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.
55 In 1858 Whicher caught the valet . . . Essex cornfield. From reports in The Times, 30 June and 6 & 12 July 1858. Investigation into the murder of PC Clark from Metropolitan Police file MEPO 3/53.
55 In 1859 . . . sued Bonwell for misconduct. The Bonwell case inspired an extraordinary editorial in the Daily Telegraph of 10 October 1859: 'This London is an amalgam of worlds within worlds and the occurrences of every day convince us that there is not one of these worlds but has its special mysteries and its generic crimes . . . It has been said . . . that Hampstead sewers shelter a monstrous breed of black swine, which have propagated and run wild among the slimy feculence, and whose ferocious snouts will one day up-root Highgate archway, while they make Holloway intolerable with their grunting.' Quoted in Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead: Beneath the Surface of Victorian Sensationalism by Thomas Boyle (1988). See also reports in The Times of 19 September to 16 December 1859.
55 A couple of months before he was despatched . . . rings fall to the floor. From reports in The Times of 25 April, 4 & 7 May, 12 June 1860.
56 He was 'an excellent officer . . . take on any case'. From A Life's Reminiscences of Scotland Yard (1890) by Andrew Lansdowne.
56 If Whicher was certain . . . a man to me.' From 'A Detective Police Party', House-hold Words, 27 July 1850.
56 He was not above . . . left cheek. From Scotland Yard Past and Present: Experiences of Thirty-Seven Years (1893) by Timothy Cavanagh.
