The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England by Haia Shpayer-Makov, and: Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction by Christopher Pittard (review)

Virginia Woolf makes a policeman the symbol of the Victorian age in the historical pageant of her final novel Between the Acts (1941), and in so doing suggests that to talk about the figure of the detective is to talk about the Victorian period as a whole. these very different books—one a packed history, the other an historically grounded close reading—jointly illustrate that point. Both works demonstrate that the conversation about Victorian crime and detection has come a long way from a belief that it was all piecemeal primordial stirrings until a certain deerstalker cap entered the scene. They both provide readings of the operations of Victorian culture using the detective as a lens (perhaps I should say magnifying glass?). As I read Haia Shpayer-Makov’s impressive work on the emergence of the detective in Victorian England, I kept thinking how useful it would have been to me when I was writing my own book on the literary detective. While Shpayer-Makov’s history follows the broad outlines of previous histories—the rise of the police and the detective amid longstanding cultural tensions between liberty and security, the English police’s emphasis on prevention rather than detection—The Ascent of the Detective provides such an enormous amount of textual support (over seventy pages of notes) that it will be an invaluable resource for scholars entering the conversation as well as those interested in the vast body of detective narratives beyond the usual suspects. Christopher Pittard’s work is more specific in its focus, illustrated by the careful close reading of a Hudson’s Soap ad and the Sherlock Holmes story “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (1891) that begins the book. Pittard’s argument travels deep into the weeds as he documents the current state of scholarship on Victorian crime and detection and convincingly revises some of the most familiar arguments in the field. Foucauldian readings of the genre, the relationship between Victorian science and crime fiction, and Victorian science and questions of form all come in for revisionary treatment.

Literary critics and theorists tend to enter the conversation about the Victorian detective with questions about social control: is the detective an agent of state control or an individualistic site of resistance? Shpayer-Makov is not uninterested in such theoretical questions, but her focus is on detective work as a job and how this particular profession rose out of a society already reluctant to embrace their less intrusive, uniformed colleagues. She provides detailed accounts of police recruitment, job satisfaction, and incentives for promotion (detectives were generally promoted from uniformed ranks). Her analysis of class issues in the work life of the detective is particularly interesting. she addresses both the social position of most police recruits—overwhelmingly working class with a background of physical labor—and the kinds of social mobility (not to mention trade-offs) presented by moving up the ranks to detective. For example, schedules of detectives were far more erratic than their uniformed colleagues, with resulting challenges to stable family life. Detectives did, however, have higher (though still not high) salaries and opportunities for special additional payments. Shpayer-Makov shows how much reading and writing were required by police work and how working-class men navigated resulting literacy issues. This occasionally resulted in soliciting gentlemen into the detective force, though such experiments were never successful enough to change the policy of internal recruitment.

Much of Shpayer-Makov’s analysis seems consistent with what we know of police work today. Victorian detectives, struggling over how to balance authority with acceptance by the community, are recognizably modern. However, in her careful historicizing of this figure, we see...