and Social History (1991) by Clive Emsley.
49 Holborn teemed with tricksters . . . burgled houses. Slang from London Labour and the London Poor (1861) by Henry Mayhew et al. and The Victorian Underworld (1970) by Kellow Chesney. Thieves acting as decoys from The Times, 21 November 1837.
In 1837, the year that Whicher joined the police force, almost 17,000 people were arrested in London, of whom 107 were burglars, 110 housebreakers, thirty-eight highway robbers, 773 pickpockets, 3,657 'common thieves', eleven horse stealers, 141 dog stealers, three forgers, twenty-eight coiners, 317 'utterers of base coin', 141 'obtainers of goods by false pretences', 182 other fraudsters, 343 receivers of stolen goods, 2,768 'habitual disturbers of the public peace', 1,295 vagrants, fifty writers of begging letters, eighty-six bearers of begging letters, 895 well-dressed prostitutes living in brothels, 1,612 well-dressed prostitutes walking the streets, and 3,8 64 'low' prostitutes in poor neighbourhoods. From Scotland Yard: Its History and Organisation 1829–1929 (1929) by George Dilnot.
49 The entire police force . . . June 1838. The Times, 30 June 1838.
49 Already the police were familiar . . . an asylum. The Times, 23 December 1837.
49 Jack Whicher's first reported arrest. From The First Detectives and the Early Career of Richard Mayne, Commissioner of Police (1957) by Belton Cobb and The Times of 15 December 1840.
50 There had been outrage . . . infiltrated a political gathering. The agent was Popay, the gathering Chartist – see Scotland Yard: Its History and Organisation 1829–1929 (1929) by George Dilnot. Peel had assured the House of Commons in 1822 that he was dead against a 'system of espionage'.
50 Magistrates' court records . . . buy him off with silver. Court records in London Metropolitan Archive – references WJ/SP/E/013/35, 38 and 39, WJ/SP/E/017/40, MJ/SP/1842.04/060.
50 The Metropolitan Police files show . . . under two inspectors. Details of the hunt for Daniel Good and the formation of the detective division from MEPO 3/45, the police file on the murder; The First Detectives (1957) by Belton Cobb; The Rise of Scotland Yard: A History of the Metropolitan Police (1956) by Douglas G. Browne; and Dreadful Deeds and Awful Murders: Scotland Yard's First Detectives (1990) by Joan Lock.
50 ('Dickens later described . . . bags his man'). In 'A Detective Police Party', House-hold Words, 27 July 1850. Thornton was born in 1803 in Epsom, Surrey, according to the census of 1851. He was married to a woman seventeen years his senior, with whom he had two daughters.
51 Whicher was given a pay rise . . . bonuses and rewards. Information on pay from Metropolitan Police papers at the National Archives and from parliamentary papers on police numbers and rates of pay at the British Library – 1840 (81) XXXIX.257.
51 'Intelligent men have been . . . in 1843. Chambers's Journal XII.
52 In the London underworld . . . classless anonymity. The term 'Jacks' is cited in The Victorian Underworld (1970) by Kellow Chesney. Detective officers also became known as 'stops', according to The Slang Dictionary published by J.C. Hotten in 1864, and as 'noses', according to Hotten's dictionary of 18 74. The 18 64 edition included some of the London detectives' own lingo: to 'pipe' a man was to follow him; to 'smoke' was to detect, or to 'penetrate an artifice'.
52 The first English detective story . . .1849. In Chambers's Edinburgh Journal of 28 July 1849. This magazine published eleven more stories by Waters between then and September 1853. The twelve were issued as a book in 1856.
52 'They are, one and all . . . speak to.' From 'A Detective Police Party', House-hold Words, 27 July 1850.
52 George Augustus Sala . . . questioning them.' From Things I Have Seen and People I Have Known (two volumes, 1894) by George Augustus Sala. More recent commentators, such as Philip Collins in Dickens and Crime (1962), have seen the novelist's relations with the detectives as faintly patronising.
52 In Tom Fox . . . higher intelligence'. This collection of short stories – sold for Is.6d. – was published in April 1860 and went into a second edition that summer.
53 ln 1851 Whicher. . . fleeing the bank with their loot. Bank robbery reports from The Times and the News of the World, June and July 1851.
53 'The credit for skill . . . Dickens and the like. Also that year, Charley Field was criticised for the underhand manner in which he caught two men who had tried to blow up the railway tracks at Cheddington, Buckinghamshire. He disguised himself as a match-seller, according to the Bedford Times, took rooms in the town and made himself at home in the local pubs, where he would joshingly introduce himself as a 'timber merchant', until he got the information he sought. See Dickens and Crime (1962) by Philip Collins.
53 Like Whicher . . . little finger'. Literary detectives were inconspicuous and quiet. Carter of the Yard in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel Henry Dunbar (1864) looks like something between 'a shabby-genteel half-pay captain and an unlucky stockbroker'. The police detective in Thomas Hardy's Desperate Remedies (1871) is 'commonplace in all except his eyes'. The narrator of John Bennett's Tom Fox (1860) says, 'I always made use of my eyes and ears, and said little – a precept every Detective should lay to heart.' The detective in Braddon's The Trail of the Serpent (1860) is mute.
54 In 1850 Charley Field . . . a lovely idea!' From 'Three "Detective" Anecdotes' in House-hold Words, 14 September 1850.
55 The artistry of crime . . . the analytical detective. The 'Newgate novels' of the 1820s to 1840s were melodramas about fearless criminals such as Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard. For the ascendancy of the detective hero, see, for example, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel – a History (1972) by Julian Symons; Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle (1976) by Ian Ousby; Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999) by Ronald Thomas; and The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (1981) by Dennis Porter. The shift of focus was described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975): 'we have moved from the exposition of the facts or the confession to the slow process of discovery; from the execution to the investigation; from the physical confrontation to the intellectual struggle between criminal and investigator'.
55 Whicher, who was said . . . charge of the department. From MEPO 4/333, the register of joiners, and MEPO 21/7, a record of police pensioners.