The Sentimental Policeman: Poetry and Social Mobility in the Police Review and Parade Gossip

The Victorian policeman would seem an improbable poet. Indeed, contemporary representations of bumbling, avuncular Bobbies and sharp but unfeeling detectives suggest a realm of experience distinct from post-Romantic conceptions of poetry as a product of refined genius.¹ Equally, perhaps, Victorian policemen seem temperamentally distant both from the nineteenth-century artisan poets who voiced social protest in verse and from the ironies of working-class music-hall lyricists.² Despite their apparent disconnection from what we now regard as the field of Victorian poetry, however, some late nineteenth-century policemen did write verse. They wrote, moreover, with an eye to expressing themselves as thinking and feeling subjects at a time when public perceptions of their work placed them as menials defined by appetite rather than affect, instinct rather than intellect. The poetry they produced was not remarkable for its quality; indeed, though the work documented here was clearly influenced by major mid-Victorian poets such as Tennyson, it is noteworthy as class-coded evidence of a struggle to be understood rather than as aesthetic achievement. If it is not destined for the canon, however, the poetry produced by Victorian policemen expresses clearly the ways culture mattered—and continues to matter—as a means of self-definition.

This article reflects on the cultural work of poetry published by English policemen in a professional periodical, the Police Review and Parade Gossip, in the early years of the 1890s. In doing so, I focus on the sentimental, middlebrow verse produced by policemen as an instance of what Charles LaPorte insightfully describes as “poetic behavior.”³ In the published verse of late-nineteenth century policemen, I argue, such “behavior” affords insight into the ways that poetic expression functioned as a mode of identity formation. Poetic output not only identifies taste in this case, it also offers a cultural supplement to the economic and sociological factors that typically define one’s class. In what follows, I consider why and how ordinary Victorian policemen chose to express themselves publicly in a manner seemingly at odds with the practical and economic concerns that structured their lives. The answer, I suggest, is that poetic expression grounded efforts to reshape class-coded perceptions of the policeman as a social subject, offering a basis for articulating a professional identity grounded in middle-class notions of merit and affective sensibility. The Police Review and Parade Gossip is not merely an accidental venue for publication in this context. Rather, this periodical frames the larger conversations and contexts that shaped specific acts of personal expression.

Unlike earlier periodical publications focusing on crime, the Police Review and Parade Gossip (established in 1893) was concerned explicitly with the professional lives of policemen.⁴ As such, it self-consciously explored work-related issues, helping to generate a sense of shared identity amongst otherwise unconnected local forces and offering a corrective to negative stereotypes of policing. Taking up issues related to promotion, hiring, discipline, wages, and pensions, the Police Review and Parade Gossip advocated for changes in working conditions for policemen across England. At the same time, it engaged in the related work of shaping a self-consciously professional, middle-class conception of police work. Though it shared common concerns with the contemporaneous movement for a police union, the journal situated policemen as middle-class servants of the state, rejecting the working-class associations of the labor movement.⁵ Specifically, the Police Review and Parade Gossip’s founder and editor John Kempster advocated for examination systems similar to those adopted by the civil service, for advancement based on demonstrations of individual merit, and for the desirability of self-culture, education, and professional development. Beyond supporting a positive view of policing in editorial content, moreover, Kempster also included writing by subscribers: publishing letters to the editor, short stories, and poetry submitted by readers. Taken together, these features of the Police Review and Parade Gossip encouraged readers to think of themselves as individuals whose feelings mattered, and whose shared expertise, service ethic, and cultural capital elevated them from their antecedents in the lower classes.

In what follows, I...