Their area of operations around St. Paul’s Cathedral near the old City of London seethed with trouble of all kinds - robbery, pickpocketing, murder, assault, prostitution, riot and a great deal more. Tens of thousands of Londoners, it was thought, lived by crime in run-down, overcrowded, diseased-ridden homes sited in filthy streets. There was little, if anything else for them
London Criminals in the Novels of Charles Dickens
This was precisely the type of environment that offered opportunities, and plenty of them, for the entire gamut of violence and misdemeanor as it was all too well known in the extreme poverty, despair and squalor shared by its inhabitants
If all this sounds like a scene from a novel by the 19th century British novelist Charles Dickens, it is hardly surprising. London as Dickens knew it, together with its seamier characters, reached his pages, not from his imagination, but from his observations. Among these were Dickens’ fascination with, and close study of, the Metropolitan Police and the problems that confronted them
“For ever on the watch,” Dickens wrote “with their wits stretched to the utmost, these officers have .... to set themselves against every novelty or trickery ... that the combined imaginations of all the lawless rascals in England can devise”
Dickens Observing Crime and Criminals with the Police
Dickens even fantasised about going on the beat with the police, patrolling the London streets, scanning passers-by for suspicious looks and making an arrest, or making a collar as it was called in police parlance. In his magazine article On an Amateur Beat written in 1869, Dickens wrote: “There is many a ruffian on the streets whom I mentally collar ... (he) would see mighty little of London .... if I could deal with him physically”
The novelist accompanied the Thames river police on moonlit nights, watching them as they searched for bodies and other flotsam in the water. Dickens translated this scene to the opening chapter of Our Mutual Friend, published in 1864/5, where Gaffer Hexham and his daughter Lizzie trawl the Thames for bodies they could plunder and sell
The Real Life Inspector in Dickens’ Bleak House
But Dickens’ most intensive study was his observation of Inspector Charles Frederick Field who was his model for Inspector Bucket in Bleak House published in 1853/4. In 1850, Dickens had described Field as “...a middle-aged man of a portly presence, with a large, moist, knowing eye, a husky voice, and a habit of emphasising his conversation by the airing of a corpulent fore-finger ...” This was an almost exact description of Inspector Bucket, complete with corpulent forefinger
Dickens trailed Inspector Field, watched his methods of investigation, how he searched for clues and questioned suspects. Dickens wrote several articles about Field, who served in Scotland Yard’s Detective Department, established in 1842
One article was On Duty with Inspector Field in which Dickens wrote:
“Every thief .....cowers before him, like a schoolboy before his schoolmaster. All watch him.... all seek to propitiate him.... but, let Inspector Field have a mind to pick out one thief .... ,.... let him produce that ghostly truncheon from his pocket, and say ...... 'My lad, I want you!' and all .....shall be stricken with paralysis, and not a finger move against him, as he fits the handcuffs on!”
Charles Dickens, Pioneer of Detective Fiction
The crime and mystery content of Bleak House and other Dickens novels made him one of the pioneers of detective fiction. Writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and Wilkie Collins author of the first true detective novel The Woman in White written in 1859/60 readily acknowledged their debt to him
Sources
Hurd, Douglas, Sir Robert Peel: A Biography (London, UK, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007.ISBN-10: 0297848445/ISBN-13: 978-0297848448
Dickens, Charles and Gill, Stephen, Bleak House (Oxford World’s Classics) Oxford, UK: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008) ISBN-10: 0199536317/ISBN-13: 978-0199536313
Website: History of the Metropolitan Police, Metropolitan Police Service
 |
