Revisiting the Detective Figure in Late Victorian and Edwardian Fiction: A View from the Perspective of Police History

The mechanics of detection and figures with an investigatory function appeared in fictional texts in Britain before the mid-nineteenth century, but it was approximately from this period onwards that the detective in the modern sense gradually became a recognised figure and the genre was acknowledged as a literary form. By the end of the century, just a few years after the creation of Sherlock Holmes and the establishment of his subsequent enormous popularity, the repertoire of detective characters in fiction was of an unprecedented diversity, feeding the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for this fascinating figure. Despite such diversity, researchers have observed common themes related to the detective figure in British fiction. The recurrent nature of these themes has lent itself to varied ideological and contextual readings by scholars, mostly from a literary perspective. This article, by contrast, re-examines these and other themes and tropes in the context of police history

Local initiative, central oversight, provincial perspective: Governing police forces in nineteenth-century Leeds

This article examines police administration as a branch of urban government, based on a case study of Leeds between 1815 and 1900. Making extensive use of local government and police records, it takes a longer-term view of ‘reform’ than most existing studies, and privileges the more routine aspects of everyday governance. It thus provides an original exploration of central-local government relations, as well as conflict and negotiation between distinct bodies of self-government within the locality. Previous studies have rightly emphasized that urban police governance was primarily a local responsibility, yet this article also stresses the influence of central state oversight and an extra-local, provincial perspective, both of which modified the grip of localism on nineteenth-century government

Le profil socio-économique de la Police métropolitaine de Londres à la fin du XIXe siècle

Shpayer-Makov Haia. Le profil socio-économique de la Police métropolitaine de Londres à la fin du XIXe siècle. In: Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, tome 39 N°4, Octobre-décembre 1992. pp. 662-678